#*gestures vaguely* It's the cycle of abuse

[scrivellc]

Dental Records

Timeline of a "Semi-Sadist"

Birth to Age 9:

Orin was born in upstate New York to Alan Scrivello and Dorothy Byrne. From the beginning his parents' relationship was a tumultuous one with his father being abusive to both his mother and Orin himself. Around 9 was when Orin's sadistic tendencies started to manifest, likely as a means of acting out in response to his trauma. This along with undeniable bruises was what finally made his mother decide to finally leave Alan, taking her son with her.

Age 9 to 14:

Now living exclusively with his mother, Orin remembers these as some of the best years of his life. However, his sadistic tendencies didn't fully go away, and his mother did her best to focus this particular energy into more "productive activities". This worked relatively well, though Orin continued to be a rebellious and unevenly tempered child.

Orin performed well in school but upon entering high school started to experiment with drugs, though nothing super serious. Mostly just smoking pot under the bleachers and such. Unknown to him his mother was sick, hiding her illness from her son in hopes of avoiding setting off anymore...unusual trauma responses in him or disrupting what she assumed was a tenuous grip on academic success.

Age 15:

Despite her best efforts, Dorothy's illness progressed to the point that she could no longer hide it from Orin, and as she deteriorated he became her primary caregiver. Later that year she died, and Orin was made to go back to living with his father.

Age 15-17:

Now back with his father, the abuse starts up again, though it leans more toward verbal and emotional now that Orin is old enough /big enough to fight back when his father tries anything. Early on in this arrangement Orin begins to self harm, turning his focus inward and on hurting himself, but it doesn't take long for him to fall back hard into his sadistic habits, wires crossing now with puberty. His drug use becomes less casual and more as a means of self medicating away the stress of his home life.

While his grades suffer during this time, he did manage to keep them high enough to get into college.

Age 18:

He kept his college acceptance from his father until one day his father found it in his room and confronted him about it. The confrontation became physical as his father tried to forbid Orin from moving away from home to pursue further education. The altercation resulted in Orin being badly injured and his father knocked unconscious. Orin quickly packed up what he could and left home for good. Going to the hospital for his injuries and getting a prescription for pain meds, which he very quickly realized got him high. A feeling he was particularly fond of as he tried not to think about how much damage he had left behind.

Age 18-25:

During this time Orin got his degree and decided to become a dentist. He began a series of failed relationships. There were a number of causes, just falling out of interest with each other, them not putting up with Orin's "reckless sexual habits", or Orin doing some active self-sabotage. He leaned more on his addictions, especially as he became more aware of the ways he acted a lot like his father when it came to how he treated his romantic partners. Eventually he settled in New York City, opening up a dental practice, still relying heavily on pain meds and nitrous oxide to deal with his internal turmoil rather than finding healthy outlets for his aggression and sadism.

Age 25-Present (Early 30s)

Orin finally got into his first truly long term relationship with Audrey. The fact that she hasn't broken up with him being a big part of why its lasted. Orin makes no real attempts to deal with his trauma, preferring instead to indulge in things that don't require him to think about the person he's grown into. And well, he's also maybe fried his brain a bit.

[we-are-knight]

whats the sad backstory behind the hema dodge post, if you dont mind me asking?

I have about 5 Asks about this, and the actual history to it is too long and elaborate to go into.

What I will confirm is that during the time of that clip, I was informally running the fencing group involved. I say 'informally' because I had zero interest in running it as a leader, and wanted to purely focus on teaching people to fence at higher levels, while letting everyone else determine the direction they took. During this time, I had a lot of accusations of hitting too hard, and had for many years. I was not able to fully fix this however, as I literally didn't know how to correct the mechanics to this, and no one had taken the time to actually look at the issue to rectify it. (It took my current fencing leader 20 minutes total to permanently fix this issue. In over a decade, less than half an hour was required to permanently solve this problem. No one made the effort with me until then).

In the background, there's a few people you can see watching this bout. One of them later took over the group by installing himself as the new president. Later, he would tell me I was now banned from the group, and give vague reasons as to why.

I still don't have a full understanding of why I was banned, nor was I told how to be allowed back. The closest I got was something about them retroactively applying a new code of conduct, and accusation that I had made the club a toxic environment.

This stings especially because I was never given any idea of what that meant or how to fix it, or a clear idea of what I had done. The club would then go on, with several of my former best friends, to totally remove any reference to me, and disallow reference to me. They also went on to use a club logo I had originally proposed, and when I attempted to speak positively of this, one of those people would directly message me saying that I was a horrible person and manipulating the scenario, and this was why people always moved away from me. I still don't know what that was meant to be about, and would reaffirm I had thought it was a hopeful gesture that they had adopted the logo I proposed, after which communication was ended. They also accused me of threatening the guy who installed himself, stealing club funds, and had some unpleasant things to say about my partner for good measure.

I ended up being ostracised from my sport for several months, and for most of last year, I realised that the HEMA community I looked up to, didn't care one mote about what had happened, and actively enabled the people involved. None of them have ever had any repercussions, and I will never really get closure. This has been the focus of regular therapy for me for over a year now.

For me, the video, impressive as it looks, features people in the background that have left me traumatised, and led to me abandoned by the only community I was actively engaged in for over a decade, realising I had no friends at all. I still will not attend certain events in the UK if I risk being alone, because the safeguarding in HEMA is basically non-existant, and based entirely on personality cults.

The only positive is that I was later recruited by another historical fencing group, who not only have safeguarding methods, but a professional set up and regular catch-ups to address the issues that most groups don't address. The experiences above taught me that HEMA as a culture will not help you if you are being bullied or ostracised, and so I have ensured that the culture of the current group I run is everything that the one in the video was not. I have had to ban exactly one person from my current group, and the process leading to them being banned was done with full engagement, and they remain on friendly terms with everyone since that judgement. The main positive, as such, was coming out of that experience with awareness of the failings of this sport, and committing to never perpetuating the cycle of abuse to others.

Even so, I'm still in therapy over it, and will never really get closure from it. I've totally lost faith in HEMA as a sport and culture, and continue fencing only because I can't bring myself to stop swinging a sword. And now I'm teaching a new group that has such enthusiasm and excitement, and has grown like nothing I've seen before, who say they stick with it because the culture of the current group is so warm. But it's a small consolation, as I won't consider going to events if the other group is there, if I am alone.

But keep in mind reading this that I am giving a very condensed form of things and how it affected me, and why that video brings me sadness, and a little anxiety.

[andreal831]

I feel guilty: In some ways, I feel Hayley and the Mikaelsons set up Hope to fail. Now, with canon included, I think Hope did find her way - but ironically feel like her story should have been "Klaus, Hayley, and Elijah are what the remaining family tied to Hope but with the three dead - Hope is on her own, and having to navigate a world where she loves her dad but everyone is just as entitled to hate him and come into conflict with that". (Sorry, that's a long one). Basically because of how morally dubious the TVD gang (+ Dorian) could be - it makes sense that they know to separate Klaus's actions from Hope - but what about those who did not have that luxury and only remember a monster that was Klaus? I would use Tyler's story, but in a vague gesture: Hope needs to earn someone's trust after her father (or other relatives) brutalized them and has no way to defend or justify it. Essentially getting someone's trust for her as "Only Hope" and not the surname she's connected to. Or the more common arc, Hope realizing just because she loves her family doesn't mean she can overwrite the centuries of cruel history they left behind.

I'm not saying the Mikaelsons didn't love Hope, but Hope is unique (not just as a tribrid but the only living blood relative who hasn't been alive for a millennia) and had pressure on her that shouldn't be there. Hayley loved her, but should have warned her that living in a town that still had - living - people her dad fought with and hurt should have taken precedence over keeping a torch lit for their relationship. Klaus had his chance to be someone in this world, now Hope has to live in it and make something of herself - in his name or by herself.

(Sorry if this comes off anti. While I have anti thoughts and do like Hope, I think she could have stood to have a better characterized arc.)

I'll start by prefacing this and say that I haven't seen much of Legacies, I only know a lot of the show from edits.

But I agree that the show did a pretty terrible job with really diving into the cycle of trauma and pressures that were put on Hope since before she was even born. They were so focused on making Klaus redeemable and centering Hope around Klaus that they didn't allow for her character to have the development she needed.

I really like what I know about Hope's character and I even look past the wild hoops the writers had to jump through to make her existence possible. But for a show that centered around a magical, miracle baby, they sidelined her character a lot. The writers were so focused on setting up Legacies that they forgot to give the characters the development that was necessary for it to get there.

People love to say that Klaus broke the cycle of abuse with Hope, but he didn't. It just manifested in a different way. He never physically harmed her, but he neglected, abandoned, and emotionally harmed her repeatedly. This trauma is something that Hope doesn't even get to work through.

Hope at 7 years old seems more or less well adjusted. I think Hayley did a good job protecting her from everything. She missed her family in an abstract way because she didn't truly understand what she was missing. She had Hayley and Mary. Klaus allowing himself to be captured and held prisoner was the best thing he ever did for Hope. She was able to live for seven years safe and loved. I may get hate for it, but Hope was better off living as a Marshall away from the Mikaelsons.

I don't necessarily think Hayley was wrong for letting Hope grow up believing the best in her family. At that point, Hope was very isolated. She deserved to have a childhood without it being taken away by the Mikaelsons. But I do think Hayley should have had more conversations with her as she got older, especially if she was going to a school where it was likely to come up.

As soon as she is back with the Mikaelsons, her life once again revolved around what she can do for Klaus. I'm not saying they all didn't love Hope, but she was never allowed to just exist. The fact that she used to keep points when she was "good" or "bad" shows just how much she felt it. She had to be perfect because if she wasn't, she wouldn't be worth their sacrifice or Klaus might slip back into a terrible person.

I've talked about it before, but sending Hope to the Salvatore School made no sense to me. She was safer in New Orleans. She had her mother's pack, he vampires would protect her for Josh and Marcel, Vincent wouldn't let anything happen to her, and she had her mother. Hayley sending her daughter away to boarding school for most of the year made zero sense. I watched the first few episodes of Legacies before TO and I genuinely thought they all died when she was a child because of how she acted with Alaric and the twins. She desperately wanted a family, something Hayley had done a great job providing in the past, but sending her away to school made Hope feel neglected. She was already being neglected by Klaus, she didn't need to feel abandoned by both parents.

And, as you said, she is sent to a school that is run by a man who hates her father, in a town full of people who hate her whole family. She had to listen to people talking about how awful they were, and it was all warranted, which makes it worse for her. She didn't get to attempt to process that on her own. She had to do it while constantly being compared to her family. Alaric was always using it as a way to punish her. The adults clearly were not mature enough to separate Hope from what her family did and they had no business being in charge of her.

The entire terrible legacy of the Mikaelsons was put on Hope's shoulder and the show just ignored that trauma because if they didn't, they would have to admit that Klaus wasn't redeemed, everyone just moved on. So then the people who didn't just move on look like the bad guys. Alaric had every right to hate Klaus, Tyler would have every right to hate both of Hayley and Klaus. They don't owe the Mikaelsons anything, but it is also not fair that Hope has to take the brunt of their anger because Klaus died and got away with literal murder. Hope was a child and shouldn't have had to work to prove herself. She deserved love and support and understanding, like every other child. She deserved to have the space and support to sort out her feelings toward her family, the good and the bad. She deserved to yell at Klaus for abandoning her, to be angry at Elijah for putting that pressure on her, to be angry at her aunts and uncles for abandoning her after her parents died. She deserved to figure out who she was outside of the legacy of pain and torment her family left behind, but as far as I can tell, she is never given that time. All of this would have given her character more depth. Coming to the realization that her family were terrible people but she still loved them is a hard pill to swallow, but it was something she needed to come to terms with. Glorifying Klaus and erasing Hayley, did very little for her development except to play on Klaus' popularity for views.

I love the Mikaelsons but each and every one of them were terrible at being family and terrible people. Hope suffered because of this.

Thanks for the ask! Sorry if I just went on a tangent and didn't fully answer your question.

[weyrwolfen]

Eidola: Chapter 21 - CT-8821 Reaver

Rating: T

Characters: Gen, Clone Trooper OCs, Captain Rex, Ahsoka Tano, and other canon members of the 501st/332nd and the Bad Batch

Warnings: canon-typical violence; references to self-harm, injuries, and substance abuse; PTSD; it’s post-Order 66 and nobody is having a good time (but they’re all working on it)

Summary: The mission was never to bring down the Empire. Not really. The mission was to save every single one of their chipped brothers. But if doing do helped break the Empire’s stranglehold on the galaxy? Well, that was just a bonus.

“I will admit, the upcoming, earlier-than-expected visit from the Imperial tax assessor has put us in a bit of a bind,” Governor Shalk said, reaching for one of the datapads on her surprisingly utilitarian desk. “Of course, we here on Wadj are proud to support the Empire, but we have so few goods we can export to Core worlds to generate additional income, and fewer highly-connected allies to help us find markets for those goods we do have to offer.”

Major Ullmann reached across the desk and accepted the datapad, turning it around to scan through the proffered file.

Reaver was standing at attention, just to the left of the door of the governor’s office. The Coruscant Guardsman, Ori, was opposite him, posture propaganda-holo perfect on the door’s right side.

They weren’t exactly a matched set though. Ori had handed Reaver an orange command pauldron, when they’d all been suiting up for this escort mission. Reaver wasn’t sure what to make of that: if their recently arrived brothers were honestly trying to loop him in on their non-standard command structure or if it was just a sop to his ego. He might still be the top-ranking clone in the 241st, but he clearly wasn’t the one calling the shots around the base anymore.

Neither was Major Ullmann, but that had been true since they’d arrived on Wadj, right after the war had ended. That was a separate issue to mull over in the middle of the night, when Reaver’s insomnia got the better of him.

“Might I take this ‘pad to review these files in detail?” the Major asked, all diplomatic etiquette and careful obfuscation, promising nothing.

Governor Shalk waved one hand with casual grace. A single ring caught the light at that gesture, one small stone set in a plain band, resting on the finger several natborn cultures reserved for signs of marital status. Reaver had been in this room dozens of times before, guarding meetings just like this one, but he hadn’t really noticed any of the fine details of the place or the people involved. It was vaguely horrifying, just how bad he’d been at everything, under the chip’s control.

“Of course, in the event this little endeavor bears fruit, I would be happy to negotiate some form of remuneration for your efforts,” the Governor was saying with a small smile.

A bribe. She was offering the Major an under-the-table cut of the profits.

Reaver’s memory might be spotty and incomplete, but after reviewing what recollections he did retain before this mission, it was obvious that the Governor had been making every effort to ingratiate herself with Major Ullmann, from the moment they’d all been stationed on Wadj.

The funny thing was, Reaver didn’t think less of her for it. It was obvious that she was doing everything in her very limited power to protect her planet’s citizens. If that meant sucking up to the Empire’s military commanders on-planet, or greasing a palm or two to keep everyone happy, then so be it. Her actions on other fronts were far more telling.

The local economy ran as much on barter as it did credits, but what little revenue did come in from the taxes on off-planet trade was cycled back into public works and social safety nets, not into lining Governor Shalk’s pockets. Not unless she was hiding her tracks better than any of them realized.

Given the aggressive plainness of the governor’s office and attire, Reaver kind of doubted it.

Wadj wasn’t exactly a prime posting for any ambitious Imperial officer. It was too small, too out-of-the-way, and too strategically unimportant to rate much scrutiny from the Empire. As long as the planet paid its taxes and kept its head down, the chances the local politicians would be replaced with Imperial cronies were low. And the higher-ups on Wadj had been scrupulously toeing the line to keep things that way. On flimsi, the planet was populated by loyal, if poor, Imperial citizens.

The planet also appeared to be the perfect place to send a trio of disgraced Imperial Army officers to languish in obscurity, under the guard of their chipped clone troopers. Finding those reports on his personal terminal had been sobering. Reaver had immediately sent them all to the Major, who had read them over with something resembling dark amusement before forwarding them to a few key brothers among their rescuers.

At least CT-8821’s chip-addled incompetence had extended to the reports he’d filed behind his own officers’ backs. They hadn’t contained anything too incriminating. Lists of comm contacts, details of the Major’s bank records, his daily schedule. Invasive? Yes. Horribly so. But not incriminating.

Ori was confident he could mimic Reaver’s, CT-8821’s, wording well enough to take over sending safely innocuous, false reports, occasionally seeded with useful misinformation. The Corrie had offered to run all of the falsified documents past Reaver and the Major both. Reaver wasn’t having any better luck interpreting that offer than he was the orange pauldron on his shoulder.

The Governor leaned back in her chair and adjusted the drape of her robe, seemingly appeased. The garment was made of a well-crafted, but unpretentious, blue fabric with only a little embroidery around the seams to add visual interest. Not austere, but also not extravagant, at least by Outer Rim reckoning.

“Now,” she said, clearly changing the subject. “Is there anything I should be aware of, regarding security operations in system?”

From his current position, guarding the door, Reaver couldn’t see the Major’s face, but he had worked with the man long enough to easily read his body language. If they’d been playing sabacc, Reaver would be on his guard, given the way Major Ullmann had just shifted in his seat, shoulders angled casually out of perfectly square.

“There has been a minor uptick in pirate activity in a few of the neighboring systems,” the Major said, sounding professional, if largely unconcerned. That statement, at least, was true. “You may notice some heightened activity, around our base. We have been instructed to take certain steps, to increase our operational readiness in the event we need to repel similar raids in system.” And there was the lie, Reaver knew that they’d received no such orders. The Empire, like the Republic before it, cared very little for the safety and security of Outer Rim planets. “We have been increasing patrols, both on the ground and in orbit, but I assure you, these actions are precautionary only.”

That was a neat and tidy way to explain away anything odd the locals had almost certainly noticed around their base, not the mention the increase in fuel the base was requisitioning from the capital’s small spaceport.

Reaver’s lips twitched upwards into a lopsided smile, which he only allowed because it was well-hidden under his bucket.

The Guardsman, Ori, might as well have been carved from stone, visor facing perfectly ahead, seemingly focused on a blank patch of wall some indefinable distance above the Governor’s head. He might have been rolling his eyes behind his visor, but honestly, Reaver doubted it. Ori had struck Reaver as a consummate professional, even though this meeting had to be painfully quaint to a brother who’d spent most of his deployment on Coruscant serving the Senate.

Major Ullmann and Governor Shalk continued to chat for another twenty minutes, discussing minutiae that Reaver would remember this time, even though he didn’t find much of it interesting. Regulation of fishing quotas, hiring additional locals to fill empty staff positions in the Imperial registrar and judicial offices, unusual storm activity off the main continent’s southern coast.

When they left, picking up Jade and Facet along the way, they were stopped at the door by one of the Governor’s aides, who presented the Major with a wooden box of ‘export samples.’ Another bribe, no doubt. Major Ullmann clearly found the whole thing highly distasteful, but he hid it well with a polite thank you and a vague gesture to the four clones flanking him.

Jade accepted the small crate, and Reaver saw Ori discretely palm out a hand scanner and give the box a quick once over. Reaver trusted that the Corrie would do or say something if he found anything too alarming.

Apparently he didn’t.

With some final nods and empty platitudes, they were finally able to join Sergeant Levee and another one of their new brothers, Hitch, who’d been guarding the armored transport they’d taken from the base.

The drive back was largely uneventful, except for the part where Ori insisted they open the crate so he could make absolutely sure of what they were bringing back before they reached the base. That seemed paranoid, but Reaver couldn’t exactly fault the man’s reasoning. The good news was that the contents seemed to be innocent enough: some kind of alcohol in three rather fancy-looking bottles, a shockingly soft bolt of green fabric with an iridescent sheen to the weave, a solid cylinder of some kind of faintly luminescent mineral, two vibrantly painted ceramic bowls, a few jars of scented creams or cosmetics, and a selection of fancily packaged herbs and spices whose names Reaper didn’t recognize.

No explosives, no surveillance equipment, nothing biologically reactive unless you counted the alcohol.

Ori sealed the box back up, apparently satisfied with his findings.

Major Ullmann sighed, stretching his legs out in front of him in the back of the transport. “I wish I had even a quarter of the connections the Governor apparently thinks I do,” he said dourly. “She’s not wrong to be concerned though. The slated increase in Imperial taxes is going to be crippling to what few import and export businesses they have.”

The clones were all silent for several minutes. Planetary economic theory hadn’t exactly been covered in the standard trooper training regimen back on Kamino.

Eventually though, Ori did say, “I will speak to the Commander,” and left it at that. It was as vaguely non-committal as anything the Major had said back at the Governor’s office. Reaver had no plans to hold his breath waiting for anything to come of it.

Clip was waiting for all of them in the base’s courtyard when they all filed out of the transport. Much to Reaver’s surprise, he wasn’t there for Ori or the Major.

“You’re needed for a comm call upstairs,” Clip explained. The ARC’s uncharacteristically terse tone made Reaver tense up, immediately assuming that he’d be receiving some kind of bad news. Clip clearly noticed that reaction and grimaced a little before adding, “It’s nothing bad, but we thought it best to let you and Brace decide what should be shared with the rest of the base.”

Brace. Brace was the 241st’s CMO. That really didn’t set Reaver’s mind at ease.

They didn’t head to the main holotable in the base’s command center, but instead diverted off to one of the conference rooms meant for more sensitive conversations. And sure enough, there was Brace, standing on the other side of the compact comms system, looking as worn and worried as Reaver felt. He had a stack of datapads sitting on the table in front of him, which he’d obviously been reading through when they’d arrived.

Clip punched a quick code into the wall panel and said, “I’ll be in the command center if you need me.”

The device hummed and flickered to life when the door closed behind Clip, light resolving into quarter-sized images of two clones. The one on the right was a brother Reaver didn’t recognize, but the medical symbol painted on one of his spaulders spoke for itself.`

The other was Captain Rex.

Despite their nominally equivalent ranks, Reaver knew perfectly well where he fell relative to Rex in the new command structure around base. Reaver found himself stiffening unconsciously, shoulders squaring under the other Captain’s scrutiny. Out of the corner of his eye, Reaver saw Brace do much the same thing.

“Sir?” Reaver asked, with a deference he knew was deserved even if it was poorly defined.

Captain Rex was silent for a moment, and Reaver wasn’t sure if it was because of a delay in the signal or something else. “We’re working on getting someone embedded in the capital’s hospital, a Core-trained surgeon,” he finally said. “Be working on a list of your people you think could benefit from access to their facilities.”

The news was a kriff-ton better than whatever Reaver had been half-expecting. “We can do that,” he said, still waiting for the other boot to drop.

“We also have some medical files to transfer to you,” Captain Rex added, glancing over to his own medic, who leaned forward to enter something into the holotable on their end of the connection.

Brace picked up one of his datapads and plugged it into the ‘table. The file transfer only took a few moments, but whatever came up on the screen earned a sharp intake of breath.

“Nails finally agreed to let us read you in on his situation,” the other medic said without any further preamble. “He’ll be on the next ship we send your way.”

Reaver couldn’t sleep.

He was exhausted, but every time he started to drift off, some new thought would bubble up to the surface and jerk him back to wakefulness. The medics informed him that this was a fairly normal, even mild, reaction to coming out from under the long-term effects of his mind-control chip. Given how most of Reaver’s men were, or were not, recovering from their own surgeries, he kind of understood their point.

Then again, maybe it wasn’t the chip. It wasn’t like he was short on other, more immediate sources of stress.

Nails, for example.

Force. Captain Rex himself had told Reaver about Nails, almost the moment Reaver had left the infirmary after his own surgery. That news had seemed too good to be true, and Reaver’s small kernel of doubt had only grown after the days turned into weeks and their long-lost brother still hadn’t commed any of them.

But now that Reaver had read the medics’ reports, he had a better idea why Nails might have been hesitant to reach out to them.

Reaver himself had signed the flimsiwork, sending Nails off on a temporary assignment to the Republic medical station in the Hosnian system. He’d been helping to repair the base’s malfunctioning carbon dioxide scrubbers when Order 66 had gone out. Apparently there had been fifteen Jedi on base: nine knights and six padawans, all injured and receiving medical care.

The clones, Nails among them, had killed them all in their cots.

It wasn’t the last slaughter Nails had been ordered to perform, before being rescued out from under the noses of his Imperial commanders on one of Millik’s moons.

Force. The details had been hard to read. Reaver couldn’t even imagine.

Reaver had lost two years of his already foreshortened life to a slave chip the Kaminoans had planted in his brain before he was even decanted. He was angry, and bitter, and (although he hadn’t actually admitted it out loud) deeply afraid that removing the chip somehow hadn’t been enough, that one day another random comm call would snatch his mind away again, this time forever.

But in comparison to what their new brothers had experienced, in comparison to what Nails had experienced, Reaver was also very lucky.

Almost his entire company was here with him on Wadj. His men were wounded in mind and spirit, but they were recovering. The situation was far from ideal, but it could have been so much worse.

Reaver had met maybe a dozen new brothers who wore the infamous blue of the 501st, but the rest of their group sported all sorts of other colors, rarely in groups bigger than two or three. He hadn’t seen a single other brother wearing Clip’s shade of medium-green, or Shark’s brownish-red, or Aughts’s pale lavender. He didn’t know if their battalions were gone – just completely wiped out, or if their closest brothers were still out there somewhere under the control of the Empire.

Their new brothers had been opening up more and more every rotation, sharing stories from their pasts. Hearing more about them, what they had gone through during the war and especially after it, made his own experiences seem small and petty by comparison.

Reaver was so angry, and so afraid, and so lucky, and he’d really just like to work through his own osik, without also feeling guilty for not being happier or more grateful for his comparatively good situation.

He couldn’t blame his reaction on their new brothers. They weren’t doing or saying anything to stoke that guilt. If anything, they were being so unfailingly supportive about the whole situation that it was just making Reaver feel even worse. Aughts had flat out asked him if he’d prefer to schedule his check-ins with one of his own medics. That had seemed cowardly, not to mention rude towards the brothers who had saved them, so Reaver had turned the offer down.

Maybe he shouldn’t have.

He really needed to get his bucket on straight, and fast. He couldn’t let his own issues spill over onto Nails. He wouldn’t.

Sleep was a long time coming.

“Malk, we’ve got the Scythe incoming,” Latch said over the command deck’s open comms. “You’re gonna want to clear your cadets out of the way.”

They weren’t really cadets, but nobody seemed to have a better name for the pair of stringy, half-grown Nautolans one of their new brothers had somehow adopted. They’d been on base for a little over a week at this point, running endless laps around the courtyard, or eating in the mess, or practicing with blasters under the watchful eyes of multiple different clones. They seemed like good kids, not that Reaver had a lot of experience with less-than-fully-grown natborns.

Captain Rex had asked Reaver if transferring them here was going to be a problem, and Reaver had said no. He genuinely hadn’t thought there would be any issues.

He also hadn’t been sure if he could actually voice a complaint if he did have one. If it would be heard or heeded.

He wasn’t sure if the question itself hadn’t been some kind of test.

He was pretty certain he was being unfair.

Reaver just wished somebody would just lay out the details of this… whatever the kriff this was. Rescue mission or rebellion or what.

Maybe their new brothers couldn’t.

Maybe they didn’t know themselves.

Reaver had always known where he stood back on Kamino, with the G.A.R. Kriff, even with the Empire, under the control of the karking chip. The knowing made things easier, let him predict how he should act, when he should speak, and when it was better to keep his mouth shut. He didn’t know where that line was anymore.

Major Ullmann had always encouraged his officers to speak their minds, but now he was deferring to the newcomers in all the ways that mattered. He’d instructed his men to do the same. There had been a lot of pretty words to say about self-determination and the founding principles of the Republic, but none of the brothers present had missed the guilt and anger and grief and heartache behind his words.

Reaver got it. He did. The Major felt responsible for what had happened, for not figuring out the reality of the chips or how to give his men their own minds back earlier, no matter how irrational or illogical that line of guilty reasoning was.

Reaver felt the same way.

He just wished his CO would give him a little additional guidance here.

The 241st still answered to Reaver, and Reaver now answered to… somebody. Maybe Captain Rex. Rumor had it he’d been promoted to Commander near the end of the war, but those same rumors also said he’d been stripped of his rank and accused of treason after Order 66. Reaver wasn’t interested in reopening any of those wounds with tactless requests for details. And besides, Rex hadn’t exactly been around much, to oversee the day-to-day workings of the Wadj base.

The same could be said about Ahsoka Tano, who as a Jedi padawan also had held the rank of Commander, but who had also made herself scarce shortly after Reaver had been released by the medics. From what little gossip he’d been able to gather around base, her actual rank was even more convoluted than Rex’s, even though both of them were clearly the leaders of this operation.

Perhaps Reaver was supposed to be answering to one of the seemingly random sampling of Coruscant Guards, ARCs, or indeterminately elevated troopers who seemed to round out the rest of the upper echelon of the group’s command structure. Who even knew?

Force, the entire outfit was a karking organizational mess, except he couldn’t exactly say anything against their operational effectiveness. Not when they’d taken his own base out from under him and then seen to the health and freedom of his brothers. Chips or no, the entire incident was deeply humbling in retrospect.

Reaver sure as kriff couldn’t run any of these thoughts past his own men, who needed him to be a source of stability while they all sorted themselves out.

And he still didn’t know where he was supposed to fit into this whole mess.

“The Scythe is on her final approach,” Bar reported, sending out the data on the projected flight trajectory to the other terminals. “Requesting permission to land.”

Reaver had a wild, irrational impulse to deny that request, just to see what would happen.

“Latch, please confirm that the yard is clear,” he said instead, perfectly professional.

“Yard’s clear,” Latch said after only a moment’s pause.

“Then permission granted,” Reaver said, rattling off the prescribed words like he was reading from a script.

The shuttle was easy to pick out, a dark silhouette against the last colors of Wadj’s fading sunset. They’d been routing most shuttles in and out after full dark to hide them from the locals, but sundown was just going to have to be good enough cover this time because–

“Did a piece just fall off of them?” Bar asked, alarmed.

Because of that. Yeah.

“Looks like yes,” Reaver answered without glancing over his shoulder at the men. He didn’t need to. He could feel the incredulous looks they were trading behind his back.

He didn’t blame them. He sure as kriff wouldn’t have been comfortable taking that thing out of atmosphere, much less into hyperspace.

Despite the obvious beating the ship had taken, the Scythe rotated smoothly and sank carefully into the courtyard. The base’s floodlights were doing their karking best to highlight every spot weld and temporary patch that were currently holding the craft together.

Reaver stepped closer to the command deck’s main windows, so he could see into the courtyard below. Ori was down there, waiting to greet his brothers as they exited the ship. Eventually the 501st ARC and their senior medic, Jesse and Kix, appeared, escorting an unfamiliar sentient down the ship’s damaged ramp. The being’s slender build looked particularly out-of-place surrounded by so many clones.

Right.

The surgeon.

“Slicing isn’t the issue,” the trooper said, scowling down at the datapad in his hands. Reaver had seen him around base, but he’d never managed to catch this brother’s name. Whatever his name was, he didn’t seem terribly comfortable being the temporary center of attention. “We have the access codes. In Hutt space, that’s all you need to open accounts and move around credits. But…” he trailed off.

“But the Hutts police their own banking system, and they don’t look favorably on unsanctioned thefts,” Ori said, picking up the thread of conversation without glancing up from his own ‘pad. “Draining these accounts will be a blow to their reputation.”

Jesse nodded, clearly unsurprised by their analysis, but also unhappy about it. “With the Imperial oversight of their own banks, somebody’s going to notice a huge number of credits suddenly appearing in some random account on an Outer Rim skug hole.”

“The Mandalorian banks are still independent,” Ori said, frowning to himself, and then amended, “Barely.”

Wait. Wait… “Wadj has an independent banking system,” Reaver said, looking around the holotable. He’d thought Ori, at least, had already known that, but maybe not, given the hard looks he was getting. “Lots of these small, Outer Rim systems do. It’s small, and I don’t know all the details, but I was never asked to report back on the Major’s Imperial accounts, only the Wadj ones.”

Reaver could practically see the gears spinning in all three brothers’ heads.

“Factor, can you look into this?”

Right. The trooper’s name was Factor. Reaver filed that piece of information away, grateful that he wasn’t going to have to break down and show his shebs by asking.

“Already on it,” the trooper said to himself, eyes flicking back and forth across whatever he was reading on his personal screen. After a protracted silence and a lot of rapid fire typing, he said, “Oh, that’s interesting,” under his breath. He seemed momentarily oblivious to the fact that everyone else was watching him, waiting for some kind of elaboration.

Finally, Jesse sighed and then asked, “What’s interesting?”

Factor looked up, refocused his attention with a small shake of his head, and reported in a stringently professional tone, “The local system functions more as a membership-based, credit sharing entity instead of a true bank. It looks like it only really handles in-system transactions and has agreements in place with the Imperial banks for anything off-planet.” He handed his own datapad over to Ori, who took it with obvious interest.

The Coruscant guard’s expression sharpened like a hunting strill catching a scent. “They don’t require chain codes for membership,” he said, half to himself. He shared a weighted look with Jesse. “And the transfers can be done in the system’s name, not the individual member’s.”

Jesse made a quiet sound, half exhale, half low whistle. “How the kriff did they get away with negotiating that?” he said.

Ori shrugged. “By being too small and too unimportant to be worth targeting,” he said, but there was something distinctly predatory under the casual statement.

Reaver hadn’t been following the conversation half as well as he would have liked – credit-sharing didn’t sound any different from what regular banks did to him – so it was almost a relief when a comm request popped up into his HUD. It was from Brace. He turned to the side, flashing an explanatory hand signal to the others, and accepted the call.

“Reaver here,” he said, hoping this wasn’t some kind of emergency.

“The surgeon’s here,” Brace said flatly, not even bothering with a greeting.

Kriff, already? Reaver checked the chrono in his HUD and realized that this meeting had run exceedingly late. He’d completely lost track of time. He’d meant to get down to the infirmary before the natborn surgeon arrived. “I’ll be right down,” he said.

“Good,” Brace said and then cut the connection.

Well, that didn’t sound promising.

Reaver re-engaged his external mic just in time to hear Jesse say, “… If any of the natborns might be willing to test the waters by opening a personal account.”

Ori actually snorted. “Better than stashing their credits under their bunks, which is what I’m pretty certain everyone in the safehouse has been doing so far.”

“I’m needed in medical,” Reaver inserted into the brief lull in conversation. Maybe he should have phrased that as a question, but kark that. His brothers needed him, and whatever else this karked up situation ended up demanding of him, they would always come first.

But Jesse just nodded and asked, “Can you ask Echo and Tech to come up when they get done?”

Reaver just nodded and left the command deck to the others.

The walk across base was largely uneventful. It was a little disconcerting, how day to day life just kept humming along, chip or no chip.

Except, of course, there were differences. There was more chatter in the halls, more anger and more laughter and more sniping and just more personality underlying every conversation. Most everyone was wearing their old Phase II armor again, freshly pulled out of storage and touched up with the paint their new brothers had sourced.

And of course, tan wasn’t the only color paint he saw on his walk.

Reaver had known exactly who to expect in the infirmary, but the space still felt unexpectedly crowded. That could probably be chalked up to Clone Force 99’s presence, in its entirety.

The surgeon, a slender, multi-armed sentient in surprisingly colorful attire, was tracking a small light back and forth in front of Wrecker’s clouded eye and asking questions in a tone too quiet to make out. Kix was discussing something with Echo and Tech, the kid, Omega, was obviously trying to provide moral support to the others, and Hunter was hovering over them all like a broody Krayt dragon, puffed up and just as prone to bite. The situation seemed well in hand, so Reaver felt precisely no qualms about going to his own men.

Brace was bristling in front of Truss and Curl, pretending to review something on a datapad while actually watching the proceedings unfolding in the infirmary’s neighboring cots. It didn’t escape Reaver that he’d placed himself between his brothers and the unknown natborn in the room.

As for Curl and Truss, their reactions were about what Reaver had expected. Curl just looked bored, but Truss was fidgeting, playing with the makeshift prosthetic the medics had knocked together out of scavenged neural tech and a partial droid hand. The two metal digits curled along with his organic ones, but they moved more slowly in awkward fits and starts.

“Interface still glitching?” Reaver asked him, keeping his voice low.

Truss shrugged and looked up to meet Reaver’s eye, expression stubbornly blank. “Not really,” he lied.

“I had trouble figuring out distances back when it happened,” Wrecker was saying, his booming voice filling the space. “But I’ve gotten pretty good at managing.”

That also sounded like a lie to Reaver’s ears, but maybe it was a day for it.

Reaver was about to ask Curl how he was doing as well, when his scout suddenly hissed a soft, “Force,” under his breath.

Reaver turned to see what the issue was.

Echo had removed his armor and was starting to strip off his upper blacks as well.

Karking hells.

They all knew about the prosthetics, of course. They were kind of hard to miss, even when the 99 ARC was fully armored up, but Reaver hadn’t had any idea exactly how extensive the modifications were. Exactly how far up did–

A solid thwack against his armored shoulder jerked Reaver’s attention back to Brace, who had just hit him with his datapad.

“Stop staring,” the medic hissed, expression full of warning. He turned and leveled the same glower at Curl, whose shoulders hunched up in defensive guilt, and then Truss, who was the only innocent party here.

Truss just responded with a flat, unimpressed look of his own.

“Right,” Reaver said, pulling himself back on track and trying to drag his brothers along with him. “So, what’s the plan here?”

“Plans,” Brace said, not toning back his side eye a bit. “Plural. Tide, Kix, and I have worked out a number of different options, depending on what’s actually available.” He pointed at Curl, who’d taken a lungfull of corrosive gas back on Siesiss and experienced severely decreased lung capacity ever since, and said, “Regenerative therapy, partial mod replacement, or transplants, tank-grown or otherwise.” Then he shifted to Truss, and said, “Integrated ports or enhanced neural interfacing with an updated skeletal framing covered in either armored plating or synthetic skin.”

“All of which sounds pretty kriffing expensive,” Curl grumbled under his breath.

At least that concern was something Reaver could lay to rest. “That shouldn’t be a problem for long,” he said with a tiny, lopsided smirk which slanted at least a little mean. “I can’t share all of the details, but our brothers are working on a plan to relieve some slavers of their blood credits.”

Curl and Truss just stared in surprise, but it was Brace whose entire demeanor shifted. If he’d been wearing his plate, Reaver might not have noticed the slight shudder that worked its way down the medic’s spine, but Brace was in his light grays today. His expression flickered back and forth between hope and doubt.

Reaver could relate. The clones had always worked under the framework of tightening budgets and stringent rationing. The concept that they could just get whatever they needed without skimping elsewhere seemed too big to contemplate. Too big to be real.

Apparently the 241st weren’t the only ones to feel that way either.

Later that evening, well after the surgeon had returned to the natborn safehouse and Reaver had gone back to the regular day to day running of the base, Jesse had shown up to drag Reaver and a few of his officers to an ‘unofficial, official command meeting’ in the section of the base designed for natborn officers’ R and R time.

To Reaver, it looked a lot more like ‘after-hours drinking,’ but he wasn’t about to complain about that. Not when the Major had stopped by to add one of the governor’s fancy bottles of iridescent liquor to the more questionable options their brothers had ‘liberated’ from the Abainya pirates.

Who even knew how many glasses into the evening, Jesse had leaned back in the cushioned couch they’d claimed against one of the room’s walls and said, “It’s good to see him like this.”

It took Reaver a second to figure out who Jesse meant, but he did eventually realize that the ARC was watching their own CMO, Kix, who was snickering over something with two 501st brothers and Brace, who’d also been dragged into this impromptu celebration.

“What,” Reaver said, feeling and sounding a little fuzzy. “Drunk?”

Jesse snorted, because there wasn’t any denying that Kix was at least a little tipsy, but he still corrected, “Having fun. I think that’s the first time I’ve seen him smile since… Well, you know.”

Reaver did know, but this was getting a lot more personal than he was ready to handle, even if it turned out that Jesse and the other ambiguous ‘officers’ were surprisingly easy to talk to, at least after a few cups of liquid courage.

“This is the first alcohol I’ve had, since then,” his inebriated brain decided to blurt. The admission was somewhere between a confession, an explanation for why his tolerance was so pitifully low, and a poorly-thought-out attempt at commiseration. “Imperial regulations.”

Jesse just nodded and lifted up his own glass in a casual, almost mocking toast.

“To breaking Imperial regulations,” he said.

Reaver clinked his own glass against Jesse’s and echoed, “To breaking Imperial regulations.”

The weird, sparkly liquor really was good. Certainly better than that piss-tasting swill Ori was drinking.

“Oh, speaking of recreational reg-breaking,” Jesse said, leaning forward to set his glass on the low table in front of them. “How long do we all have to keep pretending we don’t know that one of your troopers has shacked up with Agent Weeks?”

Reaver just about choked on his drink, trying not to laugh mid-swallow. He’d been covering for Callan since before the war had ended. They all had. And now that every free breath he and his brothers took already amounted to high treason, Reaver was finding it even harder to get worked up over a little enthusiastically consensual fraternization on base, especially now that the remaining complications related to their company’s chain of command were actively being jettisoned out of an airlock.

The charade was getting more than a little silly, but there was something humorous and almost comforting in the familiar, unnecessary pretense, so after a moment’s thought, Reaver answered, “Probably right up until we get invitations to the marriage ceremony.”

Don’t lock your knees.

That was one of the earliest lessons Reaver remembered from back on Kamino. Before combat training, before blaster drills or armor maintenance, before learning to read or even to march, clone cadets were taught to stand at attention. Keep your back straight, chin up, eyes forward, and never, ever lock your knees. The instructors never explained why, they just gave the order and expected it to be obeyed. Of course, a few brothers didn’t listen, or weren’t sure what the instructors meant, or maybe they just forgot the detail, and ended up face-planting on the training room floor, out cold.

And when they’d come back to, then they’d been punished for not following their orders in every detail.

So, Reaver had learned pretty quickly not to lock his knees.

He locked his knees now though. He had to.

Nails was on that descending shuttle.

“I’m going to kill them,” Reaver muttered under his breath, trying to distract himself from his own irrational apprehension. At his side, Clip just laughed quietly. Pulling a half-joking grimace in response was easy. Reaver was still working things out in his head, but he thought he’d reached something resembling equilibrium over their ambiguous ranks. Getting absolutely plastered with your brothers was useful like that, even if his head was still throbbing.

“It’s too late to dismiss them now,” Ori said blandly, standing on Clip’s other side. “You’ll start a riot.”

Wasn’t that the truth?

Reaver had told Truss, Bolt, and Callan about who was arriving today, because to do anything else would have been cruel. He’d told Agent Weeks because he wasn’t an idiot and he knew that Callan would tell her even if Reaver didn’t. He’d also told all four of them that while he didn’t expect them to keep the news to themselves, they needed to keep the welcome party as small as possible so they wouldn’t overwhelm Nails.

It looked like the entire base had shown up instead, formed up in precise lines and decked out in their old, painted armor, buckets tucked neatly under their arms. Their non-241st brothers must be covering all of the base’s essential duty postings, to help make this happen.

At least most of the extra ships had relocated to the rapidly expanding archipelago base. It meant that at a bare minimum, they at least had the room for this kind of nonsense.

The shuttle was descending towards the last open space left in the base’s courtyard, thankfully far enough away from the front line of their formation to not shower them all in dust. Once the ship had landed and cut its engines, Reaver gestured for Truss and the other brothers assigned to the armory to fall in with him. Agent Weeks did not, as Reaver had half expected, join them. She just stood at the front of the formation in her formal blacks, shoulder to shoulder with Major Ullmann and Sergeant Levee in a silent show of support.

Reaver stopped next to the shuttle’s still-sealed ramp and waited as his brothers from the armory lined up next to him.

But then the shuttle’s ramp was dropping down and there, flanked by Captain Rex himself, was Nails.

Force.

It really was him, Nails, impossibly returned to them, but frozen at the top of the ship’s ramp, body language all but screaming that he was uncertain of his welcome.

Well, that wouldn’t do.

“Welcome home,” Reaver said, voice cracking only a little.

And then Bolt staggered forward up the ramp and caught Nails in a bone-crushing hug. Callan and Truss were only a step behind him. It was a wonder the four of them didn’t topple over, back into the ship.

A miracle, which probably had something to do with Captain Rex planting a supportive hand in the middle of Nails’ back.

As for Nails, he just buried his face against Callan’s spaulder and gripped all three of his brothers with desperate strength.

“I told you there wasn’t anything to worry about,” Reaver overheard Captain Rex say to Nails in an undertone.

It took Nails a bit, but once he got himself a little more under control, Reaver managed to gently entice the lot of them back down the ramp and towards the rest of the 241st, who look ready to storm the shuttle by force if they were asked to wait even one more minute.

He fully intended to join his men in the celebratory feast he wasn’t supposed to know Kenner had been cooking up in the mess. But there was one thing he needed to handle first.

When Captain Rex finally took the last few steps down off of the ramp and into the dust of the courtyard, Reaver gave him the most proper salute he could manage, shoulders back, posture perfect, and said, “Captain Rex. Thank you, sir.” He meant it too, the respect and the gratitude for Nails. For everything. He’d been raised to be loyal, and giving that loyalty to a brother was the easiest thing in the galaxy. Especially a brother whose men and mission continuously demonstrated their mettle. This brother.

Captain Rex just looked at him for a long moment, and then, instead of returning the salute, he extended one of his hands.

Kark it all, Reaver had really thought he’d gotten this relative rank thing worked out.

But Reaver did reach out, maybe a little awkwardly at first, and grip Rex’s forearm in greeting.

“Can we not, Captain?” Rex said with a small smile, putting a little extra emphasis on their shared rank.

Except it wasn’t shared, was it? Not really.

But Reaver really was feeling a little more confident in his footing. Enough to relapse into the familiar territory of being a subtle pain in the shebs when his superior officers were being particularly dense. “Anything you need, Commander.”

Stalemate.

The grumpy, resigned expression on Captain Rex’s face was legitimately hilarious, not that Reaver was going to let that reaction show on his face and lose the upper hand here.

Finally, Rex just sighed and buckled under the inevitable. “Can I at least get some food before having to deal with whatever crises cropped up dirtside?”

“Of course, Captain.”

AN: Previous chapters are available here.

Dividers by @freesia-writes using helmets by @lornaka. More designs available here.

[lost-little-fawn]

ive written the same poem a hundred times now.

even the simile n metaphor echo previous selves

even the sheets i ball my fists in bare your name

even the memories i revisit are lost and milky, vacant

time makes me bland and bloated and pale

i met myself yesterday in a child murder case. 

every detail felt like bedtime stories i remember vaguely 

that couldve been me but im still here, still here somehow. 

nothings really changed for years. 

nobody warned me about that. 

that nothings going to change from here

that at a certain point in getting better, i met

this standstill. this you shaped roadblock.

that im never going to stop being scared

that im discovering the same memories in endless cycles. 

my previous names are all locked in the room you made me

with childrens furniture and haunted walls.

the bed i sleep in has more blood than mattress

and every man i met used you as a role model

they bent my body into shapes of obedience and

thankfulness, built me a diety to worship

all my own, dark and gritty and sharp. 

set me on my knees and waited patiently for the same devotion. 

wrung me like the laundry and built me a cute little prison, 

and the hurt has stacked up and become sentient in its need

even my family hasnt grown an inch in a decade. 

stockholm is more like a postal code when

the alternative is being angry. hurt. hateful. 

its easier to think we were healthy, as healthy as we could be. 

its easier. captor and victim both the same, both holding hands. 

shush the maelstrom in my head by 

feeding it lies about aquariums and kind gestures. 

its easier to recycle this coping mechanism 

than to leave my apartment. see you in every 

street sign. see myself in every car window. 

see the world outside so welcoming even in its terror of

this killing ground body, chalk outline bones.

see the wind that meets my window bend and shake. 

my father has more anger and fire than you ever did, 

my mothers halfmoon face bore every mistake. 

i see her in myself, hear her in my throat, 

and reject her. 

the shake in her voice on phone calls makes my throat 

close up, thick and avoidant, hang up faster. 

i cant force myself to stay anymore. i cant pretend i love her. 

because im the same age she was when she hurt me most and

every baby looks like sunlight and becoming, 

looks like hope and future, and it makes me hurt. 

i cant place myself in her footprints anymore. 

ive outgrown them,

my empathy ran out after the fourth time

(shes my mother. ill always forgive her) 

she abuses the gameplay mechanic. lags the system. 

human nature lends itself to mindless repetition. 

i just want my mommy. now, after

verse scrawled on every wall, every inch overloaded

and bloated with meaning and self evidence,

after months spent spinning and sick

with desperation to be understood and heard

and to build something more than what ive lived. 

to become something, to feel something, to be something,

i dont want to live here in her head anymore. 

i dont want to give her the delusion she created from me

i dont want to feed the fire or change the kindling 

she lies to me about my own experiences and i

am a bull in front of a red flag holding my tongue in shame. 

well adjusted and capable. when they ask why i never ask for help

i wonder if they realize i cant even ask

and the shame makes me a pariah, a bonfire. 

a lake of ever refilling guilt and bottom feeding insects

of accusations and legal involvement. 

ive been rotting for 20 years in a tomb

they built me. that they birthed. 

and ill always prefer that to my mothers voice.

[empressofthelibrary]

I should really be asleep right now but I'm having Thoughts ™️ about Thanagar and timelines and trying to figure this mess out. Bear with me for a bit while I get out the red string and corkboards

It's all so damn weird and complicated and nothing makes sense and I swear 90% of DC's problem with anything Hawk-related is that they focus on Carter and not Shayera or Kendra please just throw the whole man out

But also while one can argue that the Manhawks and the Lizarkons may share a common ancestor on account of birds and lizards on Earth, it's much harder to argue the same for the more humanlike Thanagarians

Now, according to my dad, Old Canon states that Krypton and Thanagar were Atlantean colonies and that's why the people there looked mostly human. This is the best explanation I can come up with so it's what I'm gonna say, even if it's hard to explain how or why Atlantis could throw people into space long enough ago that the descendants of the settlers had such severe physiological differences to regular Atlanteans, let alone regular surface humans. And didn't share that with the surface world at all, even when relations between Atlantis and the surface were, y'know, good

Then you also have Thanagar getting caught under the heel of a space-empire, breaking free, and becoming an empire itself. Which is really fucked up (usernames aside, I am about as far from a monarchist as you can get lol) and while I am reluctant to tackle any kind of heavy political imperialist subject matter as I know that's beyond my expertise and scope and I'll botch the hell out of it, there's something in there about a metaphor for cyclical abuse and the repetition of our predecessors' mistakes and the need to break that cycle. Or maybe that's just me drawing lines where there aren't any and this probs isn't the best macrocosm to be using but I saw the dots the other day and couldn't not connect them

Anyway this is just to get the thoughts out of my head and maybe bring me some chance of sleeping tonight. I don't know where it's all going but... *gestures vaguely* at least it's not buzzing around in my skull anymore?

Feel free to share your thoughts, and please tell me if I'm being dumb or getting out of my lane. Sometimes I need a bop on the head, especially when I start getting wrapped up in a project

[the-fall-of-armie-hammer]

While celebrity reactions to cancel culture have become frequent in the news cycle, Johnson’s remarks about the “loss of great artists” feel particularly ironic considering her beloved status on progressive Twitter thanks to a famous interaction between her and Ellen DeGeneres from 2019 where she confronts the comedian/talk show host about not attending her birthday party on her show. The actress dryly uttering “actually, that’s not true, Ellen” and a screenshot of her leaning forward in her chair have become viral memes and social media shorthand for calling people out on their bullshit. Twitter sleuths also discovered that, on the same weekend of Johnson's birthday party, DeGeneres attended a Dallas Cowboys game where she drew intense backlash for mingling with George W. Bush.

This tidbit, along with the eventual allegations that DeGeneres’ daytime talk show perpetuated a toxic work culture, provided a strangely radical undertone to Johnson’s low-stakes call-out of the media mogul—again, over a birthday party invite—for people who look to celebrities for bare-minimum political messaging. Tweets that Johnson initiated the however brief “takedown” of DeGeneres’s career spread across Twitter. Even as recently as last month, Drew Barrymore applauded Johnson for the viral clip when she appeared on her self-titled talk show.

It’s a common exercise on Twitter for users to project their own beliefs and opinions onto a celebrity’s facial expression or a certain gesture when aimed toward someone they dislike. This kind of wishful thinking can start out as purposely hyperbolic and playful. But when repeated enough times, like in the case of Johnson, it can spark a public narrative that is frankly unearned.

Likewise, to describe Johnson’s comments as disappointing is to assume that she’s given her fans a reason to think she’s some fierce advocate of justice in the first place. However, her flattening sympathy for perpetrators and survivors of abuse and the fact that she believes her positive experiences with these men, as a well-connected actress, is even worth voicing is another example of why the topic of accountability within the entertainment industry feels like it’s gone nowhere over the past four years since Hollywood’s #MeToo movement. (Also, referring to Armie Hammer as a “great artist,” and his sudden disappearance amid sexual abuse claims as a “loss,” is an egregious statement enough). Maybe the most infuriating part of that quote, though, is that many of the female victims of these men and other abusers in Hollywood are great artists themselves whose opportunities have been hijacked and art has been interfered with because of the suffering they experienced.

With the amount of damning evidence that’s accumulated since the Trump era, we should assume that the majority of celebrities feel the same way as Johnson when it comes to systemic issues that poison their industries and the rest of society. Everyone is fine embracing vague, non-threatening ideas of “change” and “equality,” but no one wants to deal with the costs of getting there.

[flightlessangelwings]

Run

Ezra (Prospect) x gn!reader

Word count: 4.5k (I don’t know what happened either)

Warnings: angst, pining, fluff, hurt/comfort, non descript smut, protective!Ezra, mentions of past abuse (nothing graphic, I tried to be as vague as possible so it’s not triggering but I needed a tragic backstory), mild violence, minor character death, happy ending

~

Run.

That was the only thought in your head as you sprinted through the vast desert planet that you had found yourself on. Run. Don’t stop. Keep going. Get away.

You don’t know how long you ran for. At least an hour had to have passed from when you took off. Most likely, it was longer considering how much the sun had moved in the sky. But you didn’t stop. You couldn’t stop. You had to keep going. Even though at this point, there was nothing and no one behind you, you still couldn't stop.

You just couldn’t stop. You just ran. And ran. You ran until…

Because your eyes were too filled with tears and the adrenaline coursed through your veins, you didn’t pay attention to what was right in front of you until you ran smack into it. With a grunt, you crashed into someone and landed right on top of them. It was then that you realized just how exhausted you were, and you would have passed out on the spot if it wasn’t for a whimsical voice that ran though your comm.

“Careful there, gazelle. You could hurt somebody with that fervent tenacity.”

With wide eyes, you lifted your gaze from where it fell on his chest up to his face to find a handsome man with kind eyes and faint scars on his cheek. You also noticed the small patch of blonde in his hair that seemed to suit him. Quickly, you scrambled away from him and scooted yourself so that you sat opposite him on the ground, “I’m so sorry…” your voice was weak and hoarse from your exhaustion, “I wasn’t watching where I was going.”

“No harm done,” he replied as he got to his feet. 

It was then that you noticed he only had one arm, and you quickly looked away so you weren’t rude by staring. While your gaze was on the ground, a hand came into your line of sight as he offered to help you stand. You looked up to his face once more and you instantly felt calmed by his soft smile, but you made no attempt to move.

“I won’t hurt you,” he spoke in a reassuring tone as he held his hand steady in front of you.

A moment passed before you finally accepted and placed your hand in his and let him guide you up. “Thanks,” you mumbled once you were steady on your feet,

“Now what brings a beautiful desert rose such as yourself out here all alone?” he was direct with his question, since it was unusual for someone to be by themself on a desolate planet like this.

“I…” words failed you as your face twisted into a pained expression. You weren’t about to spill your thoughts to a complete stranger. He had to have noticed how out of breath you were, and you were obviously trying to get away from something, or someone, but he didn’t press when you didn’t offer an explanation.

“I assume I don’t need to disarm you or knock you back down,” he smiled at his words. When you shook your head and assured him you weren’t a threat, he introduced himself, “I’m Ezra. What shall I call you?”

You gave him your name and realized that your hands were still connected. Your eyes went wide for a moment before he gave your hand a quick shake and finally released you. Adrenaline still rushed through your veins as you tried to calm yourself down, and you found that your gaze lingered on the man you had literally just run into. He had scars on his face, but you saw a kindness in his eyes, and there was something about him that started to put your mind at ease.

“Are you in need of shelter?” Ezra asked, “My partner and I are set up not too far from here. I can offer you a safe place with us.”

You were taken aback by his offer, “You’d take me in just like that? No questions asked?”

“Well, I do have questions,” he put his hand on his hip, “But I can gather from your appearance that you’re in need of help. And since you haven’t tried to disarm me yet, I think it’s fair to assume you won’t cause trouble.”

“Thank you,” you breathed out as you slowly reached for your weapon, “Here,” you extended it out to him, “So you can trust me.”

Ezra eyed the weapon in your hand for a moment before he gently pushed it back towards your body, “The gesture alone tells me all I need to know,” he paused as he thought, “How are you so willing to trust me then, desert rose?”

You shrugged, “Intuition I guess,” you really didn’t have a choice if you wanted to get off this planet, but it was true that you had a good feeling about this man. After all, nothing could be worse than what you just ran from, so you took your chance with this stranger.

He led you toward the tent he and his partner, a teenage girl named Cee, had set up. She seemed more apprehensive of you, but she listened to Ezra when he explained what little he knew about you. Cee didn’t seem as convinced, but she relaxed slightly at Ezra’s words.

“Don’t worry birdie,” he assured her, “This one is not a killer,” Ezra looked at you with confidence in his eyes.

You wanted to ask how he could possibly know that when he hardly knew anything about you, but when you saw that it helped to put Cee’s mind at ease, you chose to keep your mouth shut. Instead, you thank them both for their hospitality and shed your gear. When you were down to your undershirt, you felt both their eyes on you. You knew they saw the scars and marks that adorned your body, but neither of them commented on it, which you were thankful for.

The next cycle, the three of you were able to leave the planet. You breathed a heavy sigh of relief as you watched it get further and further away. You were so wrapped up in your thoughts that you didn’t feel Ezra’s eyes on you. When you all finally reached the station, the commanders in charge there had good news: they were impressed with Cee’s wits that they offered her a job with them at the command center.

She was hesitant at first, but Ezra pulled her aside and told her that she should take the job, “No one is more deserving of a position like this than you, birdie,” sincerity lined his voice, “Besides, I’ll sleep better at night knowing you’re safer here than prospecting with me.”

Cee accepted the job, and you decided to stay with Ezra as his new partner. Over the next few months, the two of you journeyed to different planets together to dig and harvest any rare gems you could find. You actually found that you made a good team, and you worked well together. You also just enjoyed Ezra’s company, and you could listen to him talk for hours.

Ezra always had colorful nicknames for you. Sometimes it was Cactus, sometimes Flower, sometimes Oasis. But when the moment seemed more special or intimate, he used the special nickname Desert Rose for you, and that one always made your heart flutter the most. All of the names he used for you always alluded to the desert planet where you met, and something about how personal his nicknames for you were made you smile.

Together, the two of you ran at your own pace from planet to planet. It was refreshing for you to move like this, not like how you were on the run before.

Over time, you each grew fond of the other, and you found that your gaze lingered on the man when his back was turned to you. You wondered what it was like to kiss him, or to feel his touch against your bare skin. Some nights, you found that you fantasized about him while you laid alone in your cot. But, you were careful not to let your feelings show. You were afraid to let someone into your heart like that, even if it was someone like Ezra, who you grew to trust.

Sometimes, you thought you felt Ezra’s gaze on you when you weren’t looking, but you just attributed that to your own growing feelings. If only you knew that you were right. There were times when Ezra couldn’t keep his eyes off of you as he watched you handle the delicate gems in your hands. When you spoke, he always stole a glance at your lips. And he always caught when you looked so sad when you thought he wasn’t looking.

It pained him to see you plagued with such sorrow and pain, and Ezra wanted nothing more than to know what it was and take it all away from you. But, he chose not to press it. He figured you would tell him one day when the time was right. Ezra offered his own story to you so that you could know him better, and in hopes that you would tell yours in return. When you didn’t, he tried not to let the sinking feeling in his chest show.

After some time together, you and Ezra found yourselves on the most beautiful planet you had ever seen. The air was clean enough that you didn’t need your suits, which you both were grateful for. 

Ezra loved to watch you when you were unobscured by your helmet. He longed to reach out and hold you, but he kept himself back for fear of frightening or upsetting you. If he was to guess, when you first met, you had run away from someone you knew who had hurt you from the way your suit was intact, yet your body was riddled with scars.

Ezra felt the growing need to protect you the longer he was near you. He knew you were more than capable of defending yourself, and he saw it first hand once when a pair of bandits tried to rob the two of you. Between the two of you, you were able to fight them off and save your harvest. Ezra had never been more attracted to you then when you knocked the bandit on his ass.

The two of you engaged in idle conversation while you worked, as you always did. It felt nice to breathe in fresh air while you worked, but you felt Ezra’s gaze on you more often than not. Every once in a while, you’d glance up and meet his eyes for a brief moment before you looked away again.

When you reached out for one of your tools, your gloved hand brushed against Ezra’s and you both froze for a moment. He had moved at the same time, and your hands connected over the tool. Your heart pounded in your chest, and yet neither of you pulled away. You opened your mouth and were about to say something when a rustle in the distance caught both of your attention.

Just as you and Ezra stood, a group of men dressed in all black strolled out from the nearby forest. They were all armed, and they did not look friendly at all. You swallowed hard and you felt Ezra nudge you back so he could place himself between you and the intruders. 

“Stay behind me,” he whispered to you in a voice that left no room for argument, “Greetings gentlemen,” he addressed the group, “I’m sorry to say that this is our digsite, so I’m going to have to ask you to move on and find somewhere else.”

The man in the middle sneered as the rest of them looked at you in a way that made your skin crawl. “Oh we’re not here for a dig,” the man who appeared to be their leader said, “We’re here for that one,” he pointed right at you.

Your blood ran cold, and a fear pulsed through you that you hadn’t felt since before you met Ezra.

“I cannot allow you to have my partner,” Ezra replied without hesitation as he slowly reached for his own weapon.

The group laughed and pointed their guns at him, “Our contract says to keep our target alive, but it didn’t mention anything about killing you.”

You gasped as you jumped in front of Ezra before you realized your movements, “No,” you shouted at them, “Don’t hurt him,” you tried to sound tough, but your voice wavered.

The men didn’t appear moved by your display, “Someone is looking for you,” the leader said, “And the price for your return is worth more than this entire digsite.”

Ezra whispered your name as he leaned in close to you. You felt him move subtly behind you, and without needing to see him, you knew he reached for your gun. From there, everything happened so fast. He shot the leader from behind you, and chaos broke out from there. Ezra kept your weapon and you reached around for his as you both fought off the group of men. 

The fight seemed to happen in a blur for you as you were too wrapped up in your emotions and fear to fully process what happened. You acted on instinct as you and Ezra took down the attackers. One of the men tried to run off, and Ezra leapt after him while you kept your weapon pointed at the leader, who laid on the ground heavily injured.

Your eyes bored into him in a mix of rage and fear as you hovered over his body. He cowered as he choked on his own blood, and he knew this was the end for him.

“He’ll never stop hunting you,” the leader spat as he looked down the barrel of your gun, “You should have seen the look on his face,” he cackled darkly between heavy breaths, “There’s no place in the universe you can run, so count your days.”

His words made you waver, and you lowered your weapon as your body froze in terror. The man took the opportunity to try to launch himself at you, but a shot from behind you stopped him before he got off the ground. The action brought you back to reality and you spun around to find Ezra behind you with his gun aimed at the leader.

He stepped up so that he was next to you and he fired once more time to make sure the leader was dead. You only stared at Ezra with wide eyes; you had never seen him look this intense before.

Once Ezra was sure everyone was dead, he turned to you, “We must get out of here, cactus,” he grabbed your arm and led you back to your campsite. 

You barely processed that you had moved, too lost in your own head to notice the world around you. It wasn’t until you were back inside your shared tent and Ezra stood in front of you that you snapped back. You parted your lips to speak, but nothing came out, and you collapsed down to the ground.

Ezra called your name as he dropped down next to you and held your arm as tightly as he could, “Flower, talk to me. What’s wrong?” he couldn’t hide the concern in his voice as he tried to bring you back to him from wherever your mind went.

After several slow breaths, you calmed yourself down enough to meet his gaze, and he broke your heart to see how scared he looked. You knew you owed him an explanation, and you thought it was time you told him your story but, “I’m sorry, Ezra,” was all you managed.

He looked deflated; he wanted nothing more than to help you, but he also didn’t want to force it. All Ezra could do was be there for you in any way you needed, and there was nothing he wouldn’t do for you, “You have no need to apologize my desert rose,” he brushed his hand along your face in an attempt to comfort you.

You closed your eyes and leaned into his touch. After a heavy sigh you were finally able to put your thoughts together, “I guess I owe you an explanation now.”

“You owe me nothing but your company,” he used your name. Not any nickname he had for you, but your actual name. It always held more meaning whenever Ezra used your name, since he usually referred to you with one of the many affectionate nicknames he picked out for you.

Something about the way he said your name made your heart flutter. You swallowed the feeling before you shifted so that you sat more comfortably, “The day we first met,” you started as you dropped your gaze down to the ground, “You told Cee that I’m not a killer.”

Ezra sat down in front of you just shy of your touch, “I hardly think that killing bandits counts for what I meant, flower,” he shrugged off the notion, “I still stand by that.”

You bit your lip; his words pained you more than he realized, “What if I told you you’re wrong?” you looked up to meet his gaze, and you gasped when you saw the steel resolve in his eyes. He had a look the told you that he wasn’t swayed on his opinion of you, and you hated how he looked at you like you were something worthy, something you were not.

“I find that hard to believe,” he said, “But please tell me if you’re ready.” Ezra made no move to grab a weapon or put space between your bodies. No matter what happened in your past, he still trusted you, and there was not much that you could do to change his mind.

“I am a killer Ezra,” you sighed, “In fact, it’s the first thing I did,” you scoffed as you looked up and blinked away tears, “My first act in this life was to take one.” You paused to steady yourself before you continued, “My mother died giving birth to me.”

Ezra furrowed his brows, “That does not make you a killer…”

“Tell that to my father,” you snapped as you cut him off. You looked into his eyes and by the look on his face you knew he could see the tears in yours, “He blames me for her death. In fact, he reminded me of it nearly every day.”

It wasn’t often that Ezra was stunned to silence, but he found that he had no words. He guessed that you wouldn’t want to hear it anyway, so he stayed quiet as he scooted closer toward you.

You continued when you were ready, “It wasn’t so bad when I was a kid. He took care of me well enough I guess,” you wrapped your arms around yourself, “But when I got older he… I guess I reminded him of mom and he couldn’t take it. I’m a reminder of what he lost, and he always took his anger out on me.”

Ezra scowled as he realized where all your scars came from. It all made sense now: you had run away from your father when you first met after you couldn’t take his wrath anymore. It also explained why you trusted him so fast, he was your only hope at the time. In that moment, Ezra wanted nothing more than to hold you close and try to take away your pain. He hated to see you like this, and he silently cursed your father for what he did to you.

“I ran away so many times, but he always found me. I thought maybe since it had been so long this time that he wouldn’t find me this time,” your tone turned bitter when you added, “But I guess I was wrong,” you sniffled and took in a shaky breath, “And even worse, now I got you involved in my mess.” 

He couldn’t hold back anymore and Ezra pulled you in close so that he held you flush against his chest. His arm gripped you tightly in an attempt to protect you from your own past as he said your name in a steady voice, “Do not apologize for anything,” he spoke in a low but soft tone, “None of what happened is your fault, you understand? And I would protect you until my dying breath so do not feel guilty for my involvement.”

Your breath caught in your throat at Ezra’s words. You pulled back just enough to meet his gaze while you stayed securely in his embrace, “You’d what?” you asked breathlessly.

Ezra gave you a soft smile as his thumb rubbed comforting circles against your body, “I care about you,” he said your name, “And I would do anything to protect my desert rose.” 

You clung to his shirt as you searched his eyes for any hint of doubt. Your heart pounded in your chest when you realized you saw none, “I care about you too Ezra,” your voice was just a whisper. 

Slowly, he leaned in and closed the gap between your faces. Ezra paused as his lips hovered just above yours to give you the chance to pull away. It was only when you didn’t that he kissed you. 

The kiss was everything you fantasized about and more. Almost right away, you parted your lips for him to deepen the kiss, and Ezra took the invitation willingly. Emotions spiked as your tongues danced together and all the time you each had spent yearning for the other came to a head in this one kiss. You could feel the passion behind Ezra’s kiss, and you hoped he could feel yours just as much.  

You and Ezra spent the entire night in each other’s arms. You both felt like you had many cycles of lost time to make up for, and you certainly made up for it. He spent what felt like hours worshipping your body and left no scar unkissed. Ezra’s touch was unlike anyone else, and you thought you would burst when he finally slid inside you. He was rough yet tender, and you could tell how much he truly cared about you as he made love to you. It wasn’t even until your third orgasm that he gave in to his own pleasure.

When you woke up the next morning, you were still naked and cuddled up next to him. You laid there in the comfortable silence as you listened to his heartbeat in his chest. Ezra still had his arm wrapped tightly around you and even in his sleep, his grip never loosened. You smiled against his skin as you absent-mindedly traced patterns along his chest. You never allowed yourself any hope of happiness, and yet here this man was like the sun to light up your darkness. 

“Good morning flower,” Ezra’s voice was deep and raspy from sleep and you felt him place a kiss on the top of your head.

You were about to reply when a voice rang through the communicator on the table. It was a voice you recognized and you tensed in Ezra’s grip. He knew right away that the voice belonged to your father, and both of you jumped up and got dressed as quickly as you could.

As you grabbed your weapons, you tried to ignore your father’s voice. He tried this trick before: he would signal out with the sad father act, desperate to get his missing kid back. It had worked on others before when you were a teenager, but you hoped now that you were an adult that Ezra wouldn’t fall for it.

It would break your heart if he did. 

Ezra said your name as he charged up his own weapon, “Stay behind me, no matter what happens,” he met your gaze, “I promise you will be alright.”

Your eyes went wide as you clutched your gun, “Ez…” 

He squeezed your shoulder once before he stepped out of your tent. With a deep breath, you followed but you weren’t prepared to see your father just outside. You gasped as you froze in fear; all of your memories flooded back as you looked into his face for the first time in many months. He smiled and said your name as he opened his arms wide to you.

“I’ve been looking for you, sweetheart. I’ve been worried sick since you ran away,” your father’s voice sounded sincere but you knew how fake his tone was.

“Do not step any closer,” Ezra stood firmly in your father’s way however, and was not fooled by the tone of his voice. He blocked you from him with his body as he addressed your father, “I must ask you to leave,” there was a danger to his tone that you had never heard before, “My partner will not be going with you.”

You hated the way you trembled in fear from behind Ezra. You hated how weak you felt under your father’s gaze. Ezra must have felt how much you shook because he subtly reached behind you and squeezed your hand once before he hovered over his gun.

“Don’t watch, my oasis,” he mumbled to you, and you immediately buried your face into Ezra’s back. 

When it became obvious to your father that Ezra would not fall for his act, his demeanor changed. “You son of a bitch!” your father shouted as he lunged forward. 

Ezra was quick to react and shot your father before he took more than two steps. You yelped behind him but didn’t lift your head as you clutched onto the back of his shirt.

Once he was sure your father was dead, Ezra turned to you as he said your name in a softer tone, “It’s over,” he caressed your face as he tilted your head to meet his gaze, “You’re safe now.”

You looked into his dark brown eyes and all you could see was home. You had never felt like you truly had a place to call home before, but you found it for the first time in your life in Ezra’s eyes. “Safe…” you echoed in a hushed voice as you tightened your grip on him, “Thank you, Ezra.”

He smiled at you, “You've no need to thank me, my desert rose,” Ezra’s thumb brushed across your cheek as he looked at you with a tender expression, “Now when you run, you run because you want to, not because you have to.”

Without a second thought, you closed the gap between your bodies and kissed him desperately. All of your emotions poured into the kiss, and Ezra immediately reciprocated and mirrored your feelings. “I love you, Ezra,” you breathed when you broke away from him.

Ezra said your name in a soft whisper as he placed a sweet kiss to your lips, “I have fallen in love with you as well.” 

From that day on, you were finally truly free. And it was all because of the man who saved your life more times than you could count. You still ran sometimes though. But you never had to run away anymore, and whenever you ran, you always had your Ezra by your side.

~

Notes: I’m super nervous about posting this one since this is the first time I’ve written for Ezra. I had so many people read over this and I spent weeks picking at it so I hope y’all like it! Taglists are open so let me know if you’d like to be added to my Pedro characters or Ezra taglist!

[takerfoxx]

In response to JK Rowling and Joss Whedon, my (former) idols

I really didn’t want to have to do this.

So in addition to…=gestures vaguely=…all of that, the last few months have been kind of sucky when it comes to learning some really unpleasant things about artists that I looked up to, admired, and was in fact inspired by. I’ve already spoken about the Speaking Out movement revealing a lot of ugly behavior from various wrestlers, some of which I was big fans of, and then later we got Chris Jericho being a full-on MAGA. Yeah, that all sucked. But those were just performers whose work I enjoyed watching. The one that really hurt were writers who I deeply admired, whose stories I love, and who I was heavily influenced by.

The first, of course, was finding out that JK Rowling, the author of perhaps the single biggest YA fantasy series of all time Harry Potter, is a TERF. This really sucked for a number of reasons. Firstly, I really like Harry Potter! I mean, I’m not a super fan or anything. I came into it when things were kind of dying down, like the whole book series had already been released and there were only a few movies left, but I still really enjoyed it, have all the books and movies and a fair amount of merchandise swag, including a nifty wand I got at Universal Studios. Shit, I got two replicas of the Sword of Griffyindor, thanks to them screwing up my order in my favor and sending me a duplicate! They’re on my wall right across from me as I type this!

But in addition to writing a book series I really liked, JK Rowling was supposed to be one the good guys. She’s been vocally progressive, often openly comes down on British right-wing nonsense, has supported various persecuted minorities, and is on record as being one of the few self-made billionaires to actually stop being a billionaire for a time because she donated so much money to charity. And while we mock it now, her revealing Dumbledore as gay was a huge deal at the time. Plus, she cultivated this reputation as Auntie Jo, that cool, supportive aunt we all wanted.

But for a while her stock has been dropping. Her preference for confirming “representation” via tweets instead of explicitly putting it in the text of her stories has raised the question of queer-baiting, especially with a whole-ass movie with a young Dumbledore and Grindelwald to make their relationship explicit but failing to do so. The whole Nagini thing from the latest Fantastic Beasts movie was pretty gross. And re-examination of various problematic elements from the original novels has rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. Now, none of these really looked to be intentionally malicious, of course. Just about everyone’s early work will have problematic elements; that’s just how people work. And the later stuff smacked more of ignorance than anything. But after all this time, it’s like, c’mon. You should know better by now.

But the biggie came when her transphobic views finally came to light. Now, this one had been brewing for a while, due to some questionable likes and statements on her twitter. But then she decided to just go public and published what essentially amounts to a TERF manifesto, one with a very “love the sinner, hate the sin” condescending attitude and had a real persecution complex air to it.

Now, I’m not going to go into detail about what the manifesto was about, what the circumstances surrounding it were, or how wrong it was. It’s already been raked over the coals, dissected, answered, and debunked in detail by people far more qualified than me, so odds are, you’re already well aware of its contents and the subsequent rebuttals. But the gist of it comes down to her basically believing that transwomen are actually cis men claiming to be trans so as to infiltrate and invade female-only spaces.

Yeah.

Okay, that’s gross, but…why? Why is someone so noted for being progressive and wanting to foster an inclusive environment making this the hill of exclusion that she wants to die on?

Well, that’s where things get tricky. She mentions that prior to Harry Potter, her first marriage was highly physically and sexually abusive, and when she escaped from that, she had no place to go, leading her to be homeless for a time.

Oh.

Well, that makes sense. Someone goes through a highly traumatic experience with a member of the opposite sex, has no support structure when she escapes it, is left to fend for herself, only to suddenly get rocketed into fame, fortune, and influence, which in turn leads to a Never Again mentality. She was hurt, no one was there to help her, and now she’s afraid of men invading women-only spaces to victimize others like she was victimized. So…literally transphobic. Literally a Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist.

Guys, this is so fucked up. Like, how do you even approach something like this? She’s a victim in every sense of the word, so of course she’s going to have physiological damage and a warped view of things. I mean, if I found out that a close friend of mine went through the same thing and had the same prejudices, I would be nothing but sympathetic! I mean, I’d still do what I can to convince her to overcome those prejudices, but I’d still show sympathy and support for what she went through.

Abuse warps people. There’s a reason why so many abusers are abuse survivors themselves. It makes you terrified of being hurt again and often causes people to adopt toxic behaviors, beliefs, and reactions to protect themselves. I’ve already talked about it at length while discussing She-Ra and its own handling of the cycle of abuse, which included franks discussions of Catra’s horrible behavior, why she was the way she was, while never losing sympathy for her and rooting for her to overcome it. So if JK Rowling is an abuse survivor, is it really right to come down on her for having warped views because of that abuse?

But that’s the problem. See, she isn’t your troubled friend that you’re trying to help. She isn’t your cousin Leslie who’s a really sweet person but unfortunately adopted some bad ideals due to trauma suffered. She JK freakin’ ROWLING, one of the most famous, wealthy, and influential women in the world. She has a platform of millions, if not billions, which means her voice lends credibility to her bigoted beliefs. Alt-righters and other TERFs have already swooped upon this for giving validation to their awful beliefs, which puts trans people even more at risk. And as horrible as Rowling’s experiences might have been, the trans community is often the victim of far worse, and they don’t have a mountain of money and an army of defenders to protect them like she does. I’ve said it time and time again: just because you’re a victim, that doesn’t give you the right to victimize others! And bringing things back to Catra, as much as I loved her redemption in the final season, she was still a TERRIBLE PERSON for a huge chunk of the show, one that needed to be stood up to and stopped.

So yeah. That’s the messiness that is JK Rowling.

Now, let’s talk about the one that really hurts. Let’s talk about Joss Whedon.

I’ve made no secret of what a huge Whedon fan I am. Unlike Rowling, I was a HUUUUUGE superfan. Seeing Serenity for the first time in theaters was akin to a religious awakening to me as a storyteller, making it one of my top three movies of all time. Firefly is my favorite show ever. And I adored Buffy, Angel, and Dollhouse as well. I love Cabin in the Woods and The Avengers. The very first fanfic I ever wrote was a Firefly fanfic that disappeared along with my old laptop. I know his style isn’t for everyone, but I cannot understate how much of a personal inspiration he is to me as a writer.

And like Rowling, Joss was supposed to be one of the good guys! Buffy was monumental in pushing the needle when it came to female empowerment. Will and Tara were groundbreaking as a gay couple. He’s been outspoken for years about his feminist views and beliefs and was seen as one of the most prominent and influential feminist voices in Hollywood!

And then things started to go bad.

One day he was on top of the world, the mastermind behind the first two Avenger movies. And the next, it seemed like he was in freefall. It’s hard to really pinpoint exactly when the change took place. Some would say him being brought in as a last-minute substitute for Zack Snyder to take over on Justice League after Snyder had to leave due to family tragedy, and the subsequent awful critical reception to that film tarnishing his image, even if those were very unique circumstances that couldn’t really be blamed on him. Others might point to Age of Ultron’s less than stellar reception, as well as criticism of some questionable jokes and certain creative decisions regarding the character of Black Widow, which then led to a more critical examination of how Whedon continues to write female characters, as while his work might have been revolutionary in the 90’s, his failure to evolve with the times had meant that many of his portrayals are now woefully outdated and problematic, with his vision for a Batgirl movie getting hit with a lot of backlash as a result.

Again, I’m not going to go into too much detail, as this is all public knowledge and can be easily looked up, but overall it seemed that Whedon entered into a period where he was getting criticized more than he was celebrated, and his image of a guaranteed hit maker was now in doubt.

But all of this wasn’t the big problem. All creators go through rises and slumps, and everyone hits points where they get hit with a barrage of criticism; that’s just part of being a public creative figure, especially a progressive one. And had nothing happened after, it would have probably faded, got forgotten, and Whedon would have moved onto the next project with no fuss.

But as it turned out, it wasn’t just a minor slump in his career. Instead, it was the priming of the pump.

In 2016, Whedon divorced his wife of sixteen years, Kai Cole, and in an open letter, Kai Cole accused him of being a serial cheater, who would have affairs with a great many women, from co-workers, to actresses, to friends, to even his fans. And in addition to raising questions of him possibly abusing his position as showrunner to elicit sex from those working on his projects, there also is the ugly question of how could someone who speaks so highly of women then go and backstab the person who was supposed to be the most important woman in his life, as well as lying to her and denying her the autonomy of deciding whether or not she even wanted to continue to have a relationship with him?

Furthermore, Whedon himself has not explicitly denied these accusations, and comments made by him seem only to confirm them.

Now if you’ll recall, I reacted publicly to this news, and despite my admiration of Whedon’s work, I came down on Kai Cole’s side, and stated that while things like marriage issues and infidelity were no one’s business but that of the couple’s, it did raise a lot of uncomfortable questions about how Whedon treated the women in his life and he really needed to get his shit in order.

But hey, a messy private life and a guy falling into temptation isn’t that big of a deal, right? Plenty of creators also go through multiple marriages and have problems staying faithful and still continue making great art. We’re all human, it’s a stressful job, and this shit just happens, right? Sure, it’s gross and a shitty thing to do, but ain’t no business of ours, right?

In late 2020, actor Ray Fisher, who played the role of Cyborg in Justice League, openly accused Joss Whedon of fostering a hostile work environment, claiming that the director’s behavior was abusive and unprofessional, and that Whedon in turn was protected by DC executives.

DC and Warner Bros. came down against Fisher, claiming they had done an internal investigation that turned up no evidence of wrongdoing (yeah, sure they did), and soon Fisher was out as Cyborg, apparently for rocking the boat.

But then Charisma Carpenter, noted for her important role as Cordelia Chase in both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, then spoke up, claiming to be inspired by Fisher in doing so. She described Whedon did indeed foster a hostile work environment on his projects, that his often acted in a toxic manner, from asking incredibly invasive and inappropriate questions regarding her pregnancy to insulting her on set. She said that she made excuses for him for years, but after undergoing a lot of therapy and reading what Ray Fisher had to say, she felt compelled to speak out.

And this just open the floodgates. Other actors and actresses also came forward, some with stories of their own, others to offer support. Even Buffy herself, Sarah Michelle Gellar, confirmed Carpenter’s stories and said that she no longer wanted to be associated with Whedon. Michelle Trachtenberg, who played the character of Dawn, stated that she also experienced toxic treatment from Whedon despite her being a minor at the time, and says that the set had a rule that Whedon wasn’t allowed to be alone with her again, which really raises some sickening questions of what happened the first time. Even male stars have spoken out, from words of support and apologies for not speaking up earlier from Anthony Stewart Head and David Boreanaz, to an earlier interview with James Marsters, in which he described being terrified of Whedon, mainly due to an instance when Whedon was frustrated with the popularity of Marsters’s character of Spike messing with his plans and physically and verbally taking it out on the actor. There have been many corroborating stories of Whedon being casually cruel on set, on seemingly taking delight in making his fellow show writers cry, and even the man himself admitting to enjoying fostering a hostile work environment during his director commentary of the Avengers. We’ve joked about Whedon’s supposed sadism for years, but that was in regards to how he treated the characters in his stories, not the people helping him make them!

So yeah. That’s the problem with Joss Whedon.

So, do I think that Joss Whedon is somehow some kind of sociopath who lied about his feminist principles and deliberately put on a progressive façade specifically to get into a position of power so he could torment people? No, of course not. I think he was sincere about his beliefs, and I do think he didn’t realize the wrongness of his behavior. But that’s kind of the problem. See, it’s one thing to have kind of a trollishness to your nature, a sort of sadistic side. No one can help that. But when someone with that quality gets put into a position of power in which they are protected by both the higher-ups and their legions of fans, they are allowed to mistreat and continue to mistreat people. And by never suffering any consequences, that sort of toxic behavior becomes internalized, becomes a habit, becomes their moda operandi. And when you’re constantly getting praised as a creative genius and a wonderful feminist voice, any self-criticism just gets wiped away, and you think yourself above reproach, leading to what Joss Whedon became and went on being.

And you know what scares me the most about this particular issue? It’s not that I am a fan of his stories. It’s that I can so easily see myself turning out the same way.

Look, I’ll be upfront about it: I’m kind of a sadist myself. You’ve seen it in my stories, you’ve seen me gloating after a particularly dark plot twist makes my readers freak out. That sort of stuff is fun to me. There’s a reason why I have a much easier time in the dark and violent scenes, because I’m channeling something ugly within me. We all have a dark side, and this is mine.

But UNLIKE Whedon, that doesn’t carry over to how I treat people in real life (unless Monopoly or Mario Party are involved, then it’s fair game). Maybe it’s because I wasn’t given the sort of power and praise he did so early, and I was always taught to be considerate of other people’s feelings, but if I ever find out that I hurt another person or went too fair, I feel TERRIBLE, and it just throws me off all day until I apologize. Even if I don’t notice right away that what I said or did wasn’t cool (autistic, remember?), when it’s pointed out to me and I have some time to think on it, yeah, the guilt is on and I make a point to apologize to whoever I’ve hurt. I’ve even made a point to apologize to members of my family for inconsiderate stuff I said years ago as a little punk kid because it wouldn’t stop bugging me.

So maybe Whedon got too big, too fast. Maybe putting people on these sorts of pedestals, especially progressive ones, is ultimately a bad thing.

So where does this leave us? How are we to treat JK Rowling and Joss Whedon, one who developed a lot of transphobia due to abuse suffered while the other became a toxic individual due to unchecked control and a lack of consequences? Can we still enjoy their stories despite them now being colored by their creators’ falls from grace? Can we separate the art from the artist, or do we have to do a clean split?

Honestly, I feel that has to come down to the individual. I can’t remove the influence Rowling and Whedon have had on me as a storyteller, and I still highly respect both of their talents despite taking major issue with their problems as people. And I’m not going go throw away all of my Harry Potter or Firefly stuff. Because that’s my stuff. It has value to me, it doesn’t represent the issues with their creators, and a lot of it was gifts from people who are dear to me. Though I do think it’ll be a long time before I return to either of their work, as I just don’t have the stomach for it now.

But I will be avoiding any projects they have in the future. I don’t want to put money in their pockets that might go on to support their toxic beliefs or behavior. And as for royalties for their past work that would also support the cast and crew of the Harry Potter films or those who worked on Whedon’s shows who do not deserve to lose money because we don’t want any of that money going to the creators? Er, that question is a little above my paygrade. I don’t know. You’ll have to all decide for yourselves. As for me, I still have a lot of thinking to do.

Regardless though, if I or anyone else is still able to enjoy their work, then it’s important to not divorce what these people said or did from the art they created, even if it makes enjoying that art less fun. It’s important to be critical about what we enjoy, to acknowledge the bad aspects along with the good, and open up discussion of those elements, because that’s what mature adults are supposed to do. 

And as for JK Rowling and Joss Whedon, whose stories I love, whose talent I admire, and whose past good work I’ll happily acknowledge, I do hope they both experience some sort of realization and enter into a period of self-examination that leads to them getting help for their issues, for Rowling to get help in coming to terms with her trauma and realizing that she’s wrong about the trans community and a full apology, and for Whedon to also come to terms with his toxic behavior and how he treats people, for him to make no excuse for what he did and sincerely apologize to those he hurt and work on bettering himself, as well as them both examining some of the more problematic tropes still present in their works. Because despite everything, I do feel that they can still be a creative force of good, and it would be a shame if they let themselves self-destruct.

But if not, then if it comes down to choosing between Rowling and the protecting the trans community, if it comes down between choosing between letting Whedon continue to make shows and protecting actors and writers from his abusive behavior, then I know who I’m siding with, and it ain’t the two individuals this whole essay is about. No story, no matter how good, no matter how creative, is worth letting sacrificing vulnerable people in order for it to be made.

[delimeful]

WIBAR Intermission: Cultural Differences

a commission for @secretlypansexualmango !! thank you so much for your patience with me during this difficult time, I hope you enjoy reading as much as i did writing it! :)

if you’re new to this AU, you can find the first story on tumblr here and the ao3 collection here! 

warnings: anxiety, tense discussion, mention of nonconsensual drug use, medical experimentation, mention of child abuse, dehumanizing language, flashbacks, PTSD

-

Logan paced back and forth along his floor, hands strumming the air but not noting any particular information, just… moving. A nervous tic that he’d recently been struggling to repress around Virgil. 

Speaking of.

“Patton, you are certain that Virgil will not wonder where you are and come to investigate?” he asked, turning on the balls of his feet to face the little Ampen. 

“Yep, I showed him how to use the tech in the washroom and he said something about staying in there all day. Turns out Humans need water to clean, not dirt!” Patton tapped his fingers together consideringly. “Now I feel kind of bad about trying to get him to dust more often, no wonder he’s all grimy.” 

Logan forced his hands to still so he wouldn’t record the information. That was the whole reason they were here, after all. 

“Why are you so worried about the Human finding us huddling in your bedspace like a bunch of giggling adolescents?” Roman asked, adjusting his armor plates slightly so they didn’t pinch. He perked up for a moment. “Are we finally kicking him out?” 

Patton frowned in disapproval at him, and he averted his eyes. “Joking! Just joking, Pat.” 

Logan hummed lightly to recall their attention. “I am seeking advice in regards to the Human— or, Virgil, rather, but I don’t want to offend him or give him the wrong idea by openly excluding him from a conversation. Hence, covert gathering.” 

Patton brightened— literally, his feathers aglow with excitement. “Oh, why didn’t you say so, Lo!” 

Roman sunk further down, a grumble forming in his chest. “Yeah, why didn’t you say so. I don’t think I’ve got much to contribute about him compared to Patton.” 

Logan inclined his head slightly in a Crav’n gesture to hold on for a little longer. “While I will admit that you have very different opinions on Virgil, I value both your perspectives equally and as such, would like to hear your honest thoughts on my query.”

Roman didn’t shift, but the grumble eased slightly, placated by Logan’s words. “Alright, what is it?”

Patton nodded encouragingly.“I’m all ears, kiddo! Feathears, that is!” 

Logan didn’t dignify the atrocious pun with a response beyond his face pinching slightly. “I’m sure you all remember the incident we had recently, with the... yawning.”

At the reminder, Patton winced and Roman glowered. 

Virgil had joined them for breakfast again the prior light cycle, a rare occurrence, and had nearly startled Logan out of his seat when he had stretched his jaw unnaturally wide with a crack, apropos of nothing. Patton had hurried to reassure them it was normal, and very much harmless, but it hadn’t prevented Roman from looking visibly on edge for the rest of the morning. Virgil had fled to his room early as a result.  

“I believe that it would be beneficial for all of us to learn more about Human culture, and while I have scoured many texts for information, most of it has proven to be inaccurate or downright offensive. As a result, I’ve decided that I should attempt to ask Virgil directly to share,” Logan nervously fluttered his hands. “Ideally through a Vidi.” 

Patton, who had gotten all fluffed up during his explanation, now paused slightly. “I think it’s a great idea for you to bond with Virgil, Lo! I’m not sure he’d be too keen on sharing minds, though. The idea seemed to make him nervous.” 

Roman snorted.

“Yes, I predicted as much.” Logan gestured between the two of them. “Hence why I have gathered you to receive insight on how best to go about gaining his permission.” 

His two closest friends shared a look, Patton having to crane his neck up considerably to do so. The Ampen piped up first.

“I say you should just ask him! What’s the worst that could happen?” 

Beside him, Roman made a gesture to ward off bad luck, muttering about inviting chaos. Logan held a hand to his face to ward off any headaches. 

“He could say no,” he emphasized, pointing out the obvious flaw. 

“That is not the worst that could happen. And anyways, if he says no, it’s not the end of the universe. You can still make a valiant effort to convince him after the fact. Write a 20 page dissertation on all the reasons he should give it a shot, or bargain with jam, or any other nerd stuff. But if you try to go behind his back--”  

“He’ll never trust you again,” Patton completed, antennae lowering at the thought. “Virgil is slow to trust, and for good reason. I know you of all people can understand that, Logan.” 

“Actually, I was going to finish that with ‘you might never get a second chance to Vidi with anyone, because you’ll be dead.’ Humans don’t take lightly to intrusion,” Roman clenched his hands, gaze dark.

Patton drooped more, like he was attempting to become a puddle of sad Ampen. “I know you two aren’t as familiar with Virgil as I am, but… I’m telling you, he doesn’t want to hurt anyone. He’s probably even more scared of you than you are of him.”

“I am not scared of a Human,” Roman insisted, scales rattling in offense. “And anyhow, we aren’t talking about a little fuzzy pollinator from a flora planet, we’re talking about a Human. A deathworlder. I know he was merciful to you, Pat, and I’m glad, but that doesn’t mean we can trust him to go against his nature. The way he acts, the look in his eye… I’ve seen it before. So you’ll have to forgive me if I don’t believe for a second that he’s harmless.”  

“Roman--!” Patton stopped short as the Crav’on rose to his feet and stormed out in a huff, dramatic as always. The small alien let out a frustrated trill, tugging on his antennae for a second before turning back to Logan.

“I never said that he was harmless,” he announced pointedly. “None of us are harmless, not even me. But just because he’s got the… the potential to be dangerous doesn’t mean we shouldn’t give him a chance. Try asking him about the Vidi, Lo, and if that doesn’t work out I’ll help you think of more options, okay?”

Frankly, Logan had been hoping for something more along the lines of a guide he could follow while striking a deal with Virgil, but he nodded anyhow. Sometimes researchers simply had to work with what little they had.

-

He spent the next few light cycles calculating the encounter, from his words to all the possible outcomes. He had plenty of time to consider such things, seeing as Virgil was particularly adept at avoiding him. 

Though the Human was subtle about it, it was hard to miss the way he found an excuse to leave any room Logan was in more often than not. Even when he couldn’t make a hasty escape-- most often because Patton was sleeping on his person-- he was always following Logan’s movements from the corner of his vision. Tracking him. It was… nerve-wracking. 

Logan was much more than a creature of instinct, though, and so he persisted despite the occasional shiver sent down his spine. 

When he finally managed to get the Human alone, however, it happened completely unintentionally. He was fixing a middark snack before sleep, and had just put the jam back in the coolant box when a vague emotional pulse nearby made his skin prickle. 

He paused. Neither of his shipmates would be so quiet while nearby, so… He squinted into the dim hallways, searching for movement. “Virgil?” 

“Uh,” said the Human, from on top of the cabinets how had he even gotten up there— “Hey.” 

Logan was suddenly thankful for his dulled physical response, since it prevented him from doing something embarrassing like jumping out of his carapace. “Hello. Might I inquire— May I ask why you are all the way up there?” 

The vague shadow that was Virgil shifted slightly, before dropping to the floor with a muted thump that shook the ground. Logan hoped that he hadn’t left any imprints in the floor paneling; Roman would have a fit.

“Just, uh. Just felt like it,” he answered, avoiding Logan’s gaze. “I’ll get out of your way.” 

“Wait, please,” Logan blurted, and to his surprise Virgil paused mid step. He quickly pulled himself onto a nearby stool, both so he could meet the Human’s eyes better and leave an exit available, seeing as a cornered Human was not one he wanted to deal with. “I had something I wanted to discuss with you, if that’s alright. Nothing bad, simply a request.” 

Despite his attempt to be soothing, Virgil’s shoulders only seemed to rise further, a defensive gesture according to Patton. Logan attempted to look as non-threatening as possible. 

“And what if it’s not alright?” Virgil challenged, voice low and rough as he glanced towards the hall entryway. 

Logan folded his lower hands in his lap carefully, his words measured. “Then I shall ask again another time. It is late, after all. I don’t want to keep you from sleeping.” 

Virgil made a half-exhale of amusement, or maybe resignation. Logan suspected it was because tonight was one of the nights Patton slept with him and Roman, nights that Logan suspected the Human often got little to no sleep. It was a concern to bring up at another time. 

“Okay, fine, discuss away. But I reserve the right to leave any time.” 

Logan blinked a few times, almost surprised that Virgil had actually agreed. He tapped his fingers together nervously— now came the difficult part. “My request is in regards to the incident at morning meal yesterday. Specifically, the misunderstanding about your ‘yawn’.” 

Virgil visibly hid a wince. “I already apologized for that.”

“Unnecessarily, I believe,” Logan said, causing Virgil to dart a glance at him in surprise. “You know as little about us as we know about you. It’s unreasonable to expect you not to make a few mistakes.” 

After a beat of stunned silence, Virgil shook his head slightly. “Try telling that to Roman,” he muttered. 

“I did, actually,” Logan said, frowning slightly at the recollection. “Surprising nobody, he didn’t want to listen.” 

“Wait, what?” Virgil asked, voice coming out a bit louder than before. “I thought you guys were like… cool. Uh, good. Friends.” 

Logan forced himself not to interrogate the Human on the slang, noting his embarrassment at fumbling. “We are, now. When I first came aboard the Mindscape, however, Roman and I fought constantly.”

“No. Really?”

“Yes. We were-- and still are-- very opinionated individuals. Stubborn,” he clarified, seeing Virgil struggle with the unfamiliar word. “Patton had to intervene in our bickering more often than not.”

“Huh,” Virgil uttered, curious. Logan was pleased to note that he’d relaxed slightly, and pressed on.    

“But that is a story for another time. My request is actually an attempt to help prevent such misunderstandings in the future. I would like to ask you about Human culture, in order to clear up common misconceptions and help me and the others recognize unfamiliar gestures or actions,” Logan ran the words through his mind, trying to see if he’d forgotten anything. “You’re free to say no, of course, I simply assumed that it would be easier for us all, but--” 

“Logan.” Virgil waited for him to glance up before continuing. “This is a lot. I’ll… I’ll think it over, alright?”

Logan nodded, enthusiastic to not be rejected outright. “Of course. In that case, I am going to head to my quarters to rest. Don’t hesitate to seek me out if you would like elaboration on anything.” 

The Human nodded, seeming deep in thought as Logan ducked his head in farewell and left. He could only hope that Virgil would be open to trying. 

-

The next light cycle, Virgil appeared quite suddenly at the entry to his lab, never crossing the threshold. 

“What are you going to do if I say no?” he asked, features clearer but also somehow harsher in the light. “Maybe I don’t want you to know anything about Humans, or me. What then?” 

Logan hurriedly set aside the samples he’d been comparing, pushing his thick inspection lenses up so he could see the Human properly. He took a moment to think over the question. “Roman suggested that I write a dissertation-- that is, a sort of argument to convince you-- if you refused outright, but seeing as you’ve had time to consider your options already… I will take your refusal at face value and not pester you about it any longer.” 

Virgil narrowed his eyes in a gesture that was most likely not an Ampen smile. “Just like that? Seriously?” 

“I am always serious,” Logan told him, very seriously. “Though I do encourage you to speak with Patton on other potential solutions not involving me--”

“I’ll do it.” 

“Pardon?” Logan asked, his ears twitching. Virgil raised his chin slightly, meeting Logan’s eyes solidly in challenge. 

“I’ll do it,” he repeated, and Logan noticed the way his hands shook slightly at his sides. He slowly placed his lenses onto the countertop, turning to face Virgil fully.

“Would it be preferable to talk in the common area?” he asked, spreading his hands to accentuate the question. “We are simply exchanging information, there’s no need to do it here.”

Virgil raised an eyebrow at him, and then shoved his hands in his pockets, feigning nonchalance. “Sure, whatever.”

A short trek later, they were seated in the lounging area, Virgil a careful seat away. Logan had received permission to ‘take notes’ as the Human called it, and started off with questions that seemed simple enough.

Naturally, they immediately encountered problems. 

“So, you do actually keep canids in your home for defense purposes?” Logan asked, hands stalling. “Is that not dangerous? Do you train them to not recognize the home’s residents as threats? I was under the impression all of Earth’s fauna was relatively vicious in order to survive.” 

Virgil dragged a hand over his face. “I guess some people keep guard dogs, but most people just get them as like… companions. We take care of them and they live with us. We… ugh, I don’t know the word for it. We trained them to not be… angry? Wild? Way long ago.”

“Domestication,” Logan suggested, and then resisted a sigh when Virgil looked at him without comprehension. “Virgil, I would like to try something, if it’s alright with you. My species has the ability to link minds and share memories, referred to as a Vidi. It would allow us to bypass the language barrier and you could show me what life on Earth is like with far more clarity.” 

Virgil was already shaking his head. “I don’t want you poking around in my head. I don’t know how it works on your planet, but thoughts are personal on Earth.” 

“Nor on mine. I am not a mind reader,” Logan corrected wryly. “The Vidi is more like a form of shared thinking, and if you would like, I will take no part in paddling-- guiding where our thoughts take us. You will then have control over what you share and what you ask from me. Both Patton and Roman have linked with me in the past, and suffered no ill effects, if you are worried about cross-species Vidi.”

“Well, I am now,” Virgil muttered, and hunched his shoulders. “... Can I stop it?” 

“Yes. It may take a few moments, since the flow of thought is unpredictable, but I have never gotten stuck in a link,” Logan tilted his head slightly, offering a hand. “Do you want to try something simple to test it?” 

Virgil chewed on his lip for a click longer before reaching out and placing his own hand atop Logan’s.

Immediately, he was seeing from a different angle, different time, different eyes. The hall was dark, but he could see uncannily well in it, noting the outline of stairs in front of him. At the base of the stairs, a light illuminated a dog staring up at him pleadingly. An Australian Shepard, though he had no idea what that was.

“Zero, it’s three in the morning,” a familiar voice grumbled, Logan feeling echoes of the sound in his throat. The words were foreign, but he could understand the meaning. He observed the dog as the memory proceeded to stumble around the house and open a door to the night, releasing Zero into the yard. 

‘This is bizarrely immersive,’ Virgil commented as the memory’s gaze turned up to the stars. ‘Like a dream. But… not as weird as I thought it might be.’ The memory flickered to a cartoon alien for a moment before stabilizing again, and Logan graciously ignored the lapse. 

‘Just from this alone, I have a much better concept of dogs,’ he responded, his mental voice quite enthusiastic. ‘Can you show me the devices you mentioned earlier? The ones Humans ride for entertainment?’ 

‘Oh, yeah, roller coasters. That’s a good one.’

The world around them flickered, and then it was bright daylight streaming around them. The memory stepped forwards, leaving behind a line that had taken ages and climbing into a seat. Another human-- slightly older than Virgil, probably too old to be working this job-- stepped over and pushed the safety bar over the memory’s lap, locking them in securely.  

The ride started, and Logan’s stress levels increased along with the memory’s sense of anticipation, peaking as they hit the top of the tracks and began to topple. The memory of Virgil’s stomach dropping was well-preserved, and fear-excitement-glee surged through the memory as the scenery blurred by too fast to process. After a period of time that was both too-long and too-short, the ride came to a stop.

Virgil’s smug amusement was tangible as Logan struggled to form words. ‘Humans do that for fun, you said?’ 

‘Yep.’ 

‘... I get the feeling this is going to be a truly interesting mindshare.’

-

Several alarming concepts later, including coffee, sleep deprivation, gender roles, and babies’ soft skulls, Logan was itching to take some time to journal all his thoughts out and also have a brief respite from horrifying implications. 

Virgil snorted, which he had learned was a Human gesture of amusement rather than a Crav’n one of disdain. He visualized an image of Logan writing with all four hands in a book, and Logan responded with showing him the art form practiced back home, which involved exactly that. Drawing a full image at multiple points simultaneously was a honed skill for some Ulgorii. 

‘This has been quite illuminating, however I am hoping to end it here,’ Logan requested, pulling them back on track. 

Virgil hesitated for a moment, and then: ‘I want to check something. Really quick. I need to know.’ 

Logan had barely agreed when the scene shifted again, this memory tinged with haze around the edges. Physical sensation was dulled somewhat, but the cold metal underneath their back was a clear enough feeling. White walls above them, and aliens in thick bodysuits leaned over them. The memory was too fuzzy to recall what was being taken, but there was a sense of relief that it didn’t hurt. Not adrenaline, then. 

Above them, a couple of the harvesters spoke. Logan recognized Virgil’s intent too late to do anything to prevent it. He couldn’t simply stop understanding Common, after all. 

“Drain duty is so boring. You think it’d be entertaining with a Human, but no, all it does is lie here with those freaky dead eyes,” one complained. “Are they sure they didn’t accidentally grab a braindead one?” 

“You wouldn’t say that if you’d been here for the Dren drain,” the other responded, voice morbidly fascinated. “Thing’s practically feral, the way it lashes out. I don’t envy the escorts who have to drag it back to its cage afterwards, even with the drugs.” 

“If it’s so beastly, why not just treat it like one? Put two together till they breed and train the baby to be less of a monster, same as we do with the troublesome creatures,” the harvester suggested, jabbing a claw at Virgil’s form. Logan felt sickened. ‘Virgil--’ 

“And risk them tearing each other apart? Humans are rare as is, there’s no way the Uppers would authorize something that might end with both dead.” The harvester took a few paces to the side, meeting the memory’s gaze with complete apathy. “Those scientists that have dibs on the body want it intact for dissection, or else we’re getting fuckall for the payment.”

The memory flickered, unstable, to an alien that only visited when they were doing the painful tests, wearing what Logan recognized as scholarly gear instead of the customary bodysuit. Virgil remembered they had snapped out words with one of the smugglers, numbers, prices, bargaining for his corpse-- 

Back to the little white room where they drained him, bit by bit. 

“It’s pretty sedate, considering,” A smuggler prodded him, to no response beyond a brief flicker of eyelids.

“Of course it is, we picked it up off the planet fresh. Stupid thing can’t understand a thing we’re saying, so what’s there to panic about?” 

The memory fractured, splitting into a thousand different fragments that flashed by with increasing speed-- panic attacks in his cell, unable to count the days he’d been locked in the too-small space, the ring, being hosed down like a rabid animal.

‘Logan,’ Virgil managed weakly, his grip on the Vidi loosening, ‘change it.’ 

In his alarm at Virgil’s condition, he practically yanked the share back to his own memories. He was too concerned to focus on what or where exactly he was remembering, until it had already snapped into clarity around them. He should have known better.

The memory was a mirror of Virgil’s, summoned by Logan’s automatic recall. His younger self sat on a sterile white counter, kicking his feet as around him, four machines worked to draw blood from each of his arms. He moved to shift the share again, but Virgil nudged him, distracted by the surprise. 

‘What… what is this?’ he asked, despite the fact that he was surely receiving information from the memory’s perspective as they spoke. 

Logan sighed, watching as a pleased doctor removed the equipment and shuffled him off to be escorted back to his room. ‘As I told you before, you are certainly not the only one to deal with trauma or flashbacks on this ship.’ 

“You promised me a new book,” the memory said with the voice of a child who had grown up too fast. “I sat quietly, so I get a new book, right?” 

“Of course, of course,” the doctor waved him off, already moving to bottle and package the blood to be sold. Ulgorian blood, which would make a fair amount of coin at market for its use as a paralyzing toxin. “Continue being such an obedient, quiet child and you will have any book you desire, Aconite.” 

Logan finally broke the Vidi off, opening his eyes as Virgil jolted sharply across from him. He studied the Human’s complexion for a moment, and then reached into the table drawer for a water jug. “Drink something. I believe you have experienced the beginnings of a panic attack during our share.” 

He held the water out patiently until Virgil took it, pulling back to give him space. “Though I had my suspicions, I now see why you reacted the way you did to my designation as a self-identified scientist.” 

Virgil laughed hoarsely, sipping at the water. “Yeah. Sorry. I didn’t know--” He cut himself off sharply. “You won’t do anything to me. Patton told me, and I think I knew it too, really. I was just... nervous. That you’d ask for more than I could give--”

“--or change the parameters before you could ever reach them,” Logan finished, lacing his fingers together in a wry Crav’n gesture. “There’s no need to apologize. I understand, as you now know.”   

“Sorry about that,” Virgil repeated. “I didn’t mean to peek at your trauma.” 

“Again, no need. It’s nothing I haven’t already come to terms with,” Logan said, and then offered him a few thumbs ups. “We are cool, as I believe the term is used.”

Virgil gave him a small grin, and Logan finally understood what Patton meant when he called Virgil’s teeth-bearing friendly. 

-

After a discussion on how PTSD affected the mind share, they settled for focusing on simply communicating through Common. It would be better for Virgil’s language growth, and reduce the amount of traumatic flashbacks they were both exposed to. If either of them got frustrated, they simply left off to discuss the matter another cycle.

This was how, a rotation later, Logan found himself enthusiastically quizzing a Human on his dietary habits.  

“I know that there are Humans who raise livestock, presumably for meat. Do Humans prefer raw meats or cooked ones? Or are there other ways to prepare animal flesh? Is it determined by individual preference?” 

Virgil waited patiently, ducking under one of Logan’s flapping hands as he moved to sit down. “We eat all kinds of stuff, Specs.” 

“Ah. Should we stock up on blood at our next port, then?”

A startled laugh, though Logan was only half-joking. “Okay, all kinds of stuff like plants and some minerals.” 

Logan made a note to correct his notes, again. “Another incorrect assumption... I was under the impression that human omnivorous tendencies were only for survival scenarios, similar to your ability to endure blood loss. Most texts say that humans are primarily carnivores.”  

“No, we’re pretty omnivorous.” Virgil shrugged. “Some people are vegetarian-- or, herbivores, I guess, but that’s a personal choice dependent on all sorts of things. We evolved to be omnivorous, we’ve got the flat teeth and the pointy ones, see?” He pulled a lip down to show his teeth, which were in fact thick and rounded in the back.

Logan half-lunged forwards, inspecting the inside of his mouth carefully. “You’re absolutely right! While you have the canines for biting and tearing meat off the bone, you also have molars for masticating tough plant matter! Oh, of course Humans don’t actually drink blood, there are evolutionary signifiers for such things and Human blood likely has little to none of the nutritional value that your body needs. Fascinating! Are these made of bone?” 

It was at this moment that Roman walked in. There was a pause in which Logan realized that at some point he had moved to stick most of his hand in Virgil’s mouth to better examine his dental structure. 

“Logan,” Roman started, deceivingly composed, “if you lose a finger by being a huge nerd, I am going to freak it.” 

Logan executed a ‘wink’ to Virgil before responding. “Not to worry, Human teeth are dull enough that they are only dangerous if significant jaw strength is applied. I do not believe Virgil will bite me. Correct?” 

“Uhn,” Virgil grunted in affirmation, spit starting to spill out of his mouth. Despite his reassurance, he looked vaguely uncomfortable with the situation. Logan hurriedly withdrew.

“Oh sure, you totally know he’s not going to bite you when he is literally drooling!” Roman howled, before turning on his heel and walking right back out of the commons. “I am too tired for this. Call me when you’re done being an insane scientist in our living room.” 

Virgil wiped his mouth off on his sleeve, voice sardonic. “Doesn’t he know by now that mad scientist is your permanent state of being?” 

“I have no idea why you would say such a thing. I am a perfectly calm and composed scientist,” Logan responded in a monotone, turning his nose up when Virgil started laughing. “How dare you imply otherwise. The indignity of it all. Woe is me.”

“That’s what you get for inviting a malicious human onboard,” Virgil snarked back, leaning back. “Too bad, you’ll regret it to the end of your days.” 

“No,” Logan answered with a wry twist of his lips, “I don’t think I will.”

[darkficsyouneveraskedfor]

Painted Windows 6

Warnings: violence, trauma, allusions to abuse and noncon, isolation, torture, further tags to be added.

This is dark!Bucky and explicit. Your media consumption is your own responsibility. Warnings have been given. DO NOT PROCEED if these matters upset you.

Summary: You struggle to make sense of your captivity.

Note: Alright so we’re seeing things amp up and I hope you all enjoy it. I have up to part 8 planned out and then brainstorming the rest lol. I honestly don’t know what this series is. I always appreciate you and thanks for all your patience. Thank you. Love you guys!

Please leave some feedback, like and reblog <3

Day fourteen. Two weeks. Two whole weeks of the interminable routine. Wake up; if you slept at all, breakfast, lunch, dinner; sometimes alone, sometimes not. In between, you opened your notebook, or watched television, or walked around in circles until you were dizzy. Other times, you did nothing at all and wondered at the principles of time.

Bucky was no different. Mercurial, albeit amenable since his little victory. Since your acceptance; your surrender, had become obvious. You were quiet, not that you had been eager for conversation before, and listless. You hadn’t had a purpose in years, no hopes, no ambitions, but something about this place felt so final.

That day, the door finally budged after lunch. You watched it fall open and listened to the grunts that announced your visitor. Bucky dragged in a box almost as big as himself. He dropped it in between the bed and table. He turned and closed the door before he knelt beside the large package.

“You wanna help?” He asked as he tore open the box. 

Several metal parts, a small screen, a seat, nuts, bolts, a screwdriver; everything you needed to piece together the stationary bike. You were stunned that he remembered. A passing comment about your inactivity; cramped legs and an impenetrable restlessness. You neared and stood on the other side of the box.

“If you want me to,” You answered.

“Are you busy?” He asked dryly.

“Never,” You dropped to your knees and helped him unwrap the contents.

You took the instructions and sat back on your heels. You search for Part A among the mess. You grabbed it and the other part listed in the first step and slid them over to Bucky. 

“You need one of the flat-topped screws it says.” You read carefully.

He considered you above the thin booklet. “Alright.”

You carried on as such. You read out the steps and helped sort through the pieces and he screwed them together. Almost an hour before you finished. A silver exercise cycle was your prize. You couldn’t help but be excited.

“There,” He stood and gathered up the packaging. “It should keep you busy; fit.”

“Thank you,” You touched the handlebar and walked around it.

“Well, go on,” He neared the door. “I’ll be back for dinner.” He opened the door and glanced back at you. “I can order something. You like Chinese?”

“All the way out here?” You peeked over at the window.

“Yes, all the way out here,” He grumbled. “Might be a bit cold but that never killed anyone.”

“Sure,” You shrugged. “Chinese is fine.”

He left. That was what you hated. The acquiescence. It was so easy to treat his control as courtesy. This wasn’t truly to make you happy, only to appease you. To make your captivity easier for him; not for you. You huffed and climbed up on the bike. You adjusted the resistance and pedalled as you lost yourself in thought.

You went until you were out of breath and achy. You slipped down onto your feet and ambled over to bed as you yawned. It was the most exercise you’d had in… well, you were still trying to figure out that math. 

You sprawled out and clicked on the television. Your latest addiction was a comedy about an office. It made you wonder where you’d be if you hadn’t ended up in the cell. Would you be at a desk wiling away the time staring at a computer? Or maybe you’d be a teacher or librarian. You liked animals; you could’ve been a vet.

You let yourself melt into the pillows and soon your eyes closed under their sudden weight. You fell asleep with the buzz of dialogue in your ears; the words vaguely familiar to your idle brain. Your snores rose too and mingled with the steady drone. You rolled over onto your side as you began to rouse and shadow passed through the slit of your eyelids.

Your eyes fluttered open through the haze of your unexpected nap. You looked at the table; a big white bag pulled taut over several cartons, beside it, a familiar set of pages laid open beneath a metal hand and you followed the arm to its owner. Your heart leaped and you sat up as Bucky pored over your journal. He didn’t seem to notice you as he was so wrapped up in the words. Your words. Private words. Secret thoughts.

You hurried across the bed and stormed over to him. You tried to wrench the book from beneath his hand but his grasp was stronger than yours. He merely looked over at you and ripped the notebook free. He held it away from you as he blocked you with his other arm.

“You can’t--” You slapped his arm. “How could you read that? It’s mine. You…. you…”

“You started writing,” He said plainly as he closed the book in his hand and set it down. “That’s good.”

“Why would you read it?” Your voice was brittle as you pushed away from him. “Why? It’s not for you.”

“Sit. The food’s going to get cold,” He gestured to the other chair. 

You frowned and he cleared his throat. You dragged yourself to the chair and sat heavily. You stared at the notebook. He untied the plastic bag and began to unpack the cartons one at a time. You were livid and speechless. Worse, you were helpless. He would always win. 

He rose and got two plates from the cupboard. He set them out and grabbed a carton. 

“Rice?” He asked. You ignored him and crossed your arms. “Noodles?”

You reached out and slid a plate in front of you. “I can serve myself.” You snarled. “You might think I’m weak but I wouldn’t be alive if that was true.”

He chuckled and spooned out rice onto his own plate. “Sure,” He scoffed as he set it aside and grabbed the box of veggies. 

You scowled and scooped out some noodles and waited for the veggies. You only took a little of the chicken and sat back with arms crossed. The food smelled great but you just couldn’t focus on the faint tickle in your stomach. You were angry. For the first time, you weren’t scared or sad or sickened, you were absolutely enraged.

He lowered himself into the other chair and started to eat. You watched him with a sneer. You recalled he said he knew what you felt because he had been kept once. It sure didn’t seem like it. It seemed like he was an expert at keeping others. His empathy was nothing more than manipulation. You dropped your arms and fiddled with your fork but didn’t use it.

“Why don’t you write about… before?” He swallowed. 

“What?” You spat.

“You write about the cell, about what they did to you,” He shifted in his chair, “But not about what came before. Your home, family… your life?”

You looked away embarrassed. You twirled a load of noodles around your fork and shoved them in your mouth to avoid answering. You chewed as he watched. As you took another bite, he dropped his fork and grabbed the notebook. You froze and watched as he flipped it open.

‘The man who came most often was tall but skinny. Still, he was cruel and too strong for me. I remember the first time he visited. It hurt and every time after, it did as well. It wasn’t just sex though. He would take out this little folding knife and draw lines down my stomach as he used me. Or he would choke me until I passed out. One time, he held my head in the toilet and I thought I would drown.

But I dreamt of that knife. I still do. I thought of how to steal it from him so that I could use it myself. So that I could finish the job he always left half done.’

Bucky closed the book and reached across to place it beside your plate. You were stunned as you gulped down the noodles and stared into his eyes. They were as dark as that night he returned. Savage and resolute. You shivered and looked down at the notebook.

“Do you miss the man with the knife?” He asked.

You shook your head but couldn’t look at him. Your chest knotted and you let your fork fall against the plate. You twined your fingers in your lap and bit your lip.

“But you write about him?”

“I don’t wanna talk about it.” You whispered.

“Why do you write about those men and not your family?”

“Because…” You croaked and meekly looked up across at him. “Because I can remember those men. I can’t…” Your voice trailed off and you lowered your chin again. “Please, I can’t--”

He was silent. You stewed in the tension as you fought to hold back the tears. You pressed a hand to your stomach as you hunched in the chair. There were scars still; you ignored them as you passed by the mirror before your showers. Your cheeks twitched as you resisted the sob caught in your throat.

You sensed movement and your eyes were drawn across to the other side of the table. You made sure not to move your head as you watched along the edge of your vision. You could see Bucky’s arms as it disappeared below the table. You could tell his hand was moving in his lap, slowly. His breaths rasped and he suddenly seemed to recall himself. His hand came up and gripped the edge of the table.

“You should eat.” He said. 

“I’m not very hungry,” You lied.

He sighed and his fingers tapped on the table. “You know I can tell when you’re lying. I was trained to. It’s part of my job.” He grabbed his fork again and stabbed a piece of broccoli. “Among other things.”

You sat up at the foreboding in his words. You stared at him and he stared back. He chewed and nodded to your plate. 

“Go on.” He jabbed his fork towards your plate. “Eat.”

Bucky didn’t leave after dinner as he usually did. You cleaned up to keep yourself busy and ignored him as you hit play on the television and balled yourself up against the pillows. He lingered at the table but rose as the second episode began. He kicked off his boots and climbed up next to you. He said nothing as he watched the screen. His arm touched yours but he only sat with you.

He slumped down and began to snore several episodes in and you glanced over at him startled. You crawled off the other side of the bed as you kept your eyes on him. He didn’t wake, didn’t move. You left the television on as you tiptoed around the bed. You went to the washroom and closed the door behind you. There was no clasp to lock it.

You went to the tub and pulled the curtain across the bar. You laid down across the porcelain with your arm beneath your head. It was cold like your cell. Your heart slowly petered out and the pounding retreated from your ears. You closed your eyes and you were back behind the concrete walls. Waiting.

But your mind wouldn’t stay behind the bars. It slipped past them and returned to the padded room. To the table where the metal armed man sat, hand in his lap as he bent over your scribbled memories. You bit down on the heel of your hand and tears leaked down your nose and temple.

You wept until you fell asleep. Until the memories turned to nightmares; though they were barely dissimilar. Only your visitor differed. The shadow at the bars; broad shoulders, rifle, shining arm, hair to his shoulders. He kicked in the door but you couldn’t move. Couldn’t shield yourself from the new monster creeping through the dark.

Bucky stood over you as he set aside the rifle. You followed the barrel’s nuzzle with your eyes longingly. Your small cot trembled as he climbed over you. You were naked against his bloody leather jacket. The zippers and buckles cut into your skin as his metal fingers wrapped around your throat. You peered up into his eyes; blue like the ocean and just as endless..

You were woke by the sound of the rings sliding across the bar above. You looked up as Bucky stood by the tub and stared down at you. You shielded your eyes from the bright bulbs above the sink. He knelt and tilted his head as you crossed your arms over your chest and drew your legs up.

“What are you doing in here?” He asked. You shrugged. “Come on.” He grumbled and grabbed your arm. 

He pulled you until you stood. He forced you to step out of the tub and back into the bedroom. The sky outside had begun to lighten. He guided you to the bed and turned you to him. His hands rested on your shoulders and he pushed until you sat on the mattress. He frowned at your reluctance.

“Sleep,” He ordered as he drew away and bent to grab his boots. “I’ll be back at noon.”

You didn’t say anything as he crossed the room. You didn’t move even after he was gone. You just sat there on the edge of the bed. You closed your eyes and saw his again; the depths of terror. You quaked and balled your fists around the blankets. How long could he restrain the monster within? He was no different from your former wardens and this was no different from that frigid cell. It was all just as hopeless.

[maruzzewrites]

2 & 14 for Abba with a stubborn , perceptive, fem crush , but confused about his romantic intentions with them

i’m really sorry, i strayed quite a bit from the request ;; but when i started i couldn’t stop

2. “God, you have no idea how amazing you are, doyou?” 14. “I fucking need you more than I need to breath.” 

Content warnings: yandere content, possessive behavior, alcoholism, mental abuse, guilty tripping, depression, in general it’s more angsty than the other works.

Losing hope, in your eyes, was the easiest thingto do. Born and raised in Naples, you couldn’t even begin to explain your knowledgeof the little streets, the alleys, the shops and the people; you could closeyour eyes and let your instinct guide you as you walked the steep roads, thelively buzz of the city comforting your ears. Knowing Naples came with a price,though, and not everyone could bear the weight of the burden. The sunny citythat birthed you was plagued with ancient evils, rooted firmly in place withyears, decades, centuries of history.

The way to live the city was through optimisticcatastrophism, joyful acceptance; how could you expect anything more from apopulation stationed under a volcano, still pulsing with dormant life. Youlived your life knowing that you will live to see another day, the bright hopein your soul sewing your thought and actions together, no matter thecircumstances and the hardships. Curse through life and you won’t have worries,mind your own business and you won’t have to fear. You never bothered anyone,never dared to speak out of turn, as you wanted to live your life and secureyour next meal.

Yet, despite the ingrained mentality, some wouldbreak through the mist of indifference surrounding the minds of an entirepopulation. You met one of those people in Leone Abbacchio, bright-eyed andidealist, with his pale features and tall stature. He couldn’t hide himself, hewould always be noticed in spite of his quiet nature. With his ideals and hishopefulness, he would attract discussions and arguments, his determined wordsnever faltering at the sight of injustice, of pain, of desolation. He was themisery around him, but his blindness would prevent him from seeing theramifications of that malevolent vice strangling the city.

The day you departed, after the end of yourschool year, he was still a dreamer. When you met him again, a few years later,he was awakened by the ocean of sorrow drowning him. The light in his eyes, onhis face, was dimmed by gloom and the bitter taste of failure rolled out of histongue as he spoke. Your heart stung at the sight, the visionary Abbacchio likea dull shadow that would be swallowed by the darkness of that world. Despiteyour philosophy of staying out of the way, you couldn’t help the ache to helphim and heal him, hold his cold hand as he stumbled step after step with theheaviness of alcohol.

Befriending him again, with the awkwardness ofhis silence, was a struggle. He resisted your help, clawing away from your careevery second, barking out about his own worthlessness and disgust. He nevercried, he never let out tears of vulnerability with you, but his breath smelledof alcohol. When you were at his house, you’d take so much just to collect theglasses and bottles of days, weeks, in which he was left alone. The rest of thehouse was always immaculate, never touched, his body constantly on the sofa ashe looked at you with vague eyes and labored breath.

When he was lucid enough, when he could keephimself up and talk to you, he’d offer you drinks and food. But the bittertaste of annoyance would cling to the words, his dark eyes casted on you like acurse, so you always refused; you’d see his jaw stiffen, hear his tongue clickin disappointment, just as he turned around and you were faced with his back.These moments of temporary lucidity were increasing slowly, you’d see him sitstraight up from the couch and whip his head to the entrance door when you camein – he left you the keys, after so much time.

He was starting to contain himself, despitedrinking since morning. But you didn’t see him walk into furniture, trip andfall on the ground as your smaller frame tried to help him up. With a spark ofhope in your heart, you started to coax him out of the house to escort you duringerrands. He’d grumble, he’d complain, but he let you drag him around with yourarm around his own. Walking the streets you knew so well, offering him coffeeand snacks to ensure a smile he never offered you.

With the intimacy of his grief, you thought itwould be just fair to show him your own life and routine. You went on with yourlife, Abbacchio following at a close distance to observe, as you allowedyourself the luxuries of silent kind gestures. You’d pay a little more to buy acoffee for a stranger who would come later, you’d offer to help senior citizenscarrying their bags and groceries, you’d give up your favorite pastry if itmeant a child could have it instead; little actions that couldn’t change theworld, but brought a ray of sunshine for a few minutes in the life of someone.Never intrusive, never shaking the boat; Abbacchio studied your gentle heartwhile it found ways to make a difference in the dark, horrible world.

It was when you started to be personal withspecific people, lavishing them in attentions they didn’t deserve or didn’tneed, that Abbacchio felt the icy coils of resentment swirl in his mind. He wasnever special, he was never more than another charity project to you. He wasworth of nothing more than pity, and he would gladly reject that same feelingfrom anyone that wasn’t you. He grew comfortable with the contempt of others,but the mere thought of you loathing him like everyone else made his heart burnfrom the cold.  

“God, you have no idea how amazing you are, doyou?” When he told you that, at the table of a cafe shop, you jumped insurprise at the sweet thought and the sour tone. You giggled, cheerful, andtold him to quit embarrassing you. You didn’t believe his words, because hiswords didn’t matter. He was another face, another man to help, so that he couldwalk alone once again and move on from his mistakes.

But he didn’t want to learn, overcome, grow; ifit meant you would walk away, he would drown himself, going against his veryfirst instinct of survival. He would dig his own grave until you would try tosnatch the shovel from his hands and hold him until he was well again. Hestarted his cycle, getting better and getting worse, roping you into aguilty-filled sequence of tears, pain and suffering. It didn’t matter howexhausted or frustrated you got with him, how much you screamed or begged forhim to rethink his choices, he would sink, and sink, and sink. Grasping your ankles,managing to drag you with him.

“I fucking need you more than I need to breath.”You winced and cried at his words, closing the door in front of you when you heardthe crack in his voice. It wasn’t the first time, it won’t be the last; whenyou turned around, his eyes were glassy and wet, hollow behind the protectionof alcohol clinging to his lips. You crumbled once again in front of the man inneed, stepping timidly to hold his head, your finger in his hair. When you sat downon the sofa, he clawed to you and rested his head with a shaky exhale, stealingyour warmth with his freezing skin.

There, your heart, it was beating. Your gentle,gentle, gentle heart. He felt himself returning to his childhood, when hisdreams weren’t shattered; your idle fingers would move in his fake memory, youwere always there for him. You will always be there for him. You weren’t goinganywhere, not when he needed you.

[ramyajana]

My toughest project so far...

...Parenting!

Been in the wonderful software industry for quite some time now. Hence, the beginning of this blog is a very software project-related opening.

My projects and deadlines, be it professional or personal, are a very serious affair to me. I seldom miss the deadline and ensure that the product delivered is quality tested. On my professional front, I think I’ve done due diligence to my projects handled. On my personal front, one of the key projects I’ve ever handled, rather handling is PARENTING!

Imagine, there are no clear-cut requirements and QA seems to take the highest cycle! How do you plan such projects, what are the risk factors, what are the RCAs, is ROI even considered? As a parent, I adorned many caps: that of a PM, Dev (of course), support/sustenance, a little bit of testing.

In this blog, I onerously try to capture my confused, happy, sad, and constantly seeking thoughts.

Call it luck – good or bad, I became mother to a beautiful girl, at the age of 24. In this era, that’s probably considered too young to take on that responsibility. I did get many unsolicited comments from folks about my pregnancy: “isn’t it too early”, “what about your career”, “do you have enough money”. All through, one thing I strongly believed in, is my instinct. And my instinct always pushed me to seek some advice/guidance from mature acquaintances and of course from my very dear Krishna (the Almighty) and thus, Driti was born. She’s now a typical, strong-headed teenager that has various interests: books, biology, music (Carnatic & others), internet, friends, home décor, and many more!

In all these wonderful years of parenting, I’m not sure how much of a learning experience Driti has had, I’ve definitely learned quite a lot, and from Driti in particular. Some of the core values such as tolerance, patience, controlled anger, acceptance, criticism, and unconditional love has just enabled my self-realization in the path of life.

In the recent times, as Driti and I started to discuss about various topics from academics to sex, I started to share with her about some of the parenting ideologies that others had shared (directly with me or on social media). There seem to be a lot of hue and cry about how parenting should not involve controlling your children, parents are just carriers of their children to this world, letting your children fall and fail, respecting the child’s individuality and space, and the list goes on. While I’m in agreement with all of these, what I’m not sure of, is the specifics. This is a typical situation of a product manager (PM) having vague market requirements that makes Engineering lose the plot. Getting into the PM shoes, I first began with market analysis: what’s the expectation of product functioning, who’s setting these expectations, how does one measure the product quality, who are the competitors, influencing parties, and most importantly who are the consumers.

In this epoch of aping the west – both good and bad, it created a perplexed mindset in me with respect to parenting. I kept pondering, what that “gold standard parenting” is. What I realized is that there’s no one standard definition that qualifies for good/successful parenting. Each parent defines their own success statements.

To me however, if I have to set some goals for myself, I’d focus on lead by example. One of my professional mentors always said, “No one likes to be told” and yet we have to get things done. All veteran leaders and philanthropists always empowered people by actually “doing” rather than commanding others to “do”. This is what I started to employ. For instance, I did not want my daughter to fall prey to gadgets and all I started to do was to minimize my time with gadgets. This did have an effect on how positively Driti (my daughter) reacted to the situation. Especially, when her peers succumbed to gadgets’ addiction and the superfluous social media. What this actually meant was, I had to rework on my time spent with Driti. I began to spend more and more time with her. I had to be prepared for a lot more that’d come my way. One of which, like it or not, giving an ear to whatever Driti had to say. The conversations, some interesting, some not so interesting, some very boring, and some enlightening, proved to be very fruitful. I’m delighted about the fact that Driti has always, and continues to, frankly tell me about each and every minute detail of the happenings. I’m sure there’re some that she may not tell me, but easily share with her friends. It doesn’t bother me much, and I try not to delve too much into it, and respect her space. All I pray and work towards, is to continue to sustain in this mode of mother-daughter dialogue exchange, which in the long run would result in a healthy relationship.

Recently, a meager debate on the social media bothered me to a great extent. I kept wondering if I was doing the right job as a parent? Am I being too rigid with my teenager? Was my parenting thought process not the right one? Well, after careful observations, talking to my husband, my mom, and a couple of my friends (similar to me: working and raising teenagers), and then reading a couple of articles from new-age parents to sadhgurus, I did come to a conclusion that I’m in the right path, and my right path could be perceived as not-so-right by many others.

To give a background…it was an argument between the so called very broad-minded, well-educated, and highly dignified folks on the one side and a simpleton with some traditional Indian values on the other. By traditional Indian values, I mean the ones that are rational, powerful, and humble ones.  I belonged to the latter. The topic of discussion was about how one cannot control their children, whatsoever. Even if it’s about letting your child learn life hacks from their mistakes. Mistakes that can be brutal to the child’s emotional and physical well-being. Group-1 argued with strong language about how it’s important to let your children explore the world by themselves. Yes, I do believe in the fact that protecting your child from the realities of life takes away valuable learning opportunities, before they're out on their own.  Although, I’m in agreement with the part about not controlling your children, I definitely wouldn’t vouch to the aspect of parents washing off their hands even when you know that the child is in some kinda danger. To me, danger could be in terms of the child being vulnerable to any kinda abuse, addiction to drug, or anything that’d harm themselves and others in a society. As a parent, I think it’s my responsibility to educate my child about the possible effects of all these abuses. To me, this is like protecting your child against illness like measles. All I want to do is to “immunize” my child. I kept mongering over points discussed on both the ends.

While I was juggling in my head about all of this, two incidents proved to me that I’m on the right track. Incident-1: Driti was selected by her Guru to participate in an esteemed Indian classical music competition. On the day of competition, we got all set and arrived at the Sangeetha Sabha. It was glorious to witness the gathering of a “huge” number of participants to showcase their talent. Each one sang blissfully. As I sat there listening to them all, singing with such involvement to the beautiful art of Carnatic music, I realized that such music really helps one grow beautifully inside out. This is what I told Driti “Until we have the art called Carnatic music with us, our outlook to life will always be positive.” And Driti responded saying, “I agree, but let’s not miss out on other kinds of music out there which gives us the same focus and positivity.” I totally totally agree and respect Driti’s broader attitude. This incident gave me a boost, in terms of trying to show a good path (music) to Driti. PS: Not to brag, but driti did win an award in the competition! 😊

Incident-2: One evening, while returning from work, as I waited for the lift to arrive, I noticed an old woman approaching my tower. She looked fragile and walked very slow. By then, the lift arrived and I got in. I however, held the lift door open for the old woman. She tried to hurry, I signaled at her to come slow and I’d hold the lift. She then joined me and smiled as if to say a thank you. She seemed new in the block; I hadn’t seen her before. I then asked her which floor she was headed to, in gestures, since I didn’t know what language she spoke, and she said “Pannendu” which’s 12th in Tamil. I pressed 12 and 10 since I had to get off at the 10th floor. She did realize that I understood Tamil. She did not feel quite comfortable in the lift, probably wasn’t used to lift that much. She asked, “Idhu tower-1 dhane?” meaning, “is this tower-1” to which I replied “yes, aama mami”. “Mami” is how we address elderly women in Tamil, analogous to aunty in English. She then exclaimed that all towers in the apartment looked similar and she always got lost. I offered to go with her till the 12th floor. She gleefully said, “romba thanks ma”. When I held the lift door for her to come out, she thanked me again and insisted me to come inside her home for “Kumkumam”. Kumkumam (applying vermilion powder on one’s forehead) is a Hindu tradition, that signifies a woman’s married life. I was already tired after my long commute form work. My thoughts swiftly moved around my gymming routine, making dinner, emails, and then a meeting after. However, I couldn’t say no to the lady. I went in and sat on the sofa. She offered coffee, I gently refused, “Kumkumam kudugo mami” I said. She then got busy with setting the thamboolam (a return gift of sorts, a gesture to show one’s appreciation to the guest for visiting their home). As she prepped that thamboolam, she talked about how people were quite helpful to her in the apartment.

She came up to me to give the Kumkumam and the thaamboolam and cited an episode where a young girl helped her out in finding her house. She said that she had just moved in with her daughter who works in a software company, and right after the move, the daughter had to fly out to the US for a week for official purposes. Mami went down one evening to take a stroll in the wonderfully landscaped podium. Later, she did not how to get back home. She neither knew the tower number nor the flat number. All she knew was that she resided on the 12th floor. She stood there looking perplexed, as it started to get a little darker. That’s when a young girl in her shorts and Tee with a wireless headset, listening to music, pushing her cycle came to mami’s rescue. Mami waved saying “Kozhandhe” (meaning “Child”), and the girl fortunately saw the wave and went up to mami. Mami asked “Tamil varuma?” – “Do you know Tamil?” to which the girl nodded (girl with a few words). Mami explained her situation to the girl. The girl immediately put her bike aside and asked mami to be seated on a bench in the podium and said “Naa azhachindu poren” (“I’ll take you home, not to worry”). The girl went up to the main security to try and figure out who recently moved to the 12th floor in the apartment. Apparently, there were two families that moved in recently, both to 12th floor, one in tower-1 and the other in tower-4. The girl then used the intercom to call both the flats. There was no answer from the tower-1, 12th floor flat and from tower-4, a little child spoke in Hindi and said that there’s no grandma living there. The girl then zeroed in on tower-1 and rushed back to mami. Mami seemed worried by then. The girl then held mami by her hand, slowly walked her towards tower-1. She then dropped mami to her flat on the 12th floor. Mami couldn’t thank the girl enough, she invited the girl inside, and insisted on taking a banana as a note of gratitude. She then thanked the girl profusely and asked her name…to which girls said, “I’m Driti”. Mami couldn’t really pronounce the name, she just smiled and said “Riti, unna nanna vaLatthirukka, kozhandhe” which means “your parents have done a good job in bringing you up!”

As I took the thamboolam, I told mami that Driti was my daughter. Mami’s eyes lit up, and she squealed, “Oh ho”. I then took leave from mami’s house and grinned my way back home. Well, if not for a great doing, this indeed was a humane gesture that Driti portrayed. This incident implied to me that somewhere, I must have done something right in parenting. This is probably because, Driti not only lives with her parents but also her grandparents. She definitely knows what it means to have an elderly person around.

These two incidents further gave me strength to pursue my parenting project along the same lines. Not policing my daughter, being there for her, read/write together, sing together, play together, cook together, and just lending an ear to her – these are now my must have’s that I must address. I’m now beginning to work on some of the nice to have’s. Here’s to mommy-daughter times!

[splendidlyimperfect]

Gray hasn’t seen Natsu in years - not since he moved away with his boyfriend Joel and Natsu stopped texting him. A chance run-in at a bar brings Natsu back into Gray’s life, but the encounter puts Gray in danger when Joel finds out. Natsu quickly realizes that Gray’s stuck in a cycle of violence, and wants to help him escape. But leaving isn’t that easy, and sometimes loving someone might not be enough. 

Chapter Summary: Natsu shows up again, and Gray doesn't know what to do.

Chapters (10/21):  1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 Rating: Mature Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Natsu Dragneel/Gray Fullbuster, Gray Fullbuster/Original Male Character(s) Tags: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Abuse, Abusive Relationships, Rape/Non-con Elements, Rape Aftermath, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Natsu just wants to help, but Gray feels like he can’t leave, Non-Linear Narrative, Trans Character, Tumblr: FTLGBTales, ftlgbtpride2019, Coming Out, First Love, Angst with a Happy Ending, I promise

-----

you and i both have to hide, where i can't be yours and you can't be mine

com· pli· ca· tion | \ ˌkäm-plə-ˈkā-shən noun : a difficult factor or issue often appearing unexpectedly and changing existing plans, methods, or attitudes

.

x april

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“Gray! New table for you in section three!”

Gray sighs, rubbing his face and nodding at Jeremy. It’s busy today – even though the lunch rush is almost over, the restaurant is still packed, and Gray’s both exhausted and hungover. He wipes at the sweat running down the back of his neck before washing his hands and heading out into the front of the restaurant.

“Good afternoon, welcome to...”

Gray trails off as he realizes that the person sitting in his section is Natsu.

Shit.

There’s an awkward silence as they stare at each other, and then Gray’s eyes flick across the table to a vaguely familiar blond man in a police uniform.

Gray’s stomach immediately drops and he’s sure he’s going to throw up.

“Gray, right?” The man smiles at him, and Gray realizes with relief that it’s just Natsu’s friend from the bachelor party last night. He rearranges his face into something neutral while he desperately tries to remember the man’s name. Stan? Stiles? Sting.

“Y-yeah,” Gray says after a second. He can feel Natsu staring at him, and Gray’s suddenly incredibly conscious of the faint red mark across his cheek. “Sorry, I, uh—there was a mistake, I...”

Gray’s vision blurs and for a terrifying moment he thinks he might pass out. He catches himself on the table, refusing to meet Natsu’s gaze, then turns around and all but runs back into the kitchen. His heart is pounding, and he leans back against the wall near the staff room, taking deep breaths.

“What are you—Gray? Are you okay?”

A gentle hand lands on Gray’s arm and he’s about to shrug it off when he realizes that it’s just Lucy.

Continue reading on AO3

A gentle hand lands on Gray’s arm and he’s about to shrug it off when he realizes that it’s just Lucy.

“Sorry,” he says, leaning back against the wall and taking a deep breath. “I just—I...” His hands won’t stop shaking and he clenches them into fists, digging his nails into his palms to try and focus. “Can you take my new table?”

Lucy looks out across the restaurant, then back to Gray. “The cop and the guy with the pink hair?” she asks, and he nods, crossing his arms over his chest. Lucy sighs. “Are you in trouble?”

Gray sighs, forcing himself to look up at Lucy and give her a wry smile. “It’s silly,” he says, trying to keep his voice even. “He’s my ex – the guy with the pink hair – we haven’t talked in a while and it’s just...”

“Gotcha.” Lucy squeezes Gray’s hand and gives him a grin. “Want me to spit in his drink?”

Gray manages a laugh as he shakes his head. “I appreciate it,” he says, “but he’s not actually a bad guy. I just don’t think I can handle him right now. He’s... a lot.”

“Uhuh.” Lucy rolls her eyes. “You’ve met my ex, I know a thing or two about ‘a lot.’ I’ve got this.” Then she squeezes Gray’s arm and heads out to the front of the restaurant.

-----

Gray manages to avoid Natsu’s questioning gaze for the rest of the lunch rush, and when he and Sting finally leave, Gray breathes a sigh of relief.

“Honestly, I think you downgraded,” Lucy says, appearing behind Gray in the break room and sitting down on the couch. “He’s cute.” She holds out a piece of paper to Gray and he groans, grabbing it before slumping down on one of the chairs.

“What does he want?” he grumbles, unfolding the note.

I swear I'm not stalking you, I had no idea you worked here. I hope you got home ok last night. I’m gonna be hanging out at Second Beach this evening, I'd love to see you again while we’re both sober. xo

Gray groans, dropping his head into his hands. After Joel had fallen asleep last night, Gray had read Natsu’s note one last time, then burned it and washed the ashes down the sink. The fifty dollars is hidden in his work locker, tucked in the sleeve of his extra shirt.

A touch on Gray’s wrist drags him out of his reverie and he looks up to see Lucy crouched down in front of him.

“I’m fine,” he says immediately, and she rolls her eyes at him.

“Go,” she says, gesturing to the note. “Yes, I’m nosy, and no, you’re not fine.” When Gray tries to protest, she shakes her head. “How many times have you covered for me when the twins have been sick, Gray? I owe you.”

“But I—”

“If Joel shows up, I’ll text you.” The look Lucy gives him is so knowing that Gray feels his cheeks start to burn. He glances down at where Lucy’s hand is resting on his arm – over the bruises that are hidden by the fabric of his shirt.

“I can’t,” Gray says softly. Lucy takes both of Gray’s hands in hers and squeezes them.

“Gray,” she says gently, “I just want to help.”

“I don’t need help,” he insists. A spark of anger ignites in the midst of his fear, and he pulls his hands away from her, pushing the chair back and standing up. “Everything’s fine. I just don’t want to see my stupid ex.”

Lucy sighs, pushing herself up to her feet. “Okay,” she says, pulling her hair back into a messy bun and straightening her apron. “But if you change your mind, I’m here.”

-----

Despite spending the rest of his shift convincing himself to ignore Natsu’s note, Gray finds himself walking down to Second Beach later that afternoon. Joel’s working until nine, so Gray calls and tells him the closest thing to the truth that he can – he's taking Bella to the beach to meet Lucy and the boys.

He convinces himself that the only reason he’s going is to apologize for his drunken mistake. It’ll be the last time they talk, because he promised Joel, and Joel trusts Gray, even when he doesn’t deserve it.

“You came!” Natsu’s face lights up as soon as he sees Gray, and he runs across the sand, dropping down to a crouch in front of Bella. She’s already hyper, so she launches herself at Natsu and starts licking his face while her tail whips back and forth.

“Bella, sit,” Gray says half-heartedly, but Natsu’s grinning and rubbing behind her ears and telling her what a good girl she is, so she ignores Gray in favor of the attention.

Eventually Gray gives up and just watches them. Considering it’s been five years, Natsu looks remarkably similar. His hair’s longer and his ears are pierced, but his smile is the same. He’s still got those freckles on his shoulders that Gray used to kiss, and the scar on his neck from the time his brother pushed him into a barbed wire fence, and...

Gray stops himself and looks away before Natsu can catch him staring.

Eventually Natsu stands up and tucks his hands into his pockets, then raises an eyebrow at Gray. “How’s your head?”

Gray snorts, tucking his hair behind his ear and shrugging. “Could be worse,” he says. “You?”

Natsu laughs, tipping his head up to watch a flock of gulls fighting each other over the scraps of somebody’s lunch. “I’ll live,” he says eventually. “I, uh... definitely haven’t had that much to drink in a while.”

Gray sighs, wishing he could just avoid this conversation entirely. “Me neither,” he says quickly. “I’m sorry I led you on. I wasn’t thinking, and I was surprised, and—”

“Hey, it’s okay,” Natsu interrupts, shaking his head. “I just... I was worried about you.”

“Well, don’t be,” Gray snaps. He exhales slowly, then shakes his head. “Sorry. It’s been a long day.”

Natsu nods, and they both stand in silence for a minute before Natsu gestures to a bench not far from them. “Can we... talk?”

“Aren’t they gonna miss you?” Gray asks, gesturing to a group of guys down at the edge of the water. He can see Sting’s spiky blond hair again – he's not in uniform, now – and a few other people that Gray vaguely recognizes from the bar last night.

“They’ll live,” Natsu says, reaching out for Gray’s hand. Gray pulls away from him, wrapping Bella’s leash around his wrist, and Natsu sighs. “Fuck, sorry. Can we... please?”

As soon as they sit down on the bench, Bella leans her head back into both of their laps, tongue lolling out of her mouth as she begs them to pet her. Natsu laughs, stroking the soft fur on top of her nose.

“What do you want to talk about?” Gray asks softly, watching a little girl chase the waves out along the beach, then giggle and run back to her mother, leaving wet footprints behind to get washed away by the next tide.

“I missed you,” Natsu says, looking sideways at Gray.

Gray snorts. “You’ve got a funny way of showing it,” he mutters, and when Natsu gives him a puzzled look, he rolls his eyes. “I haven’t heard from you in years,” Gray says, and he can’t help the bitterness that seeps into his voice. “You barely even recognized me.”

“I... what?” Natsu sounds genuinely confused, and Gray looks over at him, frowning. “Ellie, I—”

“Gray.”

“Gray, shit, sorry,” Natsu says, shaking his head. “You’re the one who stopped talking to me.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out his phone. “Erza and I—”

“Seriously?” Gray’s trying hard to keep his voice down, but hurt and anger are coloring his words. “You both stopped talking to me when I told you I was moving here with Joel, so—”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Natsu looks so taken aback that Gray stops mid-sentence and stares at him. “You told me ‘hope life treats you well,’ then never texted me again!”

“...what?”

“Look!”

Natsu holds out his phone and Gray stares down at it, then back up at Natsu again.

“No, I...” Gray closes his eyes and runs his hand over his face. This is a mistake. He shouldn’t be here. “I have to go.”

He stands up and Natsu makes a soft sound of protest, reaching out and grabbing his wrist. Gray tries to mask a wince as he pulls away, glaring at Natsu. He doesn’t miss the way Natsu’s eyes quickly drop to his arm.

“Gray, please,” Natsu says, standing up as well. He doesn’t reach out again, but his eyes are sad. “This isn’t right, something—I didn’t abandon you, I swear to god, you have to believe me.”

“I don’t have to do anything,” Gray says, tugging on Bella’s leash. She whines at him, thumping her tail in the sand. “You can’t just show up after five years of not talking to me—”

“I have texted you a hundred times!” Natsu insists, holding out his phone again. “Gray, I don’t know what’s going on, but I promise, I— ”

Gray shakes his head, taking another step backward. He needs to leave. He promised Joel, and Natsu is dangerous. He’s the spark that’s going to burn down everything Gray has built over the last five years.

“Gray, look at me,” Natsu begs, putting his hands out placatingly. “Please, I just—something doesn’t feel right, and I’m scared for you... you’re not acting like yourself—”

“You don’t know me!” Gray shouts. Bella looks back and forth between the two of them and lets out a soft, rumbling woof, then settles down next to Gray. People are starting to stare, and Gray can’t cry, not here. “There’s nothing wrong with me, just leave me alone.”

“Please,” Natsu whispers, and Gray stares at the ground. He doesn’t want to see the confused, pitying look on Natsu’s face. “I just want to help.”

“I don’t need help,” Gray says, fingers tightening on Bella’s leash.

“You... c’mon, Gray, you’ve got bruises, and you were crying, what the hell am I supposed to think?”

“I was drunk and I fucked up,” Gray insists. “This was a mistake. I have to go.” He doesn’t look at Natsu as he whispers, “please leave me alone.”

Then he turns on his heel and walks away, biting his lips as hard as he can and trying not to cry.

[invcder]

Druxy - Something which looks good on the outside, but is actually rotten inside. !

Send me a word and I’ll write a drabble. 

            It had become somewhat of a pattern, an unspoken agreement between the two hereditary enemies ; Zim would launch a spectacularly evil and overly complicated plot to overthrow the human race, Dib would rise up to combat his merciless alien will and attempt to save his miserable, doomed planet, Zim’s plan would ultimately fail ( though it was usually through some form of incompetence or unwitting self-sabotage, rather than due to any effort on Dib’s part, however well-meaning said efforts had been ), and the cycle would continue. But this particular phase was relatively new – every so often, after another catastrophic clash of opposing wills, when the dust had settled, the pair would relent to one another in a sort of unspoken truce ; it wasn’t as if Zim was going to launch another nefarious plan in the same day, after all, and often it seemed that Dib was too exhausted from his efforts to oppose the invader to bother stopping him even if he did so. No, instead they would both wordlessly acknowledge the fact that the game was over for today, and resolve to be civil with one another until the next morning, when the alien would undoubtedly resume his malicious intentions with renewed vigor.

            Sometimes they simply bid the other goodbye ; well then, curse you and all that, death to the humans, see you at school tomorrow. But other times, they would …talk – discuss the unfolding of the day’s events, take some superficial pleasure in ridiculing the other’s foolish shortcomings, or complimenting one another on the rare occasion that they noted something worthy of acknowledgement in their respective rival. But on even rarer occasions, they would talk about nothing pertaining to their perpetual struggle for control of the planet at all – the Dib human’s somewhat lackluster home life, scientific theories that humans had yet to stumble upon, and sometimes …when the alien was feeling distracted enough to reveal such things …he would satisfy the human’s curiosity about Irken customs. That was how they had stumbled upon the conversation in question, a topic which seemed oddly foreign to the Earth boy ; being defective.

            ❝ – Eh? Your puny human mind misunderstands. There’s no fixing it. ❞

            Defective was a four letter word – well, not literally. Not in English. It was nine letters in that language ; and actually, it was even more characters when spelled out in Irken – but that wasn’t the point. It didn’t mean the same thing that it did here on this filthy planet – or, perhaps it did in essence, but the repercussions for the condition were vastly different. It wasn’t as simple as rewiring a hard drive, or rebooting a computer. No …on Irk, being defective was a good as a death sentence. In fact, those who were deemed so were resigned to a fate even worse than death.

            ❝ – defectives are mistakes; nothing but a hindrance to the objective. So accordingly, they are erased – their consciousness is deleted, their PAK destroyed, and their existence is erased from Irk’s recorded history. – they thought ZIM was defective once, you know. ❞

            He admitted with a nonchalance that didn’t suit at all with the description of the title he had just provided. In fact, he seemed rather smug about the matter, the soles of his standard issue boots scraping against the roof tiles of the human’s squalid little home as he pointed his chin up toward the stars with pride.

            ❝ – They held a trial for me and everything. Of course, the Control Brains determined that it was all a misunderstanding ; after all, how could ZIM be defective? As it turns out, I’m just so amazing that it was beyond their comprehension. They ended up giving me a promotion, and let me pilot the Massive, too. It was the least they could do, after all. But I didn’t blame them, of course – very few minds can grasp just how exceptionally advanced my genius is. Take GIR, for example. ❞

            He gestures vaguely with a wave of his gloved claw down into the human’s yard, where the little green-suited robot was currently occupying itself by lying on the side of its over-sized head and running in a circle on the lawn. The grass beneath it had started to flatten and die in response to the abuse, adopting an appearance that was suspiciously similar to that of a traditional crop circle.

            ❝ – The Tallest gave him specifically to me for my extremely important mission here. He’s an incredibly advanced model, light-years beyond the capability of standard-issue SIR units. To your untrained, human eye holes, he likely appears to be quite stupid – BUT YOU’RE WRONG !! WRONG !!! – Your tiny human brain meats simply cannot grasp the complexity of his advanced engineering. Zim is the same, naturally – I’m so amazing that most life forms are simply too stupid to understand it. ❞

@hebelieved