kvetchinglyneurotic

[kvetchinglyneurotic]

ok so i was just reminded by a post by the lovely and talented @jamiesfootball that i'm technically the originator of the idea for their jamie murders zava fic, and also that in a wild case of divergent evolution, i technically *also* wrote something very very loosely based on that idea back in like september 2023. except the idea of murdering your doppelganger (figurative) got extruded through the original fic-inator and turned into murdering your doppelganger (literal), and the thing i wrote was um. this.

You wake in the morning to find a man in the corner wearing your face. He is a tall, spindling man; a man with arms that stretch the width of the room and legs that fold him against the ceiling, a man of all sinew and bone. He leers down at you with your own mouth, pokes his tongue through the gap in your teeth. You (he) fell, once, long ago when you were a child tottering on a bicycle, swerved to avoid a stone and there you went tumbling grass-stained down the hill and into the street, lay bleeding from the mouth before swerving cars. You tell him get out and your voice comes smooth from his throat, reverberates in your ears through bone instead of air. You eat and it fills his stomach. You sleep and it rests his mind.

In the evening, you tell the man who wears your face a story. He is in the chair across from you, a plaid monstrosity from the roadside. You hauled it home, twenty and sweating and broke, left scratches up the stairwell and for months your apartment crawled with bedbugs, with cockroaches, with spiders, your body freckled with bites and sores. The scars gleam silver on the man who wears your face. This is not the story you tell.

The story you tell is this: you had a job once, some years ago — five, ten, fifty, you (he) know(s) there is no use accounting for such things — out in the desert, alone with no one around for miles and for weeks you stayed there sleepless, sweating under the spotlights as the creak of industrial fans wormed down, down into your mind so that you hear it now, still, even in silence; and you tell him of heat like the open door of an oven and of calluses down to bone. You tell him of clay taking form under your hands, and the whole time you tell it he draws in on himself, great sprawling limbs retreating towards the centre mass as your voice speaks from his mouth and yours from his.

You kill him, this man who wears your face, or perhaps he kills you. You reach out and touch him and he feels real, a prickle of goosebumps beneath your palm, the scratch of scars, the smooth prickle of hair. He is not so tall, now: his eyes meet your own. You feel over the surface of him in the stark white of your kitchen and he trembles under your touch. His (your) vocal chords stretch under his pleas, his (your) tongue flexes. A step backwards; the knife rests heavy in your (his) hand. Tears pool in your eyes, carve trails over your cheeks; your voice shreds raw 'til you taste iron on your tongue. A slash of the blade, a burst of red across your front. Your voice quiets to a gurgle; your mouth falls slack, your eyes stare up sightless from the floor.

You wake in the morning to find a man in the corner wearing your face.

(it's also on ao3)

[kvetchinglyneurotic]

people in books and tv shows are always getting so upset they throw an untouched meal in the trash. that would never be me. i'd receive the worst news of my life and still be like Let me put this in the fridge.

[kvetchinglyneurotic]

Sir John Franklin, on the matter of mosquitoes :

The crew :

[kvetchinglyneurotic]

Idea: The Terror but they add namecards everytime someone shows up on screen like in a reality TV show so I know which white man with sideburns I'm looking at now

[kvetchinglyneurotic]

going directly from reading wilson's terra nova diary to the worst journey in the world is so funny because wilson describes everything from like fun social engagements in australia to evans' actual death in basically the same tone and meanwhile cherry's like the first thing to know about my time in the antarctic was that it was bad. the second thing to know about my time in the antarctic is that it was very, very bad

[kvetchinglyneurotic]

nice pair of characters who trust each other more than anyone else in the whole entire world it would sure be a shame if one of them betrayed that trust for the sake of trying to keep the other alive. it would sure be a shame to love someone so much you destroy them

[kvetchinglyneurotic]

(Definitely More Than) Seven Sentence Sunday

tagged by the lovely @thewildballyntynesgrow! this is from my original fic, arson and other fires — i actually wrote this part quite a while ago, but i stumbled across it while i was scrolling through the doc and was like hey the impromptu brain surgery bit, that's fun

The door opened and a man stepped inside, thin and sallow-skinned, grey speckled through his dark hair and eyes hooded. He wore scrubs and an orange medical exemption badge — orange, the colour marking him as a Healer where Sacha’s, on the handful of occasions he did above-board hospital work, was blue. A trembling apparition of the first Lifebloom cohort, older even than Immanuel’s father, older than Sacha’s parents must have been. His eyes flicked to Dita, sharp, looking for instruction, and she nodded. He stepped in close, close, blocking out all the rest of the room until it was just the two of them and the rebounding fever-heat between their bodies. A hand on his shoulder, pushing him flat. Hands on his face, cupped around his jaw. Skin cool, thin, papery dry. Time dissolved in a rushed kaleidoscope jumble. Lightning pain behind his eyes, racing through his nerves, melting, molten hot, dissolving him to distended putty. There was nothing before and there would be nothing after, just this moment suspended forever in time, a sack of bones and meat on the table that had ceased to be, for minutes or hours or days, Sacha Pavlik.

[kvetchinglyneurotic]

ppl misunderstand me when I say "I want more [thing] in stories". I don't mean "I'm going to love every single one" I mean "I'm very picky and I want more of it in circulation so I can actually choose from a wealth of them and be discerning". I see ppl being like "you say you want more of [this thing] but you don't like [example of it]" YEAH CUZ I'M PICKY!!!!!!!! I have opinions and standards????? not all of them are gonna be the same I wanna be able to look at 100 of them and go "I want these 20" not "I only have 3 to choose from and I don't like any of them" you feel me??????

[kvetchinglyneurotic]

crazy how every time a female character gets cliche misogynistic writing we have to explain to people again that fictional characters are not real and do not choose things for themselves.

[kvetchinglyneurotic]

I'd compare learning to recognise all the terror characters to learning how to differenciate animals of the same species and breed.

Some might be easy to tell apart at first glance. Some are harder to tell apart. With some you will spend weeks trying to put a name to a face with no success until one day it clicks and you don't know how it happened. And you'll look back at photos and suddenly you can tell them apart although you couldn't at that time and it's the strangest feeling ever

[kvetchinglyneurotic]

kill 'character did nothing wrong'. nurture 'character did everything wrong and i was whooping and cheering the whole time'

[kvetchinglyneurotic]

fictional character discourse would be more fun if we all internalized the fact that characters are narrative tools, not people. once we have that basic fact down, we can start talking about what story the author is trying to tell using these characters, whether they’re successful, whether the story itself is successful and by what means we are measuring success—which are all really fun and interesting things to discuss! but we simply cannot get to that point unless we first accept that fictional characters simply do not have thoughts, feelings, opinions, or any agency on their own. a fictional character has more in common with the fictional chair theyre sitting on than with a real person

[kvetchinglyneurotic]

I cannot relate to people who dislike female characters for “being manipulative.” She’s literally creative problem solving before your eyes. She’s literally just using her words. Maybe the other blorbos should be less pawn-like for her beautiful hands hmm

[kvetchinglyneurotic]

did i get much writing done this weekend? no

but did i make progress packing my apartment? also no

[kvetchinglyneurotic]

Does that mean you have human feelings, too? 'Cause it really seems like you do.

It does? Ah, shit. <- me every time someone points out that i'm expressing an emotion

[kvetchinglyneurotic]

stop earning advanced degrees i need you to finish your fanfiction

[kvetchinglyneurotic]

oh im sure