#this post includes none of those but

[python333]

staring at the fanfic i have yet to finish like it just called me a slur rn (i have 8 drafts and 6 of them are requests and ive only gotten about halfway through one of them)

[theminecraftbee]

you know the excellent quadruple life fan comic has me thinking about double life again. and MAN. thinking about the soul bonds mechanically. like, before I get into my meta-analysis it’s worth noting that non-diagetically the soulbond mechanic being based on how many hearts someone has is basically the only way I can think to do it in minecraft that’s sensible, but diagetically…

so do you ever think about how the marker of what made people soulmates in double life was pain?

like, soulmates share injuries/pain! that’s the whole premise! like, to the point that day one people were making up elaborate ways to hurt themselves so they could test for their soulmates! you met your (very romantic-coded) partner and confirmed they were the person you were looking for by hitting each other, generally!

being a soulmate in the double life universe isn’t about being compatible, it’s about literally sharing pain, and it’s just… I think about how for some pairs, they share the burden between each other, and it brings them closer. for some pairs, though, the only way they know how to communicate is by hurting one another. and the thing is, this isn’t just a literal thing. like, mechanically, the thing soulmates do is share pain and communicate with pain, but metaphorically, can you say desert duo doesn’t have trouble communicating because half of how they know how to exist is either sharing in pain or causing it for each other? can you say that ranchers’ strength wasn’t a pair of people who understood each other’s pain and desperation to be better than they’ve been before? can you say that divorce quartet isn’t, well—

so pearl wins after scott hurts them one last time don’t you ever think about that,

[its-a-beautful-day]

These slugs are gay and there's nothing you can do about it 🏳️‍🌈🐌🏳️‍⚧️

This valentine card references the unique mating habits of leopard slugs (video can be found here)

[spookythesillyfella]

this is probably one of the most wonderful videos ive made using capcut

★ feat : @chamom1le-t3a . @thecultoflove nd @jumjum-crafts 's tonys

[synthshenanigans]

Something about how Heart is being compared to mythology, Minds referencing the bible & Soul being the one to use both of those things

[moiraimyths]

Before we call anon rude because let’s see it from their perspective, imagine getting an entire feast to eat. That can be pretty hard to start with so much that’s going on, but if they start with one thing they know they’ll like (aka one character they like) that can be the start for them leaping to other characters to finish the story and the bigger story. I struggle the same way to start book series if I don’t have at least one character that drives me to read it, it’s all about what can be the hook to push them through. Sounds like the anon is neurodivergent (just a guess) so they might genuinely not see it as rude and see it as a solution to even play the game to start with.

Btw absolutely adore the game, the complex and rich characters making them all so unique is amazing. The art is so pleasing to the eyes I love it!! I’m waiting for it all to get out at once so I don’t get too impatient. Shae however interests me the most, which routes will have the most lore for them? Will there be routes that give more lore in general based on decisions you make or do they all share the same amount? (I mean general lore not just Shae lore)

Apologies; we are not trying to accuse any asker of being rude! We are simply explaining our perspective as the developers / are trying to broadly encourage folks to dip their toes into other areas of the story outside of the main route(s) they're interested in, especially considering some routes will be made available sooner than others, and these other routes will likely contain additional scenes/lore of everyone's fave(s) regardless! We want to give each main cast member an equal amount of love (and lore) regardless of their overall popularity, so our goal is not to tut-tut anyone for having strong preferences for one character over the others, but rather to explain that you may be surprised by how much *more* you learn about your preferred characters in the other routes. That's all!

For Shae... Well, they were a foot soldier for one of the worst periods of the War. Lore wise, any other story that touches on the War will likely have content relevant to them and their experiences. ^^

[tacagen]

please please lets talk about how barry and hunter percieve thawne and his relationship with barry. like im sure barry had no idea of thawnes crush on him (along with what even was his motivation in general before rs) like up until 'the only time' confession and him calling thawne pathetic for that is his live reaction to this realization under the influence of negative speed force. and we KNOW he knows at the very least after that because of these mfs!!!

they are fear constructs and they are based on barrys fears!!! THEY ACT EVEN FUCKING GAYER AND CREEPIER THAN THE ORIGINAL ONE!!!

and barry oh poor sweet barry. he had no idea that this!

was thawne meaning time with barry and barry alone! and barry didnt fucking see that! barry related to these words because they reminded him of his parents and naturally he supports The 25th Century Flash! AND THAWNE HEARS THAT 'I UNDERSTAND' AND THINKS THAT BARRY UNDERSTOOD EXACTLY WHAT HE MEANT!! THAT BARRY FEELS THE VERY SAME FOR HIM!!! JUST LIKE HE IMAGINED ALL THESE YEARS!!! AND NEVER QUESTIONS THAT CONCLUSION!!! AND LATER CALLS BARRY A LIAR FOR THAT!!! FOR NEVER FEELING THE SAME DESIRE TO SPEND TIME TOGETHER WHICH BARRY NEVER ACTUALLY IMPLIED!!!!

and what about hunter? oh he saw the events of running scared alright. and more, he has an unlimited access to the info about thawne, both personal experience and flash museum archives. he relates to him, he finds fucking comfort in him and his story. he is just like me fr! thawne is his poor little meow meow too and hunter takes it so much more serious than i do due to percieving him as Tragedy Personified!

in fact thawnes death in running scared fucks him up so badly he gives up his ideals and beliefs about flashes in favor of 'they are unfixable and deserve only to suffer'. besides, hes a profiler, he studied psychiatry. like, that guy should understand thawnes character deeply, right?

..............

hunter. hunter my sweet summer child i dont know how to tell you. this is SO not the reason thawne kept it.

he is the BIGGEST (and the only) fan thawne ever had. he knows about him SO MUCH and yet he straight up cannot figure out the most obvious thing about him because he PROJECTS HIS OWN ISSUES AND BELIEFS ABOUT FLASHES ONTO HIM AND REFUSES TO THINK FURTHER. yall im fucking crying. no comments.

THE CLOSET IS GLASS AND NO ONE FUCKING SEES THROUGH AND I AM PERFECTLY NORMAL ABOUT IT!!!!!!

[2prince2sparkle]

Losing my mind hearing that people think being punitively misgendered as they/ them only happens to she/her trans women and not also he/ him trans men

Edit: glad I dug through the shitty comments enough to find op saying she didn't mean the phrasing of a particular sentence to imply this didn't happen to trans men, she wasn't expecting the post to blow up and was just writing about the things she's experiencing in a casual rant way. Internet ok sometimes. (Still other people in the comments thinking the above though.)

[retordedd]

I never use this blog because the eddsworld fandom is genuinely the only fandom I've been completely fucking miserable trying to engage with. It's full of trans people and yet the community is SO hostile towards non-afab or non masc aligned in some way trans people. I've had people blatantly refused to respect my pronouns after saying they would. I've been misgendered in a server full of trans people where literally no one else was misgendered because there were pronoun roles. In that same server, while I was uplifting trans people making jokes about being proud of their bodies, they made fun of me for not having breasts. I've had multiple people debate my boundaries like it's a topic of discussion because I asked not to be called dude, a GENDERED TERM. I've had people gang up on me to the point of tears because I dared to describe my experiences being raised with an unconventional relationship to gender. I've been accused of holding grudges and being aggressive for even daring to speak up when I'm tired of being treated this way

And these events don't refer to a bunch of random assholes, they refer to people well known in the fandom. People I've seen on multiple servers. People whose names you say and it gets recognized

The eddsworld fandom has a HUGE transmisogyny problem and it needs to be discussed. The way I constantly feel unsafe when in a fandom surrounded by trans people is completely unacceptable

[e77y]

Finished my homrwork… 👍 I wrote like 5,000 words today. I am made of jelly

[beesarthur]

The X-Files: Fight the Future

just some coworkers trolling each other on a roof

What is the plot? Where to start? In 35,000 B.C., alleged Neanderthals in what is now North Texas...encounter aliens in a cave? In 1998 in the same location, some kids find the cave and one of them...gets infected with the black oil virus? A few weeks later, in Dallas, Mulder and Scully are part of a team responding to a bomb threat, but the guy who's going to defuse the bomb...doesn't, sacrificing himself to destroy whatever ~evidence~ is in the building. This is not the only instance of someone destroying himself in order to destroy evidence! Also: Scully almost leaves the FBI, Mulder and Scully almost kiss, Scully gets abducted to an underground lab in Antarctica that turns out to be a spaceship, Mulder saves her with a vaccine that he can just carry around in his pocket in a vial, and Scully doesn't leave the FBI after all, but gets the x-files reopened, because now she's out for answers again.

What does this episode suggest about Mulder and Scully’s relationship with each other? Well, the One Scene that I have heard about for years arrives at about an hour and fifteen minutes into the movie and is, in fact, wild!! All this happens, though, in the emotionally heightened situation of the idea that they will not work together anymore, and is not interrupted by just an ordinary bee, but interrupted by a bee that will lead to some of the worst body-horror situations that Scully - a veteran of a lot of body horror - has ever experienced!

Where are the aliens? they're been doing interplanetary travel for tens of thousands of years??? idk some of this evolutionary-historical world-building doesn't add up, probably, but let's play out the hunch and see what we learn

[fideidefenswhore]

The appearance of Halley's Comet, first observed streaking across the sky in August [1532], was the occasion for much muttering and comment. For Anne the omen seemed favorable, as on the morning of Sunday 1 September [1532] in Windsor Castle and with de la Pommeraye as the guest of honour, Henry ennobled her as Marquis of Pembroke in her own right [...]. Anne's grant followed the same format as for the creation of male peers and closely resembled the one Francis [I] made to his sister Marguerite in 1517, which Anne had witnessed. As Duke of Berry, Marguerite had become male in terms of status, entitled to the traditional rights and privileges ascribed to the male siblings of the king. [...] As a marquis, Anne could sit in the House of Lords, and the title would automatically descend to her offspring even if illegitimately conceived.*

Hunting the Falcon: Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and The Marriage That Shook Europe, John Guy & Julia Fox

*"Whether the omission of the customary words 'lawfully begotten' in the Latin text of the patent was a drafting error will never be known. Nobody noticed at the time."

[ninjaaa-go]

please, I’m begging you, just give me clear and thorough instructions. please

[beatcroc]

Getting bad abt not tagging art again simply because so much of it has been fandom drivel recently [by which i mean the past two years][and this is not stopping any time soon] and I don't want to clutter my art tag with just an endless wall of that so im gonna try to. Have a split art tag again. I did in the past to delineate sketches and big stuff but I was terrible at maintaining it and the nature of what and how I draw shifted quite a bit so I eventually merged them anyway. The difference this time is it's completely arbitrary and I just put stuff under either based on how much i like it

[batsplat]

your negative takes on recent tennis rivalries pleaseeee🙏🙏🙏

ps. you’re a treasure

okay so I'll do the copy paste thing from what I did just cut from the initial post, which was my polite 'I'm attempting to write a reasonably neutral post' approach

so, this may come as a shock, but obviously I'm a bit of a fan of rivalries. we do have some bangers in tennis history, rich narrative texts, but... well. the landscape out there hasn't been great for the past decade or so. sometimes you can get invested in match-ups between specific players that are fun to watch and interesting tennis-wise, but it's all very much about the sport rather than the personal relationships between the different players. I enjoy matches between all three or ryba, sabs and iga!! but also. they are coworkers. you do kindaaaa get the sense sabs and iga aren't particularly fond of each of other, but it's all perfectly cordial. again, the tennis is great, I support them in all their endeavours, but it's very much the tennis itself you need to look for for the drama (also they don't play each other as much as I'd like, but that's a conversation for a different day)

you do still sometimes get some fun beef but it's very much isolated dumb stuff like the fritz/rinderknech "have a nice flight home" thing. this isn't going anywhere story-wise but it's fun in the moment

speaking of men. obviously the most important rivalries for the last however many years have been between various big three/four members, and federer/nadal specifically is extremely popular. tennis-wise, I still think federer/djokovic was the most fun match-up, and at least there was a little tension there because federer used to hate djokovic. they've played a lot of matches that are worth watching!! also they've finally mostly retired so it's not super relevant any more, but well tennis fans as a collective are very big three-pilled so you'll hear a lot about these blokes

and now there's alcaraz/sinner. they've only really had one match that was good start to finish (uso 2022), but definitely some fun ones (miami 2023 and wimbledon 2022 are probably the other ones that stand out, their most recent match was very much in the 'long does not equal good' category). plus, they're quite good at producing highlight reel content, like this one point everyone remembers (shown here from every angle... tennistv produces longer videos for single points than the wta releases for most finals). it's an interpersonally warm rivalry between two young guys who are both very successful and will presumably win everything for the next decade. again, I'd suggest trying to become a fan of one of those two

this was the polite way of phrasing it!! everything below here is quite rude and negative, peace and love to all

okay, let's ditch the thin veneer of neutrality, here's what I actually think: it is completely baffling to me how popular quite a few of these rivalries are, I don't get it, I have never understood it, I will never understand it. tennis went 'what if we had rivalries without narrative tension' and everyone just kinda rolled with that? mind you federer/nadal early confrontations were happening at the same time as clijsters/henin, who were like?? dude it got so bad henin said she had never been friends with clijsters so nothing clijsters and her father said could hurt her ("nothing was broken between us because there was nothing to break" ???? ffs). which is obviously not true!! but it's so... she denied the friendship ever existed and called it all pr like that's so SAD! look, this is beside the point, I'm not talking about henin/clijsters here, I do understand why people aren't that into a rivalry that was at its peak like two decades ago and federer/nadal were still playing slam finals in 2k17 (a dark dark time for some fans, federer had already HAD his decline and then he was suddenly winning slams again like tf). and to some extent I go 'well clearly people will just be into anything if you have two successful blokes' but there's clearly quite a lot of genuine passion there? like I'm not denying the passion EXISTS, people do clearly care about these guys, it's not all a psyop by Big Fedal who have suckered people into caring for these two dudes. and I'm not denying the tennis is great! I still personally prefer the match-ups that involve djokovic, and also the match-ups that involve none of those three, but fundamentally I have been watching these matches for like!! so many years! it's part of my childhood, I have enjoyed plenty of these matches, the tennis is obviously otherworldly. I have hot takes on a bunch of their matches, I can have the goat debate with you, I can give you the rundown on surface-specific match-ups and how long since nadal won a set on hard court against djokovic and federer's peak year domination rate and what they all did at madrid and blue clay and yec and golden masters and all that shit, of course it's part of my dna as a tennis viewer too!! I did usually have a slight order of preference in my head when I was watching big three match ups to have someone to root for (it's different now but back when I was a kid it was djokovic > nadal > federer, these days federer's redeemed himself a little bit in my eyes by having the decency to retire and I was radicalised against nadal). but like!! what's the narrative hook! I need somebody to explain to me what the story here is. these guys are all very good at tennis and they are racking up their titles and it's so!! whatever!! no tension no arc no real interpersonal development once federer stopped being so bitchy about djokovic. twenty plus slams who CARES, what are they doing this for! it's all so?? ugh

anyway now that I've taken a potshot at the most popular rivalry in men's tennis, I should quickly back it up by saying I feel almost the exact same way about the second most popular one (at least on tumblr) and also feel nothing for alcaraz/sinner. that one was still like... vaguely palpable? when alcaraz was clearly a way better player but struggled in that match up and also was way more invested in the rivalry than sinner was. but well, sinner is world number one now so THAT'S been ruined. again, sit me down and explain to me what the narrative stakes here are. like, if sinner wins that roland garros match, he'll be fine? alcaraz will be fine? everyone will be fine? their relationship is basically 'friendly coworkers', zero chance of anything more substantial developing there. now, don't get me wrong, I'm not gonna pretend like I'm massively into the current state of the women's game when it comes to rivalries either, but at least I have a base level of fondness there for the top players and am ideologically inclined to hype up any rivalries there whenever they come along. also, quite frankly, it DOES matter viscerally more to them!! iga spends a lot of her time kinda like,,, on the edge, the way she was in tears when getting physio after the naomi match, united cup last year, a bunch of her 2021 matches, like she's so intense and so tightly strung on the court that you do really get the sense that a loss could just cause her to have an existential crisis. there's so many unanswered questions about her ultimate potential off clay, I'm still proper curious about her story develops. and then with aryna, she's obviously ALSO so intense but in a different way, and she feels every single emotion so completely and entirely and iga has beaten her in one of those infamous semifinal chokes and it's kinda... you know, aryna also feels like she has something to prove, and you can tell they both really really want to beat each other. there's something there!! it's something real! I'm always seated whenever we actually get to see them play

that being said, yes, obviously I do think we're not exactly peak rivalry potential in either gender. the men's is more egregious because the way the game has shaken out since like,,,, 2004, is incredible top level domination by just a few guys. and now, yes, I'm aware I'm a fan of another sport where this was also incredibly true. but. the key difference is that the aliens had the decency to not be so fucking boring about it. sure on paper they were as a PACK winning everything, but good lord were they screaming crying throwing up whenever things went mildly wrong for them. like!! they despised each other and they needed to beat each other, which makes ME care!! I'm not saying I NEED rivals to hate each other, though it sure does help for my investment levels, but I need a narrative hook! borg/mcenroe had a narrative hook, evert/navratilova had a narrative hook (unfortunately that narrative hook these days is 'being united in transphobia'), agassi/sampras had one HELL of a narrative hook. noughties wta tennis about fifty million narrative hooks!! when I watch alcaraz/sinner, I just try and enjoy the tennis (though their roland garros match was mid as shit so what's that all about) but like... I don't care? or I care because one of them has pissed me off recently. I do fundamentally watch most of men's tennis as a hater, and admittedly this is accumulated bitterness over way too many years, but I do also think it's frustrating! tennis gets in its own way with this whole gentleman's sport business, the amount of wanking people do over federer/nadal in particular is truly insufferable... this is a sport filled with millionaire tax evaders and they'll have you believe that smashing a racquet is not only not fun (obviously it is) but also some kind of arbiter of morality. congrats to nadal for not smashing a racquet in his career!! could we please get his thoughts on gender equality in prize money? oh... okay. hm. this isn't supposed to be some gotcha, these guys all suck. but ultimately I would prefer not to engage with this sanitising and pearl clutching, given they do all suck, over shit that fundamentally does not matter while giving them a pass over all the stuff that DOES and instead maybe just have some fun. maybe you need to be single-minded and kind of dull to be good at men's tennis these days, maybe it's inevitable, doesn't mean I don't find them boring and pointless. there's some people who just enjoy like,,, watching greatness, endlessly racking up numbers and reaching the pinnacle of the sport or whatever, that's not me, I need there to be a story

thing is, right, obviously I'll still watch these matches (though I have massively turned it down this year, especially on the men's side - I did have a kind of breaking point this january where I was like 'wow I don't think I can ever care about anything any more?' and broadly speaking this has proved to be correct). I've tried hard to like a lot of these men because, god knows, it'd be a way more pleasant experience if I could trick my brain into it, but I can't! I think they're dull! fundamentally I'm too embedded in this world to ever be able to leave it. but I think it's funny when fans go 'oh people who are into drama don't appreciate the actual sport' like buddy I can basically guarantee I know more about the sport than you do. I Just Think that actually interpersonal relationships do also enhance the actual sports, like this shit is a conversation right,,, it has its history, it's a development over time in terms of your tactics and your knowledge of your opponent's tactics and so on, your expectations going into every match. when you have an interesting interpersonal dynamic, the sport also becomes more interesting... it's actually pretty straightforward lol. a lot of tennis is in the head, rivalries are also in the head, you're playing the other guy (gender neutral) as much as you are the actual ball. I get super annoyed by fans who are too busy being nostalgic to actually enjoy the players we have now, and I really don't like it when people call iga boring for instance, but I do also have a little bit of that. love the game, hate a lot of the players, simple as. bring back agassi calling his pet parrot more interesting than sampras in his autobiography, we used to be a proper sport

[atlantablack]

i'm facing all my fears of the unknown (i've been shaking in my bones)

also on Ao3

At the end of the world, his sides still aching, and Eddie’s blood still tacky on his hands, Steve calls his mom. Leans heavily against the side of the phone booth right outside the hospital, the dial tone somehow still hanging steady in the air, and punches in a number his fingers still remember by heart.

It isn’t that his parents ever officially moved out of Hawkins. It isn’t that they’d ever looked him in the face and said, we’re never coming back. One day there’d just been a number written out in his mother’s small, cramped script on a neon yellow sticky note, hanging next to the phone. He used to call it every few months just to hear his mom say hello. Just to make sure they didn’t move somewhere else and forget to tell him.

He stopped checking at some point. Before Robin, before the party and Nancy’s slurred words. He’s not sure of the exact moment his parents faded into an entity he didn’t care to check on, but if he had to guess, he’d say it happened right around the same moment Jonathan slid his bloody palm into Steve’s and dragged him away from the monster bursting out of the wall.

But still, at the end of the world, the bites on his stomach burning, he calls his mom.

He doesn’t even know if she still lives there, if she’ll answer, if she’s home, but four rings laters his mom’s airy voice says, “Hello? Betty speaking.”

He breathes in harshly, lungs aching in a way he’s come to associate with bruised ribs. Breathes out softly and, the word more air than sound, says, “Mom?”

If he’d thought on it, he’d have thought he’d need to explain, to go into detail, to tell her that something awful is happening, has happened, that he doesn’t even know what he wants her to do, he just, he’d just been standing in the hospital watching Dustin sob and Robin press her hands to her throat and Nancy stare blankly at her bloody hands and he’d needed something he couldn’t name. If he’d thought on it, he wouldn’t have called at all.

But she doesn’t ask for an explanation, not really. He says mom, his voice shaking around the word like it hasn’t since he was six years old and still convinced his mother hung the stars, and she makes a noise he’s never heard, but recognizes from the few times he’s seen Joyce fuss over Will.

“Where are you?” Is what she asks, instead of any of the other questions he has answers for.

“The hospital,” he says blankly, staring at the parking lot, the cars parked haphazardly, the diseased red light still flickering out of a crack across the street. “I’m at the hospital. I’m, we lost… it’s really bad here,” he settles on after a minute, listening to the faint background noise of her moving around a room.

“Are you hurt?” Her tone is brisk, heels clacking as she moves back and forth while she talks.

He thinks about lying. Even now, when she’s actually asking, he thinks about lying and telling her it’s fine and hanging up. He’d handled this mess at 16 and been fine. Had handled it every year after that, always younger than he is now, and he’d been fine. But he glances back toward the hospital and the grief. Thinks of Lucas still sobbing when they’d finally managed to get to the Creel house, to Erica’s shaking hands, how she’s never seemed as small as she’d been in that moment.

He’s thinking of the blood, all the fucking blood, and the way this town just keeps hemorrhaging, drowning person after person, kid after kid. Thinks too, of all the times this week he’d barely made it out alive.

“I’ll live,” he says.

It’s maybe supposed to sound like a joke but she goes very quiet, the only noise the sound of her nails tapping, click click click, in rapid succession against a table. “I’ll be there in six hours,” she says. “Steve, don’t go anywhere. Wait at the hospital.”

He laughs, only vaguely registering that the sound is too high. “Yeah, trust me, I’m not going anywhere.”

Another long pause, her heels clicking across the floor faster than before. “Six hours,” she says again, voice tight. “Go sit down, Steve.”

———

Dustin cries himself out somewhere around 2am, falls asleep with his head on Robin’s shoulder. Robin rests her head on Steve’s shoulder and he rests his head against hers. On his other side Nancy is picking at the skin around her fingernails and he reaches out, gently pulls her hands apart and holds on.

Lucas sits on her other side, eyes unerringly fixed on the door, waiting for the doctor to come back with news on Max. Mr. Sinclair and Ms. Henderson are sitting on the other side of the room, speaking in low tones and Steve, selfishly, wishes that Erica was still in sight as well. He knows Ms. Sinclair was right to take her home but it makes him anxious that he can’t see her anymore. That anything could happen between here and her house and he’d never know until it was too late.

“What are we going to do?” Robin whispers, twisting her hands together like she’s trying to turn the shadows into puppets she can banish.

He doesn’t answer, couldn’t even if he had one for her. It’s lucky really that they seem to have entered the lull following the battle, because he doesn’t think he’s going to be able to stand up again without passing out.

If a monster burst through the door right now, if something gave him a shot of fear fueled adrenaline, he could keep going. But the adrenaline crash, the facade of safety settling on their shoulders, the grief wrapping around his throat—

His sides feel like they’re melting, like every brush of cloth against raw skin is sandpaper instead. And it’s fine, he can wait, of course he can wait. There are still other people in the hospital who need to be seen more than him. So many people who got caught in the earthquake and are hurting. So many people who didn’t make it all because the upside down swallowed them and isn’t going to give them back.

“Steve?” Nancy murmurs, “Are you okay?” She’s squinting at him in concern when he tilts his head her way and he can’t figure out what gave him away until he sees how tightly he’s holding her hand.

“I’m fine,” he says, forcing himself to let go of her hand. He forces an awkward laugh and a weak smile. “I’m just tired and worried about Max.”

Nancy’s eyes narrow but she hums under her breath and he knows she’s going to swallow the lie. But he should have known Robin wouldn’t. Should have expected the sharp jab to his side and the pain that goes bursting through him. He almost falls off of his chair with how tightly he curls in on himself, almost throws up on Robin’s stupid, filthy shoes.

Robin and Nancy both exclaim in alarm, although what exactly Robin expected to happen he can’t imagine. Lucas startles and Dustin wakes up with a shout. Dimly, around the ocean roaring in his ears, he can hear Mr. Sinclair’s smooth voice cutting through the noise, but it’s hard to focus on much of anything when his skin feels like it’s trying to peel off of his bones.

“You fucking asshole,” he grits out , not caring if she can hear him. “I’m never giving you a ride again.”

Robin laughs, high-pitched and terrified as she grabs his right arm and hoists him up and out of the chair, Nancy doing the same on his left. “Well, sense of humor is still intact, so—”

“If you say that’s a good sign,” he says, the words coming out fainter than he’d like.

She huffs in annoyance, doing her best to steady him as Nancy mutters, thank god, at the sight of the nurses hurrying towards them. “It is a good sign,” Robin says quietly. “You being alive and talking is always a good sign because I remember the first time when you weren’t and you can’t do that to me again Steve, okay? You can’t.”

His heart clenches, twisting itself into a knot and pulling at his lungs until they ache. “I’m fine, Robin. You know me. Can’t keep me down for long.”

Her breath hitches, and as the nurses herd him into a wheelchair, he thinks he just barely hears her whisper, yeah, that’s what I’m worried about dingus.

Inspired by:

And no, I'm not good at calling Dad said I've fallen off the grid We hardly say I love you 'Cause your parent's parents never did Ohh, ohh, ooh Save me, now I'm facing All my fears of the unknown I've been shakin' in my bones Lately, I've been praying To a god I've never known I can't do this on my own