#watch its going to feel super long here in my drafts and then ill post it and itll be two sentences and a clown horn.

[majorasnightmare]

i finally did it. character relevant sex lore for the party bicycle YAHOO

this post fucking fought me every step of the way. thats what i get for writing character analysis while violently ill and dosed to the moon on meds. enjoy in detail content on how bhaals favorite gore baby straight out of pottery barn fucks his way through the sword coast

content warnings for below the cut for sexual content and references to past sexual abuse 👇

so dirges relationship with sex is kind of... intense? ironically its at its simplest in his bhaalist years but that baggage gets carried over into experiences post tadpoling

bhaalist!dirge did... NOT have a good relationship with sex. the act itself was to be done for procreation, to seed the world with spawn to help fulfill Bhaal's goals, and to that end Dirge was coerced via duty into having sex with volunteering priestesses to try and conceive. Those efforts never bore fruit, and Dirge unconsciously tried to avoid that particular duty whenever possible, and it contributed greatly to his compulsive need to prove himself fit and worthy as Bhaal's vessel to avoid having to conceive an heir. the pleasure was embodied in the ecstasy of murder, a sensation somewhere between a full body orgasm and an addictive drug high, an instictive kill response triggered by Bhaal's blessing, and a sign that Dirge was the favored child. the desire for sex, for intimacy with another living person, was a sin, a sign of weakness. if you wanted the feeling, all you had to do was kill, and kill well. if you didnt want to kill, then it must be because you desired to spread your seed and incubate another heir to the throne of blood. what else could you possibly be looking for?

so dirge more or less avoided sexual encounters as a whole during his bhaalist years, up until meeting gortash, where gortash was an intimate human connection dirge WASNT going to kill (for the sake of bhaals schemes), and furthermore gortash was a connection that encouraged dirge to view himself as a person with desires outside of bhaal. things snowballed, and dirge fell into a cycle of sleeping with gortash that looked something like this

-be overwhelmed by the crushing weight of being a living religious idol

-feel soul destroying amounts of guilt for not living up to the standards set for you by yourself and everyone you interpret as a voice of authority on the matter

-refuse to go home because you hate yourself and your procrastinating on the inevitable routine of self flagellation and overwork until you feel youve earned the right to exist again

-end up at gortashs because you dont know where else to go

-seriously consider killing gortash and freeing yourself of this final piece of connection tying you to the material plane and potentially keeping you from killing the world. avoid killing gortash for exactly that reason

-let yourself be talked into making use of your time here by working on your schemes and projects together. be completely unable to focus and emotionally distraught

-be convinced into letting gortash relieve your stress. let things get carried away and take your clothes off. finally indulge your desire to be close to another person. >not your fault >banite talked you into it >youll kill him about it later

-you dont want to be responsible for your own desires or actions but you want to be guided by someone who knows how to make this work, so now that youve already shot yourself in the foot, might as well deepthroat the barrel. go completely submissive in bed and give gortash the thrill of a lifetime being the dom for a murderbeast that only tames itself for him

-have a genuinely really nice enjoyable time having sex

-wake up at the crack of dawn before gortash wakes up, feel completely disgusted and ashamed with yourself for succumbing to the weak desire for social connection, use his bathroom to clean yourself up, leave through his window without saying anything.

-promise yourself your never going to do this again, find someone to kill on the way out, crawl back home in disgrace to get started on that routine of self flagellation (literally)

-rinse and repeat.

and that cycle more or less stayed stable entirely up until dirges lobotomy. but dirge got to carry alllllll that unexamined guilt and trauma with him into his second go around

Post tadpoling, Dirge doesn't retain the old religious values that punished him for connection seeking, though he DOES retain the effects it left him with. Topping triggers traumatic memories of feeling coerced into trying to conceive at the temple (though he only recalls the intense discomfort, bereft of context or reason), and the years of religious guilt means hes so consciously present in his body that he struggles to finish. He also just takes a long time to climax overall. The discomfort doesnt start fading until a good bit into his relationship with Minthara. Generally this means his preference is to just treat his body as a tool his partner can use to make themselves feel nice, and Dirge derives a LOT of pleasure from watching his partner climax because of him. Its usually enough to satisfy him even if he doesnt cum, just as long as his lover does. This was one of the main sticking points in his relationship with Astarion, and one of the reasons Astarion eventually transitioned their relationship away from sex.

Dirge post tadpoling doesnt project any particular meaning onto sex and mostly sees it as a way to enjoy yourself physically, and is very open to casual and platonic sex. He sleeps with Astarion off and on throughout act 1 very casually when giving Astarion blood, he sleeps with Gale to reaffirm to Gale that he IS desirable and attractive, Dirge just cant reciprocate the exact kind of relationship Gale wants, and Dirge sleeps with Karlach after her engines fixed cuz he told her hed stay open to the idea and shes been pent up for a decade. Its something thats enjoyable to do, and Dirge takes to the role of attentive seducer quite well, lavishing affection on a partner over and over and over again, so he doesnt see a reason to abstain from it when its so fun, and it can do nice things for the people hes sleeping with. dirge very much is the kind of guy you can fuck without changing literally anything about your relationship to him, and he makes that clear before you blow his back out.

while dirge CAN be dominant in bed, he enjoys himself the most when hes being submissive. the dom/sub dynamic has more of an influence on how "into it" he gets than any other particular kink, because for dirge the relationship of power, potential for violence, and the physicality of his body are all intrinsically linked together. dirge is a killing machine that receives pleasure from inflicting death, and finds peace in receiving pain, and he is constantly aware of those facts. if someone isnt making him submit, hes doing the work of taming himself for them, and thats going to contribute to his difficulty losing himself in the experience. its easier and more enjoyable for him to pleasure a partner unwilling or unable to dominate him, because he can divert most of his attention off of himself onto intuiting the noises and motions of their body to pull the strongest reactions out of them.

when it comes to actual sex acts, dirge is a MASSIVE fan of oral. dirge typically seeks to satisfy multiple of his senses at the same time, and burying himself between his partners thighs ticks multiple checkboxes for him. its a reliable way of pleasuring a partner that rewards attention to body language and patience, it brings him close to multiple erogenous zones on his partners body (inner thighs, lower stomach, behind the knees, all within easy reach of his hands or easily manipulatable to bite, kiss, or otherwise mark), it satisfies multiple senses at once (nuzzling against his partners thigh, indulging the taste of them on his tongue, savoring the intensity of their scent so close to their heat, being able to look up and make eye contact), its something he can happily do for hours at a time until his partner wants him to stop, and above all its something one sided he can give to his partner without having to receive anything. dirge is free to take pleasure in the act itself and what it does to his lover without worrying about his bodys own reactions to things his lover might want to do to him, and in a d/s context its a blatant act of fulfilling devotion and worship that is its own reward. dirge is a very worshipful submissive, combining aspects of pet play with religious kink, needing a dominant to domesticate and take charge of him, before he rewards their efforts with service, devotion, and worship as thanks for going through the efforts of taming his more unruly urges. to that end, once minthara and him agree on their romance, she collars him as part of their initial courtship so that she has a means of restraining him on hand at all times.

dirges understanding of interpersonal power, autonomy, and self control are all tied up with his desires in social relationships and intimate connections, so because hes a bhaalspawn, because hes specifically an instinctive killer, the concept of indulgence itself carries inherent risk, and furthermore it carries the burden that he is not an infallible paragon of restraint. if dirge wants to be fully present in a relationship, he needs an external vehicle of control that isnt centered within his own capabilities of restraint, because otherwise he'll betray himself and act out against his own wishes and cause harm when he doesnt want to. dirge NEEDS someone to leash him so he can fully let go, but the responsibilities and risks of something like that are too much to reasonably expect out of most people. so far minthara and gortash have been the only ones willing to step up to be his self control kill switch

anything that plays into or around dirges power dynamics will typically be received well. bondage and restraints are enjoyable for him, alongside most forms of painplay. he has a huge thing for blood, and letting him draw it or drawing blood yourself and letting him catch the scent of it will sharply increase the intensity of the experience

generally dirge enjoys spoiling his lovers, dedicating the entire night to them with barely any focus on himself, lavishing affection on them, and using his own body to pleasure theirs, or letting his partner use his body themselves. intense scenes push dirge into subspace where his tendency to worship a lover gets emphasized, and he has a much easier time finishing like that and is prone to overstimulation. because he usually focuses so much on his lover, dirge tends to be quiet in bed, but gets increasingly vocal the deeper hes pushed into subspace

the only thing dirge possibly enjoys more than having sex with someone, is the aftercare afterwards. dirge gets incredibly soft and sweet after sex, and is a very big cuddler. aftercare is another oppurtunity to spoil his lover, to service and attend to them, and he enjoys the feeling of winding around them in the afterglow of it all. typically, the night has gone on long enough to thoroughly work through most of his visceral cravings for intense sensation, pain and blood, and with the Urge cowed through dominance and satisfied through intensity, whats left is shameless affection. hes very much an acts of service+physical contact love language kind of guy

it probably goes without saying but there isnt much that dirge wont experiment with, as long as it turns his partner on. hes also very openly a monster fucker, and the potential for dramatic violence holds deep erotic appeal for him. chimeric hybrids of monster and man scratch an itch meant to be soothed by the rejected slayer form for him, and his "hear me out" cake features bloodbornes ebrietas, daughter of the cosmos and the moon presence, and would almost certainly include several of MtG's phyrexians if i knew more about them. hed happily solve the lament configuration to fuck a cenobyte ala hellraiser, and he almost definitely found several of the necromorph transformations in dead space remastered viscerally satisfying

overall dirge is a submissive bottom who prefers being able to focus almost the entirety of his attention to servicing his lover, as his own pursuit of pleasure requires a lot of time investment and intensity that has to be increased either physically through stimulation or emotionally through domination, but finds plenty of satisfaction and enjoyment through his effects on his lover. the act of sex is very casual for dirge, with the d/s dynamic being more emotionally charged and the relationship standard for dirge. hes very open to polyamory, but wont seek out another dom if hes already leashed to one, but will happily share a partner so long as everyone is satisfied with the arrangement. he has a very high stamina, owing to his particular collection of cult traumas and bhaalspawn traits and how they more or less ensure he takes a while to satisfactorily finish, and he will gladly suck the strap like his life depends on it and eat out his lover like a starving man graced with his last meal. he adores all the attention aftercare provides, and it means that if anyone plans on actually making a night of sleeping with dirge thats more than a quick roll in the hay, it WILL be a multi hour affair so dirge can propely indulge in all the physical stimuli their body can offer. he is, also, super big on terms of endearment and if you dont give him something to call you, hes going to invent his own and itll probably be something morbidly sweet.

all in all, probably a rewarding lay for anyone who can make it past all the cult trauma spike traps and dark urge murder scares! or at least the post coital snuggles would be

[zid1an]

ok so. I’m avoiding my problems. here’s the context, the pitch, if u will, for “thirteen years is a long time” because things have changed VASTLY from what they were two months ago. biggest thing is that its zhancheng. please bear with me, This Is Going To Be Long. and also incomprehensible. :]

- sunshot happens. lan wangji goes into three year seclusion, jiang wanyin continues building up lotus pier from the ashes. bleak!

- so you’d think I’d make this sad. tempting! but I make the conscious decision every morning to pull on big red metaphorical clown shoes and a shiny red metaphorical clown nose and angst makes me feel physically ill so ah. No ❤️

- so in those three years a-yuan gets raised by lan xichen and lan qiren while lan zhan kinda figures himself out. why does lan zhan need to figure himself out? good question. flashback noises

• so imagine we’re at cloud recesses, before sunshot, before everyone has lost someone important to them to a war they didn’t ask for. jiang wanyin, jiang yanli, and wei wuxian arrive with the other yunmeng jiang disciples and somebody not naming any names is just like. wearing the big red clown shoes and shiny red clown nose but less metaphorically and they’re about to look at second jade of lan, lan wangji, and be like “You Want To Be My Friend So Bad”. and it worked. Somehow.

• lan zhan had a fleeting crush on wei ying that faded almost immediately, and so they were friends*

*wei ying would get into problems and lan zhan would watch torn between exasperation and genuine endearment, if that qualifies friendship. the extrovert adopting an introvert trope is good, actually

also wei ying didn’t know about that crush. which is probably for the better, he’d make a mess of it somehow

• what wei ying DID know though was that his shidi had a crush on lan zhan, jiang cheng has never been very subtle about these things, and he liked teasing him about it because that’s what a good older brother does. HOWEVER, wei ying had NO IDEA that lan zhan had a crush on jiang cheng. probably in part because lan zhan also had no idea that lan zhan had a crush on jiang cheng.

so lan zhan, admiringly and longingly, awful at nuanced romantic social cues, was like “jiang wanyin’s sword forms are very elegant.”

and wei ying, the biggest fan of his siblings and their number one cheerleader, also awful at nuanced romantic social cues, was like “yeah jiang cheng’s great!!!”

• where does jiang cheng himself sit in all of this? big embarrassing hero worshippy crush on lan zhan. thinks lan zhan is super super cool and perfect and because of [despondant mumbling] he Yearns from afar. I actually already posted screenshots of my thoughts on [despondant mumbling]. Anyway

• so for all of you watching from home, that’s lan zhan with a crush on jiang cheng, jiang cheng with a crush on lan zhan, wei ying entirely unaware of lan zhan’s crush on jiang cheng and delightedly aware of jiang cheng’s crush on lan zhan, and wild card nie huaisang who knows about all of the above and nonetheless just fucks around with wei ying and has his own shit going on, which I do also have planned in elaborate detail. ‘great that clears up everything!’ you are certainly thinking. fantastic let’s continue

• so how’d everything get so fucked up?

- (It Was The War.)

- so. lan zhan figures himself out. I had to go back and check where I was going w the flashback noises bc I got so caught up in the euphoria of needlessly complicated relationship graphs but . Lan Zhan. ‘if he figures himself out does that mean he realizes that he had a crush on jiang wanyin back then?’ you are perhaps asking yourself. Haha :]

- (no)

- he gets out of seclusion, three years older and a bit more at peace with the loss of his best friend (not entirely though, obviously, we’ll get to that) and he’s like “ok. I will visit shufu, then xiongzhang and a-yuan, then da-ge and nie-xiong, then look for wei ying. this is a good plan.”

• oh yeah huaisang lan zhan childhood friends. another time.

- so lan zhan Does All of That and you know. just .. happens to find himself on bichen flying top speed to yunmeng from qinghe because that’s exactly the kind of thing that can happen on accident. lan zhan touches down on the docks at lotus pier, however, and realizes that it very much is not the kind of thing that can happen on accident and also He Has No Plan.

- ah lan zhan lan zhan...... you fool

- meanwhile jiang cheng is just trying very very hard. hasn’t cried in years (not that he doesn’t want to) has incredibly calloused hands (listen I don’t want to get sad about the golden core I don’t but. But.) pretends that he doesn’t care about his disciples (they know better). the usual. this is a very shallow description on purpose

- so where does THIS leave us. the plot, that I’m working on. cool great now for the part that REALLY doesn’t make any sense!! aka all of the Everything Else

you thought THAT was long..... I am so sorry that tweet that goes “I will try to be brief (1/437)

WEI YING: this bitch doesn’t stay dead. the original draft had him staying dead but I got really sad and immediately changed my mind. he comes back in .. his.... body? a body that’s his and he tries not to think about the implication that the demonic cultivation remembers clearly enough what he looked like to not only create him a new body, but to create him a new body that looked like it aged. creepy! also it’s up for debate whether the demonic cultivation also shook somebody out there down for a golden core. who knows ! I don’t!!

MO XUANYU: hey guess what! I’m going to craft a happy ending for this dude if it fucking kills me. so he still gets taken into lanling jin after jin zixuan’s death (rip king I’ll do better by you in another au), that stays the same. it’s just that jin guangshan just straight up fucking Dies . like unprompted jin guangyao didn’t even get to fucking do anything yet. it doesn’t even matter what killed him in the end as long as it hurt but mo xuanyu is technically next in line to inherit lanling jin because of technicalities. good for him

JIN GUANGYAO: hey so. I will try to be brief (1/437). ohh man ok so the quickest possible way I can sum this up comes down to this, and I am so sorry because this is about to spiral into something wayy beyond jgy: lan zhan and nie huaisang are childhood friends (I know, this IS a great place to elaborate further on this, isn’t it?), and that means that lan huan and nie mingjue are also childhood friends. because lan huan and nie mingjue are childhood friends, it means that lan huan has been playing clarity for da-ge since he learned clarity, which means that da-ge’s doing better qi deviation wise. so when meng yao gets invited into qinghe nie, he’s getting whats essentially a free pass into Lan Huan’s Clarity Concerts, which means he gets free clarity.

SO. jin guangyao is still cunning and scheming and generally a sneaky sneaky little man but he’s also chosen his loyalties better this time around. I am absolutely going to have to make a separate post for him and huaisang. and da-ge. and lan huan. why did I write all of that out, actually,

[maikatc]

Black Sun Tale | Her Lullaby

i said i’d post it today without a time, so here it is! you actually get to meet some of my favorite super-side-characters in this haha–

remember this is a first draft with only minor edits, but enjoy! comments are reception are always appreciated.

-

Oliver was off at school, leaving Ayu to his own wits at the house. Though, the assignment for finishing a section of the textbook deemed itself… ill-tasting for Ayu’s attention. 

He doodled instead, most definitely, cursing his own drawings in the meantime. Thoughts of the events days prior already passed by his mind as almost nothing out of the ordinary. To be fair, however, Eilwen’s tests did pop up from time to time. 

Despite the scenes he drew, those crosses and his own blood seeped an abnormality into himself while tapping his fresher skin. It ticked him. The thoughts of his relations to Akeldama poisoning him beckoned as another one of his mistakes. But I should’ve expected that, shouldn’t I? 

Then there was Eilwen herself: follower in Akeldama’s society being punished by such simple items. The idea of her hands holding still from the burning cross stuck to him, leading him to wonder his own curiosities. Is everyone else the same, he asked. Certainly, they must have had pain tolerances similar to Eilwen’s words. 

But, then again, he always had somebody to ask. 

“Vittorino?” 

“What is it, now,” he asked. His form appeared out by his and Oliver’s bed, sitting with an irked face. 

“You… know Eilwen right?”

He scoffed, “Yeah, I’m taking you to see her later today.”

“I am?”

“It was a last-minute call,” he replied. “But why are you asking about her?” 

Ayu adjusted himself before answering the question. “I just want to know what you know about her.”

The question brought Vittorino to a side-eye of thought, but he shrugged nonetheless. “There’s not much I know about her, or any first eras other than Alice –but everyone knows about her really–. All she really does is hate on Akeldama and stick herself inside her own room, but most of ‘em keep to themselves like us too.”

He fidgeted. “That’s it?”

“Yeah.” He then asked, “What, did she do something weird?” 

“I guess she did…” He brought an explanation to the table. “I guess she was wondering about what’s happened to my body after dealing with Akeldama, which that was weird but… She tested me with a cross and her hands looked like they were burning…”

Vittorino’s calm face dropped just the slightest. 

“She said it happens to everyone because of contracts, but she didn’t even bat an eye at it. I figure she’s just strong about it. She seems strong. But I just want to know how it is with other members in the society since– since it burned me immediately yet she took it like a champ.” 

“Wait it burned you?” He nodded. “Huh, I didn’t expect that… I figured Oliver would but–. Anyways, you really wanna know about that stuff, don’t you?” Within a whim, Vittorino brought himself down to Ayu’s sitting level. 

“It’s just been stuck in my mind for a while.”  

“And that’s a bad thing to get stuck behind.” Digging through, he buried his hands into his pocket, viewing downwards whilst doing so. Soon, steam appeared out of the pocket as he paused, only to bring himself at a sigh when he brought it out. 

There laid a wooden cross against his skin, burning up in a red yet he too held no response. “It’s a simple thing: it burns whatever is associated with a demon like Akeldama.”

“He’s a demon?” 

“Probably,” he answered, “We figured once Alice told us some stuff.”

“So, he’s that bad…”

“Well, people take him for granted,” Vittorino commented. “Anyhow, this stuff is painful, yeah, but it’s just that some of us are used to the feeling by now.” 

Ayu asked, “Why?”

“Because…” Vittorino shook his head, storing the cross back in his pocket and standing back up. “Because some of us like holding it sometimes… to think about things.”

“… Vittorino–”

The tallest chuckled to himself, turning back to Ayu with a cheeky smile. “I think I’m one of the only second eras who even do it, but it’s just because it’s funny. Like, we aren’t even allowed to hold it, how idiotic is that? It just shows how ridiculous all that stuff is.”

The lie radiated to Ayu’s discomfort, a good one for sure considering his character, but a detection in lies were somewhat of a tendency. “Vittorino, are you sure this isn’t about…”

He pushed the idea aside, “No, they were all idiotic. That’s why I left the whole place.” His foot tapped impatiently. “Do you want to go to Eilwen’s early or something?” 

Ayu blinked at him, then back at the textbook. “… I mean, if it gets me out of language arts.” 

Opening a door already, Vittorino rolled his eyes. “He really wants you learning all that?” 

He followed him over to the forest entrance. “It’ll be important for when I’m older, and I really need to catch up anyways.” 

“Yeah, like learning phonetics can help you fight stuff or whatever.”

“Ollie said that shouldn’t be my priority anymore–”

“That’s what Oliver said,” he argued, “but not what you decided.”

He ventured himself into the darker woods that steeped itself by its depths of a hillside. The conversation obligated Ayu to follow. 

“I’ve been watching both of you ever since you guys had to be relevant in my life, and all you do is care about and follow others. But what about yourself?” The steps he trudged formed a beat to themselves, as if of a slow march. “Oliver’s was easy to notice since him caring causes him to start dying, and he stopped following people a while ago, but you’re less noticeable. For everyone, you’re less noticeable, since you aren’t dying from it. However, you keep caring and giving yourself away for other people. You’ll kill yourself eventually from just doing that.”  

The speech brought fear to Ayu’s throat, as he gulped at those last words. 

“’Everyone is manipulated by everything, but it’s in everyone’s power to take their own control.’” he glared down at Ayu. “That’s what I’ve been taught, and by now I think you should learn it for once.”

“… You were taught that by Akeldama, weren’t you?” 

He answered, “Obviously. Like I said, he’s taken for granted with some things he says.” 

Ayu had to argue then. “Vittorino, he’s a terrible person.” 

“So, what if he’s a bad person? For me, he made me the great and living person I am today and got rid of so many lost causes from making more chaos.” 

The excused seemed invalid with many counterarguments. “He caused the deaths of a bunch of lives because he felt like it.” 

“And that’s where it is: he does what he feels. He has nothing holding him back and we can’t even imagine all the events he’s had in his life. He doesn’t follow anyone and that’s what makes him great!” 

His excitement over the conversation peaked the slightest with his voice and giddy hands, to Ayu’s dismay. 

“Oliver’s right, you’re a weird fuck.” 

“If those guys are the ones that are free from all those rules,” he chuckled. 

As they walked, Ayu tripped on a root again. “Why are we even walking here? Didn’t you want to drop me off at Eilwen’s?” 

He shrugged. “I just like walking here, and I don’t actually have access to her room. She locked me out of it.”

“I…” Somehow, Ayu yelled in anger, “Vittorino! –”

*** 

Eilwen was found in the wild an hour later conversing with Alice. Though she hesitantly brought him back to the black-box. 

As they sat together in their separate chairs, Ayu questioned her silence. “Why did you bring me here now?” 

At the question, she bit her thin lip, her eyes piercing at him with an unknown feeling. Then sighed, “I asked Alice about your body’s behavior, and why you even have such odd relations with Akeldama… And I’m afraid I’ve now been tasked to prepare you for that answer yourself.”

Ayu blinked. “What do you mean?” 

“I cannot explain any details. I’m sorry. However, you are not here for that; you’re here to learn of other matters.” Standing up, she grabbed her candle to light up others from behind her back, illuminating a distinct chart connected to her watch by a string. “That being the current members of the society today.” 

Admittedly, Ayu groaned in the inside. “Can’t you take me on flashbacks again for this?” 

She shook her head. “No, that’s rather unnecessary. I’ll only be explaining each briefly.” A face mirroring a sigh planted on herself. “Then you’ll meet some yourself.”

The last section peaked his interest at an instant, as his eyes beamed at attention once said. “You mean I have to meet them?” 

“As annoying as it is yes. However, considering your importance, they won’t harm you now especially after the Margaret incident.”  She shook her head, adjusting her hat while setting up her watch. “Now then, let’s begin with the second eras.” 

*

After many psychopaths and silly characters in such a presentation, the watch clicked onto the final member. In his seat, Ayu sat intrigued but rather tired, with his arm barely lifting his head up. All the faces he only met on the board deemed themselves a weighing amount to handle by sight from their demeanors and smiles or frowns. 

At least some members seemed human. 

“Finally, we have the accursed, Bluebell.”

Ayu tilted his head. “Accursed?”

The picture brightened up with a woman in the forefront. Her body still like a portrait, she hung against a wreath of giant flowers delicately with her gown and hair flowing. Her hair welcomed itself like long roots of strawberry blonde that breezed down up until her waist. The gown glowed in a gentle white, small patterns of flowers speckled across its edges and rims, and sleeves cuffed under her wrists leaving an airy puff to her arms. But within it all, crowned with flowers colored vibrant and beautiful upon her freckled skin, she smiled, wide and calm. 

The beauty and serene nature of her image calmed Ayu as that of a young, mystical mother. However, previous members already brought him to a distrust. Plus, ‘accursed’ was finally explainable with her appearance. 

“Don’t trust her.” Eilwen explained, “While Bluebell is objectively the most gorgeous of the first eras, she is most definitely the least liked.”

“And why her specifically?”

“She’s just a sinister addle pate,” she grumbled. “She has not talked much of her origins but she either lied to many or she held multiple jobs as a caretaker, nursemaid, and florist whilst as a young mother. The happenings to what happened to her child are unknown, though she joined Akeldama without them.”

The image, in Ayu’s mind, continued to stare down into his soul somehow. While doing so, Eilwen explained her abilities and methods of extermination.

The concepts blended with Ayu rather poorly along with all the other new faces. “I get she hunts down kids but aren’t I safe?”

She replied, “It’s difficult to consider… and to explain. She likes to fool around with everybody in general. Although, I’m not sure if you’d even be affected by her.”

Through some thinking, Ayu shrugged. “I’ll be fine; Oliver’s singing is probably better anyways.”

Eilwen’s expression downed itself, proceeding to blow out the candles near the board and summoning a door. “I’m sure you will.” The door opened up her hands, which signaled Ayu to jumped out of his chair. “Follow me, please.”

And so, he stepped on out along her side, yet through the door was not the average forest of Fowls. Glass-ridden, a topless hallway was formed, large and wide in its endless interior. On each side of its walls placed multiple doors all of which caked against each other in their designs, along with small silver plaques beside them all. 

“Woah…” Ayu breathed out into a smile. “This is cool!” 

“This is where you have access to the houses and fields of every member in history.” The coat that blanketed her shuffled whilst she returned back to the door behind them. “Many will be empty, I warn you. And I won’t be accompanying you due to all their annoyances.”

As the door closed, he asked her. “Wait- Wait! How am I supposed to get back here? Or back to you?” 

“Elementary, now that you’re here, just think of this hall and the door will appear. Don’t hassle over it.” Then the door finally faced him flat, its carvings of bells and old clocks mocking him. 

The situation brought Ayu to a grumble, not so much any fear in his bones more so irritation of mentors. Perhaps the day was a bad mood, we will never know. Though after a huff and sigh, Ayu trudged forward to the first door in sight.

The new entrance glossed itself in comparison to all the other wood-like structures, shining along carvings of fancy men. 

One of Ayu’s eyes lifted up at the design, its properness making itself more of an oddity. And already his guesses as to who it was appeared in his mind. He took a breath, motivating himself to enter in, and with his sight closed, he opened the door. 

Barging in, Ayu stopped himself before his speed kicked in. Opening his blind view, he was met with velvets and greens, as well as stairs to his questioning. Stepping over, he greeted himself to what seemed to be a rich brat’s lair. 

Yep, it’s him. 

At the edge of the floor, a table sat furnished in cards and coins, as well two party members sitting on each side. 

“… I draw three.”

“What do you mean you draw three? I had just went all in.” 

“Well, you always cheat so you’ll be disqualified in two seconds once King comes back.” 

“But don’t we always cheat?” 

“Yeah, but the two of us can’t manipulate the card order.” 

“Then that’s just too bad to be you.” 

The two conversed at the singular turn. Their bickering brought Ayu to a slight familiarity. Soon, he spoke out, “You’re… Eden and Cosmina, right?” 

They turned at him instantly, the girl holding a card by her two fingers without hesitation. The appearances began to clear up for Ayu, however their clothing and accessories contradicted that of past sights. The man, Eden, seemed to have lengthy brunette hair tied to the back, edges still rolling off from the knot and blocking up some of his face, though a piercing still appeared by the edge of his lip. His top comfortably laying against his torso and thighs as a well-knit turtleneck, yet the sleeves ripped themselves off. Then Cosmina’s hair changed to that of a slim cut down to her chin, with her uniform only consisting of a tank-top, shorts, and thin coat. 

Eden questioned, “Are you the kid Alice mentioned earlier?” 

“I thought he’d look more off-putting,” Cosmina commented. “Not that I’ll complain. Were you expecting King?” 

Hesitantly, Ayu nodded. 

She stared down into his soul. “Timid, I see. Well, there’s not much to be weary of here. We won’t bite, if that’s what you’re thinking. And King’ll be here soon, he’s only getting essentials.” 

Ayu’s words stumbled within themselves, ultimately bring nothing of a reply. 

“You’re calling booze an essential?” 

“What else are we supposed to do waiting here? Might as well get a little tipsy.”

“I…”

“Jesus fucking Christ you couldn’t believe the number of parents at the liquor store today!” The door behind them all slammed closed. Ayu and the others whipped their heads to find the last member of the party. His figure lean and confidant with his boxes hung around his arms; his tailcoat flowed as he paced up the stairs. In Ayu’s eyes, the man’s eyepatch glistened in its dark cloth, his short haircut to match. “Oh, it’s the kid.” 

“It’s Ayu…”

“King, perfect timing, he just got here.” Cosmina walked on over to the new figure. They greeted each other by King’s kiss on her cheek whilst he placed the boxes down for her to grab. He kissed down Eden’s cheek as well, to Ayu’s slight confusion. “He’s a little shy, so we’ll save the drinks for later in case you two do something stupid.” 

“Oh, who are you kidding? We all go stupid with bourbon,” King laughed as he tidied the small mess on Eden’s shirt. 

Ayu scurried in his spot. “You’re King?”

“In the flesh, hopefully.” 

The answer forced Ayu to gesture at the whole room. “Aren’t you supposed to be the fancy one?” 

He muttered, “Damn, I really do wanna drink. Mina, get the OJ.” 

“On it.” 

“Anyways,” the focus laid back on Ayu. “I suppose that’s how I’m seen in the society.” 

“Yeah,” Ayu eventually brought himself to a seat. “You’re the fancy-ass ruler with the throne…” he then pointed at the other two. “And you guys were the servants?” 

Eden cackled. “Oh god, that takes me back.” 

The king chuckled a little with him. “Yeah, I guess that’s how it was.” 

“You all had old fancy clothes and stuff… what happened?” 

“That shit was hot, that’s what,” Eden answered. 

The girl returned with cups of orange juice by a hand and placed it on the table for the others to grab. “There were too many layers back then, I’ll admit.” 

“Thank you very much,” King snatched a cup. However, he offered to Ayu, “You want some? It isn’t spiked,” as he eyed the alcohol in the corner. 

That in itself raised Ayu’s hands against it. “I prefer apple juice…” 

“Huh, we haven’t had apple juice in a while. I’ll get that later.” 

Ayu still grabbed the cup from him, taking a sip to a surprise of the nice taste. And no pulp. “– Still why’re you guys like this now?”

King handed himself his own cup while answering. “Well, I will admit that back then, we did act like snobs.”

“It was you who was the snob,” Cosmina retorted. 

“And it was you all who went along with it,” he added. “But what am I joking, almost everyone in the first era has some kind of act going on, especially if we’re talking about back then.” 

Ayu questioned with his cup, “What are you talking about?” 

“Everyone here exaggerated themselves back then, whether it be by fashion or action. We were just the types who did both,” King explained. “And while we did like the roleplay and the clothes, being immortal for four hundred years made that a little boring.” 

“Oh yeah,” the idea of immortality seemed so normal for Ayu by then. “How is even being immortal.” 

“Oh, my god, it’s terrible!” Eden raised an arm. 

Cosmina said, “Remember you’re supposed to live a life for less than one hundred years and imagine doing the same thing four times.” 

“What she said,” King sipped. “We followed the trend of the society for a while which was ‘stay in your rooms to do whatever bullshit for eternity’. But we realized that, in itself, was bullshit.”

The swearing still threw Ayu off. 

“Usually people would off themselves after being tired of immortality, but we knew that was a stupid idea considering our society deals. So, instead of killing ourselves or moping like the rest of the ‘woe is me’ first eras–”

“And the even more ridiculous seconds.”

“– them too,” King continued. “We just decided to go and have a life outside of killing.” 

“By… drinking and living off of orange juice?” 

Eden drank his own cup of orange juice when he spoke, “Nah, the bourbon’s only for when we’re stuck here.” 

“… You’re gonna throw that out later, right?” 

“No, why would we,” Cosmina asked. 

And Ayu replied, “Because my dad always told me and my sister to throw that stuff out for Mom so…” 

“Psh,” Eden chuckled, “Then that’s just a bad parent.”

“They were pretty nice,” he defended. 

“I’m sure your parents managed to fix that up, or at least will do soon,” King pushed aside to Ayu’s own bitterness. “But, no we aren’t alcoholics. We go travel and find whatever’s fun in the new world.” 

“What?”

“We visit all different kinds of places in the world and do whatever festival or party’s going on there. Because, why stick here for a hundred more years when you can do whatever you want?”

“Whatever’s fun or whatever sounds funny enough,” Eden added, pointing at his own piercing with brows together. 

“It looks lovely on you, dear.” 

The compliments gave Ayu another topic to look upon. “… And all you three are?” 

“A couple.” Cosmina stayed in the background during all of the answers. “Is there anything of it?”

“No, not really,” Ayu looked down at his cup. “I just, don’t know anything about that stuff and I’ve never seen three people before so I was wondering why.”

“Fuck monogamy, that’s why,” King replied. 

“I drink to that.” With the raise of a cup, Eden drank more of the juice. 

“…?”

“We do as we feel, and we all like each other’s company. That’s all the necessary explaining,” yet even Cosmina casually sipped the orange juice. “You’re only a child but once you really understand, good for you.”

“Wait… do people like each other just because they like their company?” 

King interjected, “Well, there’s more to it but…– hold on we aren’t here to give romance advice!” 

“I wasn’t asking for any! I was just curious!” 

“What, are you having a school crush or something,” Eden raised a brow at him. 

“What?” Ayu scoffed at the idea, blushing in the midst, “No!”

“Alright then. That’s that.” He finally set his empty cup down after playing with it. “Are you going to ask us anything else or are you done with your orange juice?”

“I…” He set down the cup. “I think I’m done.” 

***

The other doors Ayu entered were abandoned by their owners long ago, as Eilwen told. Some brought worn down activities for Ayu to venture into, though others laid barren. Those barren lands packed themselves up, from the owner ready to leave as he learned. The ghosted lands still hung around with bright colors, but the dim atmosphere brought him to leave early to every single one. 

King’s trio seemed like the biggest treat of the day, alongside their flavorful beverage, but he tried to ignore that. Their modernist attitudes stuck to him, as well as their farewells to his visit. 

“If you end up joining us, come over here because everyone else sucks!”

Not the kindest gesture, he admitted, but the message still stood. He questioned the message, Am I joining the society soon? Is that what Eilwen’s worried about? 

The idea pleased itself easily, considering his associates and history. Besides, with everybody’s growing concerns to his own apparent growing importance, the aspect of him joining them seemed of a satisfying end to finish his mess, in some way of the matter. Perhaps he would receive more power than he could ever imagine or be granted his wish to undo everything in his life. That concept pleased himself the most. 

However, the price still stood ahead of him. That price of taking another’s life for his own lingered in the concept. And to that, he availed from the chances quickly enough, his heart too strong to break by himself.

There ahead of him, was yet another door to enter. This time, the wooden décor carved itself into flowers and leaves growing into one another in intricate detail. The petals fell and the stems kissed the grass carved below. In such detail in design, Ayu gulped knowing who it may be. And yet again, he brought his arm to open up the door. 

Stepping into new grounds, the soles of his old sneakers brushed up against long grass. It tickled his knees as his first views of the land were made. Despite the nature field, her land posed itself as disproportional. Flowers grew wild and of various shapes and sizes which many were larger than likely possible of a normal plant. They all swayed rhythmically to nothing, dancing to their own hearts content at the silence, but also the humming of another person in the garden. 

He faced doubt in the eye, and ventured more inside, ignoring his own inner-warnings. Quickly after drowning of the leaves in front of his path, he discovered the source of the hummer. Her long, angelical hair swayed down like a river, covering her face alongside her crown of wild flowers. She mumbled a tune as she watered a bustle of flowers, but the identity was clear nonetheless. 

Bluebell, his eyes darted down the nearest bush and hid in its rustling leaves. Even with his mouth of courage to Eilwen, her own words left a mark of warning once seeing her in person. He managed to not flinch, to itch a muscle, or to form a single peep of gripe. After moments in time, and some flashing of black and white, Ayu sighed. Soon, he rung his arms to start crawling away and making it out of the door–

“And who might you be?” As soon as he stepped towards the outside, the lady grabbed him by the hood. She yanked him back to his startled fear. 

“Fuck–” He pulled the hood in front to resist choking, and struggled with his own feet to muster up. “Let me go!” 

With his light weight, she lifted him up with ease, her copper eyes squinting at his appearance. Yet eventually, she smiled. “No, no, come with me,” she pulled him, “You look tired; you can sleep here if you need rest.”

“Let me out,” he yelled, but to no avail. 

“Oh, don’t be fussy, Ayu,” she giggled, “This will make Akeldama fuming. Just listen to me.” 

While the pleasure of Akeldama’s misfortune would have convinced Ayu another day, the risk of her ability still lied as a great possibility for him. “No– Stop! –” However, he was too late to make a hit. 

“My dear, in sickness, sadness, and red, can sleep from a song with sigh…”

Her voice echoed and rang into his ears, slowly softening every inch of this tension and mind merely from those lines.

“Your life, your soul, your ending night will rejoice with us in light.”

The lullaby wrapped him around, stopping his struggles and whines and instead relaxing and numbing the pain. 

“Despite these somber eyes, I can see, there is time to close them away…” 

Such a clear, siren-like voice called to him. It chilled the bones that wanted end so recently and brought along a warmth that coddled him endlessly. Soothing him, his own eyes began to calm into a slumber. 

“In hope, my love, without life in sight, your days will say–”

“BLUEBELL!” Alice screamed at her, interrupting her beautiful song. From the erupt end, Ayu snapped back awake with the lingering melody as he turned to the distressed woman ahead of them. She ran and snatched him away from the siren, to his dismay. 

“Oh, Alice, you ruined his fun,” she said. 

The head of the society glared at her. “You impudent–” yet she turned back to the young boy with closing lids, “Are you alright?” 

Ayu remained silent, processing the event that just unfolded. 

Another slowly walked into the scene, somehow shying away with her scarf. 

“Eilwen, I told you to keep watch on him,” she stomped towards the mentor. 

“I–” she stammered. “I thought he would be alright considering he’s of–”

“He hasn’t developed at all yet! He’s only a mere child at this stage!” Alice shrieked in her stop. “God, didn’t you think of how Akeldama could be upset by this? – Ugh, that’s beyond the point now. At least I managed to catch him before Akeldama arrived… How are you feeling Z– Ayu?” 

The argument rather unsettled Ayu’s mood. The lullaby from before seemed as something to return to once more already… In all honesty, the song was not as horrifying as he imagined. “… I’m doing fine.”

“Be honest.” 

More so, it lifted him up the slightest. “No, I really mean it,” he told her. “Kind of, uh, refreshed actually.” He forced a smile upon the odd feeling. That sense of wanting more began to kick in. 

Alice nipped her lip and turned to Eilwen. “Do you believe it’d be alright to bring him back home? It doesn’t seem all that bad…” The head turned again to the wonderful lady. “We’ll only need to console you later,” she spat at her, who only continued to water her plants once more. 

She scoffed, “You never tell us anything, Alice. How would I know of the consequences?” 

“Well, your fun may have caused you your own death grave.” 

Instead of anything else, Bluebell shrugged with a giggle, “Do you really think that matters anymore, Cecily?”

Alice huffed, patting Ayu towards the exit. “Let’s go; you need the rest.” 

***

The apartment entrance shut as Alice led the way. Ayu scurried behind her, unsure of her silent aggression. 

Oliver sat by the couch, legs crisscrossed and Ayu’s textbook on his lap. He poked a pencil by his hand, jotting down on whatever pages Ayu bothered to commit to the day prior. Corrections most likely covered the pages considering previous marks on his answers. 

He turned around at them, his pale eyes peering at Alice. “Oh, hi… Alice, why are you here?” 

Originally, Ayu would have pondered as to why Oliver never asked why he was gone; however, that failed to bring him down that day. Alice instead pushed him gently more towards the inside as she explained. “Ayu simply ran into a… mishap, while in Eilwen’s care. But don’t worry, she and I will take care of it.” 

He dropped the book down onto the couch, standing up. “Alice, what happened?” 

“It’s nothing for you to worry about. The most Ayu will experience is some improper thinking and a state of intemperance.”

“But I can’t ask why?” 

“No,” she stated, her voice reaching a new low. “You aren’t to be involved with anymore things that can harm you.”

“So, he’s been hurt.” Oliver’s brows furrowed together at Alice, as he walked down to Ayu’s side. “Are you okay?” 

He told him, “Yeah… I’m great, Ollie.” A smiled crept up the slightest in his dazed fate. 

His face raised into that of confusion. Only for him to sigh, “Just go, Alice. You aren’t going to help me with this.”

She nodded in silence, and exited through the doorway and magic. 

In the unknown, Oliver hummed and stared up until he faced Ayu again. “Okay, Ayu, what happened?” 

Unsure of how to reply, the serious tone gawking him, he only answered back, “Nothing really… But, something really nice happened if that’s what you’re thinking.” 

“… What?” 

He figured Oliver would like his story. “I met this lady, who sang a nice song and I got to hear it… Too bad Alice stopped it though. Oliver, you should have heard it, she sounded amazing.” His mind bubbled at the thoughts of it. “I think I’ll go try and visit her again. You should come with me.” 

“Oh.” His face softened the slightest. “Okay…?”

In the comforts of his thoughts, Ayu held up Oliver’s hand and gripped it in his smile. “Trust me, the song makes you forget about everything.” 

At those very words, Oliver’s mouth sided downwards. “Sure,” his words slurred as he reached back in a smile. 

Ayu let go of the hand, bringing himself to an arm stretch. “Well anyways, I’m gonna take a nap.” Drifting off, he told his final words to Oliver, “I’ll talk more about it later.”

In the room, instead of sleeping, Ayu actually giggled at himself and his own formulating thoughts. Not even sure himself as of why, he laid there, smiling and basking himself in the growing euphoria inside of him. However, his sense remained ever so prevalent, and his ways of listening peered from outside the room. 

“You have a clue, don’t you, Vittorino?” 

“Yeah,” he replied. “I’ve only heard of Bluebell, but I know kids are her main targets… He must’ve been affected by her ability.”

“… What does she do?” 

He quickly jabbered, “It’s a more subdued but strong version of my ability. She sings people to sleep to kill them. But if she doesn’t finish her song…”

“Ah,” Oliver said once connecting the dots. “And it’s going to get worse, I assume?” 

“Most likely.”

He sighed from the outside. “Goddamn it…”

But Ayu listened to it all, and all he could reply from it was to shrug. Oh well. 

-

Ten Dollars | Bread and Water | Red Eye | Crimson Capture | November 1st | A Mother | A Demon | A Child | The Wolf | Bloody Fingers | A Monochrome World | The Pocketwatch | I’ll Have My Day | Two Weeks | Monsters | Sleepover | First Meal | Dearest 

[shhh-no-ones-home]

did you say close or closet?* steve harrington x reader

+++++++++ okay this is my final prompt story of the five. i was waiting to edit it for a super long time but i finally did and am posting it. this was also written around season one so sorry if it's ooc now 🤷 like i said in the other prompt one shots these have been in my drafts for a super long time.

* - shes here. Trapped in a closet because your hiding from people at school and it gets super awkward super fast but things start to escalate ;)

prompts:

7. Everyone keeps telling me you're the bad guy

13. Looks like we're gonna be stuck here for a while

20. d..did you just make that noise?

Song: i dont need love by sammy hagar

tag list:@cynic-spirit 

+++++++++

I ran down the hallway, steve hot on my heels. We were running from some of the football players that we had played a terrible joke on. We turned a corner and before i knew it i was being pulled backwards into a hall closet. It was dark for a second before steve pulled the light chain, pouring the harsh light into the small space. We both just sighed before laughing quietly so they wouldnt find us.

"Looks like were gonna be stuck here for a while. Wouldnt want any of them to catch us and do terrible things to us."

He made a screwy face before smiling back down at me. I shook my head and leaned my body on the wall behind me, watching steve do the same. I sighed.

"You know, us being here a while could be a good thing, now i can get to know you a little better."

He looked at me in confusion.

"Why would you need to do that?"

"Everyone keeps telling me youre the bad guy, id like to make that decision for myself."

"Well i mean youve been hanging around me long enough dont you think? I mean you're not the nicest girl ive ever met."

I mocked hurt and placed my hand on my chest.

"Well then, i guess ill just have to try harder next time huh?"

we both stood there a second before laughing at my sarcasm.

"Seriously though, im not here looking for friends or acquaintances or boyfriends or anything like that. Im here to have a good time with whoever wants to join me. Which is why i was stoked to hear youd help me prank the football team."

"So what im hearing is you're just in it for the ride, not the destination."

I side nodded.

"Sometimes the stops on the ride are better than the destination, i dont need love or appreciation as long as im having a good time. Now im not necessarily easy either but if the moment arose and i was stopped long enough i might just consider some things."

He looked at me like he was reading my mind.

"We're stopped now. "

He raised a brow at me.

"You think your ready for this harrington? I heard you like vanilla girls like nancy drew."

"Its nancy wheeler actually and she'd never do anything like the stuff we did today, even with a little male persuasion."

I laughed at him, male persuasion my ass, that girl would be too scared to get her panties wet if the moment arose much less sleep with anyone she thought was interesting.

"Ill make a deal with you harrington. We can do this right now if you can promise me that nothing comes out of your mouth about me after this. And i know thats a long shot but im not here to make people mad. Like i said, im here for the fun along the way, im not here to ruin other peoples fun."

He reached his hand out for me to shake.

"Deal. now how do you wanna go about doing this, ya know since we are in a pretty small closet."

I shrugged.

"Ive done it in smaller."

I started by sliding off my jacket and throwing my shirt off. He just stood and watched before i pulled him to me and started kissing up and down his neck.

"You gonna work with me or not harrington?"

He nodded frantically before removing his jacket and shirt as well. We quickly got back to each other, but actually kissing this time. He pushed me up against the wall, lifting me, allowing me to wrap my legs around him. As he attacked my neck i let out a soft moan, reaching down to rub him through his pants. I was quick to undo his pants, along with mine so we could get to business. We kissed as he removed my panties and gripped my thighs to line himself up with my entrance. I ground my hips down onto him and he let out a needy, whiny, moan. We both paused for a second.

"D...did you make that noise?"

He let out a small laugh and i could see the blush on his face.

"I guess its been a hot minute."

I kissed him softly and nodded at him.

"Perfectly normal."

He nodded back and kissed me a little more needy. He broke away to look down for a second and entered me, earning a moan. I slid my head back against the wall and he attacked my neck again, sliding in and out of me at a steady pace. I held onto him for dear life, resting against the wall with my legs wrapped around his exposed torso. He rammed into me over and over again, earning soft moans that i was trying the stifle so no one would hear us. I could tell he was getting closer though, his breathing was becoming less steady and so were his thrusts. I reached down and rubbed my clit, sending me down the right path to cuming with him. He rested his head against my shoulder, kissing and biting it, trying to keep his noises to himself; or at least just to us. I could feel him trying to hold on for dear life but he quickly pulled out of me, unhooked my legs, and stumbled back against the opposing wall, stroking himself and cuming down his hand. He let out a loud sigh before looking back at me, walking over to me and kissing me again.

"I dont believe i heard you finish."

He wiped his hand off with the paper towels sitting on the overhead shelf before lifting me back up against the wall. I was shaken a little bit but he kept perfect eye contact with me as his other hand got closer and closer to my core. He rubbed my clit, which sent my head back against the wall, before fingering me, pushing in and out of me over and over again. I gripped his shoulder tightly, wrapping my legs tighter around him as i came around his fingers. My legs were shaky as he set me back down and licked his fingers off.

"See i dont like just vanilla girls."

I smirked at him before pulling my panties back on.

"That was probably as much outside of vanilla as youd ever try to get harrington."

[serenagaywaterford]

was I the only one who thought tuello was going to mention the 2x10 rape and not the nick thing when he arrested serena??? like, obviously I understand the thing with nick was rape regardless, but she did ask them both and june would've ended up in the colonies had she not gotten pregnant while the 2x10 rape doesn't really have any sustainable justification behind it. I don't see "I was in a mood and wanted the baby to come faster" working in court (1/2)

and I guess you can argue there's no way to prove that that rape happened, but serena got arrested before any paternal test was done so it seems as if fred's word is enough?? I guess they can get the test done later and confirm it, but I don't know, I feel like there's a way out of this for serena whilst I don't think there would've been a way out if they had proof of what happened in 2x10. I just find this flimsy. (2/2)

---

No, you weren’t! I honestly... I thought it was going to be about her actual war crimes, like her blatant terrorism against the US, conspiracy to blow up state capitols, and overthrowing a democratic government via war. But hey, that’s too easy lol. Like, why on earth Fred wouldn’t turn her in for THAT, which are HUGE crimes that the ICC/Americans/etc would actually be interested in is beyond me. Oh wait, no it’s not, cos this is The Handmaid’s Tale and they don’t know shit about law or politics, or at this point common fucking sense. It’s a soap opera now.

I’m just so irritated by that whole “Let’s arrest Serena for rape!” concept because it’s entirely based on a) an individual and singular crime against a single person on foreign (sovereign) soil; not a war crime (so why the ICC would have ANYTHING to do with it is beyond me) and b) FRED WATERFORD’S WORD. Because suddenly they believe everything an admitted war criminal is saying against the woman who literally turned him in???? No, nothing suspect about that at all.

(The American government may have an interest because they do get involved in individual crimes against Americans on foreign soil. But then it gets into whether June is still an American, legally. And whether Serena is. Which is super confusing and murky. I’d say June is, and Serena likely isn’t since she probably renounced her US citizenship, but I’m also not a legal scholar or lawyer. And whether the international community even considers Gilead its own country, or just some type of military occupation on American soil. SO COMPLICATED. This is why the show should have just stayed away from all of this trash.)

I mean, we know Fred’s not lying about what happened to June then but the fact Tuello & Co. just take his word at face value with NO corroboration is absolutely fucking mental. 

Not to mention, how the FUCK does Fred even know about that? All he knows is that June got pregnant with Nick’s baby. Was he secretly listening the entire time to everything Serena has said? Cos, let’s take a step back for a second and think rationally about how the hell Fred would have access to that information lol. Serena, from what we saw, was incredibly discreet about setting it up. Was Fred actually lurking in her bushes when she talked to June about it? Was he around when Serena supposedly spoke to Nick about it? (We don’t know where that was but probably either in Nick’s apartment or in the car.) So, does Fred actually have the whole house bugged? LOLOLOLOL. Even if he saw Serena bringing June out to Nick’s apartment, he has no idea what anybody’s thoughts or feelings were about that. Serena and June could have easily been in on it together, and there was no rape involved at all! He doesn’t know that. Did he sneak up to Nick’s second floor window and watch how fucking WEIRD that whole thing was? LMAO.

To me, the fact Fred knows all that is a fucking big plot hole. He didn’t before. But suddenly he knows Serena set up Offred’s rape by Nick? Did she tell him that? Cos that would be insane of Serena to do and completely OOC. All Serena’s said is that “HA HA! The baby isn’t yours, you manky chode!”

Anyway...

To be frank, I have a post--quite a long one--sitting in my drafts about how incredibly asinine and unrealistic that charge against Serena is as a “war crime”, not to mention how weak it is just from a legal standpoint, even if we would take it as a regular rape charge. (She would literally never be found guilty, lbr. There is no solid legal basis for it (there is a flimsy one) and when you consider her defense--which is way more solid than the charge--the chances of anybody ever prosecuting her for that, let alone convicting her, are so incredibly thin, even if it was just as a regular rape crime, not a war crime.) She’d be more likely charged with something like sex trafficking or procuring (prostitution) or coercion or accessory to rape and/or conspiracy to rape. (And she’s clearly guilty of those things). Not the rape itself. It’s so! fucking! stupid! Sex trafficking would be SO much more solid of a charge cos essentially that is what she did...

She didn’t rape June in that instance much more than she murdered those kids Fred shot in the woods. She’s a shitty fucking person for putting that idea in his head, and basically saying, “Go do this for me, you pathetic little man” but she didn’t actually say the words, nor did she commit the actual crime herself. (Heyyyyaaa Lady Macbeth!) Both Fred and Nick were acting of their own free will. 

(Honestly, I will go on forever about how Nick is NOT some innocent, helpless creature. He’s a MAN (aka automatic superiority over any woman), and an EYE (AN EYE, YOU GUYS!!!! The most elite of the Gilead intelligence forces!!!), and to refuse Serena’s request would be EXPLICITLY FOLLOWING THE LAWS OF GILEAD and there is NO WAY he would ever, ever be punished by Gilead for that lmao--for following the law. If he reported Serena to Fred or even Pryce, Serena would be fucking punished--probably with death or Colonies (which is just prolonged death). And he’d have June’s supporting testimony too! What part of this misogynistic fascist state are you people missing? A lowly woman trying to make a man break the law and defile another man’s property?! HAHAHAHA. As if they’d take Serena’s side. Nick is a fucking Eye. There are instances where they do take a woman’s side, like with Janine’s random accusation--but significantly: Warren was BREAKING the law, not upholding it as Nick refusing to rape Offred and turning Serena in would have been following the law. To me, it never ever made sense that the men would just turn on their own like that over a literally mentally-ill Handmaid’s suicidal admission. I think, when it comes down to it, Naomi’s contribution made it “two witnesses” to the crime. Like, if you look at most religious texts or cult texts, they generally require more than just the victim. Some require at least 2, some 3 individuals. So for Gilead to require nothing but victim outcry is bonkers and not consistent with the type of society they claim they’ve built in the series. BUT ANYWAY, that’s a big digression...

Like miss me with that complete utter rape-apologist bullshit. He literally took advantage of the situation to put his dick inside a woman who did not essentially consent to it in that particular situation. Or, if you’re going to argue she did cos she wuvs Nick and wanted to anyway, then your case against Serena falls apart too.)

The only thing I don’t see as being up for debate is that June was raped. That’s it. That is clear and certain. It’s fact. June was raped in that apartment. (She’s raped a lot, obviously, but this was also rape. Nothing else.)

And the creepy part is by doing that she actually did save June’s life. Which is all shades of massively fucked up, and probably not her intention, but here we are. And it seems to be a big part of why June went along with the plan. If Serena hadn’t set up a rapey fuck session for Nick (which he LITERALLY COULD HAVE SAID NO TO AT ANY TIME WITH ZERO CONSEQUENCES and they could have fucked completely consentually another time), June never would have started sleeping with Nick (they had almost 2 years and never made a move on each other lbr), never would have become pregnant, and in a few months would have been sent off to the Colonies to rot. Serena is just going around saving June’s life and not even trying to lmao. Stupid gross idiot. Yes, June agreed under threat of death otherwise. So, that is NOT consent in any universe. If you must do it for survival, it’s rape. If you’re gonna die or agree to sex, that’s rape. Would she have agreed to get raped by Nick if the threat of the Colonies was not hanging over her head? No. Probably not. And Serena used that for her own ends. There is no way Serena is not a shitty criminal person for what she set up. But it’s also not a fucking crime against humanity, by definition.

So, anyway, without going into all the complexities and bullshit about Nick’s role any further, Serena’s role, etc in all this, it’s just absolutely motherfucking insane that any international law enforcement agency would charge Serena with THAT based on the word of a scorned husband who is also a massive rapist, liar, abuser, and war criminal himself. Like, give me a fucking break already.

And... I’m not gonna lie... if this was even remotely based on history/reality, they would turn a blind eye to anything Serena has done, especially if it was on such a small scale as one instance of sex trafficking. Sounds terrible to put it that way, but that is how these things roll. She’s a small little fish, comparatively. In the grand scheme of things, she’s FAR more valuable as a witness/asset against the Big Fish (Fred) and as a tool for their anti-Gileadean use. Unless they had significant evidence about ALL her crimes. She’s so much more useful as someone who has direct experience and witness to the entire rise of Gilead, including all the massive fucking terrorist crimes against an entire government and mass murders, that Fred et al. committed. To go after Serena so soon is just kneecapping their own damn case against Fred/Gilead lmao.

[This is where the rumours about Rita come in, but here’s the thing, Serena was already granted immunity for what she did under the guise of being a “Wife”. And seriously, what does Rita really know anyway? Serena’s smacked some people around. She’s locked June in her room. She makes June cry and drink gross smoothies. She helps with the Ceremony. She--with the entire system--forced surrogacy and basically kidnapped a baby. Those things, from what I can tell, are perfectly legal in Gilead for a Wife to do, just like it’s perfectly legal for Fred to whip the shit out of Serena--and Serena has been granted immunity for that shit (which is sorta funny in a way cos she basically used the Nuremberg defense, but it’s layered because she was actually a victim of Gilead too. Tricky shit). 

Now, that 2x10 rape is pretty fucking awful (and likely NOT Gilead-legal) and I’m almost certain Rita would have known about that in some way--but she also wasn’t a direct witness. But maybe she doesn’t? It would be fucking stupid of the Waterfords to be like, “Hurr durr let’s illegally pregnancy rape the Handmaid with a Martha an/or Guardian around even tho it comes with a punishment of DEATH!” But I suppose they are not exactly the sharpest tools in the shed either... 

Maybe she knows about the Rapey Sex Date Serena set up for Nick, maybe not, also not a witness to it. We can make assumptions about what Rita knows and doesn’t know, but also... like, none of that matters? (Yet.) Those are just regular fucking crimes on foreign soil and the American and Canadian governments have no jurisdiction to prosecuting them. War crimes require different criteria and Serena smacking Rita in the face isn’t a war crime. It’s shitty assault, but not something any international body would EVER go after.]

Anyway, the show is stupid af for suggesting they’d go after Serena for that singular instance of rape as a war crime. Crimes against humanity--of which YES sexual slavery (sex trafficking in this way) is--require widespread and/or systematic implementation. Serena was NOT going around making all Guardians rape Handmaids for her to get a baby. (Gilead however, and FRED WATERFORD specifically, were directly responsible for the SYSTEM of massive sexual slavery that they created AND maintained. Serena didn’t even come up with the Handmaid idea--THAT WAS THE MEN IN THAT DAMN CAR (Hi Nick, you were there too!).) 

Like... ugh. Stick with what you know, THT. Cos clearly it isn’t anything remotely in the legal realm.

But hey, they had to make up some way to either put Serena on trial for an entire season (YAWNNNNN), or send her back to Gilead. If it’s for the latter reason, and it means we’ll revisit the June/Serena dynamic as the core component of the show, then I’ll let it slide but if it’s to set up the Miller Wet Dream Trial Season and keep Fred/Serena forced together, then I’m livid.

Not that I should care at all considering how many times I’ve said I’m not even watching it anymore, heh.

[lordgeebsdom]

2019, a year in review: Superlative Edition

-Gareth Bill

Athlete of the year:  Lamar Jackson - QB Baltimore Ravens.  HM: Kawhi Leonard - SF Toronto/LA

Lamar Jackson came out of nowhere to light the league on fire in 2019 breaking Michael Vick’s all-time record for rushing yards by a Quarterback and redefining the position in the process.  From his five touchdown performance in Miami to being the assumed MVP, there wasn’t a week where Lamar Jackson didn’t dominate headlines and he continues to show superiority as Baltimore has secured the Number 1 seed in the AFC.  Honorable mention goes to Kawhi Leonard for producing the first ever buzzer beater in a game 7 in NBA history and for also bringing Canada their first NBA title.  Even against a Kevin Durant-less Golden State Warriors team, Leonard stepped up and delivered when it counted most.

Song of the year: Lost Lately- San Holo.  HM: Daemon Veil - EPROM & G Jones

Sander van Dijck, better known by his stage name “San Holo” surprised us with “Lost Lately” in June of this year.  A melancholic and melodic ballad of discovery and feeling “lost in aftermath of a breakup” spoke to feelings of insecurity and extends a friendly hand to those in need.  From an endearing marketing campaign featuring “lost” posters where fans could call a “helpline” to hear an exclusive sample of the song, to a music video taken straight from EDC: Bitbird executed an almost perfect build and drop for “Lost Lately.”  Great followup work to last years “Album1” and I definitely am excited about his future projects for 2020.  Honorable mention goes to the IDM monster “Daemon Veil” by EPROM and G Jones.  Plain and simple, I loved this ear worm.  There’s so much going on from the initial baseline drop to the stuttering minefield of drops and turns that follows before a calming conclusion.  Every time I hear this track, I see it too: the flying snares, the zips, zooms and wubs, the story it tells me….its captivating and satisfying.  While it isn’t as friendly for casual listening like my 2018 song of the year “Time” (also by G Jones), Daemon Veil is an IDM banger that I’ll continue to blast well into 2020 and beyond.

Album of the year: Good Faith- Madeon.  HM: Hollywood’s Bleeding - Post Malone

This was a tough call for me, there was a lot of great albums that came to us in 2019 but Madeon’s “Good Faith” stands tall above the rest.  From the initial singles of “All My Friends,” and “Dream, Dream, Dream,” to the unexpected bangers of “Miracle,” and “No Fear, No More,”: “Good Faith” makes a solid argument not just for album of the year but possibly even for the decade and I simply cannot recommend it enough.  Honorable Mention goes to “Hollywood’s Bleeding” by Post Malone.  Like many, I have thoroughly enjoyed the evolution of Post Malone from SoundCloud sensation to certified super-star, and “Hollywood’s Bleeding” continues to show us that this artist is just getting started.  I loved “Goodbyes,” “Circles,” “Sunflower,” and many other tracks on that album, and I’m confident many others did as well. Rapper, Rockstar, Soul-singer and bro: best of luck in 2020 and beyond Post, we’re all eagerly watching.

Movie of the year: Its a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.  HM: Avengers: Endgame

Easily the most contested category of the year and the hardest decision made in these superlatives.  2019 produced some awesome films but Tom Hanks’s take on Fred Rogers gave me chills that I hadn’t felt since seeing Christopher Reeve’s Superman as a child.  Like Superman, his presence among adults and children alike would universally cause awe and calm, almost god-like tranquility through security. In a year that was defined by division, unrest, cruelty, and anger: Fred Rogers reminds us that there’s still a great deal of hope for humanity, and it all starts with being a good neighbor.  Young, old and everyone in between can learn something from this deeply affecting story about humanity and connection.  Honorable mention goes to Avengers: Endgame for managing to be the only major franchise ending this year (Game of Thrones, Avengers, Star Wars) that managed to do it with a consensus BANG!  It was a 3 hour film that somehow felt like an hour and half, and when Captain America held Mjornir with every Avenger ever at his back and said “Avengers, Assemble!”, I couldn’t help but fist pump with a grin from ear to ear.  Tony Stark’s dying words of “I am Iron-Man,” gave me goosebumps and Black Widow’s death made me feel genuine loss: The Marvel Cinematic Universe managed to execute a singular plan and vision over 23 films and that is truly exceptional. 

Actor/Actress of the year: Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur/Joker.  HM: Florence Pugh - Midsommar

Joaquin Phoenix’s long anticipated and controversial performance as Joker was the best singular work I saw this year.  Authentic, gut-wrenching, thought-provoking, and anything but boring: Joker gave us the next step in comic book cinema and a new cultural icon in the process.  Arthur Fleck is a poster child for mental illness, something that currently is at the forefront of our society and gave the general public a poster child for such conditions.  Phoenix’s Joker will one day be recognized in the same light as we currently see Che: an underdog figure of resistance and revolution standing against a seemingly unstoppable status quo and inspiring the unseen masses in the process.  Honorable mention has to go to one of my new favorites in Florence Pugh and her performance as Dani in “Midsommar”.  Her pain, confusion, and ultimate triumph that unravels throughout a trip to a small village in Europe during their mid-summer festival is the stuff of “slow-burn horror” wet-dreams.  There’s a scene early on where her character has to convey immense grief after suffering a personal tragedy and I can still hear that crying in the most haunting way.  Pugh’s performance stuck with me in a year full of great ones, and I’m very excited to see her future work including “Black Widow” in May.  

Television show of the year: Watchmen- HBO.   HM: Good Omens - Amazon Prime

Watchmen blew my mind, and I the less I say about it, the better.  A continuation of the story told in my favorite book of all-time, “Watchmen” managed to tie together many loose plot threads from that story while also moving the universe forward in new and exciting ways that matched the tone of the graphic novel.  Regina King’s “Sister Night” was a complex, likable, and tragic protagonist uniquely qualified to walk us through this new chapter, and without spoiling things anymore than I already may have: YOU NEED TO WATCH THIS.  Honorable Mention goes to Good Omens on Amazon Prime.  To any familiar with the story or Neil Gaiman’s work in general, you know what to expect: deep stories, complex and likable characters, and witty dialogue that will make you pause and think or laugh feverishly in equal measure.  Its only 5 episodes, so there’s really no excuse to not dive into this one and see how the world ends…..or rather was supposed to…

Game of the year: Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice - PS4/XboxOne/PC. HM: Apex Legends - PS4/PC/XboxOne

From Softwares’ “Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice” stands tall in a year that finally saw long awaited projects like Obsidian’s “Outer Worlds” and Kojima’s “Death Stranding” get long-awaited releases.  An exciting and more stealthy evolution of the Dark Souls combat system made me feel like a real Ninja for the first time since Ninja Gaiden Black on my original Xbox.  The demanding, but fair gameplay combined with a variation of environments including haunted Japanese forests, Sengoku Temples, Palaces and gory battlefields came together to give the most complete package I played in 2019. Just don’t be too surprised if the final boss gives you problems because that f***er can almost made me break a controller.  Honorable mention goes to the game that managed to dethrone “Fortnite” as the most popular game for like a whole two months.  Respawn entertainment developed the awesome Titanfall series that I personally enjoyed and rumors had been circulating for quite awhile that they were looking to expand Titanfall into the booming genre of BR or Battle Royale.  Apex Legends is the answer to those prayers and still continues to push out new skins, content and weapons at a regular rate.  Did I mention it is also completely free to play? 

Story of the year: President Trump becomes the third President to ever be impeached 12/19

HM: Henry Nobrega wins the fucking BVN Football Fantasy Football title. 11/19

To be perfectly honest, this is the first category that really could have gone either way for me.  President Trump becoming the third President in US history to be impeached for abuse of power and obstruction of congress was massive; regardless of how you feel about President Orangutan.  His tenure as President has produced a number of newsworthy moments but this story stood out among the others for sheer importance and international embarrassment.  Speaking of embarrassment, that’s essentially what my good friend Henry’s fantasy football team has managed to be every year that I’ve played with him.  A perennial basement dweller that typically auto drafts due to some BS excuse, and a resident near the bottom of our power rankings but this year he flipped that script on its head.  He managed to draft my Athlete of the year, Lamar Jackson, and the last great white running back in Christian McCaffrey.  Not only did Henry surpass his preseason ranking of bottom, he managed to win both regular season and postseason titles and beat a solid team by Graham Heck in the process.  I got love for you bro, but I’m still perplexed on how your season managed to be as dominant as it was.  Sorry Greta Thunberg, but these stories had my jaw on the floor, maybe next year lil’ Queen.

Meme of the year: Baby Yoda of the Disney+ show “The Mandolorian” 

Was there every really a doubt here?  Baby Yoda or “The Child” as he’s known on the show is the biggest pop culture icon born on the internet in 2019.  The gap between Baby Yoda and what I considered to be an honorable mention was so wide that he will officially stand alone in this category.  Baby Yoda’s cuteness managed to melt even my stone cold heart this year and that is absolutely an achievement.  What made this creature so endearing was the universal applicability though music, sports, culture, and food: Baby Yoda was everywhere and the internet found common ground and shared meaning through sharing little graphics everywhere prominently featuring him as the centerpiece.  Well played Jon Favreau, we love this little guy and everyone thanks you for creating him.  

[junker-town]

The 7 best beefs to circle on the NFL calendar

Of course Jalen Ramsey and Baker Mayfield are two of the players with a score to settle in 2019.

Welcome to Revenge Week at SB Nation NFL, where we are celebrating the dish that’s best served cold. You can keep up with all our latest revenge content here.

Everyone loves a classic case of bad blood.

Football is a contentious and confrontational sport by design, but things get ramped up when two of the competitors just plain don’t like each other. You know if Michael Crabtree and Aqib Talib are playing each other — Crabtree officially signed with the Cardinals — you better tune in to see the inevitable chain snatching.

That skirmish started because a player was disrespected and thought he needed to defend his pride. That’s the same dynamic that fuels so many other NFL feuds.

It’s why Jets running back Le’Veon Bell will want to show out when he plays the Steelers this season, and Ravens safety Earl Thomas will get a chance to make the Seahawks pay for not giving him an extension.

Right now, we’re not talking revenge on a former team, though. Charles McDonald already broke down the best of those matchups on the 2019 schedule. Instead, we’re focusing on the best beefs between two players — or maybe a coach and a player — this upcoming season.

Here are the battles in 2019 that have too much animosity for you to miss.

Aqib Talib vs. Michael Crabtree (Rams-Cardinals, Weeks 13 & 17)

The aforementioned chain snatching feud is back on the menu.

Arizona scooped up Crabtree in early August and that’s perfect because it puts him back in the NFC West. That means two (possibly high tension) December matchups against the Rams, and the possibility of another matchup or two with Talib.

Crabtree and Talib got along during joint practices between the Ravens and Rams last year, and they reportedly squashed their beef at a go-kart track earlier in 2019. So maybe it’s done. We’ll see if December football can ramp things back up to their old chain-snatching ways.

ICYMI: #Broncos CB Aqib Talib broke Michael Crabtree's chain necklace, then laughed about it: https://t.co/lb4gi5g4ag pic.twitter.com/gftimX02G7

— Jon Heath (@ByJonHeath) January 1, 2017

Richard Sherman vs. Michael Crabtree (49ers-Cardinals, Weeks 9 & 11)

Talib isn’t the only one who has had problems with Crabtree. Sherman had some harsh things to say about the receiver years ago. Back then, Sherman was a member of the Seahawks and Crabtree with with the 49ers.

The peak of the rivalry came on Jan. 19, 2014. In the NFC Championship, Sherman deflected a would-be game-winning touchdown away from Crabtree, resulting in an interception that sent the Seahawks to the Super Bowl.

Then he tore into Crabtree, calling him a “sorry receiver.”

Let us never forget that time Richard Sherman went off on Michael Crabtree while a terrified Erin Andrews stood next to him. pic.twitter.com/graJKFvxg5

— gifdsports (@gifdsports) March 9, 2018

Things never got quite that contentious between the two again. They only played each other two more times in 2014 and then Crabtree left the division to join the Oakland Raiders. They haven’t seen each other since and Sherman’s rant to Erin Andrews came to define the feud. It pushed Sherman into superstardom and Crabtree’s star has since faded.

A couple more matchups after five years away could stoke those old flames.

A.J. Green vs. Jalen Ramsey (Bengals-Jaguars, Week 7)

Ramsey has annoyed plenty of players in his career in Jacksonville, but nobody has blown their top quite like Green.

In a 2017 game between the Jaguars and Bengals, Green had finally had enough. After about two quarters of getting antagonized, the receiver was set off by one more push from Ramsey. Green choked, tossed, and punched the cornerback and both players were ejected.

Green was suspended for a game, and apologized for losing his cool.

A.J. Green -- "I apologize to my teammates, Mr. Brown, and everybody, because that is not who I am. It just got the best of me today."

— Katherine Terrell (@Kat_Terrell) November 5, 2017

But Ramsey only tried to further stoke the flames. He reportedly tried to find his way to the Bengals’ locker room after the ejections. Days later, he told reporters that Green was “soft,” “weak,” and not “mentally strong.”

Jalen Ramsey sounded off at AJ Green after practice: pic.twitter.com/NbeVK1kTTQ

— NFL Update (@MySportsUpdate) November 9, 2017

Ramsey has provoked what sometimes feels like half of the league in the couple years since. The fight was out of character for Green, though. He’s generally a mild-mannered, quiet player who hasn’t had problems with anyone else.

Green’s even dismissed the idea that he and Ramsey have a problem.

“There’s no real beef,” Green told PFT Live. “There’s no real beef off the field. There’s just two competitors. Got in the heat of the moment. Stuff happens. When you’re playing, it’s sports man. You know, tempers go crazy sometimes, and sometimes you can’t control emotions. I couldn’t control mine that day. [I’ve] got to do a better job of that.”

Does that mean part two will be less contentious? Maybe. But Ramsey’s still going to be someone who talks trash constantly, and you have to imagine Green badly wants to avenge his frustrating first performance against the cornerback.

You shouldn’t expect another brawl between the two, but this midseason clash will surely have some heat.

Baker Mayfield vs. Kliff Kingsbury (Browns-Cardinals, Week 15)

Most of the time a coach vs. player beef wouldn’t be that exciting to watch — not so when Mayfield is involved, though. He’s the type of player who will air his dirty laundry out in the open.

After all, the iciest death stare of the 2018 NFL season came from none other than Mayfield and was directed at his former coach, Hue Jackson.

Baker Mayfield staring down Hue Jackson pic.twitter.com/GIOTBemQF1

— Vikings Blogger (@firstandskol) December 23, 2018

So don’t be surprised if Mayfield has even more attitude reserved for another one of his former coaches: Kingsbury. He probably has even more reason to have a chip on his shoulder when facing Kingsbury than he did with Jackson too.

Jackson was fired by the Browns before joining the Bengals — which somehow pissed off Mayfield. In the case of Kingsbury, it was Mayfield who was spurned.

In 2013, Mayfield walked on to Kingsbury’s Texas Tech squad and earned the starting job for the opener of his true freshman season. By the end of the year, he was the Big 12 Offensive Freshman of the Year, although an injury cleared the way for Davis Webb to steal his starting role.

The situation rubbed Mayfield the wrong way and he left Texas Tech to join Oklahoma.

“When I got hurt, there was no communication between me and my coach,” Mayfield told ESPN. “When I got healthy, I didn’t know why I wasn’t playing right away. At that time, we were losing a couple games in a row. I was still clueless as to why I wasn’t playing. That was really frustrating for me because I started the first five games and we won. So, I just didn’t really know exactly what he was thinking or what the situation was.”

Between 2015 and 2017, Mayfield was a three-time All-Big 12 selection and beat Kingsbury’s Texas Tech teams three times along the way. He wound up with a Heisman Trophy, was the No. 1 pick in the 2018 NFL Draft, and enters his second season with the Browns with expectations sky high.

There’s not a lot of reason for Mayfield to harbor hard feelings, because things certainly worked out well for him post-Texas Tech. Except, this is Mayfield. He feeds off of revenge. There’s no doubt he will jump at the chance to stick it to the coach who he thinks didn’t believe in him.

Ben Roethlisberger vs. Terrell Suggs (Steelers-Cardinals vs. Week 14)

Suggs and Roethlisberger battled in the AFC North for 15 years. Now Suggs will don a different uniform for the first time in his career after joining the Cardinals on a one-year deal.

In December he’ll get another chance, likely his last, to bring down Big Ben.

Both players have experienced success in their long history of Ravens vs. Steelers matchups. Suggs has sacked Roethlisberger 17 times, more than any other player. Roethlisberger’s 13 victories in the regular season — and two more in the playoffs — against Baltimore are the most any player has ever had against the franchise.

The (presumptive) final chapter will look a lot different with Suggs wearing red. And the ill will between the two players is closer to a case of frenemies than true rivals.

“I think there’s a lot of mutual respect there between each other,” Roethlisberger said during the 2018 season. “There’s a little bit of talking on the field — I wouldn’t call it trash-talking — but there’s some mutual respect trash-talking, if you will, that goes on. It’s a special rivalry he and I have.”

Suggs hasn’t been as effusive when talking about Roethlisberger, but he was friendly enough to swap jerseys with the quarterback after their last duel of the 2018 season. Over the years, he’s called Roethlisberger a “rat bastard” with “Jedi mind tricks.” He’s also warned everybody not to fall for the quarterback’s supposed injuries.

Suggs has no doubt that Roethlisberger will play on Sunday: "How you doin', Benjamin?" pic.twitter.com/lEwQbP15EM

— Baltimore Ravens (@Ravens) November 2, 2016

But hatred has never really been the backbone of their grudge. Both players will be 37 for their Week 14 game, and even if it’s not quite as spicy as other feuds, it’s one we should all appreciate getting to see one last time.

Richie Incognito vs. Yannick Ngakoue (Raiders-Jaguars, Week 15)

The silly rivalry that’s brewing between the Bills and Jaguars is great fun. However, one of its most unfortunate chapters came shortly after their postseason meeting in January 2018.

After the Jaguars’ win, defensive end Ngakoue accused Bills offensive lineman Incognito of saying “some weak racist slurs” during the game. Other Buffalo linemen denied the accusation and an NFL investigation concluded it had no proof slurs were said.

A few weeks later at the Pro Bowl, Ngakoue and Incognito reportedly cleared the air.

So maybe they buried the hatchet. Or maybe the two will play with a little extra edge when the Jaguars and Raiders meet in December.

Sean Payton vs. Marcus Peters (Saints-Rams, Week 2)

The Great Gumbo Grudge started in November 2018 when the Saints picked on Rams cornerback Peters in a 45-35 win. The New Orleans offense couldn’t be stopped, but it was receiver Michael Thomas, especially, who couldn’t be contained.

Peters was in coverage for seven of Thomas’ 12 receptions and gave up 146 of the receiver’s 211 yards. That included a 72-yard touchdown for Thomas in the final minutes that put the game on ice.

Payton told reporters that Thomas burning Peters was exactly how they drew it up.

“That was the plan,” Payton said, via the Los Angeles Times. “They were going to travel Marcus to him, and that was fine by us. We thought we really liked that matchup — a lot.”

Peters responded by telling reporters he looked forward to a potential rematch:

Marcus Peters looks forward to playing the Saints again, and sharing a bowl of gumbo with Sean Payton. pic.twitter.com/W5Kpmm5P4M

— Lindsey Thiry (@LindseyThiry) November 9, 2018

“Tell Sean Payton keep talking that shit, we’re going to see him soon,” Peters said. “You feel me? I liked what he was saying on the sidelines too. So I’ll tell [him] ‘Keep talking that shit and I hope you see me soon. You feel me? And then we’re going to have a nice little bowl of gumbo together.”

Peters got his wish when the Rams and Saints faced off in the NFC Championship Game. In the second meeting, he gave up only two receptions for 28 yards, although the Rams floated several different cornerbacks over to cover Thomas. Still, when presented with a clear opportunity for an “I told you so,” Peters opted against it.

Marcus Peters: “I don’t even like gumbo. I was just bullshitting y’all.”

— Dan Wolken (@DanWolken) January 21, 2019

[infomercial voice] But wait, there’s more!

The next chapter of this particular rivalry is great because it’s not just Peters vs. Payton. It’s also the whole damn city of New Orleans vs. the Rams.

The Saints would’ve been in Super Bowl 53 if it weren’t for an atrocious missed call. Rams cornerback Nickell Robey-Coleman clearly got away with a pass interference penalty that — if called — would’ve set up the Saints to run out the clock and kick a game-winning field goal. Even the Rams admitted it should’ve been a penalty.

Instead, Los Angeles got the chance to force overtime with a field goal of its own and eventually won.

Saints fans had a big, angry parade and went so far as to file a futile lawsuit against the NFL for the result. Payton — who said the blown call was the most obvious pass interference penalty ever — led the charge for a rule change that will now let coaches challenge interference penalties.

There will be fireworks when the rematch happens in Week 2. There will also be a chance for the Saints to get some vengeance. But Payton and Peters are at the root of it all.

[burgermiester]

My (public) private life, 4/11/17

Might as well write a bit about me to fill the time.  Its the topic I know best after all.

This turned out to be way longer than I expected so Id better read more it.  My life ramblings under the cut.

From now until about a month from now I have an extra 3 and a half hours on my shift.  Ill be really tired but I really can use the extra money so I am happy about it. Mostly.

Speaking of money, this job is over in a month, and I havent gotten a single interview from the dozens and dozens of applications I have sent out since August when this temporary job started.  Really hoping that changes soon, because every day it gets a little more stressful.  Adult life is grand.

The wall noise seems to have stopped.  It was a plumbing issue from the downstairs deaf old ladys apartment so it took her a few days to pick up on it.

Still losing my mind with Echoes hype.  Only 9 more days until I get to play it in a language that I dont understand!

Finally started Nier Automata, I didnt get much farther than the prologue that was the same as the demo I already played but it still seems great.  Considering how I cant play action games for very long stretches of time I dont think I will get too far before Echoes comes out but itll be good to come back to after Echoes time dies down a bit in June.

Still hyped for XII Zodiac age in July.  Its the only thing I am currently anticipating amid the scorching heat and boiling humidity and seemingly inevitable unemployment of this summer.

Probably will get Persona 5 after that if I actually have money.

Been watching Chloe play Mass Effect Andromeda.  Goofy animations and many many glitches have kept us giggling the whole time but damn if it doesnt still have pretty good game feel and very solid party members.

I miss Chloe.  It feels silly to say since shes just visiting her family for 3 days and will be back wednesday night but everythings harder when shes not around.

Wedding planning seems to have stalled.  She still cant find a location she likes thats within our (mostly her parents) budget.

We also started watching the anime Konosuba the other day.  I was a little worried that watching it the same day as Your Name would make it pale in comparison but not everything needs to be a super serious story, silly stuff is good too and I am enjoying it.

I’m not in the groove of anime yet but I do seem to be getting more used to the medium and generally enjoying what we watch more than I used to.  The weirdness of the medium is less weird than it used to be.  Give me a few more years with Chloe and ill be a weeaboo for sure.

The only thing keeping me from making a honest-to-god youtube video about FE is editing, everything else is done.  But editing means dragging my lazy ass to the library when I’m not at work, and thats just so hard.  Does anyone else feel like its enormously draining to go into your place of employment when you arent currently on the clock?  I cant stand it tbh.

I also wrote up a whole big post about bows the other night and saved it to drafts but the more I look at it the more shitty and pointless it looks, which is generally how I feel about all my writing which is why I always try to post written things immediately so I dont have to look at them again.  idk.  maybe ill post it sometime.

Debating whether or not I want to surprise my parents with a visit this weekend for Easter or tell them ahead of time. As always I am both dreading the 5 hour drive (one way) and looking forward to the peacefulness of long drives in the country.

I feel bad I havent streamed as much recently.  Ive been a lot more tired with my new hours and especially after the wall sound incident.  Im still not really recovered from that just yet.  I think I am nearing the end of FFIX, relatively speaking.  Ive broken the hell out of it with grinding in any case, so its just about experiencing the story from here on out.  Still only about halfway done with PoR so thatll be going good for a while.   Im thinking I might want to do my first ever playthrough of Tear Ring Saga on stream next, if that sounds interesting to anyone (if anyones even read this long, my goodness).  That start after I finish PoR; not sure If i want to alternate with games again or just do one at a time.  If I want to alternate again I have to decide what game id want to play after IX (probably another rpg I think.)

I think thats about it for now.

[not-tryin-2-have-a-debate]

i want to keep my original long draft for an essay abotu my Psych Ward Expirience somewhere so i’m post it here under readmore bc its super long

When most people hear the phrase “Psych Ward,” they think of settings in horror movies. They picture 1800’s sanatoriums, dark and crumbling asylums full of dangerous murderers. I don’t know if hollywood or a general societal ignorance towards mental disorders should be blamed more for that, but living with a serious mental illness is one of those things that “outsiders” never really seem to understand. That misunderstanding extends to treatment as well.

    Therapy comes in many shapes and sizes, different types and intensities. There are different amounts of work expected from the patient, different ways the therapist can try to work through their issues, but the biggest range of differences is probably in the environments these sessions can take place in. One-on-One appointments with a therapist, Group therapy that meets once or twice a week, specific support groups, and anger management classes are all things that we in the business would call “outpatient” treatment. Some programs are dubbed as “intensive outpatient” or “semi-inpatient” programs, for when they want to hospitalize someone but aren’t allowed to for whatever reason (usually because they can’t pay for it, or the family in charge of their affairs won’t allow it, or they're actually a good and understanding doctor that sees the problem with taking a mother away from her job and kids from three days to three months depending on the program.)

Group homes, halfway houses, and stays in mental hospitals would all be on the “inpatient” or residential side of things. Some places are specifically “Crisis Hospitals,” a place where suicidal patients go for one or two days until they aren’t considered an active threat to themselves anymore. Depending on the hospital and how much they actually care, the patient may run out the clock of their stay and can sent to a different center or dropped back into society while still in the middle of their crisis. Every psychiatric hospital has protocol for patients on suicide watch and many have specific rooms for it, open cubbies in a big long hall with no doors or front walls, so the staff can be watching you at all times.

When someone’s in treatment for any mental issues extending beyond mild depression or anxiety, being hospitalized is a kind of vague threat always looming on the horizon. If they say something a little too dark, or they fly off the handle a little too often, the question comes up asking if they’re in need of more ‘intense’ care.

Most patients that have been around a while know how to quickly deflect a nervous doctor. We get told our own horror stories; tales of prisons with heavily medicated inmates, friends recounting abuse from their nurses, being locked up in a place that claimed to help them but in actuality just held their lives/times for ransom until they stopped complaining.

I’m asked about my safety every time I see my psychiatrist. I sit in Brian’s office once every three or four weeks and discuss how much of a failure I am at pretending to be a human being. Every time, near the end, he looks me in the eye with an uncomfortable grimace and asks me how safe I feel. We both know it's a strange and impossible question. I could say no for so many different reasons. Realistically I will probably hurt myself before our next appointment. There will definitely be at least a few times I think of dying, go over the details in my head. I could point to my paranoia, or my childhood, and tell him I haven’t felt safe in a long, long time. But he knows all of that, and he knows my honest answer, and we both know that him asking how safe I currently feel is just secret code for whether or not I want to be sent to a hospital. So I shrug and tell him I’ll be just fine.

I guess I was having a pretty rough time at fourteen. I say “I guess” because I can’t remember most of it, but what I do remember wasn’t particularly any worse than two years before or the year after. It was mainly just that when I was fourteen, people were noticing more, and feeling more guilty, and I was saying some wrong things at the wrong times.

I’d already been in regular therapy for years; I’d been through one group until my therapist got transferred and an “intensive outpatient therapy plan” after that.     Every two weeks or so one of my parents would dig me out of bed and drive me to the one small therapy office in my town. I would wait for at least forty minutes past my appointment and then be called back to see the nurse, Mellisa. (Her name was spelled with two L’s and one S; I know about that because she would get very upset with the other staff for spelling it wrong.) Every time I went to that office, Mellisa would have me take a pregnancy test, no matter how many things about me made its results obvious, because when you’re a kid medical professionals will never trust a single word out of your mouth: especially if you’re crazy.     My mother and I would go and sit in an uncomfortably warm room waiting for my psychiatrist go come online. I would study the boring, mass-produced ocean painting on the wall, finding anything to look towards but my mother.     My psychiatrist at the time was an attractive nigerian man that I was only ever introduced to as Dr.O; one time I asked Mellisa what his full name was, because I felt disrespectful not knowing it, but she’d brushed it off as too hard to even try pronouncing. Dr.O lived somewhere else in the state and would see me for our appointments through a computer monitor, setup on a cheap wooden coffee table across from some chairs. My parents always complained about having to drive all the way to the office just to have a skype call; I always just wondered why they bothered setting up the fancy room, since you could hear what everyone was saying through the walls anyway.     Dr.O mainly saw older patients and I could tell that he usually thought I was being overdramatic. I would keep my head down, trying my best to speak up so he could hear me through the microphone on the table (and often being chided by him and my mother to move closer to it when he still couldn’t hear me.) I would stay silent as my mother talked the whole time, giving half of the story with none of the context. I would stiffly and awkwardly be made to stand up and show a man on a screen the words carved into my arms, motion to where the cuts went on my legs. I would look at noe one and try not to think of the mostly-screamed “lecture” that was waiting for me once we were done there, where both of my parents sat me on my bed and stood there with crossed arms, telling me they weren’t angry, they were just frustrated, telling me they just didn’t understand why I did these things to myself. They didn’t understand why I couldn’t just come talk to them.

Dr.O decided once, while my mom was in the middle of telling him her version of what I was going through, that I needed to be hospitalized. I snapped back to attention, stopped picking at the scabs on my arm, asked what I did. I barely remember what the real reasoning was: something about how I was already suicidal and they were going to take me off my anti-depressants which were making me more depressed on top of causing me to gain weight, and I would probably feel even more suicidal when I was in the withdrawal from those so I needed to be monitored, or something. That’s a series of events that I’ve gone through about five or six times with five or six different drugs, and that one (paxil, for anyone wondering) wasn’t the first. I’m still not sure why that time it was any different...maybe those reasons were an excuse for some kind of psychic doctor vibe he was getting from me.     My mother was, of course, completely furious for all the wrong reasons. I was calmly sent out of the room to wait with Mellisa while she screamed, asking if he was really about to lock up a fourteen year old girl with a bunch of “violent drug addicts” because I was having “some issues adjusting.” When I was younger my mother would often refer to my ‘adjustment issues’--i was never sure what it was I was trying to adjust to.

My mother called my father and I thought to myself that this was a really bad way to make me not want to die. He entered the building crying and confused, probably having only been told a vague three word explanation by my mother, leaning down at me chair, caressing my face like I was dying or like we would never see each other again. For all I knew, we wouldn’t; for all the information I’d been given, I was about to be shipped off somewhere for life. We spent probably another hour in that office, me sitting in my chair, watching everyone else argue and talk and come and go and give me weird looks for split seconds and then continue on talking about me like they’d already sent me to the terrifying gate of hell that a mental hospital apparently was. Mellisa tried to comfort me and pointed out that I was crying.  She put a hand on my shoulder and I accidentally, involuntarily, blurted out for her not to touch me. My mouth says a lot of things I don’t want it to. That’s one of the times I’ve most regretted it.     I was eventually told I would go home, pack my things, and drive to the hospital that night. That had set my mother off again right when she’d started to calm down--     “Tonight!?” she’d barked at Mellisa. “We can’t even wait til tomorrow?!”     Imagine what a dinner that would’ve been.     I assume I did as I was told. I remember packing the stuffed animal my internet boyfriend had hot-glued together for me, and a (paperback) Robert Louis Stevenson novel that I was trying to read and pretending I understood more than half of. You aren’t allowed to take a whole list of things with you to the hospital; anything that could possibly be considered dangerous to you or to anyone else is prohibited. No shoes with laces or pants with drawstrings. No mirror, hair brushes, toothbrushes, or soaps either, because the hospital would supply those. At one point I bitterly argued with a nurse that I could shove a sock in my mouth a choke on it if I really wanted to, and she threatened to take all my socks away. I decided to stay quiet on the realization I had that if I got really desperate I could just try to bite off my own tongue.     The drive was two hours long and completely silent. My mother spent the first twenty minutes determined to squeeze as much as she could out of the time we had left til arrival, but I was in a confused haze and she was tired from screaming at doctors...or tired from dealing with her defective daughter. She tried to comfort me, assuring me that this would be good for me, that maybe this hospital would straighten some things out and set me on the road to true recovery after all this time spent struggling. I looked at the moonless sky outside and chose not to tell her that she had finally admitted something was wrong with me. It was almost midnight when we actually reached the hospital; we passed it once on accident since we could barely make out the sign. My body was working on its own again at this point. I took mechnical steps, looking straight ahead, hand held in my mother’s because she needed the comfort.

The sterile white walls and fluorescent lights in the front lobby were blinding coming in from the night. I squinted at the woman who came up to meet us, shook my dad’s hand, my mom’s, glanced at me for maybe half of a second. A man named Jesus took and searched my things while we were guided into a more traditional room for this setting, corporate representations of calming moods. Light blue or green walls, wicker and tweed furniture, mass-produced ocean paintings. I focussed on how much I hated paintings of the beach while my parents filled out forms, until the woman finally turned her attention to me. I was comforted and assured, again, that this would be good for me, and then assured that they legally weren’t allowed to use electro-shock therapy. I was told I would do regular groups and that the security wouldn’t use force unless I posed a violent threat. She explained expressive therapy to me, as if I’d never heard of art, while I signed a form saying I consented to being medically sedated if need be. I asked how they would sedate people. She asked if I was afraid of needles.

After signing my name a hundred times, with one of my parents signing after each, it was time for us to say our goodbyes. I’m sure I cried, but I can’t honestly say I remember.

Jesus reappeared without my belongings, telling me before I could ask that they were waiting on my new bed. He led me about three steps out of the conference room to a set of wooden double-doors, like the entrance to a school cafeteria.     “This is the Ad Ward…’Ad’ stands for ‘Adolescent.’” he told me, shuffling out an ID card to unlock the doors. He quickly ushered me through and it the first door on the left before I could nothing anything other than a hardwood floor. Jesus handed me a paper hospital gown I never noticed him holding and instructed me to put in on, pointing at the spot on the floor on the small empty room where I should put my clothes. He said a woman would come in shortly to search them and me and then took his swift exit before I could ask any questions. I did as I was told as quickly as possible, nervously trying to make out the muffled voices right outside the door.     The second I’d put my clothes in their neatly folded line the head nurse came into the room, making good on Jesus’s word. She went down the line of clothed I had made her, picking up and shaking out every part of my outfit without saying a word. When she was satisfied with them, she turned to me.     For those of you that have never been strip searched, please know that it is every bit as strange and mortifying as you would expect, and that no matter how many times you’ve been through it, it’s going to stay just as weird. As my mostly-naked fourteen year old self squatted and coughed before the eyes of a stern older woman with a clipboard, I wondered again how this place was supposed to make life seem worth living.     After that, and her metal detector being set off by my braces, I was regifted my clothes (but not my shoes) and handed off to my last stop for the night before bed. I finally got a good look at the Royal Oak Hospital Adolescent Ward: one long hallway with a nurses station near the exit, an elevator, and a long line of almost closed doors.     A younger nurse took me into one of them, again completely different from the others I’d been in, and sat me down on an expensive medical equipment looking chair. The girl’s name was Rebecca, she told me sweetly, in the first actual human conversation I’d had in hours. She tried at mostly one-sided small talk with me and she gave me some kind of vaccination or shot. I remember being told it was just a precaution, but I can’t remember what it actually was. The second she was done with the mysterious syringe, though, Rebecca turned on me, bringing out a clipboard and a volley of emotionless questioned that seemed routine to her, but invasive and a little nerve-wracking to me. Asking if I ok with having a roommate or if they had to move my stuff to a different bed was one thing, but at the time I was tired and scared and every question after seemed to strike just the right nerve. She got about halfway down her sheet and asked, casually, what my sexuality was, before I started sobbing. She went back to the good Rebecca and sent me off to bed. We could finish the questions tomorrow.     I wouldn’t get to really get a look at my new room and roommate until the morning, as all the other patients on ward were already asleep (or were pretending to be). I slid into the bed, noting the plastic covering on the mattress and the starched, motel room feel of the blanket. Jesus peaked in the doorway to tell me it needed to stay open at night and that he and another man would keep watch on the hall. He said if I couldn’t sleep I was allowed to come sit out there and talk with them; there was usually at least one kid that took advantage of that at some point in the night.     I thanked him but chose to stay where I was, holding my handmade stuffed animal so tight it hurt my wrists and staring at the cracked door. I listened to Jesus and the other man talking quietly for hours until I finally passed out. I finally drifted off some time after Jesus lamented about how little time he was getting with his daughter after his divorce.     Morning Routine in the hospital was as follows: wake up at 8 a.m. and line up in the hallway for Checks. Roll was taken and an always different nurse that didn’t know our names would check our blood pressure, temperature, and pulse. People who took meds in the morning were given their pills and some water in two small paper cups, and David, the nurse that later became my favorite, would ask everyone who they wanted to call on the phone that day. (Phone time was allowed during a break after lunch; we could only ask to call people on an approved list of phone numbers written during admission.) Then, and only then, were we allowed to cram into the one elevator that led from the ward to the basement, and eat breakfast in the cafeteria. After that our daily routine mainly consisted of therapy, one-on-one conversations with a psychiatrist, and school, if it was a weekday.     My first morning I was greeted with a great enthusiasm by the eight other kids on the ward. Most of them were older than me by a year or two and I was quickly taken under their collective wing as a newbie. My roommate introduced herself (I’ll call her L) and wasted no time in getting to the stereotypical “what are you in for” conversation. Since my answer was pretty much a vague shrug she made up the difference, telling me a fabulous story embellished highly in her favor about how she punched her school’s superintendent in the face and was given the option of juvie or the hospital. We agreed that it was stupid of the school to give her that choice.

L loved to see how far she could cross the line before she got in trouble, but in the middle of testing people’s limits she would get angry and fly off the handle. She bragged to me that by the time I got there she had been restrained twice and medically sedated the second time. Eventually I had to change rooms when she started an altercation with Jesus and had to and was put on restrictions.     There’s an immediate air of understanding and camaraderie between patients on a ward, even between people that kind of hate each other on a personal level. I think it makes perfect sense given the environment, and the fact that in a short time there everyone is going to learn a lot of deep and personal things about everyone else. I remember most of the kids I met there well:     M was a small blond and the youngest on the ward at thirteen. He was extremely proud that he was old enough to belong with the teenagers. He was one of the most adamantly alive people I have ever met. He was very upfront about the fact that he had anger issues. I think I was the only one there who didn’t.

G is a girl that I think about very often, fondly and worriedly. She was such a genuine and lovely person, a heavy and pretty girl with long curly hair that was always smiling and talked with her hands. I worry about her because I was never able to contact her once i was out of the hospital; she didn’t give anyone contact information because she wasn’t sure where exactly she was going to end up after her stay there. Knowing what i did learn from her about her family...I still worry about her. But i also worry that trying to look her up now would be weird, but also only make me sad no matter what i found, even the best answers would feel bittersweet. I think that for now i prefer to just remember G fondly as a very dear friend i only got to spend a precious little amount of time with.     R was nice but was also the most actively angry about being there, and none of us could blame him. From what he told us (looking back on it now I’m still not sure which side was truthful) his parents had forced him into his stay after blowing an argument completely out of proportion. R as I gravitated towards each other magically, drawn by our innate ability to Tell. from my experience there were always two or three kids on the ward or in the group who aren’t straight, and we would always find each other and group together as quickly as possible.     D was the third or the two or three gay kids. I was told she made advances at me but I don’t remember noticing any of them. She really liked naruto and would tell me dramatic stories that I knew were mostly lies but listened to anyways because we were friends.     J was a surprise in a lot of ways. He showed up very suddenly and had the staff scrambling. He was tall and wide and older than most of us, with gauged ears and angry eyes. I feel guilty for the amount of time I spent compulsively strategizing self-defense plans against him before we got to know each other. J had been in juvenile detention before coming to the ward as a way to ease his transition back out into the “real world.”     The only person I didn’t really get along with was K, but I wasn’t the only one; she sat on the ‘normal people’ side of the social rift and didn’t particularly want anything to do with the rest of the group. Her choice.     The rest I don’t remember by name anymore; the teenage mother who got transferred to a different hospital, a boy who would not talk talk about anything other than weed every time I heard him speak. A quiet boy who’s name started with a D and had a nurse communicate things for him.   

The usual length of a stay at Royal Oaks was around a week, so people were usually coming and going every other day, making a rotating list of patients for David complained about because it complicated his job and phone call cataloguing. L left on day four, the weed guy the night before her. We vaguely celebrated when someone was left; we could have done more, but it would have meant celebrating almost every night, and jesus didn’t have enough change for the vending machine. We would say our goodbyes before we went to sleep, and part ways at breakfast. The new kids would be greeted with stories of who they replaced, and would be taken under our collective wing, and the cycle would continue.     I never personally got to see them, but there was a ward for Adults somewhere on our floor and one for “Pre-Ads” (children under the age of thirteen) downstairs, with the classroom, cafeteria, and ET room. The full layout of the Ad Ward wasn’t much more complicated than what I had observed the night before; one mysterious room was the “Lounge,” a baby blue nightmare where we spent free time, and another was a shower--yes, the whole room, that was it. A twelve-by-twelve cube of brown tile from floor to ceiling, with a small drain in the middle of the floor and a sad faucet with the water pressure of slow falling tears on one wall. About a foot in from the door there was a haphazardly installed shower curtain, and right below the faucet was a wall-hanging soap dispenser, like same kind you find in most public bathrooms. I’d heard of 2-in-1 shampoo and conditioner before, but never All-in-1 general showering goo.     Every other room in the hall was a bedroom, and most of them looked identical. Blue walls, two beds set in wooden box frames, and a strange storage-shelf-table-sink hybrid on the other wall. Each room also had a small closet with a toilet in it (two of the rooms had actual bathrooms with their own, normal shower, but most of us weren’t as lucky.)     Bathroom doors weren’t allowed to be closed unless they were actively being used. We could only close the door to our room if we were changing clothes, or “with permission,” which meant we could only close the door when we were changing clothes. We were each given a plastic basket of toiletries with our name on it, given it us from a locked space in the nurse’s station after break and before we went to sleep.     At some point in the afternoon we would each be called away separately to go meet with a psychiatrist for a bit; a rotating door of short indian men that usually didn’t introduce themselves. The psychiatrists were nice but impersonal, concerned but not well-informed about your situation, fitting with the general theme the hospital seemed to have going. Once one of them took me outside to have our talk, in a little fenced in area with a basketball hoop but not enough room to really try playing with it. I don’t remember anything we talked about other than how I was feeling, how I felt about the hospital, same old thing again and again.

Every night after dinner, two patients that behaved well were allowed to order 1 soda and 1 candy bar from a vending machine outside our reach in the ward. I got a twix and a coke on my first full day, and all the other kids were simultaneously very jealous and proud.     The art therapy room was, like all walls in my world at that point, blue, but now with past patient’s art hung up and painted onto them all over, which was a welcome change. Art therapy only involved making art about three of the times that I went. Other times We’d have another group therapy session, or try and fail miserably to play ping pong, or be forced to watch the movie “Freedom Writers” and then talk about our feelings on it. My feelings were that it was a bad film with a nice idea.

The hospital had a Classroom right beside the cafeteria that the ad and pre-ad patients had to attend for three hours every school day. We went separately; the wards weren’t allowed to mix, especially after it turned out that a girl on our ward was the cousin of a kid on the pre-ad. Every week a new sweet older lady would be our teacher, a good samaritan volunteering her time to the hospital. Most of us were old enough that we would just work on our own homework from our school; i was lucky enough that my high school didn’t want to work with the hospital at all, and was unwilling to give me any assignments but the one’s I had brought with me. When I finished those halfway through the first day of class I was given general middle school level work packets and left to my own devices. When i finished those i started trying to help the others, usually M with his science worksheets, or I would spend as long as possible with one of the medical student interns going over a graded french test. I told G how to pronounce her name with a french accent, and she excited told every member of staff about her new name for the rest of the day.

The food, unless you were on suicide watch or “Finger Foods.” Finger Foods was the general terms for when someone had their privileges taken away after an outburst or trying to hurt themselves. You could only use crayons to write, couldn’t handle any sharp objects, were out of the running for a night time candy bar, and obviously, good only eat food with your hands in the cafeteria. Suicide watch Included all the rules of being on Finger Foods but with an added element of direct surveillance at all times; there were some people on suicide watch who were still allowed to be rewarded or participate in activities with supervision, because the restrictions were meant more for their protection than as a punishment. For my first two days at every meal a bulimic girl on my ward would be light-heartedly threatened with a feeding tube if she didn't eat. She and the nurses all seemed to think it was funny, so i just accepted it.     At one point we were promised a pizza for our good behavior. We never received that pizza. I’m bitter about that to this day.

Group therapy came in two flavors: there was actual group therapy where we would do therapy, but in a group, and then there was what group normally meant, which was “a nurse is going to come talk about some topic no one cares about for a while.” riveting topics covered in our sessions included personal hygiene and the importance of not doing drugs if you don’t already do drugs, which half of us did. Actual group required more emotional effort but at least I wasn’t going to be bored to tears by the end of the hour. The ward’s main therapist was a nice guy that happened to look exactly like sigmund freud. He also happened to not enjoy it very much when i blurted out that he looked like sigmund freud.     We were told multiple times a day by various nurses that shoes were a privilege and you would earn back your shows after you showed staff you were deserving of them. I never saw a single person earn their shoes, and not for lack of trying.     This was a problem because if a single person on the ward was without their shoes, we weren’t allowed to have time outside. Every time I’ve ever recounted this to someone they’ve seen the Immediate flaw in this system, but it apparently slid past all members of staff on a daily basis, despite continued incredulous whining from a dozen barefoot teenagers.On the fourth or fifth day, I was whisked off with no explanation to get an EEG (a test where they part sticker attached to wired attached to a machine on your head and listen to the electricity in your brain.) i was never told the results on that test or why i was getting it done. The lady washed my hair afterwards, which maybe up for the fact that i had to miss breakfast but didn’t make up for the strip searches before and after i left the building. At the very least it made G jealous i’d gotten to wash myself with anything other than the suspicious shower goo.

At some point i started routinely being woken up about a half-hour before everyone else to a nurse that would take my blood pressure. Then i would lay there, tired and confused, until we all had to wake up and get in taken as a group anyways. I asked about this every time they did it and was never given an answer as to why this was necessary. Honestly I think they might have just been messing with me.

We were supposed to refrain from asking for personal information about each other, and told that if we wrote down another patient's email or phone number whatever it was written on would be thrown away if found. Obviously we all worked around this; one girl secretly wrote names on her stomach an hour before she was processed for release, another kid wrote phone numbers in code. For me it was as simple as just remembering people’s last names so I could find them on facebook.

The hospital existed in a kind of twilight zone half in and half out of reality, where a crisis would occur every other hour but in the between times we were all bored to tears. Surrounded by such an intense atmosphere, staff trying to force an understanding of our lives being in our own hands, and we would just sit there, nodding our hands and coloring with our crayons. In a way the hospital was a sanctuary; no family to get into screaming matches with, no classmates to end up in a fist fight with. An environment meant to be scrubbed clean of all the stressors of day to day life.     Visiting hours happened twice a week; kids with visitors would go down into the cafeteria while everyone else hung around in the lounge. Usually it was just me and M waiting down there for our families; the visits were always entirely uncomfortable. My parents wanted to be sure I was being treated right, and held my hand with a guilty sadness that I didn’t really want to acknowledge. Free time didn’t offer very many options. We would play cards and coloring mandalas printed out on copy paper. I finished coloring about six of the things before a decided it would no longer be a helpful part of my mental healing journey. Our card game of choice was called “BS,” initially because it was the only game everyone who wanted to play cards seemed to know. BS became a highlight of our day, because of M. The hospital had a lot of rules about how to conduct yourself. We weren’t supposed to yell, run around, or touch each other unnecessarily. We also weren’t supposed to curse.     The name of the card game “BS” is short for “Bullshit.” the rules of the game are very simple--cards are passed out and someone decides to go first. In turns, everyone goes around, putting some cards face down on the pile and announcing what value those cards supposed were (someone put down two cards and says they had two jacks, etc.). Multiple cards have to be on the same value, if you think someone is lying, putting down more cards than they had to win faster, you point to them and call out that you think they’re lying. The challenged player turns over their cards, and depending on if they were telling the truth or not one of the players in penalized.     Usually the thing you yell out when you challenge someone is “Bullshit,” but we weren’t allowed to say that and were told to call it something else. M thought that this was a personal affront to him and everything that he stood for as a person. Every single free time, two or three times a day, we got into the routine of playing this card game solely to see this scene play out. We would start out normally and do as we were told, politely pointing out lies. M wouldn’t say anything. We’d go on for as long as we could, before someone would make an obvious play, putting down three jacks after someone else put two or saying they had five aces. Then, ecstatic, M would heave air into his lungs, jumping up and pointing at the other player and yelling as loudly as he could: “BULLSHIT!!”

He stopped being scolded for it around the fifth time because most of the staff thought it was hilarious. We’d stop playing the game immediately after that, our point achieved, all of us having got what we came there for.     We sat in the hall and shared stories about when each of us had lost our virginity, or the first time we’d been punched in the face. He giggled at Jared as he mimicked grasping at his bleeding nose. The nurses didn’t seem to find it as funny.         There was a general, noticeable disconnect between us and them, even the nurses we all likes the most. Not  really because of age, or because they were on the job. It was a feeling of disconnecting, not quite meshing with normal people, that all of us already went through life with separately-- and here, where we had community, that only intensified. For many of us this was the first time that our abnormalities had really been accepted and even admired by others. Being with the other kids in my ward was a time i felt freest, even in our restricted and controlled environment. None of them cares if i’d twitch and fidget, none of them minded my shiness or were caught off guard by the things I’d say. While the nurses would squint at me suspiciously if i repeated that they said or spiralled into babbling from our conversations, my new friends had all accepted these things by the third time they came around. I was allowed to express myself and allowed to not be able to, and it felt effortless to return the favor, because who was i to judge. Little outbursts, conversations that trailed off into blank stares, people needing to go walk around or cry or smack their seat five times before they sat on it, these things were all easy to look past. It was hard, however, not to notice the trouble staff still saw with them, and not to turn on them a bit for that. My friends accepted that i spoke weird, while the nurses would roll their eyes if i stammered. G would nod understandingly when I confided in her about the past while staff would react uncomfortably, their only help in offering to make police reports i didn’t want made. If I told the others i felt like hurting myself, they would show sympathy and talk with me about it; the one time I told a nurse i was “having urges,” like we were supposed to, I was put on finger foods.     This tension culminated in one particular group session. A thin older woman replaced our usual freud impersonator, loitering outside to chat with the nurses as long as possible before having to deal with us. We whispered to each other; no one had met or before, or seen her around the building. That was probably a bad sign. She told us to call her Olivia, I think.     Olivia was the worst therapist I have ever seen in action, and that should be frightening.     She commanded direct eye contact between her and the patient speaking, and that no one else speak until directly spoken to (interruptions are one thing, but discussion is just about the entire point of doing therapy in a group.) She gave us all a question she assumed would be simple enough for our tiny broken minds. “What do you think is keeping you here?”     I started echoing the hard way she said “What” and clamped my mouth shut as soon as possible. Usually I could keep the parrot in my head around doctors, with some effort; being open with my impulses around the others made it hard to start shutting up again. She took my weird reflex as volunteering to go first, and looked to me expectantly.     Its honestly the most stupid and annoying question you will ever be asked in a therapy setting. I never heard it asked in a tone other than condescending, and it's never failed to be ignorant; ‘Why do you think you’re here?’ is therapist code for ‘why are you messing up your life, and can you convince me it isn’t on purpose?’     I had a routine for this question that seemed to be shared with the others; attempt to answer honestly, listing all the things in and out of your control, your life and environment and symptoms, the fact that you are a complex human being with feelings and a past. Then, try not to sigh at your doctor and list some rehearsed line about how you guess you’re just a disrespectful child acting out for attention. I ran through it as quickly as possible, feeling restless and trying not to avert my eyes from hers or change my position too much as she would impatiently observe every movement. Usually I’d have something in my hands to funnel my stress into, but this had to be the one time I forgot to take one of my hoarded stress toys from the pile in my room.     Three more kids went after me, in the same routine, with varying degrees of sass. Then Olivia set her eyes on G. The rest of us shared a silent realization and looked to each other with worry, straightening up, thinking up ways to deflect Olivia onto something else. It was too late when G shrunk, laughing nervously and not meeting the womans eyes.     G’s home situation was truly heartbreaking to hear retold. I love and respect her too much to retell the details of it here, but Olivia spent what seemed like unending years of punishment pulling this story out of the girl, giving us a demeaning hush if we objected. It was surreal and we didn’t know what to do, stuck in a room with one authority figure under threat and tranquilizers, watching the friend we all openly adored the most be forced to recount such a cruel thing in such complete detail. Obviously she was crying, most of us were too. J sat alone on a couch beside Olivia’s, hands in fists, and I focussed on my fear for him instead of my fear of him. I was sitting beside G, being shushed at every concerned whine that forced its way out, unable to think of an escape plan because I couldn’t turn off my ears. It was when she reached a specific point of the story, G cut herself off and let out a sob and my hand automatically went to her shoulder. Olivia barked out, in the coldest tone I think I have ever heard, “No Touching.”     The room exploded, every one of us reacting at the same time with a vicious intensity. The others jumped to their feet, protectively leaning towards G. M pointed and yelled a few choice words hand selected for our doctor, R went for the door to get other staff, someone else just cried out at her hysterically. J lunged at the woman as G slid into my arms, looking away from what was happening and sobbing into my shirt. I put my hand on her hair half to comfort her and half to make sure she didn’t look back.     A dozen staff members crowded around the doorway of the room but only three actually entered; I don’t remember how it felt watching my friend try to choke out an old woman and be pulled away by security, but the picture of it in my head is crystal clear. A nurse, Cecily, had her arms out low but wide, making a barrier between us and the gasping doctor. Everyone was yelling, us at staff and staff at us. The intern that helped me with french came to guide Olivia out of the room and M screeched that he was a traitor, throwing a stack on coloring sheets in their general direction. Olivia said something under her breath as she left-- something about how we were terrible demon children, or how ‘never in all her years in the field’ something like this had happened, I think I forgot because her words aren’t worth remembering. We locked eyes for a split second before the slid out of the room, and I muffled “Occupational Hazard” into G’s hair.

For an hour after we were forced to sit and have alcohol poisoning explained to us until Freud Jr. Appeared. We were happy to see him but still furious, all on the same side against Olivia once we were finally asked what had happened. Everyone recounted the same story, agreeing loudly with each other, stopping to comfort and apologize to G and ask if she was okay. We stayed in that room for another hour, giving our testimony and demanding J shouldn’t be punished, or more begging they didn’t send him back to juvenile. Freud nodded solemnly as he listened to us the way only he and Jesus and two of the nurses did, meaning at all. He told us he’d see what he could do. We didn’t see J for the rest of the day and come morning, Jesus was his new shadow. He was on some kind of reverse suicide watch, with all the restrictions, but the league of nameless psychiatrists and hospital directors had agreed or been swayed to agree that J’s only real crime was being physically violent with staff. After dinner that night, I asked if he could have my candy bar, and threw it in the trash when I was refused.

    I was discharged after nine days on the ward, feeling no more or less suicidal, no more or less recovered, not more normal but not more different. I remember Rebecca calling me into the hallway to ask if i was afraid to go home. Of course I was, I told her! I was leaving friends I had connected to more in a week than I had with anyone in years. I was returning to a town of people like the staff, strangers that didn’t understand and only pretended to want to. I would be returning to my second month of high school, gone for the last week of September, though I’d barely showed up at all before then. I asked her what I had not to be worried about, but then dropped it, because I knew we were only having this conversation in case my answer alluded that my parents weren’t safe to go home to.

    The goodbyes I was given before 8 o’clock lights out were short and sweet and always, turning our attention back and forth between them and “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou!” playing on the television. I only slept an hour through that night, feeling about everything I could think to. In the morning, I was given my shoes while the others were lined up, in the middle of Checks. I waved silently at them and heard M call out “Bring a better book next time!” Before Jesus closed the double-doors behind us.

[itain]

long.. complaint post essentially

id say rant but its less anger than just.. despair i guess

oh god i feel at this moment.... very hopeless

ive just kinda been frozen since i got home,,, talked some, ate dinner, etc... but there is so much i need to get done but i {feel i} cant do until i finish one thing in particular...... like so many rows stacked up in tetris that all get cleared with the one block that fits them all... i mean perhaps nobody thinks its that big a deal,,, idk......... i just feel like i cant breath... literally it feels like my chest is a bit tight just thinking of all this shit stressing me... like once i finally get one thing done turns out its not done and i had 10 more things to do as well... i feel that in the time it takes for me to take one step, i’m pushed back like 20 paces....

you know when you have so much stressing you that you play games or just fucking fill your mind with static to pretend nothing is wrong?? you waste time having fun while the stress just looms next to you all day every day?? thats like my usual state of being.... and here is the other end.. where things come crashing down, and im panicking, and im frozen because i can never solve things, i have to find an order in the chaos, and at this point everything immidiately turns negative and i wonder why im even alive rn... i like that ive written this much and still remained so vague.......... SIGH

uh lets see i mean its mostly all just financial shit

the biggest block rn is the fucking gym... gee am i getting so damn sick of this shit.... i am ready to sccream over this fucking gym...... ive been trying to quit almost since ive started... i FINALLY send the shit i need to on time..... and they didnt do it???? so i need to call them tomorrow asking why they havent drafted the quitting fee, and im sure theyll ask if i did the fucking secure mail where i get notified when they recieve it, and no i didnt bc i dont have money, and they will come up with some bullshit excuse reason why i cant quit still, and at that point ill want to scream and cry, i fucking wish that could solve my problem??? why cant i be like my dad who yells at the customer service people on the phone till they solve everything for free???? why cant i ask that of him now?? thoughts like these... who let me be an adult, how will i not get fucked out of shit because im a fucking pushover who just wants to please everyone and be polite.....

then lets see.......... the student loans..... the big issue with this... i mean 50 bucks a month starting in october... i mean we will fucking see if i have the money... considering im already drowning now, i fucking doubt, but my biggest concern is the logistics... what amount am i paying back? how do i know that its set up to draft out of my account??? questions i dont want to ask anyone because i’ll feel like a fucking idiot and i’ll just cry about it instead pls.... so i’ll just rot till october tyvm...

and what else... my biggest fear is the combination of these two, that i cant quit the gym and im paying like 75 fucking bucks a month for two things that have made my life nothing but hell...

but i think the other biggest stressor is the small shit adding up rn... for like 2+ months (i havent really counted but i know its been a long time now) my phone isnt working without a charger.... and to even get it replaced for a working model is like 75 bucks.. id buy some shit phone but thats 20 bucks that can be spent towards surviving... like, see above bills.... oh and id switch to an old phone of mine to even ask if thats possible would fucking cost money bc metro pcs wont answer shit without seeing money first ugh.. its made all communication and leisure time way more difficult as im chained to the wall and only a few short times a day for either.... so setting aside that, ill just fucking pray for that for christmas orz the other “small shit”...... oil needs to be changed on the car,,, means i have to find some time to buy oil, figure out what fucking oil to buy, where to buuy, if i have the money, etc... communicate with coworker friend and get a day we both have off so her friend?? can change my oil for me for free, bless.... but thats not even possible till i get back from my vacation.... so a week or two..... then we have the registration sticker that needs to be updated before september,,,, 80 to 85 bucks my dad said... that obv cant be updated with a code on my car so again, it has to wait a couple weeks... even driving with a code on my car gives me such anxiety...

so moving on to.... i guess the tiny shit that isnt as big problems but only have become such because im mega stressed..... thought i had finished the laundry... found another bag orz... apartment much more disorganized than i thought.. you know how order in the home gives a certain peace of mind.... and vise versa.... bf and i are fucking depressed and at least i want pills but that is a faraway dream rn, booking a fucking appointment, much less having $$ for a perscription????? trying to work out then losing motivation so quickly as always... but because i want to dedicate my energy towards cleaning this place... which just somehow never happens.... just never seeing a way to save money??? ive been so damn frugal and i still cant pay my bills and here i am with more bills, meanwhile my dad posting his stupid fucking bullshit on facebook about “choose happiness” like money doesnt have a fucking say in the matter.... and all the low self esteem and negative thoughts that accompany all this situation... wanting to “do something nice because ive been having a hard life/week” and then still feeling like shit, or feeling guilty for having spent anything then complaining about money...

i guess last thing i wanted to touch on..... the vacation... bfs mom takes me with them on their family vacations.... honestly i feel like the goth in the prep family? like im too much drama to make them happy.. ive been pretty open with her about my feelings towards my dad and stepmom, mostly bc she is super giving and nice and agrees with me against them.. and recently ive been more open, like about my depression even... and like... she even said she would get me a scrip... like....... i just.. this kind of thing, the vacations, the covering my half of rent, even while she doesnt have a job rn (she is rich but tighter on $$ now so) but i feel so guilty accepting it.. like if i justify it, then arent i being too greedy?? but i literally cant refuse it, or i’d be on the street right now so..... but i just feel like she owns me... if i were her daughter i think id be more okay but like... if john and i break up she put like, thousands into SOME CHICK.... i feel like in the far future i’ll need to write her a check too;; i told bf i wasnt rly feeling the vacation... of course because of the neverending drama surrounding me (yeah yeah im not saying drama is drawn to me, yeah i create it okay) this will just kinda strain more the relationship and they’ll all think i have some issue with them or smth that i gotta ruin every family trip... so i’ll just go.. but like... self esteem is out the window, so i wont want any pics.. i doubt bf will either, we both have gained so much weight, and i have perma acne that gets worse by the day, and i cant even afford to get my hair cut or colored again so its just this grown out mess.... then in the other respect of a vacation... i think ill just be worried the whole time about my finances... i mean i wont be able to spend money on anything so -shrugs- i get to just look at a bunch of nice things, thinking “i wish” or feel the guilt of her wanting to get it for me.... oh god yeah and same things w my friends.... i want to hang with them?? but i dont have money for shit??? and every time they pay for smth i die inside bc when will i even be able to pay them back its the same thing but theyre poor TT

anyways i guess thats most of it..... i guess im feeling tired maybe ill just pass out watching some youtube videos.... i was wanting to get a drawing done but ~*the cycle of feeling like shit*~ will occur worse then...

[junker-town]

The 7 best beefs to circle on the NFL calendar

Of course Jalen Ramsey and Baker Mayfield are two of the players with a score to settle in 2019.

Welcome to Revenge Week at SB Nation NFL, where we are celebrating the dish that’s best served cold. You can keep up with all our latest revenge content here.

Everyone loves a classic case of bad blood.

Football is a contentious and confrontational sport by design, but things get ramped up when two of the competitors just plain don’t like each other. You know if Michael Crabtree and Aqib Talib are playing each other, you better tune in to see the inevitable chain snatching.

That skirmish started because a player was disrespected and thought he needed to defend his pride. That’s the same dynamic that fuels so many other NFL feuds.

It’s why Jets running back Le’Veon Bell will want to show out when he plays the Steelers this season, and Ravens safety Earl Thomas will get a chance to make the Seahawks pay for not giving him an extension.

Right now, we’re not talking revenge on a former team, though. Charles McDonald already broke down the best of those matchups on the 2019 schedule. Instead, we’re focusing on the best beefs between two players — or maybe a coach and a player — this upcoming season.

Here are the battles in 2019 that have too much animosity for you to miss.

Aqib Talib vs. Michael Crabtree (Rams-Cardinals, Weeks 13 & 17)

The aforementioned chain snatching feud is back on the menu.

Arizona scooped up Crabtree in early August and that’s perfect because it puts him back in the NFC West. That means two (possibly high tension) December matchups against the Rams, and the possibility of another matchup or two with Talib.

Crabtree and Talib got along during joint practices between the Ravens and Rams last year, and they reportedly squashed their beef at a go-kart track earlier in 2019. So maybe it’s done. We’ll see if December football can ramp things back up to their old chain-snatching ways.

ICYMI: #Broncos CB Aqib Talib broke Michael Crabtree's chain necklace, then laughed about it: https://t.co/lb4gi5g4ag pic.twitter.com/gftimX02G7

— Jon Heath (@ByJonHeath) January 1, 2017

Richard Sherman vs. Michael Crabtree (49ers-Cardinals, Weeks 9 & 11)

Talib isn’t the only one who has had problems with Crabtree. Sherman had some harsh things to say about the receiver years ago. Back then, Sherman was a member of the Seahawks and Crabtree with with the 49ers.

The peak of the rivalry came on Jan. 19, 2014. In the NFC Championship, Sherman deflected a would-be game-winning touchdown away from Crabtree, resulting in an interception that sent the Seahawks to the Super Bowl.

Then he tore into Crabtree, calling him a “sorry receiver.”

Let us never forget that time Richard Sherman went off on Michael Crabtree while a terrified Erin Andrews stood next to him. pic.twitter.com/graJKFvxg5

— gifdsports (@gifdsports) March 9, 2018

Things never got quite that contentious between the two again. They only played each other two more times in 2014 and then Crabtree left the division to join the Oakland Raiders. They haven’t seen each other since and Sherman’s rant to Erin Andrews came to define the feud. It pushed Sherman into superstardom and Crabtree’s star has since faded.

A couple more matchups after five years away could stoke those old flames.

A.J. Green vs. Jalen Ramsey (Bengals-Jaguars, Week 7)

Ramsey has annoyed plenty of players in his career in Jacksonville, but nobody has blown their top quite like Green.

In a 2017 game between the Jaguars and Bengals, Green had finally had enough. After about two quarters of getting antagonized, the receiver was set off by one more push from Ramsey. Green choked, tossed, and punched the cornerback and both players were ejected.

Green was suspended for a game, and apologized for losing his cool.

A.J. Green -- "I apologize to my teammates, Mr. Brown, and everybody, because that is not who I am. It just got the best of me today."

— Katherine Terrell (@Kat_Terrell) November 5, 2017

But Ramsey only tried to further stoke the flames. He reportedly tried to find his way to the Bengals’ locker room after the ejections. Days later, he told reporters that Green was “soft,” “weak,” and not “mentally strong.”

Jalen Ramsey sounded off at AJ Green after practice: pic.twitter.com/NbeVK1kTTQ

— NFL Update (@MySportsUpdate) November 9, 2017

Ramsey has provoked what sometimes feels like half of the league in the couple years since. The fight was out of character for Green, though. He’s generally a mild-mannered, quiet player who hasn’t had problems with anyone else.

Green’s even dismissed the idea that he and Ramsey have a problem.

“There’s no real beef,” Green told PFT Live. “There’s no real beef off the field. There’s just two competitors. Got in the heat of the moment. Stuff happens. When you’re playing, it’s sports man. You know, tempers go crazy sometimes, and sometimes you can’t control emotions. I couldn’t control mine that day. [I’ve] got to do a better job of that.”

Does that mean part two will be less contentious? Maybe. But Ramsey’s still going to be someone who talks trash constantly, and you have to imagine Green badly wants to avenge his frustrating first performance against the cornerback.

You shouldn’t expect another brawl between the two, but this midseason clash will surely have some heat.

Baker Mayfield vs. Kliff Kingsbury (Browns-Cardinals, Week 15)

Most of the time a coach vs. player beef wouldn’t be that exciting to watch — not so when Mayfield is involved, though. He’s the type of player who will air his dirty laundry out in the open.

After all, the iciest death stare of the 2018 NFL season came from none other than Mayfield and was directed at his former coach, Hue Jackson.

Baker Mayfield staring down Hue Jackson pic.twitter.com/GIOTBemQF1

— Vikings Blogger (@firstandskol) December 23, 2018

So don’t be surprised if Mayfield has even more attitude reserved for another one of his former coaches: Kingsbury. He probably has even more reason to have a chip on his shoulder when facing Kingsbury than he did with Jackson too.

Jackson was fired by the Browns before joining the Bengals — which somehow pissed off Mayfield. In the case of Kingsbury, it was Mayfield who was spurned.

In 2013, Mayfield walked on to Kingsbury’s Texas Tech squad and earned the starting job for the opener of his true freshman season. By the end of the year, he was the Big 12 Offensive Freshman of the Year, although an injury cleared the way for Davis Webb to steal his starting role.

The situation rubbed Mayfield the wrong way and he left Texas Tech to join Oklahoma.

“When I got hurt, there was no communication between me and my coach,” Mayfield told ESPN. “When I got healthy, I didn’t know why I wasn’t playing right away. At that time, we were losing a couple games in a row. I was still clueless as to why I wasn’t playing. That was really frustrating for me because I started the first five games and we won. So, I just didn’t really know exactly what he was thinking or what the situation was.”

Between 2015 and 2017, Mayfield was a three-time All-Big 12 selection and beat Kingsbury’s Texas Tech teams three times along the way. He wound up with a Heisman Trophy, was the No. 1 pick in the 2018 NFL Draft, and enters his second season with the Browns with expectations sky high.

There’s not a lot of reason for Mayfield to harbor hard feelings, because things certainly worked out well for him post-Texas Tech. Except, this is Mayfield. He feeds off of revenge. There’s no doubt he will jump at the chance to stick it to the coach who he thinks didn’t believe in him.

Ben Roethlisberger vs. Terrell Suggs (Steelers-Cardinals vs. Week 14)

Suggs and Roethlisberger battled in the AFC North for 15 years. Now Suggs will don a different uniform for the first time in his career after joining the Cardinals on a one-year deal.

In December he’ll get another chance, likely his last, to bring down Big Ben.

Both players have experienced success in their long history of Ravens vs. Steelers matchups. Suggs has sacked Roethlisberger 17 times, more than any other player. Roethlisberger’s 13 victories in the regular season — and two more in the playoffs — against Baltimore are the most any player has ever had against the franchise.

The (presumptive) final chapter will look a lot different with Suggs wearing red. And the ill will between the two players is closer to a case of frenemies than true rivals.

“I think there’s a lot of mutual respect there between each other,” Roethlisberger said during the 2018 season. “There’s a little bit of talking on the field — I wouldn’t call it trash-talking — but there’s some mutual respect trash-talking, if you will, that goes on. It’s a special rivalry he and I have.”

Suggs hasn’t been as effusive when talking about Roethlisberger, but he was friendly enough to swap jerseys with the quarterback after their last duel of the 2018 season. Over the years, he’s called Roethlisberger a “rat bastard” with “Jedi mind tricks.” He’s also warned everybody not to fall for the quarterback’s supposed injuries.

Suggs has no doubt that Roethlisberger will play on Sunday: "How you doin', Benjamin?" pic.twitter.com/lEwQbP15EM

— Baltimore Ravens (@Ravens) November 2, 2016

But hatred has never really been the backbone of their grudge. Both players will be 37 for their Week 14 game, and even if it’s not quite as spicy as other feuds, it’s one we should all appreciate getting to see one last time.

Richie Incognito vs. Yannick Ngakoue (Raiders-Jaguars, Week 15)

The silly rivalry that’s brewing between the Bills and Jaguars is great fun. However, one of its most unfortunate chapters came shortly after their postseason meeting in January 2018.

After the Jaguars’ win, defensive end Ngakoue accused Bills offensive lineman Incognito of saying “some weak racist slurs” during the game. Other Buffalo linemen denied the accusation and an NFL investigation concluded it had no proof slurs were said.

A few weeks later at the Pro Bowl, Ngakoue and Incognito reportedly cleared the air.

So maybe they buried the hatchet. Or maybe the two will play with a little extra edge when the Jaguars and Raiders meet in December.

Sean Payton vs. Marcus Peters (Saints-Rams, Week 2)

The Great Gumbo Grudge started in November 2018 when the Saints picked on Rams cornerback Peters in a 45-35 win. The New Orleans offense couldn’t be stopped, but it was receiver Michael Thomas, especially, who couldn’t be contained.

Peters was in coverage for seven of Thomas’ 12 receptions and gave up 146 of the receiver’s 211 yards. That included a 72-yard touchdown for Thomas in the final minutes that put the game on ice.

Payton told reporters that Thomas burning Peters was exactly how they drew it up.

“That was the plan,” Payton said, via the Los Angeles Times. “They were going to travel Marcus to him, and that was fine by us. We thought we really liked that matchup — a lot.”

Peters responded by telling reporters he looked forward to a potential rematch:

Marcus Peters looks forward to playing the Saints again, and sharing a bowl of gumbo with Sean Payton. pic.twitter.com/W5Kpmm5P4M

— Lindsey Thiry (@LindseyThiry) November 9, 2018

“Tell Sean Payton keep talking that shit, we’re going to see him soon,” Peters said. “You feel me? I liked what he was saying on the sidelines too. So I’ll tell [him] ‘Keep talking that shit and I hope you see me soon. You feel me? And then we’re going to have a nice little bowl of gumbo together.”

Peters got his wish when the Rams and Saints faced off in the NFC Championship Game. In the second meeting, he gave up only two receptions for 28 yards, although the Rams floated several different cornerbacks over to cover Thomas. Still, when presented with a clear opportunity for an “I told you so,” Peters opted against it.

Marcus Peters: “I don’t even like gumbo. I was just bullshitting y’all.”

— Dan Wolken (@DanWolken) January 21, 2019

[infomercial voice] But wait, there’s more!

The next chapter of this particular rivalry is great because it’s not just Peters vs. Payton. It’s also the whole damn city of New Orleans vs. the Rams.

The Saints would’ve been in Super Bowl 53 if it weren’t for an atrocious missed call. Rams cornerback Nickell Robey-Coleman clearly got away with a pass interference penalty that — if called — would’ve set up the Saints to run out the clock and kick a game-winning field goal. Even the Rams admitted it should’ve been a penalty.

Instead, Los Angeles got the chance to force overtime with a field goal of its own and eventually won.

Saints fans had a big, angry parade and went so far as to file a futile lawsuit against the NFL for the result. Payton — who said the blown call was the most obvious pass interference penalty ever — led the charge for a rule change that will now let coaches challenge interference penalties.

There will be fireworks when the rematch happens in Week 2. There will also be a chance for the Saints to get some vengeance. But Payton and Peters are at the root of it all.