#imagine time and time again being confronted with your vulnerability and expendability

[gwemrys]

do you ever think about gwen saying I’ve spent my whole life in camelot it’s all i know i have nothing else

[karkatvantasistrans]

Hey guys! I heard it was the angst prompt day of Rosemary month so that seemed like the best day to finally write another chapter of my Rosemary fic.

Trigger warnings for descriptions of death, gore and abuse

Click here to read it on ao3 or keep scrolling to read it on tumblr!

Be Kanaya. A half-sweep is a long time to heal, you think. You're lying in your bed, stiff and fully clothed, staring down at your abdomen. "Fully clothed" is misleading despite being technically true. The long piece of fabric usually decorating your centre is folded on a shelf a few feet away from you, and the blown-out shreds of your favourite shirt sit in a tight circle against your skin. You look at your meal sac. The troubling part of this activity, as is always the case, is that your meal sac stares back. It's exposed to the air, vibrating as networks of blood pathways and sinew work naked above it. Your innards are a writhing symphony of blood and fibre stretching across the chasm that was once uninterrupted skin. You try, once again, to grapple with the fact that you’ve had a view directly into the contents of your gut for almost half a sweep. The most disturbing, you think, wasn’t the era when it was just a hole directly through the middle of you, but when the first signs of your new spine and meal sack first started to writhe and burst into the empty circle you’d been staring at every night since the deaths of your friends.

You are…tired, of your mind always drifting back here. It’s not just the visions: slick pink tears bouncing off a river of blood before being consumed as the scream hit the walls and bounced, metallic, through everyone’s skulls. It’s not just the visions! Eridan, face flush and curled inwards, contorted with hatred borne from entitlement and you, confronting your own expendability at the end of a pointed stick in a fragile man’s hands. It isn’t the visions! Of the brown blood coating the air and dripping into your breath sacs as bone kicked and muscles convulsed under the pounding of metallic teeth under your hand. It really isn’t the visions that disturb you still.

It’s the memories. You remember, childhood friend bucking under the weight of the saw chewing into his guts, the insides of a person you were once enlisted to protect emptying out as Equius scrambled to sew wire and artifice into unforgiving piles of flesh, and you remember the taste. Medical spectacle laid out before you and the splash of vomit hitting the floor as Karkat buckled under the weight of his friends reduction to a mass of pulsing organ and steel, and you remember the taste. The sweet butter and honey of his blood coating your lips and you had to stop yourself from breathing deeper just to pull it all inside of you. The thick, sweet scent permeating the air that lingered even as blood dried on metal and Tavros was reborn from a nest of brown and wires. You remember the taste. You remember Rose making fun of you for your dedication to that sash when she saw it, clean, hung around your waist on your first training day. How she made fun of your inability to help her alchemize anything useful until fashion is involved. You remember, the night before, watching your veins swell with Eridan’s blood as you finally gave in and sucked it dry. You adjust yourself in bed to try and shake out the thoughts. You're tired of waking up early. You find this is often what happens when you try and "sleep in", so maybe you should stop letting yourself be consumed by painful memories of your dead friends as a daily ritual. Rose and Dave make it sound like so much fun, though, you can't resist trying in case it ever feels like it's actually supposed to. Unless Rose and Dave have just been over-hyping the activity for half a sweep to fuck with you. Actually, come to think of it, that seems extremely likely. You look at your recuperacoon and wonder if it would be any more relaxing to stay in there while you wait for everyone to get up, but the texture of the jelly is so gross you can't imagine hanging out in there once you're actually conscious. Sometimes it's so unpleasant you just deal with the nightmares and sleep on the "Mat-Riss". At least the familiarity of another person is attached to it once you wake up. You give up on "relaxing" and force yourself out of bed. At least you got yourself on a slightly less grim plotline internally, but you feel frivolous sitting around thinking about advanced sleeping in techniques. If you're going to waste your time thinking about something it might as well be something that's not likely just an elaborate Strilonde prank. You sit down at your vanity slab and consider your reflection, turning your head a few times for good measure. Rose has been telling you about self-loathing and female beauty on earth. Human women, allegedly, have a lot of self-worth evaluation wrapped up in their flesh packaging. You don't like to assume Rose is messing with you when she talks so seriously about things, but it's hard not to try and keep on your toes about things when they sound ridiculous to you, even if there's no one around to have anything to say about it. Beauty, she says, is viewed as similarly frivolous on earth, but is in some ways mandatory. It's stuff like that she says that makes you think she's fucking with you. You guess earth might have passed through more layers of paradox space since it's a second iteration of existence, but...a weird part of you feels compelled to understand it. Something stirs in your gut every time you think of it.

Maybe it's just your meal sack trying to regrow itself. You blink a little extra hard onto your makeup brush and try not to think about that. You keep twisting your head to try and get a sense of responsibility for your face. It's hard to hate, because you didn't make it. You always like the structure of your face, because it's someone else's handiwork. The way the knots peel down your cheekbone and how soft blue pours out from every spot that light touches, it's...nice, you think. It's much easier, and you are blinking carefully onto the brush with your other eye to not get too out of control with this thought either, to hate the personality you're responsible for. Hating parts of yourself you didn't create seems ungrateful. You dip the brush back into the paint, pulling it out slowly and rubbing the excess on the side. Hating the parts of yourself you have control over is the only logical conclusion. You feel the cold paint as it slides across your face and your mind drifts back to exactly what you're trying to keep it away from. It's fruitless, you guess, trying to ignore the first thought you've had in a day. Be Future Kanaya You feel the sticky burn of salt on your face as you feel yourself choke up, watching as Rose does the same beside you. Staring down at your hands as the wet sobs and chokes echo off your block’s walls, you hear a break in Rose’s cries as she takes one deep breath, then another. “Kanaya,” she manages, and you catch her pulling a strand of hair out of her face. Something moves in you as you watch her re-arrange herself, but you make an effort to squash it down and listen. There's another pause as she composes herself, staring down at her lap as she wraps a hand around her arm and digs a thumb into her wrist. She takes another breath, "How do you feel about a little dream bubble rendezvous next time we actually get a visit from the unreliable dead flakes we used to call friends?" She moves her head to look at you, eyes half-lidded as her mouth pulls into a slick grin. The feeling you were trying to ignore bolts through you as you feel her refuse to get close to you over, and over, and over. As she composes herself, as she tidies up stray particles of emotional vulnerability hanging in the air, as she tucks every connection away on a mental shelf to be studied later. And you snap. Black affection spills over your face and you feel the heat of it behind your eyes as you make contact. Your arm around her waist and your hand grabbing hers so hard you can feel her pulse as you kiss her. Kismetic energy rockets through your lips and shakes the core of your romantic foundation, and all she can do it laugh, slide her lips to one side and ask, "I'll take that as a "yes"?" You don't know how she doesn't feel the difference. Be Kanaya It's hard to get out from under the weight of what your mind forced into you as soon as you woke up. You picture the teeth of your chainsaw biting into Tavros' flesh again and wonder, despite telling yourself back then that it was for him, if you were really just trying to help her finish the job.

You were supposed to be helping him, you were supposed to be the reason his life wouldn't be endangered by a girl who felt too fucking black about a boy who could never live up to her standards. And you couldn't. You couldn't act like a normal fucking troll because every time she'd do something horrible, say something he didn't deserve to hear, have him sign off of trollian because she'd obviously made him cry, you felt for her everything you were supposed to be feeling for him. The mix of spite and pity that made you such a valuable part of the balancing act...how are you supposed to balance anything if you can't feel half of the equation? Every time he snapped under the pressure of your failure as an auspistice all you could think was how you wanted him out of there so someone that could actually handle her could take his place. You tried so hard to suppress the feelings that always stemmed from failing to protect him and tried, over and over, to invest, to care, to stop her from treating another troll with such a fucked up level of malice. You stiff, twice, trying to control the fluids in your face as they try to spill over your hard work. Because you have to wonder if forcing yourself to feel the wrong things made it worse for him. If every time you pushed her away from him without resolve, it made the game of pushing back that much more fun for her. If you could have spared him if you'd pushed him out of the equation from the start. You rub a thumb under your eye as you're forced to agree with something Vriska once said: Being selfish is the best thing you can do for other people. Be Kanaya, one minute later. You pull the paint, once again, across your eye-lid. You remember, early on your meteor trip, Vriska walking up to you and reaching for your gut as you flinched away, cackling and asking you how it was healing. And you remember, blue blood pulsing underneath her skin so strongly you could smell it as you dipped to back away from her reach. Moving back a second time because, chide you for being paranoid as she did, you did it because of how your body reacted as you pictured her neck under your teeth. The memory washes over you and you look back at your meal sack, pulsing as your blood pusher shoots strands of purple and green around the cavern in your gut. An unpleasant realization finally bubbles up from your brain stem; You’re hungry.

[mialoveslife339]

Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul

Breakthrough #1 Your Physical Body is a Fiction

The five senses seem to confirm our physicality. 

Those ideas are just as valid as the idea that you have a physical body and they point to a fact: there was always something suspicious about human beings fitting so neatly into the material world. The universe took human evolution far beyond the physical. 

Your body already knows that its purpose in life isn’t physical. What you are seeing with your eyes is intelligence at work. Purely physical entities don’t make decisions, certainly not such delicate yet potentially fatal ones. If being physical is an outworn model for the body, moving to a new model is urgent, because how we live is based on our underlying beliefs. 

Some people have already started inventing a new body that isn’t based on the old physical model. 

The key to transformation is that you create the change you want to see in yourself. 

Change is also a choice. Your body is alive with unknown abilities, but it looks to you for direction. When you introduce a new intention, your body finds a way, on its own, to adapt to anything you want. 

Once you change the brain, social norms change along with it. Simple daily activity quickly creates new neural networks. And there seems to be no limit to what the new brain can become. It can deliver spiritual experiences. If the brain hadn’t created a neural network for tuning in to spirit, there could be no experience of God. Mental activity alone can alter the brain. 

Mysticism is also at work here. A form of love is holding sway over solid matter. Exposure to each other has done the work of meditation. 

Your body is the junction between the visible and invisible worlds. Standing at the junction, you are constantly advancing into new regions of the invisible world. For every new step you take, your body follows. 

Subtle actions involve only the mind, whereas gross actions involve direct contact with the material world. 

You go inside and make your intention known. You believe in getting results. You don’t resist the process of change. Your body shifts effortlessly at the physical level. You repeat your subtle action until you have mastered the change you desire. 

Subtle action translates into uncanny physical ability. Your body’s whole purpose is to join the visible and invisible realms, and intelligence isn’t the only force that wants to express itself through you. So do creativity, truth, beauty, and love. 

Love catches us off guard, because we wander around in a haze of busy activity and predictable events. To have a breakthrough, you must consciously connect with the invisible forces that are everywhere around you, urging you to go beyond your old conditioning. A sudden burst of love must be expressed and acted upon, or elses it disappears, and ordinary life takes over once more. Subtle action is urgent and necessary. It invokes these invisible forces and brings them into your body. Once you experience the change that makes, there’s no reason to cling to the fiction of being physical any longer. 

Subtle action can make the difference between dreaming of an ideal love and achieving it. In ordinary life, love has become entangled with something else, usually the ego. By nature the ego is selfish, and although love appeals to it, the ego wants to have love on its own terms. These must be sorted out. One person may want to be in control, another to be taken care of. One may feel insecure no matter how much love is directed her way, another may have to dominate his partner in order not to feel vulnerable. But pure love exists and it can be found. As with everything else, a process is involved. You begin where you are, and you grow through subtle action--you quietly encourage the kind of love you really want. 

In your own life, consider the qualities of love at the highest level. The soul’s love is unselfish; giving; blissful; warm and safe; self-sufficient, needing no outside validation; innocent; uncomplicated; kind, compassionate; constant; expanding; comforting; sacred. 

Taking one quality at a time, pay attention to it until you have a clear sense of its personal meaning. What moment of love was most unselfish in your past? Can you recapture a sense of innocence, perhaps walking in the woods or gazing at the sea?

Don’t try to get through the whole list at one sitting. Return to it every day, and as you do, build up an inner sense of your connection to love. Subtle action works by reaching for a deeper level of awareness. As you become more aware of the love that is inside you, you align with an invisible force. Quietly but steadily, you will find that the higher qualities of love will start to enter your life. 

Naturally, you will also be confronted by those times when love has faltered or seemed to leave you out. Face these feelings and memories without avoiding them. Many people find it difficult to make this distinction. 

Subtle action sorts out the confusion, gently and effortlessly, by allowing the invisible force of love to make itself known clearly. You stop mistaking other things for it. 

People often want to be rescued by love, and thus love gets tied to escapism and fear. Things you are afraid of, such as loneliness, isolation, and not fitting in, must be sorted out and healed on their own. Those who do not face their neediness have brains that form a pattern of behavior so familiar that even the most negative feedback does not change it. Only subtle action can change the brain by introducing a new intention. As you learn to heal through subtle action, you won’t be forced into situations that promote failure and rejection. Those are reflections of your old inner state, from which you are slowly shifting away.

As negative impressions and memories arise, paying attention to them has a healing effect. Subtle action operates by looking, watching, and being aware, but not judging, condemning, or rejecting. The negative imprints of your past are not the real you. They are the scars of experience, whereas the good things from your past are signposts pointing toward an opening. By feeling what love is like inside, you activate dormant impulses of love in the here and now. You signal to the universe that you are open, accepting, and receptive to change. 

Then change will appear, first as fresh feelings inside yourself, the fragile sprouting of love in its higher form. Be patient and continue to be aware. More moments will come when you do feel kinder or more unselfish, compassionate, or giving. You will also see reflections of those same qualities outside yourself. You will notice them in other people; they will begin to direct them toward you. Let the process expand. Don’t demand kindness or giving of yourself or anyone else. 

Be like a child again, willing to grow without forcing anything; take a chance at being vulnerable. 

Don’t let your self-image stand in the way. Self-image is constructed by the ego. It gives you a facade that you can show the world, but it also turns into a shield behind which you hide. If you let your self-image stand in the way, you can’t be open and receptive. Real change requires a relaxed, natural attitude. Sadly, most people expend untold energy in protecting their self-image, defending it from attacks both real and imagined. Take the attitude that there’s nothing to protect and nothing to defend. You want to be strong, but true strength comes from love that is certain and self-sufficient. False strength comes from building a wall of self-defensiveness. Keep your focus on feeling what love is like for you, and on gently wanting it to expand.

Only at a subtle level can you train your brain to be completely new.