#Been in a serious long term relationship for 5 years now & we are engaged but she is having a sexuality crisis currently & | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

death-stranded · 3 months

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i’ve been double-teamed by both @nihil-ism & @demonrunningwild to post 5 things that make me happy. (that’s one thing to add to the list 😏)

i did one of these recently but i cant even remember what i put on it so i’ll try give a bit more insight to my answers:

coffee

there may be a caffeine addiction at play here but coffee honestly just makes me happy. i’m not fussy about what kind, but i prefer them strong, hot, and black as my damaged wee heart 🖤

and i love being a total homo with a tasty ice coffee (especially because i hate the sun and hot weather.)

there are elements of grounding techniques from the taste, smell and sensations that i learned during therapy that i think contribute to the overall experience for me.

(also when i’m feeling self destructive i love pushing myself over the edge with caffeine anxiety attacks, but i don’t think that’s very ‘happy’ lol.)

video games

i’ve been such a gamer since i was a child and as i’ve grown up i’ve found myself using these experiences as a way of processing things i’m dealing with. i love good storytelling and also overcoming challenges and problem solving.

i typically tend to play 3 main genres: survival horror, fantasy/rpg, and souls-like action-rpgs.

i love scary things and the sense of achievement i get from surviving my way through a horror game, i always find these characters more relatable because of the ordeals they’re facing.

i get really emotional playing huge fantasy games set in incredible worlds, and i love the archetype of light versus dark - which is why my faves are mainly from the final fantasy franchise, with casts of wonderful characters fighting together against otherwordly adversaries.

the reason i love souls-like games is because of the beauty in the stories, lore, and world design, but also the intense difficulty level, forcing you to keep trying over and over until you finally succeed. i once saw a youtube video where someone spoke about how dark souls helped them battle their depression and it really spoke to me too.

my bf

we’ve been together over 10 years now, which is a lifetime away from my unstable love life during my teens-early 20s, with several bfs, more awful first-dates than i can remember, and more one night stands than i even want to try and remember 🤣

we’re very different people and i used to struggle with this in the beginning, but over the long term we’ve given eachother some parts of what we’re each missing. i’ve changed so much during our relationship and he has been the right partner to keep me grounded during some extremely difficult personal development. i’ve engaged with treatment for my mental illnesses, now over 1.5ys sober, become more responsible, and learned to take better care of myself in general. i like having someone who i can take of, to work on improving myself so i can bring more happiness to his life too, and we really work together to try and make things a bit easier on us both.

even after 10+ years i still struggle with those ‘frantic fears or abandonment (real or imagined)’ on an almost daily basis, but our life together has helped me to find some kind of manageable stability.

autumn

my favourite time of year, mainly because i don’t like sunshine and warm weather. winter is nice but i don’t enjoy christmas so i find it all quite stressful.

autumn is the right balance for me because i love dressing in layers, and it’s the right colour palette for me with reds, blacks, and dark oranges. i love chunky knitwear, plaid shirts, scarves, and big black boots.

i also love all the seasonal coffees and things that show up, and i loooove halloween.

people around me always seem to be depressed when summer is over, but i know i’ve always felt different to average people and i feel more at home when the weather is colder, darker, are more uncertain. i hate summer, so i’m usually depressed during those months haha.

butt stuff

alright, i was gonna try keep it wholesome but honestly this is just me, and it’s a serious answer lol.

i’m really self-conscious about my body but i feel confident and powerful when it comes to my butt 😅🥹 i love cute underwear that enhances my features haha.

when i was younger i used sex as a replacement for self-esteem, to try and make people like me, but there are still things from those times that i carry into a healthier relationship today.

on a much, much more serious note, i like the agency i get from being in control of my body (and what goes into it lol.)

i’m also not an athletic person but i’ve set myself goals and challenges to overcome in different ways 🥴

i have a bit of a collector mentality, at one point in time i had like 40-50 or so toys, but i’ve de-cluttered down to a single drawer of dildos and a toolbox of other items.

but like, i have such variety for my different moods that it actually does make me happy. you could say i’m finding more creative ways to fill that black-hole void in my heart 😏 i love my cute comfy small plugs for video gaming days, my bigger boys for when i have too much energy, my really big boys for when i’m up for a challenge, the escapism of a fantasy/monster dildo, and i always feel like a good boy when i’m wagging my tail plug 🐶

thanks for tagging me cuties 😘 i hope i didn’t gross anyone out 🥹

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 1 month

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youtube

Facing It Together: The Male Survivors of Domestic Abuse | Loose Men

Vernon Kay: This year, Loose Women launched a groundbreaking campaign about domestic abuse. It's called "Facing it Together." As well as shining the light on the stories of female survivors, male charities told us they'd had an 80% increase in calls to their help lines, with one in seven men experiencing abuse in their lifetime. It's something we here at Loose Men knew we had to support.

Now I recently sat down with two survivors whose lives were made hell by the women they were married to. To find out how they were able to move on.

Vernon: I'm with Rob and Richard, two survivors of domestic abuse. After 20 years of domestic abuse, Richard secretly filmed his wife's actions, leading to her being jailed for 4 years. His story was recently covered in a Channel 5 documentary. Meanwhile, Rob's former wife is now serving time in prison for attempting to hire a hitman following their split.

Vernon: Rob, Richard thank you very much for joining us. We really appreciate it, and it's important that you guys sit with us and tell us your stories. Rob we'll start with you.

Rob Parkes: Way back, I met my ex-wife at University very soon after that, things started to become really intense and I started to pull away from my friends, my family. We moved to the opposite end of the country to be, effectively, completely by ourselves. And all of a sudden you turn around and you realize that actually my ex was my entire life.

Vernon: What kind of things was she saying that would stop you from seeing your friends?

Rob: She never said I couldn't, but she would make it incredibly difficult for me to go.

Vernon: So Rob, things escalated and then you separated from Victoria, is that right?

Rob: Things became really acrimonious and became very, very difficult.

Vernon: How did the police get involved?

Rob: By that point I was relatively used to to police turning up at my house, but this time they were there to tell me that she had been arrested for trying to engage the services of a professional hitman.

Vernon: It's incomprehensible, the fact that someone would do that. [Richard], your story is completely different.

Richard Spencer: It was-- so at the beginning, I felt like everything in the relationship was normal, and in my case, I think that probably lasted like, about, probably about two years, I think. So, in terms of physical abuse, it'd be things like, you know, just pushing and shoving and slapping and things. Obviously in hindsight, looking back and see any of those things are completely wrong. It would nearly always be when she was drunk. The abuse started to escalate and I was I was getting marks on my face, there was punching and kicking, things like that. At that time, I was traveling with work and I'd have to put makeup on and things, when I was going to meetings and things like that. But, that's the most difficult stage for me to look back on and think, why didn't I leave at that time? How could have I put up with something for so long?

Vernon: So, the one thing I know that people are going to be asking: why didn't you say anything?

Rob: And it's the one question that I ask myself, you know, why can't you say anything? You're the guy, you're the man.

Vernon: But saying that, do you think there's a bit of stigma behind "you're the guy, you're the man"? You know what I mean? Oh come on, be what we deem stereotypically masculine and deal with the situation.

Rob: Exactly. That's exactly the point, the reason why I couldn't say anything, is because of those things.

Vernon: Right. It was shocking what was going on. You had all the recordings made and then when a friend saw the footage of what was going on, he realized how serious it was and he went and called the authorities.

Richard: And he was concerned to the point where it was, well, I'm going to come down and see you. So came down to see us, that's when he noticed that I had a bruise, probably a black eye or something like that. I just kind of surrendered to the truth and just thought just relief. I'm just going to say what's happened. I didn't want to make up excuses for it, and subsequently I'd sent him some videos of the abuse because I wanted to check that I wasn't overreacting. And then that's when he sent them to like Adult Safeguarding, and then the police got involved and then she was arrested.

Rob: You know, luckily these days there's lots of different groups that you can talk to and there's so many people out there to help you. But if you don't feel as if you can get in touch with them, or if you don't know how to get in touch with them, or you're scared that is really really problematic.

Vernon: Having heard from Rob and Richard, I wanted to find out what help is available to men. I'm with Mark Brooks from one of the UK's leading male abuse charities, Mankind Initiative, to hear more.

Vernon: Mark, we discovered that domestic abuse comes in many shapes and forms. What are the most common?

Mark Brooks: The most common for men is psychological control, where they're basically being told they're worthless, being belittled, being humiliated, but also economic abuse, not having any control over their own finances. But also being isolated from their friends and family, being told that if you leave you'll never see your kids again.

Vernon: If we're fearing the worst, if we're fearing that there is a case of domestic abuse amongst our friends, what telltale signs should we look out for?

Mark: Firstly, if you haven't seen them for ages when you used to see them regularly. Also, if they've got injuries and bruises which they're continually making excuses for. But also whether they become more depressed, more anxious, more withdrawn.

Vernon: So what are the best ways to get our friends to open up if something is going on at home?

Mark: A lot of is around having open-ended questions. For example, just saying how are you doing, you know, how's things at home. So what then happens is that over a period of time, that person will see that you are interested in their well-being and the door is moved just ajar, and that means that at some stage they will actually walk through that door and tell you exactly what is going on.

Vernon: Well also Mark, as we've seen with Richard and Rob as well, there is a life after domestic abuse.

Mark: There's a great service for men in every large town, city and county across the UK. More and more friends are taking it seriously, and society as a whole and the police. So if you are a male victim, you can become a male survivor.

#Loose Men #male victims of domestic abuse #male victims of domestic violence #domestic violence #domestic abuse #violent women #female abusers #male victims #religion is a mental illness

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indramond · 1 year

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I'd be lying if I said I haven't been a hypocrite. I haven't always practiced what I preached. Yet I always find it interesting how others can be so comfortable in the blanket of their hypocrisy. But I love it even more when they get their karma for it. Case in point:

Years ago, I made the mistake of dating the much older brother of a girl I went to school with. We'll call him "William". He was 20 years older than me. We met through a mutual friend of ours. Everything started off okay. We went on dates, met each other's families, he would spend the night, and we were intimate with each other. Until he dumped me via text. He wouldn't tell me why and I cussed him out. I called him on the phone yelling and he hung up on me twice. I know I know...not the most emotionally stable thing to do. My sister got ahold of him and he told her why he was ending the relationship. He said I was deranged, he didn't think I was a good person or a good mother to my children. He didn't think I was someone that should be around his child. He had a son from a previous relationship that lived on the East Coast with his mother. We'll get back to that in a bit.

As upset and angry as I was, I had to do some serious self reflection. He was right that I wasn't a good parent. I was lax on guiding my children's behavior and didn't set good boundaries. I was also neglectful and disrespectful to my children...very very similar to my own mother's treatment of me. I will talk more about her in a future blog.

Well fast forward years later...I find out through a mutual friend that William and his now wife "Zasha" were arrested and charged with selling methamphetamines to a narc near a school! If I recall, both were convicted on all charges and sentenced to less than 5 years. I don't call if they got prison time or jail time and probation. William appealed his conviction but only two charges were dropped due to insufficient evidence. The main charges stuck. So this fool, who didn't think I was suitable for his son to be around, thought a meth head was an appropriate stepparent for his son. See, we never know what's really going on with people. What they really aren't showing you or telling you. I also found out that William had a habit of jumping from woman to woman. When I met him, he had just ended a 3 month relationship and engagement to another woman. That should've been a red flag right there! He got engaged to another chick 6 months after we broke up. They married but had the marriage annulled couple months later. Months later, he became engaged to his now wife and the next year was arrested for selling drugs with her. He even tried to throw her under the bus in his appeal to get his sentence and conviction overturned. Claiming that she was the one distributing the drugs not him. Along with using his psychological disorders as an excuse. It didn't really work. There was evidence to support the more serious charges of his case.

All in all, William was just an unhealthy person who was a hypocrite and a shyster. As well as most likely a drug addict. He may have even found another woman while we were dating and that's why he dumped me so abruptly. What gets to me is that he couldn't wife up his son's mother, but was quick to wife up other women he wasn't in long term relationships with. The fact he was willing to sacrifice his job, freedom, reputation, and life for a tweaker who was in and out of jail shows what a clown and pathetic excuse of a man he was. Probably still is...along with being a hypocrite.

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guiltysecretpasttime · 3 years

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Linzin Week 2021: Day 5 - Satomobile

Here’s another one of my late contributions. This was quite fun to write. Hope you enjoy it too.

One-shot, AU Lin x Tenzin Note: Set in the same universe as my other stories – Contentment and The Airbender’s Wife. You can read this in AO3 as well.

Lady Lin Beifong and Guest

You are cordially invited to the unveiling of the latest luxury model of the Satomobile.

The next lines were on the event details.

Tenzin flipped the invitation close; he had read enough.

Lady Lin Beifong and guest indeed.

If he did not know any better, he would have thought that the invitation was harmless enough. Just the standard generic invitation a local company was sending out to the influential people of the city.

Unfortunately, he did know better. This was a smarmy way of Hiroshi Sato to remind him how insignificant the airbender was to modern society.

“Well?” Lin’s voice cut through his internal monologue that was all about disparaging thoughts on the industrialist. “Are you free on that night?”

“Oh, are you asking me to join you?” Tenzin feigned ignorance. “Do you mean to say, Lady Lin – I will be your lowly guest for the night?”

Lin flicked a small pebble to this forehead. “Don’t be daft, Tenzin. Of course, you’re my plus one. There was never a doubt about that. So, how about it?” She took back the invitation and envelope from him.

She grabbed the pen that he had on his office desk and was poised to respond to the RSVP.

Tenzin pretended to go through the calendar and the planner his assistant had on this table. Lin flicked another pebble at him, knowing his tactics. Despite being engaged with each other for more than a year, Tenzin still regards Hiroshi Sato as a sore spot in his and Lin’s relationship.

He huffed when he confirmed from his calendar that the night of the launch was marked free.

Of course, he had some misgivings. Hiroshi and Lin had dated before they had and had been engaged for longer than they were.

Well, if he, Tenzin, had his way, they would not be engaged for longer than Lin and Sato. He would make sure to seal the deal soonest.

Plock!

“Stop with the pebbles, woman. Where are you even getting them? I’m free to attend the Future Industries gala.”

---

Tenzin had to acknowledge that Sato had pulled out all the stops in his latest press event. The venue was spacious and shiny, with overhead lights that sparkled. The food spread and drinks were lavish and decadent. The people were colorful and elegant, reeking of affluence and influence.

However, none of these people held a candle to the Lady Lin Beifong.

All eyes and all cameras were on them when Tenzin softly airbended them down Oogi, assisting Lin to alight as gracefully as she possibly can from the sky bison.

He knew that Lin had several formal dresses in her wardrobe (all part and parcel of being a Beifong lady) but tonight’s dress was one of his favorites. It consisted of a form-fitting silken bodice that tapers off to a flowing tulle skirt. The sleeveless canary yellow top with blue embroidery accentuated her figure and her toned forearms. And, to his chagrin, the slits of shimmering tulle skirt of yellow and sienna highlighted Lin’s smooth legs when he bended them down the bison.

While he was proud to arrive with her on his arm, he was feeling a bit awkward now as he stood by while Lin talked shop with a visiting high-ranking detective from Omashu.

The airbender excused himself by offering to get a refill of Lin’s drink. He extricated himself and went off to the bar, trying to recall which one was Lin’s drink.

“…She looked lovely, didn’t she? Resplendent and I bet that gown of hers is worth a fortune.”

“I agree. Such a pity she needed to get transported about with that beast.”

“Oh, come on now, darling, there’s no need to be rude using the term beast.” The speaker paused. “And the sky bison didn’t add to their overall charm either.”

Tenzin felt his face heat up as the guests from a nearby cocktail table gossiped and tittered.

Another guest piped up. “Well, who knows, maybe Lady Beifong will put in an order for latest satomobile tonight. No doubt she is capable of buying one.”

“Indeed.” A snooty-sounding foreign man agreed. “However, we do have to take account of that monk of hers. Don’t they have a vow of poverty or aren’t they against worldly comforts?”

The first guest, the one who talked about the dress being expensive, spoke up again. “Probably, I mean, he probably only has that one set of formal robes that he wears on every occasion.”

“Lady Beifong wouldn’t have to stand for all that inconvenience and disgrace had she not broken up with Hiroshi Sato.”

There was a chorus of murmuring agreement.

“Well, until they are wed – it could still change…”

Tenzin decided he had enough of eavesdropping and selected the brightest fruit punch before hurrying back to Lin’s side, keen not to be seen by the snobbish group.

To his dismay, while the Omashu detective had left Lin, it was Hiroshi Sato himself who was now conversing with his fiancée.

“Here’s your refill, dear.” Tenzin thrust the glass in between them, drawing a startled reaction for both Lin and Sato. “Hope it hasn’t gotten tedious; I’m sorry for taking too long.” He stared pointedly at Sato, who took a step back.

“Don’t worry about it, Tenzin.” Lin thanked him and took a sip. “Hiroshi was just telling me more details about his latest model.”

Sato cleared his throat. “Yes, Master Tenzin as I was telling Lin, this model is a little bit more environmental-friendly than the earlier model. The cushions are likewise more comfortable and would offer more protection in the event of an impact.”

Tenzin simply nodded with disinterest, subtly taking Lin’s unoccupied arm and hooking it around his. Sato was droning on more features and the airbender decided to tune him out. Until he heard…

“…In fact, let me offer you a large discount, for old time’s sake.”

“I can afford your satomobile!”

It took Tenzin a few seconds to realize he was the one who blurted out the last statement.

Lin and Sato looked at him oddly, as did four people within hearing radius.

“Yes, dear, we know you can.” Lin leaned forward, placing a hand on his chest. “But this is about the bulk purchase order for Headquarters. The contract made between RCPD and Future Industries has lapsed so we were talking about drafting a new one.”

“While I’m sure you can buy a satomobile,” Sato had the gall to poke his nose into his faux pas. “I don’t suppose the Air Nation would be pleased if you bought a fleet for the police department.”

“Of course, I knew that.” Tenzin bit out, then took a swig out of whatever swill he had chosen for his drink. “I was just saying -.”

“Oh, Hiroshi – I think that’s your master of ceremonies calling for you?” Lin suddenly pointed towards the stage, where, true enough, a man in bright blue formal wear was scoping the crowd.

Sato immediately excused himself and asked them to enjoy the libation.

“What was that?” Lin untangled her arm from his and turned him so that they were face to face. “Do you really want to purchase a satomobile?”

“Don’t you?” Tenzin threw back at her. “You seemed pretty fascinated by all those add-ons and features -.

“I was being polite.”

But Tenzin continued as though Lin has not spoken. “–And then, maybe at least you won’t have to arrive at fancy gatherings on a large hairy beast.”

“I’m fine with Oogi. He grew on me even if, I do agree with mom, that sky bison tends to smell during long trips.”

“Oh yes but this satomobile – it has all the works. It’s fancy, it’s rich, it’s comfortable, and it’s accepted by the upper-class. Not at all shabby, an embarrassment or out of fashion.”

“Hold up,” Lin raised a hand and wave the glass of fruit punch. “What is this really about? As I’ve said - I’m fine with Oogi and I barely need to transport myself around the city unless it’s for work.” She tilted Tenzin’s chin so he was looking at her. “Are we still talking about satomobiles?”

“Of course.” Tenzin could be stubborn too, and he does have his pride. He did not want his woman to be ashamed of him. He can provide for her, after all.

“Oh, Tenzin. Dear.” The earthbender’s lip quirked up to the side, revealing her amusement, but Tenzin refused to drop his serious countenance. “Well, true – this satomobile might be a bit more comfortable, it might even have more amenities and yes, it is quite showy.” Tenzin shifted uncomfortably. “But – with Oogi, he’s a beloved sky bison. I’ve known Oogi since I was a child. I trust Oogi with all my heart and I know that Oogi will not let me down. Ever.”

Tenzin did not even think twice and leaned forward to capture a quick kiss on Lin’s lips.

She always did know what to say to assuage his doubts.

“Thank you.” Tenzin murmured, his forehead on Lin’s.

Lin pulled back with her eyebrows raised. “Why are you saying thanks? Shouldn’t Oogi be the one doing so?”

He swallowed Lin’s laughter with another kiss.

He did not even mind the sudden camera flash to the side, knowing that this would be part of the double spread in tomorrow’s news feature on the satomobile launch.

Oogi would definitely receive a double helping of the special hay from the Fire Nation tonight.

---

Present day.

“…And that is why, Korra, I’d rather that you do not accept the satomobile that Tarrlok has sent over.” Tenzin finished his retelling at the Avatar who looked non-plussed.

“Or I could simply say I don’t feel right about taking something that luxurious coming from taxpayers’ money – assuming of course that he did charge it to city hall.” Korra drummed her fingers on her cheek. “Or that it’s not right accepting something that expensive since it would be misconstrued as a bribe.”

“Huh.” The airbender blinked at the teenaged avatar. “You’re right.”

“Yep,” Korra grinned, eyes crinkling. “I do read the materials you told me to, even if it was so boring. That constitution and by-laws of Republic City is one snooze fest. But I figured I need to be familiar with it in case Chief decides to land me in jail again.” She added cheekily.

Tenzin stood dumbfounded as Korra excused herself to head on to training.

“Oh, by the way, thanks for telling me that story, though honestly, I could do away with your descriptions of Lin’s ‘figure’, ‘toned forearms, and ‘smooth legs’.” Korra used air-quotes and hurried off with a laugh at the airbending master’s reddening forehead.

#linzin #linzin fanfic #lin beifong #tenzin #linzin2021

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onrainynights · 3 years

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why you can't compare buddie to destiel (from someone who ships both)

this is kind of addressing the recent negativity in the buddie tag, but it's also a collection of my thoughts and reasoning for being buddie-positive despite my experiences with destiel and spn in general. the text of 911 is not really discussed at all, and this is relatively spoiler-free, so if you're thinking of watching 911 I encourage you to read it. if you haven't seen both shows it probably won't make perfect sense, but I wrote this with spn fans who haven't seen 911 in mind, since that's most of my followers (and also seems to be where much of the negativity was coming from) pretty long post under the cut to save your dash

I just want to prepare y'all for the fact that buddie could be the slow burn will they/won't they mlm romance we've been waiting for practically forever.

at this point it's not fair to call it queerbait because where their relationship is now fits the characters and their development. this is not like destiel, where there were many moments over the years that could've ended with them getting together and it would've made sense with the story. buddie right now is in this sweet, wholesome pre-relationship kind of place, which on its own is a compelling dynamic and so fun and good to see. a resolution of it right now would feel out of character—they both still have some development to do before that would feel natural. and so, I don't think we can really call it queerbaiting unless the characters get to that point and there is still no resolution.

also I'd like to point out the overall positivity from the cast when it comes to buddie. both Eddie's and Buck's actors have said (I'm paraphrasing cast statements in this post unless they are in quotations) positive things about the pairing, and Buck's actor has said that he likes the interpretation of Buck as queer, and he would be happy if the writers took his character in that direction. also Eddie's actor with "that's what they all say" when buddie was referred to as a "bromance". Jennifer Love Hewitt, who plays Buck's sister (another main character), is very supportive of buddie, saying she's "rooting for it", that it would be "amazing", she doesn't "see how it couldn't happen one day". this was in response to hearing that a fan insists Buck and Eddie will be a couple. She flat-out said "I think so, too." She jokes about buddie with Buck's and Eddie's actors all the time. Also, my favorite bit from the video of her saying all this, "Let's manifest it together!"

It's safe to say this is a VERY different environment to spn. I don't think I've ever seen a cast this positive about a show's main non-canon queer ship before. NEVER. I think it's safe to say that if/when buddie is canonized, the cast will be just as excited as the fans—at least JLH will be! Add into the fact that the show's PR seems to be leaning into bi buck and buddie right now, it's a VERY different vibe than spn had, definitely. There's no gaslighting of the fans here, at least not that I've seen. also, although 911 has a large casual viewership, I think it's safe to say the GA would not be upset by buddie—there are only 3 serious, long-term romantic relationships involving main characters in this show, and one of them is a lesbian marriage with two children. And yes, the characters are shown being lesbians, it's not just a stated fact; the audience is privy to their relationship (and their interactions with their adorable kids). I think it's safe to say that buddie would go over well with the fans, even the casual viewers (of which there are many). buddie doesn't seem to be a huge divider in fandom like destiel is, either. reactions generally seem to be either "I ship it" or "I don't care either way."

Also I'd like to point out that while yes, it's possible that buddie is only bait (which would be disappointing), there's a reason queerbaiting works. people WANT to be queerbaited, because it's nearly indistinguishable from a slow burn will they/won't they queer romance. queerbaiting allows fans to make theories, create fan content (including fic), and keeps them engaged with the dynamic and the show. fans who are vulnerable to queerbaiting want a slow burn will they/won't they queer romance, which is currently an almost completely untapped market. spn could've tapped it, but despite the huge fandom they did not. there are SO MANY people outside of spn fandom who want a slow burn mlm romance, one that keeps the audience guessing, one that's will they/won't they, one that is not guaranteed, and that is why queerbaiting works so well. the audience doesn't just want the payoff, they also want the build-up. the longer the build-up, the higher the payoff, and the suspense of the build-up is gone if you know from the start that the payoff is definitely coming. that's part of why malec from shadowhunters didn't fully tap this market—there was no question of if, only the question of when (which wasn't really a question either, given there was an episode in season 1 literally titled "malec" when they got together.) the characters were always queer, the show being an adaptation of a book series where they were in a relationship and eventually had children together.

this was why November 5th was such a big deal—fans were so far past the will they/won't they aspect of destiel, firmly believing that destiel would always end as a "won't they" and not a "will they" that when cas confessed his romantic love for dean, destiel trended on Twitter over the US election. you all know that story, but maybe not everyone reading this knows that after Nov. 5 there was a case of hundreds if not thousands of spn fans experiencing love sickness because of the confession scene. the payoff of making destiel fully canon (and reciprocated, in English) would've been huge. fans would've been throwing their money at the c/w.

which leads me to the possibility (this is not at all me saying that I think this happened or even is likely, just that it's one possibility that /could/ have happened) that buddie started as bait, that the writers never intended for them to be a couple, but saw fan reactions to buddie during season 2 and started to lean into it in season 3 (and 4 so far, but it just started so I don't want to make any generalized statements about it) possibly still as bait or maybe not deciding yet if they'll go anywhere with it. and then maybe they saw destiel trending on November 5th, realized just how BIG the market for a slow burn will they/won't they mlm romance is, and said "hey, we already have the foundations for one of those. why not go for it and draw in all those viewers who clearly want one so badly?"

if buddie goes canon, because the cast and PR have been so positive about it, unlike spn, and because of the text of the show itself, the show's creatives could VERY EASILY claim that they were never baiting, that it was all an intentional slow burn will they/won't they romance from the beginning, and most people would believe them; there isn't really any evidence to the contrary, although I am sure there would be at least a few fans convinced it started as queerbaiting, and there might not be any evidence to refute that, either.

the point is that 911 is currently sitting on a gold mine. if they play their cards right, and execute buddie well, they will monopolize this market that old straight white men serving as network executives have failed so far to really tap into. they queerbait without the payoff, which gives the show a reputation among those in the market who haven't seen it, guaranteeing they will never watch it. shows in this vein: sherlock (huge reputation for queerbaiting and a finale fans didn't like) and spn (huge reputation for queerbaiting and a finale fans didn't like). spn got so, so close with cas's confession but then continued to gaslight its fans, and PR did not lean into destiel AT ALL. if 911 did buddie? the PR team would be all over it. it would be a moneymaker, big time, and Fox knows it. if buddie, or even just bi buck, went canon, tumblr would be all over it. viewership for the show, which is already impressive, would skyrocket. 911 would monopolize this market, because fans wary of queerbaiting would watch it with the knowledge that the payoff is there, and there really wouldn't be a competitor until other shows saw the success of buddie and followed suit with their own pairings, and given the fact that the market specifically wants /slow burn/ queer romances, that might take a couple years. that puts 911 in a really good position, where suddenly the fandom of the show, not just the GA, is very large and likely very dedicated to the show. the success of canon buddie might just change the landscape of TV in the coming years, showing execs that while queerbaiting does work, actually going through with it is really where the money is. 911 would not just monopolize the market for a while; it would pioneer it.

if buddie never goes canon, I would probably be a bit disappointed at the wasted potential, but unless the characters get to that point where canon buddie seems like the most logical outcome and they /don't/ go for it, I won't be truly upset because I don't think it's fair to claim its queerbaiting until then. I can't tell you how likely it is that buddie will be canon at some point, but it seems FAR more likely than destiel /ever/ did, and we ended up getting cas's confession in the end. I have hope, despite being hurt so badly by spn. 911 is a genuinely great show with some fantastic writing, and they don't leave chekov's gun unfired, unlike spn.

really, it comes down to this: if Jennifer Love Hewitt is allowed to clown for buddie, then so am I, and I'll enjoy this show—which is amazing even without canon buddie—while I apply my clown makeup.

#9-1-1 #spn #buddie #tagging as #destiel #so anyone with that tag blacklisted can avoid this post #unfortunately I have seen w/ncest shippers in the buddie tag so that's just a precaution so I don't get attacked #posts for puck #I might add more to this later who knows but I think this is a pretty good collection of my thoughts #buddie positivity #911natural

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readyplayerhobi · 4 years

Text

Flower | 39

; Hoseok x Reader

; Genre: Fluff

; Word Count: 4.6k

; Warnings: Drinking, mentions of pain

; Synopsis: You finally decide to take a dip into the world of online dating and find the Flower dating app. One of the top matches for you proves to be a guy who looks to be your complete opposite; tattooed, pierced, a metalhead and oh…incredibly handsome. What happens when you throw caution to the wind and reach out to him?

; A/N: Much faster this time, huh? For only the second time in the story...enjoy Hoseok’s POV! I hope you enjoy it and please reblog if you do so others can read <3 let me know your thoughts in a comment or ask! :D

; Flower Masterpost

“Everyone, take a shot,” Jimin says loudly, thrusting the tray holding a dozen or so filled shot glasses around the table. “Good, good. Now, let’s drink to Hoseok defying all our expectations and getting married!”

The younger man is already half-drunk, never being one to go slow or take it easy when there’s plenty of alcohol around. Hoseok isn’t particularly surprised, not when the group had already visited three bars by this point. It was his bachelor party tonight, only two weeks before his wedding and his friends were determined to give him a good time.

He’d been adamant that he wanted absolutely nothing to do with any strippers or anything that could be accidentally misconstrued. The last thing he needed was you thinking he’d cheated only weeks before the big day. Plus, he just wasn’t into that anymore.

Instead, he’d asked Jungkook to try and plan something that would avoid stuff like that. Hoseok just wanted to have a good time with his friends, not potentially cause a scandal. Thankfully, his best man had agreed happily and had instead planned the night to be a series of bar hops around the city. The day had involved everyone driving an hour to a place that let them drive quad bikes, do archery, have some paintball matches and loads more.

He was hurting from the paintballs, particularly the awful gauntlet they’d made him run at the end in which everyone had formed a tunnel for him to run through while shooting the shit out of his ass, but he’d enjoyed every minute of it. Now, he was just comfortably buzzed while some of his friends were well on their way to drunk.

Namjoon, who was currently suffering from his toddler’s inability to let him sleep past 5 am lately, looked half asleep across the table from him. His eyes were glazed and unfocused, jaw slightly dropped as he tried to focus on the glass in front of him. Jungkook had placed it there about ten minutes ago, full of water.

All of the guys were here today, having made sure to block out the time to celebrate with him and he felt a little shy at all the attention surprisingly. You didn’t have any other male friends, which meant his friends were all he had in his groom’s party. Six groomsmen for him and five bridesmaids for you.

You’d had to diplomatically pick between Chungha and Soyeon for your maid-of-honour, ending up with Chungha being chosen. Hoseok was forever amazed at how strong the friendship was between you all. Decades of media had taught Hoseok was women saw each other as rivals in everything and he’d been beyond worried about the fact you had to pick between your two best friends.

Reality had been a good slap in the face though, and he’d learnt over the four years of being with you that he should firmly ignore everything the media said. Your best friends had been gracious with each other, both trying to encourage the other to take on the role before Soyeon had given Chungha her full support. It amazed him but also made him happy that you had such a good friendship with them both.

The final space in your bridesmaid lineup wasn’t filled, and Yoongi was going to be walking alone at the end. You’d kept the space free to symbolise his sister, letting her be a part of the ceremony even if she couldn’t be there physically.

That had gotten him a little choked up when you’d told him your plans, but it had made his parents cry when he’d, in turn, told them. Any lingering concern that his parents might not actually like you had vanished then. Your sweet insistence of making sure she was a part of the day and not forgotten cementing your place in his family.

He’s brought back into the moment by Jungkook slapping his back hard, causing him to wince and almost spill the entire shot out of the glass. Glaring at him, Hoseok pushes him back before swallowing what was left of the shot. It makes him cringe, the taste of the straight vodka, not his favourite.

“Man,” Jimin sighs, flopping back into his seat before running his fingers through his hair. “Can you believe it? Jung Hoseok. Getting married. If you’d have said that in college, I would’ve laughed hysterically at the thought. The only thing I thought you’d marry was your dick into any available pussy.”

His words make Hoseok’s nose wrinkle, even if he couldn’t deny what he’d said. It was still amazing even to him that he’d finally found someone that he genuinely loved and who he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. For his friends, it was probably even more fascinating. Yet here he was.

Loving every moment of it.

“You know, I’d have thought after four years that you all would have come to terms with this. It’s not exactly a surprise anymore.” Hoseok was pleased that he hadn’t drunk enough to have his words be slurred. The last time he’d been truly wasted had been when he’d decided to introduce you to the lovely male concept of a dickcopter. Not his best moment.

Perhaps one of his funniest though.

“We have come to terms with it. Still a surprise though.” This comes from Namjoon, causing Hoseok to give him a betrayed expression. Of all his friends, he’d have thought that Namjoon would’ve been the one who understood how his life had changed upon meeting you. While Jimin had married Eden since Hoseok had met you, everyone had known that Jimin was one of those guys who wanted to have a loving, monogamous relationship.

He was the one in their group that had fantasised about marriage even in college. Meeting Eden had been the icing on his cake, even if neither of them was too sure whether they wanted kids or not.

But Namjoon had been much like Hoseok during the first years of college. Something which had certainly surprised you when you’d found out. Despite how diligent he’d been at his studies, Namjoon had discovered that he was attractive to women. Combined with the help of his friends to make sure he presented himself to highlight all his best points, such as his tall and broad physique which only looked better with a few workouts or how glasses seemed to make the girls swoon, he’d been in his element.

And then he’d met Amelia in his final year, falling hard and defying everyone’s expectations. There had been many heartbroken women, and men, around campus upon finding out that Kim Namjoon had finally succumbed to love.

They’d consoled themselves in Hoseok’s bed instead, for years afterwards as well.

Images of all the girls he’d entertained throughout his life ran through his mind like lightning. Girls of all skin colours, heights and backgrounds had graced his bed, or him theirs. All of them beautiful and worthy of a fun night, or at least ten minutes of his time.

He’d used to be one of those guys who was proud of his sexual prowess, safe in the knowledge that he could probably get any woman he wanted with some effort. It made him cringe now. Hoseok had never been one of those asshole guys who’d bragged and boasted about his body count, but he’d not exactly been subtle either.

Throughout those years, he’d been adamant that he didn’t want a proper relationship. Hoseok had been more than fine with one-night-stands and short-term relationships that were probably better as being categorised as friends-with-benefits. He hadn’t thought he could monogamy. The thought of reducing himself to one woman and denying all the delights that life had to give him was dissatisfying.

The Hoseok from back then was a fucking idiot, he thought now. A self-centred, dick-centric idiot. The very idea of what he’d been was embarrassing to him now, making him more than thankful that you’d never met him back then. You’d deserved way better than whatever he’d had to offer.

Hoseok knew that he couldn’t go back in time to change things. But he also knew that if he was given the chance, he probably wouldn’t either. Because as humiliating as his old self had been, he knew that it had formed the person he was today. And if he’d been open to a serious relationship for all those years, then he probably wouldn’t have met you.

So, yeah, he wasn’t proud of his past. But he wouldn’t change it. Not when he knew that he’d finally grown up in time to find you. You’d shown him that relationships weren’t something to roll his eyes at or be afraid of, that love was something he was deserving of and was also capable of giving.

And here he was now, frowning at the glass in front of him on the table and being a sappy idiot. The way he kept drifting away from conversations made him wonder if he was a little more than buzzed, but he found that he didn’t care. He was enjoying himself, even if he kept having these more serious thoughts.

It was a good job none of the guys could hear his thoughts now. They already gave him enough grief for going googly-eyed over you, as they called it.

Shifting back into the conversation, he realises that everyone is now talking about who they think will be next to get engaged. Hoseok is a little surprised at how quickly the topic had moved on, but given his friends, he’s also wondering how long it’ll take until it changes once more to how many farts a human can hold or something dumb.

Still, it’s his bachelor party and he feels the need to get involved. So he throws an arm over Jungkook and gives him a smirk, raising his brows in expectation.

“I bet our little Jungkookie here is going to be next. Got any plans on popping the question to Soyeon?” He grins broadly, taking in Jungkook’s expression with pure amusement. The younger man looks remarkably like a deer caught in headlights with his expressive eyes wide and sparkling with their usual youthful exuberance alongside more than a little alcohol.

“I-er,” He stutters, his cheeks turning a rosy pink even in the lowlight of the bar that makes everyone snort with laughter. “I haven’t really thought about it.”

“Bullshit!” Jimin’s small fist slams down on the table hard, causing the multitude of glasses to shudder and some of them to clink together. It also causes most of the guys around to almost clawing the ceiling with how hard they all jump. Eyes squinting at Jungkook, Jimin points one finger at him in an accusatory manner that seems a little out of proportion for the question.

“You’ve been together...a while now,” Hoseok’s shoulders jerk as he tries to hold in the snort at Jimin’s lack of numeracy skills suddenly. “There’s no way you haven’t thought of it. Women think we don’t think about that kinda shit but we do! And you’re the biggest fucking romantic on the table, Jeon Jungkook!”

His words are more than a little forceful and Hoseok has to bite his lip to stop from laughing, particularly when he glances at Jungkook’s shellshocked face. Alongside those impossibly large and wide eyes, his jaw has now dropped open and he’s staring at his friend in disbelief. Taehyung has an equally surprised look but Yoongi is nodding along in agreement, nursing his glass of whiskey that he’s had for at least half-an-hour now.

“He’s right, you are. I mean...you cried at Hercules when Meg died, remember?” Everyone goes quiet as they try to recall the incident from long ago. Even Hoseok is trying to remember it, his head tilted before giving up. There have been so many incidents of Jungkook crying at films that the Hercules one doesn’t even leave a mark.

“Sorry I have emotions, unlike you lot.” Jungkook is pouting now, crossing his arms over his chest. On another man, it’d probably look a little intimidating given the way his biceps bulged in the black dress shirt he’d put on or the way the buttons strained a little from his shoulders and chest. But Jungkook’s face negates that with his lower lip pushed out almost comically and his cheeks full.

Hoseok can’t help but reach over and cup them, squishing them until everyone laughs at the sight and making cooing noises to him. It’s with resignation that Jungkook lets him, his deep sigh brushing past Hoseok’s fingers while his shoulders slump.

Almost immediately, Hoseok is reminded of how you call Jungkook the baby of his friendship group. It’s with a grin that he realises it’s true. He’s their baby, despite the fact he’s bigger than most of them all and can probably kill them just by squeezing their head between his arms.

“Girls dig that. Soyeon likes it, right?” Taehyung comments, brow rising from where he was sitting. His arm was resting on the back of the seat, body looking long and lean with his legs spread. He hadn’t been lucky enough to be in the booth itself and had had to grab a chair from another table.

There’d been more than a few hungry looks given to him from other patrons in the bar but Taehyung had remained oblivious, his long black hair ruffled from the day's activities and tiredness on his face. Although part of his obliviousness may also be because he was both asexual and aromantic, so it may be more than he’s purposefully not paying attention to it.

“Let’s not generalise women,” Seokjin interrupted, reaching out to gesture wildly with his bottle of Asahi beer. “It’s rude and they get angry when people do that.”

Everyone pauses to look at him with eyebrows raised, wondering where that came from. But no one questioned it, instead shrugging or nodding in acknowledgement to avoid him going on a rant. Not that there was anyone who didn’t agree, but the last thing Hoseok wanted was to listen to a bunch of drunk guys debate that.

“Anyway, I think she finds it more amusing. Like...sweet but...mostly funny. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Soyeon cry at a film yet. Maybe I just haven’t found the right film or genre yet.” Jungkook has a thoughtful look on his face, his gaze distant and Hoseok realises that he’s probably too tipsy for this kind of conversation.

From personal experience with Jungkook, Hoseok did not doubt that he would spend far too long having internal conversations, arguments and debates without even realising other people were talking to him. If anyone thought Jungkook was introverted normally then they hadn’t seen anything until he was drunk.

“Keep looking,” Hoseok says cheerfully, taking another shot and trying to clean his tongue with his teeth to remove the flavour. “You’ll find it eventually. I discovered that Meeps doesn’t cry at most things but she will cry at videos of cats that have been nursed back after being hurt.”

“Well...duh.” That comes from Taehyung, who’s giving Hoseok a serious ‘wtf’ look right now. It makes him feel a little self-conscious and so he grabs one of the random beers on the tables before taking a swig.

“Yeah, who wouldn’t cry at that? What the hell.” Placing a hand on the table, Yoongi looks at them all with a serious expression that could almost sober a person. It causes him to start ranting on about animal rights for the next five minutes, no one feeling brave enough to interrupt him. When Yoongi got going, everyone had long since realised that it was better to just let him get on with it.

By the time he finally stops, sitting back with a triumphant expression on his face before swallowing the last of his whiskey, everyone else has already finished another bottle of beer. Almost like they were trying to get themselves drunk as fast as possible to cope with Yoongi’s insistence that people who hurt animals should receive the same injuries back to them.

While Hoseok agreed, he didn’t quite like hearing about some of the incidents that Yoongi was talking passionately about. It made him think of Kasumi and Ciri, which made his chest hurt.

He was a bit of a baby when it came to his furbabies.

Suddenly though, he’s overwhelmed with the intense desire to go home. To see his dog and stroke his cat and cuddle with you. Blinking slowly, he stares at the bottle before reaching into his pocket and pulling out his phone. The bright light as he unlocks it causes him to squint, trying to avoid being blinded before he realises with a shock that it’s after one in the morning.

His day had started at 10 am when he’d met up with all the guys at Jungkook’s place. They’d then made their way to the place for the day’s activities, having spent until 4 pm there before heading back to Jungkook’s to change into some clean clothes for their drinking time. Soyeon had been amused as she’d watched them all emerge almost like a new man, clean from the quick showers they’d taken and ready to get wasted.

But now he was tired. And holy fuck, he hurt. Hoseok had avoided trying to get up whenever possible. Which meant he fucking needed to piss right now, but moving hurt. His joints ached like fuck from all the activities while his body hurt so bad from the paintballing.

Licking his lips, he finished the last of his beer before sighing deeply. It caught the attention of the others, despite the music and noise. Upon seeing everyone’s gaze on him, he smiles at them.

“Okay guys, this has been a pretty great day. Thank you Jungkook for organising it and thank you to everyone for coming. It means a lot to me. Now, before I get too sappy...I’m going to head home.” He’s already organising for an Uber on his phone, ignoring the outraged noises that start from everyone.

It’s Jimin that’s loudest though, his voice rising in pitch and yet simultaneously getting deeper as his accent gets a little stronger.

“What? It’s not even late! We’ve still got plenty of drinking to do.” Now he’s the one pouting and Hoseok notes in amusement that Seokjin and Namjoon are nodding in agreement. Taehyung doesn’t seem to give two fucks, either way, giving him a lazy shrug before taking a drink of what Hoseok realises is a glass of water while Jungkook remains quiet.

“Guys, it’s one in the morning. I know that I’m flaking out early, but you guys can keep drinking. I’m okay with it, honestly. I just...I’m really tired. A little drunk too, probably not as much as you’d all like but enough for me. Also, I have a bruise on my ass that’s probably the size of Ireland from all the fucking paintballs you fired at me. I hurt.” He whines out the word, wanting to wiggle almost like a child but the pain that shoots up from his asscheek causes him to inhale quickly and still.

“Shit, does it hurt?” The question comes from Jungkook, who’s scanning Hoseok up and down as best he can. It’s not a good attempt given he’s had a little too many drinks and he doesn’t seem to be able to lift his head properly once it’s gone down too far, causing Hoseok to snort.

It doesn’t stop him from giving the younger man a droll stare, which he can only see when Hoseok forcefully lifts his chin back up. “Yes, it fucking does. Why do you think I’ve barely moved all evening?”

“Sorry.” Jungkook’s face is scrunched up and Hoseok knows why he looks so awkward. He’s pretty sure he may as well have Jungkook’s name imprinted on his back in bruises from how many times he’d been hit by him. The guy was far too fucking good at paintball, something Hoseok had regretted agreeing to within five minutes of being in the arena.

“It’s okay. But I’m done for the night. I’m going to go home and sleep so fucking hard. Meeps might think I’ve died in the morning or something.”

“Morbid.” Yoongi chuckles, tipping his new glass of whiskey towards him before grinning.

“Yep. Really glad that I asked for this to be done two weeks before the wedding. I’d have been like an old man if I’d agreed to do it the day before.” The very thought of having to hobble up the aisle made him cringe.

A notification on his phone distracted him though, the Uber app telling him that his ride is here. He feels a surprising amount of relief at being able to go home, the thought of his bed almost like a siren call that was too tantalising to resist.

“And with that, my Uber is here. Thank you for today, really,” Hoseok lets out a yelp of pain as he stands, gingerly holding his ass and causing everyone to simultaneously laugh and look concerned. “I appreciate it. It was fun and I enjoyed it all.”

It takes him another few minutes to finally get out of the bar; hugs being given out repeatedly to the guys while he accepts all their praise and well wishes. The Uber was idling by the side of the road and he wished that he could slump inside but instead, he had to gingerly get in and position himself with the least amount of pain.

To make it even worse, he had to explain to the very sober driver that he wasn’t shitfaced but was actually in pain from the earlier paintballing. That had led to a whole conversation that Hoseok hadn’t anticipated, lasting the whole trip as he’d discussed where they’d gone and the activities they’d done. The guy seemed to be very interested in it and had given him many congratulations when he’d found out that Hoseok was at his bachelor’s party.

It never failed to amuse Hoseok how easily people wish congratulations upon finding out as if they felt obliged. What he didn’t quite appreciate was the guy's remarks about marriage, which were more than a little derogatory. Hoseok didn’t know why anyone would think it was a good idea to disparage marriage to someone who was only weeks away from marriage.

As he was leaving the car, he put on a polite smile and thanked the driver for the trip. Once he was out though, he resolved to not leave a good review. Maybe he sounded a little harsh, but having to listen to how he should ringfence all his finances to avoid them being leeched by his soon-to-be wife for whenever she inevitably cheated or left him had been more than he could handle.

If Hoseok hadn’t been tired before, he sure was now.

Opening the front door, he kicks off his shoes with a heavy sigh before heading into the living room in darkness. Ciri is in her cage, fast asleep until Hoseok unlatches the door and calls her out. She’s slow to react, her little body tired until he opens up the backdoor and lets her out. He figures that you can both have a nice lie in if he lets Ciri out now.

Closing the door once she’s out, he heads into the bathroom and brushes his teeth while peeing before washing his wash. He gets to see how badly bruised he is in the mirror for the first time and winces at the sight of the already black and blue flesh, knowing he’s going to be in even more pain tomorrow.

Sighing, he towel dries his face before heading out and letting Ciri back in. He’d love to have a little cuddle with her but he’s too tired, so he just puts a treat into her cage to coax her back in before giving her an attentive stroke and locking it. She’s too busy eating her chew eagerly to notice him.

Heading to the bedroom, he pulls off his clothes in the dark before fumbling around to find his pyjamas. He’d go to bed in just his boxers but he wants to try and give a little bit of coverage to his poor body for tonight. Which is why he doesn’t even know if he’s put them on the right way around or not. Hoseok doesn’t even care, he already feels asleep.

There’s a little light when he gets over to the bed from your clock, the numbers glowing brightly in the night and highlighting your face as you sleep. Kasumi is curled up against your stomach on top of the covers, her eyes blinking slowly at Hoseok as he leans over to give her a stroke as well. She gives a quiet chirp of appreciation and he smiles softly at how her body vibrates as she purrs, her paws flexing and closing as she pads at your covered thigh.

And through it all, you don’t even stir. Your breathing is slow and steady while your body is completely relaxed, unaware he’s even arrived home. Hoseok doesn’t even realise he’s smiling until he lets out a soft laugh, knowing that you probably won’t wake up at all. Once you’ve fallen asleep then you’re truly out like a light until the early hours of the morning so he has no fear of waking you up.

Carefully, he climbs into bed and throws the cover over himself with a quiet groan as his limbs feel so heavy. He can’t even remember the last time he hurt this badly. It takes way more effort than he’d like to admit to not wake you up and have you coddle him. Mainly because you’re grumpy when you’ve been woken up.

What he does do though, is shift onto his side that doesn’t have the most bruises before carefully shuffling closer to you. A soft mewl of pain leaves him as he does so but he doubts he could get in any position without some level of discomfort right now. So he’ll be damned if he denies himself some comfort in cuddling your sleeping form.

Wrapping an arm around your waist, he moulds himself to your back as gently as he can before letting out the deepest sigh he’s done in a while. His whole body relaxes, causing him to almost whimper as the pain he hadn’t realised he had is exacerbated by his now lax muscles. Fuck, that’s the last time he paintballs with Jungkook.

Pressing his nose to your back, he inhales deeply. You haven’t even moved, despite all the jostling he’s done behind you and there’s no change to your breathing. Taking in the comforting scent of you, he recalls his earlier thought process about his past. Feeling you solid and warm in his arms provides him with a sense of peace that he’s never found with anyone else, causing him to feel content despite his discomfort.

Yeah, he wouldn’t change a thing if it meant he ended up with you. And he doesn’t care how cheesy it sounds. In only two weeks, he’d be marrying you. He was allowed to be as sappy as he wanted, whether it was internally or externally.

You deserved to be praised and shouted about and goddammit, Jung Hoseok was going to worship you.

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outerbankspreferences · 4 years

Text

Mistakes - Topper Thornton

Word Count: 2599

Warnings: death, swearing.

A/N: So I had to look up Topper’s mother’s name, and found out that apparently he is a professional surfer??? Did I miss this the countless times I’ve watched the show???

It was three day’s before Topper was getting married. It was going to be the biggest wedding on the island. Finally, the Thornton and Cameron family coming together. This wasn’t for business, or blending families, this was simply the will of love between two people. Topper and Sarah had been together, broke up and then got back together when they came home from college. Topper went to university out west, studying pre-law while Sarah stayed home and got her nursing degree. It was about five years they weren’t together. Topper moved back home to finish his degree and started to work for law firm on the island. To say that Cynthia and Ward were ecstatic was an understatement, they had already started making business plans around their kids’ marriage. Cynthia invested in Rose’s real-estate, and Rose helped her find a new office for her clinics. Cynthia also helped Sarah get a job at the hospital.

Nothing was being left behind. When Topper and Sarah announced their engagement to everyone the planning went crazy. The engagement party was held at the country club and no expense was spared. It was obvious Rafe wasn’t getting married any time soon, and Wheezie was still too young. Sarah loved planning all the events and getting the photo’s done. She was happy to being doing all of this with Topper by her side. At one point in time, Topper was over baring for Sarah, almost too invested in pleasing her. When they were in high school the relationship didn’t work because they were on two different pages, they had two different needs. When Sarah left for college, she had a couple boyfriends but nothing really lasting, when she moved back to island, she ran into Topper at the Heyward’s grocery store and he asked her out for coffee to catch up. The rest being history.

Topper on the other hand had a serious relationship that he left out west. Y/N was everything to Topper at one point in his life. He had grown from his relationship in high school. Learning from his mistake he always tried to not be clingy towards her. She was a history major, planning on becoming a teacher. Y/N loved kids, she always dreamt of having plenty of her own. Topper and Y/N were together for almost four and half years. Y/N thought she was going to marry Topper, never imagining her life with anyone else. They had made plans together. Moving back to the Carolina’s when they both finished school. Topper working at law firm for a while before starting his own practice, Y/N working at the high school he went too, or maybe the elementary school. They both wanted kids, Y/N wanted more then him, but they could compromise. They wanted to buy a nice house by the water, teach the kids how to surf, have a garden, maybe a dog. Everything was planned, until it wasn’t.

Y/N’s mom got sick her last year of university. Her mom had been sick a lot when she was a child, always spending time at other family’s houses growing up. She was an only child and her dad left when she was a little girl. When Y/N got the news that her mother was sick and needed her help, she didn’t question transferring to a university closer to home. In all honesty she thought about dropping out, being with her mom full time. The doctor told Y/N that this was her last fight. They thought she might’ve had 5 good years left, if they were lucky. When she told Topper this, he held her while she cried. He didn’t know a lot about her childhood, just assumed she like to keep that private, but that night she told him everything. Maybe she should have waited to bring up leaving, but she had to get everything off her chest that night. “Top, she only has a couple years left. I need to spend those with her. I need to be there for her.” Y/N tells him through tears and sniffles. “Wait, what do you mean? You’re not leaving, are you? Y/N/N, we have plans.” Topper was upset that she could so easily replace him. Not thinking twice about it. “You can come with me; we can do this together. I’m not sure if I can do this without you. Please Top, come with me. I need you.” She looked into his eyes and got the answer she wasn’t looking for. She saw anger and hurt. This wasn’t the Topper she fell in love. The one that was so kind and thoughtful.

That was where things ended. He wasn’t changing his life, not the life they wanted for her. It was selfish of him, but they had plans. So they went their separate ways. Topper always kept an eye on the obituaries from her hometown. A couple years after being with Sarah he finally saw it. Y/N’s mom had died and left everything to her. He sent a card and donation, wondering if she ever got. He even paid all the funeral expenses. In some way he was trying to make up for the hurt he caused her. That next day he proposed to Sarah. When they were sending invitations to everyone, Sarah asked if his list was ready. They had the same friends so they only people extra he wanted to invite were some colleagues and old university buddies. He kept one invitation for himself though. Not telling Sarah why he wanted and extra one. He wanted to send one to Y/N, but he wanted to send more then just an invitation, he wrote her letter, wanting to get things off his chest before claiming his love to another women in front of a church. He knew it was wrong to send it, but he didn’t care. He figured you’d moved anyways after your mom died. You always said you hated your hometown. He sat down at his desk grabbing a pen and just started to write.

Dear Y/N,

I don’t know why I’m doing this. I can’t being to imagine what you must be thinking right now. I could take a swing at it though. Maybe your think what the hell is he writing me letter for. He broke my heart; he tore it into a million piece when I needed him the most. I don’t know why I did that to you. I think maybe because I got so scared you were going to leave and move on without me. I had pictured our life a certain way for so long that I didn’t want it to go any other way. I fucked up Y/N. I fucked you over when you left. I read about your mother online. I should have been there with you to get through everything. I should have been there with you, to hold you when you cried for her, to help make the big decisions. I donated to the charity you picked out. The school meal program, the was sweet. You can see that I’m getting married, to Sarah of all people. She’s a nurse now, working at the hospital with my mom. Things have gotten better with my mom. Things aren’t so bad between us. She loves planning this wedding, her and Sarah are like kids in candy store with the details. I finished law school; I’m working at firm here on the island. It’s nice to be home, I��ve enjoyed surfing on the east coast again. Sometimes I look around and I wonder if things would have been different if you stayed and we did this together. I wonder if you would have liked it here or maybe you wouldn’t because you hate storms, and we get a lot of hurricanes. I want to apologize Y/N. I want to say I’m sorry for hurting you the way I did. I’ll never forgot the look on your face that night. It keeps me awake at night. What I did to you Y/N, it was wrong, and I wouldn’t blame you for ripping this letter up and not giving me second thought. But if you don’t if you read this know that I’m inviting you to the wedding. I want you there, and not in some vengeful way, but as someone who I still want to have there. I understand if you don’t want to come but I hope you find it somewhere in your heart to change your mind.

Yours truly, Topper

It was sunny that day. Y/N had run to the post office on her break at work. She had finished her degree a year late, opting to take a year off when her mother first got sick. She got three good years with mom. They did everything on her bucket list. They went to Italy, then went rock climbing. Her mom took a cooking class, but most importantly she watched her daughter get married. When Y/N moved back home, she had no time for men. She wasn’t over Topper and wanted to put her full focus on her mom. After a while things got better and her heart started to hurt less. She wasn’t looking for a relationship, but when a new teacher started at her school her boss asked her to help him out. Evan was great. He was funny, kind and smart. He listened to everything she had to say. He heard from other teachers what was going with her mom and he became her support person. He proposed after only eight months of being together, but the two of them were so happy. It was different happy then Topper. He didn’t make her feel the same way but she had to come to terms with the fact the no one was going to make her feel that way. It wasn’t fair to Evan to expect him to be someone he’s not. When he proposed it was the best day of her life. You guys did rush the wedding, but only because Y/N wanted her mom to be there. That was the last thing on her bucket list. To see her little girl, get married. Evan and Y/N didn’t take a honeymoon because a few weeks after the wedding her mom had finally passed. Y/N was devasted, she was hoping by some miraculous discovery they would cure her. It was a poor girl dream that didn’t come true. Y/N had planned the funeral with the help of Evan. When Evan went to pay for the funeral, the pastor told him it was already paid for by an angel donor. When he talked to her about, she assumed it was someone in the town that knew her mother.

When Y/N saw the letter she recognized Topper’s hand writing. It was like a child’s, scribbled and almost unreadable. She could only read it from years of helping him study for tests. Her heart stopped for the second time in her life. Sitting in her car reading the words he wrote to her brought back a lot of painful memories she sooner forget. She was so angry with him for bringing the past up but was happy to know that he had moved on from her. She never doubted that he would, after being so cruel to her, she began to wonder if all those years were just lies. Some sick joke to him. Though no matter what he did, Topper Thornton always held a special spot in her heart. She looked at the wedding invitation that went sent along with the letter and wondered if she should go. She could be spiteful and bring Evan with her making Topper fell some sort of pain. She didn’t think he could ever feel the same pain as she did. If it weren’t for Evan she would be alone right now.

Weeks turned into months and Y/N never told Evan about the letter she received. At first, she thought she wouldn’t go. Not giving Topper the validation that he still had some hold on her, but then she thought it might bring her closure to see him getting married. Maybe it would be like officially closing that chapter of her life. That’s what brought her to place she is now. Sitting in a plane on her way to North Carolina to watch the man she once so dearly loved get married. She brought a simple dress not wanting to stand out, as she clearly wasn’t going to know anyone. She had only been this nervous a few times before. Waving the flight attendant over for a drink, liquid courage is what she needed. She wasn’t going to make a scene. Just sneak in the back, watch them say their vows, and sneak back out. She didn’t even book a hotel room opting to leave right after. She told Evan that she was meeting a friend out there from college which wasn’t a complete lie.

After the longest flight of her life, she caught the last fairy boat to Topper’s hometown. She drove through town in a rental car. It was small but cute. She found herself picturing the life she could’ve had. All the things Topper told her about his childhood. She even drove by the school reminiscing on the time she spent with Topper. With 10 minutes until the wedding she parked the car outside the venue. Just breathe Y/N, they’re so many people here he wont even notice you. Twisting the ring on her finger she pulled herself out of the car and towards the church. Sitting in the back Y/N listened to people talk. All of them speaking about Topper and Sarah when they were younger, how he couldn’t have found anyone better. She noticed that he’s not up at the alter. She remembered that he always wanted his mom to walk him down the aisle, saying it just made sense.

Y/N was pulled from her train of thought when the music started to play, watching as the door opened. Her heart stopped; there he was. He had aged. He let his beard grow out a bit, and his hair was lighter. He looked so handsome in his tux. His mother looked the same as always, stern but happy. Then the wedding party came out three bridesmaids and three groomsmen. You recognized one of them being Rafe Cameron. You met him a couple times with Topper, they were best friends, but he was heavy into the drugs. He didn’t look strung out though. When ‘here comes the bride’ started everyone stood and turned towards the door. When they opened again a beautiful woman stepped out with her father. She looked stunning, the dress was simple and delicate and looked like it matched her personality. Y/N felt jealous of her, she wanted to be the one wearing the dress. Looking up at Topper, he looked like he was going to cry. That’s when it happened, he looked around the room to take the moment in, he saw her standing in the back looking at Sarah. He didn’t think she would come but he was glad she did. She looked older, but happy. She changed her hair colour, finally got the bangs she always talked about getting. Looking at her and then back at Sarah, Topper knew he was making the biggest mistake of his life. He wanted to run but knew he couldn’t hurt Sarah like he did Y/N. He couldn’t break two girls hearts’. So, with that he kept his eye on Sarah and forced himself to make the biggest mistake ever.

#topper thorton imagine #topper thorton x reader #topper obx #topper outer banks #austin north #outer banks #sarah x topper #sarah cameron #topper thorton x y/n #topper thorton #topper thornton x y/n

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spade-riddles · 3 years

Text

Submission:

Hi there! I’m the anon who asked for a conversation about what we (as Kaylors) actually fear from Karlie and Taylor letting the world assume Jerk is the baby’s bio dad. Switched to submission format because the Tumblr word count is tiny and asks get eaten and muddled, which makes it really hard to express yourself properly 😅

First I wanted to say thank you for engaging in a mature discussion about this. I really appreciate it. A lot of other blogs have either stopped believing Karlie and Taylor are together any more, or are more idealistic and don’t want to even talk about a less than perfect outcome to this story. It’s frustrating because while I understand the need for optimism (I feel that need too!) I don’t want us living in la la land and feeling disproportionately upset if we don’t get our perfect ending.

So. I should probably lay out where I stand: I think there is a high likelihood Karlie and Taylor will let people assume the baby is Jerk’s, at least at first. My reasons are simple.

1) The baby is due very soon. Taylor is used to sneaking around and we’ve talked before about how she is able to live in secrecy. The pandemic has definitely made that easier for her. But a baby is a whole different ball game. It will be frankly exhausting to sneak around pretending she’s not a mom, hiding her baby. And the more she hides it, the higher the risk of it being exposed by social media and becoming a huge gossip story. Taylor Swift’s secret baby! Kissgate was bad enough, I don’t think Taylor would want to risk a Babygate.

For this reason, she’s going to move soon to incorporate Karlie back into her life. Probably as a new single mom friend who is staying with / spending a lot of time with her after her marriage break up. The story may even go out that the feud rumors were bogus all along and the girls were good friends the whole time, and Taylor gave Karlie the strength to leave her bad relationship. I expect Tay to be named godmother, which will allow her to be seen more with bub while the full picture is waiting to fall into place.

2) So Taylor and Karlie are being seen together once more. Taylor looks like a great friend, Karlie’s image is slowly being rehabilitated as Taylor goes on a charm offensive, and the baby is a fixture in Taylor’s life that people think is sweet, but don’t really question because she’s supposedly still with J*e.

No-one talks about J*sh at this stage. No-one interacts with him on social media, and they do their best to limit any media mentions of him as “Karlie Kloss’s baby daddy”. This is easier than it seems. Taylor has connections at Vogue, Karlie owns W, and Tree is an expert at shutting down unwanted stories. Any publication that wants future access to Taylor or Karlie will play ball, because why wouldn’t they? No-one is that invested in linking Karlie to a past beard forever, and no-one wants to bully a newborn child over a connection insiders will know isn’t even real. Sure, Scooter and his Page Six sock puppets will probably churn out articles stirring the pot, but that’s nothing new. The girls can ignore it or deflect attention, as they do now.

3) Stage three of the plan sees the resurgence of “Kaylor” as a thing people are shipping. Hardcore fans will obviously know they’ve been together all along, but the wider public will start to wonder if Taylor has deeper feelings for Karlie, or if Karlie left her husband because she hopes to “get back together with” Taylor and take another go at their 2014 relationship. People start to link past songs to Karlie and speculate that lingering feelings for her “best friend” are what has stopped Taylor locking it down with J*e. J*e is boring and only seen on miserable pap walks with Taylor, but Karlie is seen hanging out with her and their friends in happy, seeming domesticity. People begin to talk about how much like the old carefree Taylor Tay seems again. The sunshine effect in full swing.

4) Eventually Toe break up and Kaylor are revealed to be in a relationship. You’ll never please the homophobes but by now most fans are happy for Taylor. Taylor, who has de facto raised the baby since birth, jokes that she’s “daddy”. Karlie gives a more serious interview about what a wonderful parent Taylor is and how she has always considered her as much the baby’s mom as she is, because she was there all along and never gave up or walked away. She won’t be drawn on her ex husband but does make a statement about “what a great influence” Taylor is on their child. Etc etc. By now we’re a few years out from the Trump administration and J*sh is still known and disliked, but is hardly a household name. He was only ever “famous” (I use the term loosely) for being Karlie’s beard.

People can disagree with me on this. Yes, his family are odious and will be in trouble for years to come, probably. But J*sh has always been a fringe member. He’s not Jared or Ivanka, who people really know and hate. He’s more like his father - people know he’s shady like the rest of them, but most people couldn’t immediately pick his face out of a line up, and they don’t know the details. I’m sorry, but it’s true. The general public don’t care about Jerk half as much as Kaylors do. Once he loses his celebrity connections he’ll fade from public consciousness. You think I’m kidding, but I’m not. How many people reading this right now would know if Dick Cheney passed them in the street? Not many, I’m guessing. Time passes and memory fades. People will “know” he’s the father, but in a fuzzy way, and soon enough it will fade to the point where this is brought up as surprising information. People won’t even remember she was married to him. It’ll become weird trivia that no-one really wants to talk about anyway, because it seems disrespectful.

5) At this point, people either assume Jerk has a private relationship with the child, or they notice how Karlie never ever talks about him and speculate that he’s estranged from the child. It’s likely Karlie and Taylor would then go down the route of having Taylor officially adopt the baby at this point, though a public marriage would probably predate that, and all these things take time to roll out and seem natural. Even U-Hauling it!

If J*sh is smart, he’ll keep quiet during all of this. If Kaylor were smart, they would have engineered reciprocal NDAs, where Karlie can’t reveal their marriage was fake, but Jerk can never speak about the baby in return. And I think he might go along with this policy of silence. Remember, what he was always getting out of the arrangement with Karlie was that he appeared straight. Why throw all that away? He won’t want any real involvement with the baby, because it isn’t actually his. But it suits him that people think he got a woman pregnant, and it suits him that he can pretend to be a dad. Just “a private dad” who doesn’t see his kid much. Yes, we might get some annoying stunts where he tries to pretend, but if Karlie and Taylor continue to never give him any oxygen, it’ll eventually reach a stage where people can choose their own version of reality. Some people will think he’s involved and some won’t, but most people frankly won’t care either way.

And I do think that’s the ideal scenario for both of them. Sure, Karlie could eventually leak gossip stories suggesting he’s not the dad. But that would be a hit to her reputation at a time when she is actively trying to rebuild it. WE might all be passionately anti-Jerk and gleeful at the idea of a cheating narrative, but I don’t think it would go down so well with the wider public. He may be from a scummy family but he’s always been viewed as “the one who’s not as bad”, and Karlie still made the apparent choice to marry him. Even if he was scum it would look bad to treat him like that after pretending she loved him .To say that she cheated with some meaningless random guy and got knocked up by him, and this other dude has never even been involved with the kid … . I won’t mince words here. It would make Karlie look terrible. People won’t be saying “ha ha he got what he deserved”, they’d be saying “ wow, Karlie is a sloppy mess”, “wow, how cruel to get knocked up behind her husband’s back”, and finally “wow, Karlie seems so unstable, she’ll treat Taylor badly too and bring trouble down on her head. She probably only even got back with her because she didn’t want to be alone. Taylor should RUN!“

This is NOT the impression they want people to have of Karlie. Which brings me to:

6) Karlie’s reputation has suffered enough, and Taylor knows it. Taylor is no stranger to pivots, and she’s no stranger to playing the long game. What’s most important to her at this stage? I think it’s that she gets to live a free and open life with the woman she loves and the child they’re raising together. I don’t think she cares who is assumed to be, basically, the sperm donor. She will be daddy with this plan, and that’s what counts. So yeah, I think she would go for it. It’s a sacrifice I think she would make.

And really, if he’s not involved in the baby’s life, is it even a sacrifice? We all talk about the “association” around here, but the child won’t have any actual contact with him and Taylor can freeze out any mention of him in the media. There is no actual threat to the child that I can see. Letting people assume he’s the father is NOT the same as letting him into the baby’s life. Kaylor not correcting people’s assumptions doesn’t mean they’re going to actively stunt with him. They can just choose to say nothing, the way they did with the “feud”.

What’s the worst that will happen if people assume the baby has K*shner DNA but is estranged from the family? Seriously, people. Give me answers.

Not just “I don’t want people to think Taylor’s baby has his icky genes”. Because genes don’t make a person and they don’t necessarily make a family either. Taylor’s love and parenthood would not be ANY less if it was assumed she was the adoptive mom with no biological link to the baby. The baby would not be assumed genetically evil for having a few chromosomes from that awful family. Tr*mp’s own sister has been one of his biggest critics, remember? Genetics don’t dictate your politics or your moral compass.Only a fool would actually seriously accuse an innocent baby of being some kind of devil spawn, just because they thought it was Jerk’s.

The K*shners can’t claim or take the baby. They can’t force Karlie and Taylor to stunt with them. So there’s no “using the baby to whitewash Jerk’s reputation”. There’s no putting the baby in danger. And the media aren’t going to bully the baby, because it’s poor practice and would make them look terrible, as well as costing them potentially lucrative future relationships with Karlie and Taylor.

Taylor isn’t “letting Jerk take credit for her baby” either. Not if they refuse to stunt and if it plays out the way I described. Taylor will eventually get recognition as the baby’s real other parent, while Jerk is phased out. Taylor is patient. For the end game I believe she could stand a few months of this.

I’ve turned it over and over in my head and this is the only realistic solution I can see. All our other theories - Karlie pretends to be Taylor’s surrogate, Karlie pretends she slept with someone else, Karlie and Taylor expose the fake marriage, all of those theories - they all seem like wishful thinking. They would never be credible outside our tiny fandom of people who want any memory of Jerk purged forever. (Not possible. The Jerklie history will always exist on the internet, just like Taylor’s supposed “relationship” with Calvin.) We just have to let it go. Separate our heightened negative feelings from the actual likely long term consequences.

This is what will probably happen, if we’re being really sensible and honest with ourselves. We need to stop being so absolutist and thinking it’s the end of the world, because it really doesn’t have to be. It can be just a bump in the road instead. I think we’d all be a lot happier if we adjusted our outlook about this possibility, to be honest. This all or nothing way of thinking is creating so much unhappiness and stress, I hate to see it. We need to just breathe!

I truly believe we won’t get everything we want - but good things are coming.

This is so long, sorry! But I had a lot to say.

Yours,

let’s call me, Pragmatic Anon

#i am posting this only because you put a lot of time into it.#i said i was done with this topic #you ignore a critical part of this? Why should he get any credit for this child #why should this child be stained for no reason #there is absolutely no reason to put this burden on taylor or the child #none #he has nothing to do with it #i will be absolutely stunned if they use their child as part of a publicity stunt #no words #submission

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cordonian-literature · 4 years

Text

The Aftermath - Ch. 5

Test Day

Summary: Bastien tells Liam about Gabriel

A/N: did my best to do as much research as possible. also im not sure if the tags are working or not?

Word Count: ~3.0k

Warning: Mention of character death

*All characters belong to Pixelberry, except those that are unique to my story (I’ve also used some characters and fictional instances from Donna Tartt’s “The Goldfinch”)*

Catch up here!

Tags: @captain-kingliamsqueen @marshmallowsaremyfavorite @gkittylove99 @lovablegranny @loudbluebirdlover @mom2000aggie @kingliam2019 @queenrileyrose @shanzay44 @cordonianroyalty @hopefulmoonobject @hopelessromanticmonie @cinnamonspongecake @queenjilian @kuladekiwi @twinkle-320 @iaminlovewithtrr @charlotteg234

I hope I got everyone tagged! If I missed someone, or if anyone wants to be added/removed, let me know!

- Liam -

On Friday evening, no one was given a chance to see Riley. Different specialists checked her routinely, discussing their findings with one another. Liam asked politely at different times in the day if he would be allowed to speak to her for a few moments. They didn’t let him go in, claiming that the doctors needed their time to properly assess Riley’s condition.

A little before sunset, a sleep deprived, starving, agitated Liam marched up to Riley’s doctor and demanded they be given information about her health.

The doctor leads him away from Riley’s door. Drake, Maxwell, and Bertrand follow.

“I don’t know how much Riley Brooks’ mother has told you about her daughter’s condition,” the doctor states. “But rest assured that we are doing everything we can to help her recover.”

“Really?” Drake spit. “All you’ve done is push different doctors into her room all day. From where we’re standing, none of them did anything—.”

“Please,” the doctor interrupts, holding up a hand. “Riley’s condition is very serious. She’s suffered a head injury. The procedure on Sunday morning was to repair a part of her skull and to stop internal bleeding. Since she’s woken up on Wednesday, we believe that she has something called post-traumatic amnesia.”

“Which is?” Bertrand pesters.

“Short-term memory loss from the moment of her injury and for sometime afterwards. It can last from hours, to days, to weeks,” the doctor explains.

“Short-term?” Liam forces out the words. “I’ve known that woman for the past eleven years. When I walked in she didn’t recognize me. I don’t believe that is what you call short-term.”

“Well... because you all came in and asked questions, whose answers you say that she should know, we believe that she may also be suffering from retrograde amnesia. She won’t be able to recall a significant number of events and persons from her past, even though all such events occurred before the incident and the development of the amnesia.”

“How long will that last?” Maxwell asks.

“That part, we are unsure about,” the doctor states. “But, we’ve done some assessments and the post-traumatic amnesia seems to be wearing off. We think that the worst of it ended yesterday.” She pauses and looks at the men around her, analyzing their expressions. “We asked her about you folks—,” she gestures at the four men around her, “—her kids, her mother, and the detectives who came in to ask her questions yesterday, she said she didn’t remember a thing. We believe that’s the end to the PTA, but we’re going to run a couple more tests to make sure.”

Liam’s heart drops to the pit of his stomach. When he moves back towards the chairs in front of Riley’s hospital room, he goes involuntarily: his shoulders slump and his head hangs low as he throws himself onto a seat. He buries his face in his hands, desperate for this feeling — this keen, despicable sense of despair, one he thought he had forgotten long ago — to end, once and for all.

“So we are nothing to her once more?” Bertrand breathes, the corners of his mouth pulled downwards.

The doctor sighs. “Unfortunately, yes, but again, we believe that’s the last of her short-term memory issues. On the case of retrograde amnesia, patients who have suffered a Traumatic Brain Injury don’t suffer from long-term memory loss for a great amount of time. If I were you, I would still have hope.” She pats Bertrand’s arm.

A nurse sitting at the reception desk calls to the doctor: “Doc? You’re needed in the ICU.”

“I’ll be back,” she says, and then turns to leave.

Drake, Maxwell, and Bertrand join Liam and take a seat. Each of them has to force themselves to not look through Riley’s room window. If they looked, the pain would multiply. The bandages on her head and the empty, lost look on her face reminded them how she had slipped from their grasp again, even though she was right in front of them.

After a few moments of watching doctors and nurses walking in and out of Riley’s room, Drake suggests to Liam, “Why don’t we go to the hotel tonight? Get some food in you. Rest for a bit. We’ll be back in the morning, soon as visiting hours start up again.”

“Your Majesty, I think that would be for the best,” Bertrand adds. “It isn’t healthy for you to be going on without sleep and food for so long.”

“C’mon, Liam,” Maxwell joins in. “Bertrand and I will go with you guys.”

Liam rubs his hand over his face. The rest of them notice his red eyes, unshaven face, and how pink the edges of his mouth are. Silently nodding, he stands, and his friends follow him out of the hospital.

...

As soon as he got inside his hotel room, Liam collapsed on the bed, physically and emotionally exhausted. He didn’t dream; instead he dove into a blank abyss from which he returned from in what felt like no more than eight minutes.

When he woke up, it was already nine thirty. His mind urged him to get up and go back to Riley’s hospital bed, but his feet felt sore and his eyes burned when he opened them. He managed to kick off his shoes and shrug off his clothes on his way to the bathroom. He almost fell asleep in the shower, but the warm beating of water on his face gave him the energy he needed to get back to Riley.

While he puts on some new clothes, there’s a heavy knock on the door. When he goes to open it, Drake holds up two large paper bags and two cups of coffee in a drink carrier. “New York bagels,” he says, handing Liam a bag.

“Thank you, Drake.” Liam sits on the edge of his bed and dives into the large bagel, his stomach desperate for some food after having starved himself the past three days. Drake puts his friend’s coffee on the bedside table and opens up his own bag.

“I’d say I didn’t know you were that hungry,” Drake chuckles, shaking his head, “but looking at you now, I can tell you haven’t eaten in days.”

Liam’s already done with more than half his bagel. “Truly, I didn’t realize, either.” He takes a long sip of his coffee. “I’ve been so focused on Riley, making sure she’s been getting proper attention... and what I would say to her, given the chance.” Liam stares down at the floor with his meal in his hands while Drake continues eating.

Noticing Liam from the corner of his eye, Drake tells Liam, “Riley wouldn’t want you doing this to yourself.”

Liam scoffs.

“I’m serious. Just because something happened to her doesn’t mean she’d want you to hurt yourself, too.”

They sit in quiet for a few more moments while they finish their meal.

Drake sends a text over to Maxwell, letting the Beaumonts know that him and Liam were on their way back to the hospital, when someone else knocks on the door. “Your Majesty?”

“Come in, Bastien,” Liam allows while he puts his shoes back on.

Bastien walks in and regards Drake and Liam for a moment. “Your Majesty.” Bastien clears his throat. “Riley’s mother, Charlotte, will be at the hospital today with her grandchildren.”

Liam stiffens for a moment. Her grandchildren. Riley’s children with Theodore Blaise. He must have been a worthy man to have deserved her.

“Great.” Drake sighs. “I don’t know if anyone else has noticed, but she doesn’t seem to be a big fan of our’s.”

“Will she be visiting Riley?” Liam questions.

“That is... part of the reason they are going,” Bastien continues.

“Ah, she also works there, doesn’t she?”

“Yes, Your Majesty, but she doesn’t work today.”

“Then... what is she going for?” Liam notices the look of reserve on Bastien’s face. “Is everything alright? Did something happen to the children?”

“Not exactly,” Bastien begins. “To be frank, the boy, Gabriel, will be of our concern today.”

“What does that mean?” Drake walks closer to Bastien.

Bastien sighs. “On Thursday evening, the Duke of Ramsford alerted me that he believes Gabriel Blaise is actually your son.”

Liam stands. “What?” he spits.

“He is ten years of age and his birthday was recently. It aligns with the time that you and Lady Riley were having an... intimate relationship.”

Liam blinks. “She... she....” He looks around the room in a daze, his mind blurred with memories of Riley during the Engagement Tour. Could she really have been pregnant? How did I not notice? Why didn’t she tell me?

She wouldn’t have done that. She knows how much I’ve wanted a family. He breathes in heavy air, his eyes burning. She wouldn’t have done that to me, she wouldn’t have taken that from me.

Did I break her so badly that she wanted to keep my own son away from me?

“Your Majesty?”

Taking a moment to calm himself, Liam states, “Bastien, that is absurd.”

But is it? If she got pregnant around the end of the social season, or even some time during the Engagement Tour, she would have had the child around this time of year....

“Your Majesty, the only way to be certain is to take a paternity test. Charlotte Brooks agreed to bring the child to have it done today.”

“The hospital does paternity tests?” Drake asks.

“I contacted them, and they said they only did genetic testing, but they recommended me to a lab center in Brooklyn.” Bastien holds out a piece of paper with the lab’s name on it. “I’ve alerted Mrs. Brooks, and have sent a car for her and the children so they would arrive safely.”

Brooklyn. Where we saw Riley for the first time all those years ago.

Liam nods, his head and heart still shaking with the thought that him and Riley had a son. Cordonia had an heir. For the past eleven years he believed that he would never become a father, but all this time, he already was one....

While they walk downstairs, Bastien explains that Charlotte Brooks gave permission on Riley’s behalf to have the paternity test done due to her condition, and went to get a DNA sample of her daughter this morning to increases the validity of the test and to make sure Gabriel will be tested accurately.

Liam sits quietly, simply nodding at everything Bastien said. No matter how much he wanted to believe that there was a chance Riley’s son was his, he didn’t want to think about all the complications that would come about from the test being positive.

And how she never told him. He believed he deserved a life without Riley after all he had done to her, but had the bombing never happened, had Riley never gotten hurt — had her damned husband never died — would she have ever come back to tell him that he was a father? Would she have let him continue to live a life in ignorance?

The boy is ten years old. He experienced ten years of life without me. I experienced ten years of life without him. Did she think I couldn’t handle fatherhood? Did she think I wouldn’t take on the responsibility? What did I do so wrong? Why did she marry Theodore? I ended my engagement because of her, and she married another man to act as the father of my child?

Liam’s frustration and despair were increasing exponentially, and they were nearing the lab. he decided that whether the test came out positive or negative, he wouldn’t allow Gabriel to see his frustration. There must have been a reason Riley did such a thing. He would continue to hope that she would get a chance to explain. In the meantime, that child was was still Riley’s; the mere fact that there was another being on this planet who held even the slightest amount of Riley’s personality or looks made Liam’s heart swell. His son or not, he would protect both of Riley’s children in every way he didn’t protect Riley.

- Gabriel -

Grandma scheduled Ella to have a private ballet lesson on Saturday morning. I thought she was gonna let me take a private soccer lesson, but instead she brings me to Brooklyn in a car that wasn’t her’s or Dad’s. When we get to a small building, Liam and Drake were inside waiting with another man I didn’t recognize. I wondered why they were here, since Mom was back in the hospital. Liam smiled at me and I smiled back, deciding that I would just ask Grandma about it later.

Drake stayed behind while the rest of us were led into a room that looked like the inside of a doctor’s office: there was an examination table that Grandma told me to sit on, and another longer table were there was a jar of pens.

Two men came in: one wore a professional suit with a bunch of papers that Grandma and Liam started signing on the flat table, while the second one had a lab coat on who took out a very long Q-Tip and walked towards me. I give Grandma a questioning look, but she pats my arm and tells the man, “Go ahead.”

He dragged the stick against the inside of my cheek. Then he put the Q-Tip in a little tube and then takes out another Q-Tip and repeats the whole process with Liam. I wonder if he’s about to do the same thing with Grandma, but instead she pulls out a tube from her purse and the man takes his three tubes and leaves.

The second man with all the papers is still here, looking over his bushy eyebrows at everything Liam and Grandma just signed. Liam and his friend look over expectantly at Grandma, who pulls out a piece of paper.

“The birth certificate?” says Liam’s friend.

Wait, is that mine? Or his? Or Grandma’s?

“Yes.” She hands him the paper and he begins to look over it.

Both men furrow their brows. Liam’s head jumps back in confusion.

"Full name,” begins Liam’s friend. “Gabriel Liam Blaise. Mother, Riley Brooks Blaise.... Why is the spot of father empty?”

“It’s allowed in the U.S.,” says Bushy Eyebrows. “If the mother is married to someone who is not the father, or if the father was not at the birth and did not sign and send in an Acknowledgement of Paternity form, then the name of the father is left blank on the certificate.”

“Riley was already married to Theodore by the time Gabriel was born,” Grandma explains, “which is why the last name is Blaise. She thought that it wouldn’t be appropriate to have his last name be Rys since she planned to pass Gabe off to the public as Theodore’s. But she still put your first name as his middle name. It was her way of connecting you both, since neither of you knew of the other’s existence.”

Grandma takes a moment and scans the men’s shaken faces — even Bushy Eyebrows glances between everyone with wide eyes. Liam looks like he’s mixed between anger and sadness. His friend continues to examine the paper.

“As far as I know,” Grandma states, “Gabriel is your son.”

At this point, I have absolutely no idea what was going on. Grandma never explained anything to me before we got here, and now I was too scared to speak up and ask questions.

A part of me thought that she was giving me away since Dad had died. But she had told Liam that I was her son? Did that mean he was my father? But I didn’t even know who he was? And what about Ella? Was Grandma going to give me away and then keep my sister? Would I never see her again? Could Grandma not take care of us by herself since Mom was in the hospital?

“Do you know why Riley never told me?” Liam asks Grandma, his voice breaking.

“Oh, she tried to,” Grandma reveals. “But only once, I believe. Riley didn’t tell me anything about it, but as far as I know, it didn’t go down well.”

Liam looks down at the floor, then pushes his shoulders back and looks at Grandma. “If the test comes back positive, then I will have to present him as my heir to the people of Cordonia.”

Grandma frowns, and she looks offended. I half expect her and Liam to start arguing, but Liam’s friend says, “Perhaps it will be best to discuss the specifics when the results come back. They told me it usually takes three to five business days, but I have made sure that this will be their top priority, and we could possibly get the results back before Monday or Tuesday.”

Bushy Eyebrows stands, shaking everyone’s hands but mine, and then leaves. We all walk out of the building together. Liam and Grandma nod at one another, and Liam gives me a pat on the back before getting in the car with Drake and his other friend.

Grandma and I get into our car and drive away, on our way to pick up Ella from her class.

“Grandma?” I begin. I wanted to know what happened in there. I wanted to know if my family was really getting rid of me. “What was all that for?”

She sighs. “Nothing for you to worry about right now, baby. I promise in a couple of days I’ll explain everything to you and Ella, but right now there’s nothing to worry about.”

“But Grandma, I... I... why did you tell the man that I was his son? Did you say that because Dad died? I thought I was Dad’s son. Grandma please, I’m so confused.” A couple tears fall from my eyes as my chest tightens. If those guys take me away while Mom is in the hospital, will I ever see her again? Will I ever see Ella or Grandma again? I didn’t want to go anywhere with those men. I didn’t even know them until Wednesday, and I still don’t technically know them.

“Gabriel—!” The sting of her tone shuts me up, and I lean back into my seat, doing my best not to cry.

When Ella gets in the car, she asks me what’s wrong. I shake my head and continue silently crying to myself the rest of the ride home, wishing that Mom and Dad were with us again.

#theroyalromance #kingliam #liamrys #drakewalker #liam x mc #liam x riley #trr riley #rileybrooks

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astrroloaries · 4 years

Text

♦ mini tarot readings for signs - 2020 pt.2

It is most accurate for Rising/Ascendant signs but you can also look for Sun signs.

Libra Rising/Sun:

3 of Pentacles - This card is a positive sign of encouragement for you lovelies to continue your pursue of your goals/ideas/work-related stuff. Continue with passion and fire while using your effort and not quitting. It is also a team card, so perhaps you will need to do some teamwork in order to succeed quicker and more efficiently instead of just working alone, or maybe you will need to recognize somebody’s talents and gifts and it’ll help you. You will need to look through different viewpoints, different opinions, different offers and you will be on your way to success. Do not quit after the first failure. When it comes to love, for the singles maybe you will meet your s/o through the teamwork, through work, by doing your hobbies, reaching your goals. If you are already connected to someone, or have a relationship, it will only deepen the bond and you will understand how important it is to be a team and work on each other together. The Emperor - Methods, strategy, structure. This card is an indicator that you should focus on those things in order to come closer to your goals. The Emperor is a masculine energy, the paternal instincts, working hard but with a plan that is executed strategically with principles and methods, he is the ruler of rulers after all. You will be in control of all this and you will lean away from your more feminine energy (I’m speaking of your Libra energies) toward the masculine, controlling, more aggressive energies. Ace of Wands - Beginnings, focus, creativity. You will have this flow of ideas, creative flow that will bring your fantasy alive, so much energy you will also have. Enthusiasm and active energy toward achieving all of that, with the combination of The Emperor and Ace of wands you will have the two sides of a coin, the necessary strategic/methodical approach and the creative, playful side accompanied by courage and enthusiasm in order to start. Also in love, it is an exciting, even a bit immature but in a cute way, start that will bring you joy back into your life.

Scorpio Rising/Sun:

3 of Wands - Your horizons are broadening, you are taking shit seriously right now. You’ve grown a lot in 2019, so you understand it is time for you, as a being, to experience that growth and you will cling to more long-lasting commitments related to all fields of your life. You will look at options and opportunities carefully, which will bring you to choose the best option. Also in love you will be looking for a long-term commitment, you are done with ‘flings’, you have this new-found thirst for life and creating some that will actually grow and actually last. Queen of Wands - Fiery, joyful energy. This Queen is exciting, uplifting, with your choices you will inspire, with your energy you will lift people up. This Queen is also a Queen which is loyal and stands by your side in thick and thin. I see you going through some challenges that are necessary for your growth, but you will come out victorious of course. Also you will have this light charisma that will attract people and perhaps a new love interest for your singles. This Queen is sexy, so you will be on your sexy phase over here. Queen of Pentacles - Awesome balance. Boss bitch. Sexy and strategically ready for work. You will be super focused, determined, you will always have back up plans when it comes to work/school. This Queen will also bless you with sensuality, she is a sensual Queen who is very much grounded and is hard-working and present, she gets shit done.

Sagittarius Rising/Sun:

4 of cups - Maybe you’ve begun, or you are beginning this year a bit on the down side, with apathy: “Whatever happens, happens.” But boo, you need to look around, you have so many different signs from the Universe, so many things that you are missing while you are looking down on things. You are not even giving the Universe a chance to surprise you, so many blessings are on your way, it is time to lift your head and look around baby. The Hierophant - Morality, ethics, tradition. With the Hierophant here I am positive you will start making very strong, structured decisions that will cement the flow of your future. With the Hierophant come serious commitments, some things will get resolved for you. In love it also means marriage, maybe some of you are getting engaged/married or you will attend a big wedding. Or maybe you will be involved in other ceremonies. Death Reversed: It is time for change, maybe some of you have been holding on to the past too tightly, it is time to let go. It is time to face the ‘now’, the present, embrace the past, let it go and embrace the changes that will maybe happen quickly because you’ve been holding tightly to the past. You are afraid it is okay, change is always good, but it is our perspective of when we understand that. When it comes to love, for the singles, maybe you are still holding onto some negative patterns/habits that aren’t letting you outgrow that, grow as a person. You need to work on that and let yourself flow toward the changes, let go all the negative connotation about love, love is lovely.

Capricorn Rising/Sun:

8 of swords - Aw! This is great, finally my babies are getting released. You will finally see through the blindfold you’ve put on yourself. Your anxieties may have been getting higher and higher, but you will come to a realization and you will free your mind, you will experience that release. It will feel amazing, because you put yourself in that mind-prison, hopelessness and now you will realize you are in control and from hopeless you will become hopeful. It will feel great, flow with it my loves! The Fool - Great, new, positive changes. This year you will experience so many new things that will restore your innocence, because you will be so curious, so naive stepping into these new grounds with such enthusiasm it is so lovely! Enjoy these positive changes but also be careful of not being taken advantage in these happy moments by awful people, keep the valuables closest in these moments, share your enthusiasm!! Ace of Pentacles - New beginnings, new material blessings from the Universe, abundance, material help. Success, focus, determination, hard-work but also rewards, something that will develop slowly, but securely and throughout the whole year.

Aquarius Rising/Sun:

10 of Wands - Aw! Great, release, freedom! You will come to a point of completion of a cycle that has really put a tool on you, because you’ve been carrying your own weight and the weight of your closest ones on your little shoulders. That will be released, you will release and overcome this pain in 2020. Wow I feel such fresh, new energy. Queen of Wands in reverse - You will come face to face with your own insecurities, you will work on yourself, so be gentle. You will definitely focus on other people this year instead of just yourself, you will be selfless rather than selfish. Listen to others more, be there for those same people more and it will be lovely. Work on yourself, self-love, self-care and patience also kindness to yourself and to others. 6 of Swords in reverse - You might have been resisting change, but do not hold grudges, do not hold the past, do not hold onto negative thoughts. Learn to release all that I believe with the completion of the 10 of wands this will also come to you, calm, tranquil changes and transitions.

Pisces Rising/Sun:

5 of Wands - More assertiveness, competitiveness from you lovelies. You will come in tough with your more assertive side and competitive side. You will compete for something you really love and believe in. You will be more able to express your thoughts and articulate them better in 2020. There is a negative connotation to this card but I do not get that feel, I just feel that power from this card. Also in love maybe you will start flirting with someone who has a teasy-kind-of-humor, which is kinda cute. 10 of Pentacles in reverse - Maybe something will end abruptly for you, for some relationships who are not fit for the long-run, but be careful financially. Try to find your focus, your determination in order to get back on your feet, do not get defeated by losing a battle, because you will get many more chances, but please pay attention to not getting lost in translation. Always have a way of getting alert, of having some resources. The Wheel of Fortune - I feel you will experience a lot of karmic events, relationships, you will learn a lot in 2020 and you will attract a lot of fortune.

#tarot #tarot readings #readings #aries #taurus #gemini #cancer #leo #virgo #libra #scorpio #sagittarius #capricorn #aquarius #pisces #sun #rising #ascendant #zodiac signs #astrology

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scripttorture · 4 years

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My question is basically: in the scenario I describe, do you think I should go with or without torture as a referenced thing that happened? The situation is this- my character’s father has been dead for seven years, but I thought that what if, instead of being killed by the monster he was faced with at the time, he was injured by it and then captured by a group of bad guys. This is set in the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild universe and the bad guys in question are the Yiga Clan, (1/9)

who alternate between a comical and threatening presence in the game. They are presented as a tribe of assassins, but the reason why they decide to take my character’s father alive is that they saw him using a rare kind of magic and either want him to teach it to them or want to get him to use it for them. (It’s hereditary so he can’t teach it to anyone but his daughter, but they don’t know that and he will neglect to inform them that anyone else has the same abilities.) (2/9) Most likely they want him to do something with his magic when their idol (Ganon, The Big Bad) returns or possibly something that they think would help him return. Where the question of torture comes in is, I need him to still be alive and capable of going with an escape attempt after seven years. So, whether or not they get the notion to try torturing at any point, it obviously can’t be super regular or prolonged over this period. I thought maybe one or two incidents toward the beginning (3/9) of his captivity, which were ordered to stop when they realized they would have to keep him alive for an undetermined amount of time and that’s easier when you aren’t treating extra injuries, but I’m not sure that would really add anything other than acknowledging the fact that someone in there probably got the notion to go “hey if he won’t teach us that magic what if we punch him and ask again” and may not have been turned down. Or they may have, (4/9) or they may not have brought it up at all because the Leader didn’t ask them to. Alternately, I could lean into their comical side and say that, while they got the idea to try “torturing” they don’t actually know how to do that. They’re assassins, they usually just kill, they don’t really know what to do with prisoners, it’s been a long time since they split off from another group that may have known torture techniques in the service of the now-destroyed kingdom. In which case it would be (5/9) things like “ohoho what if we give him his food... WITHOUT ANY bananas? he’ll be MISERABLE” (they are obsessed with bananas) played for a weird kind of humor. On the other hand I don’t want to imply that if they’d tried “REAL” torture it might have worked. Possibly the punching and asking again was tried once toward the beginning, then the comical “no bananas” one was tried later and neither one accomplished anything? I don’t want to say he spent seven years underground (6/9) surrounded by a comical murderous weirdo cult and “nothing really happened” in that time until his rescue but I don’t want to shoe in something like Actual Torture Attempts when it isn’t necessary. I could fill his time with escape attempts and/or trying to get information. Final thing: his daughter is going to break him out with the help of the Hero and a friend who defected from the Yiga Clan. This friend’s mother is going to take leadership of the clan but is meant to reform somewhat. (7/9) My character (the one whose father is imprisoned) could funnel her anger at his imprisonment towards the previous leader but if she finds out he was tortured (or weird attempts were made at it) she could have more trouble coming to a grudging, still pretty angry acceptance that her friend’s mother exists and is the way she is and probably shouldn’t be magically lit on fire. Or she could compartmentalize and say the friend’s mother never ordered anything like that, or may have even (8/9) turned a blind eye to her father’s final escape. This was a lot of detail but again the main questions are: does that seem like torture attempts would add or detract, and would it be in poor taste to include something like the “no bananas” scene? (9/9)

While I’d never played a Zelda game when I got this ask I am now one of Those People who got a switch in response to not being able to go outside. (They had pokemon, I was weak). And I’ve put a lot of hours into Breath of the Wild since. It’s a beautifully realised setting and I can see the appeal of writing something set in that world.

Humour is a very subjective thing. Whatever we do there are always going to be people that the jokes don’t land for. I’ve (mostly) got positive responses to my humour but I have had incidents both here and on my AO3 page where people took exception to it. And that’s a lot more likely to happen when we’re dealing with serious topics.

That said, I do think that we need humour about the things that scare us. There’s nothing quite as potent and satisfying as making our fears ridiculous.

If you’re considering using humour in a torture/kidnap/POW situation (whatever you decide re torture the story definitely contains some of these elements) then the main thing to consider is this: what are we actually laughing at?

This kind of humour is mostly likely to backfire or be outright hurtful when it can be interpreted as laughing at the victims. Or at the existence of traumatic events. And it’s most likely to work consistently when it’s aimed at the abusers.

From the way you’ve described this it sounds like the joke is on the Yiga clan. As it is in the game itself. (I have enjoyed the assassination attempts by enraged ‘banana salesmen’.) If you wanted to continue the pattern the game set I think a lot of fellow fans would enjoy this humour.

But the main question here is about when we should use torture in a story. And how we judge whether it’s adding anything.

Personally I start by thinking about the tone and themes of the story. The kind of atmosphere I want to capture and kinds of character interactions I want to write.

Then I try to think through the impact torture would have on the narrative in terms of knock on effects. So, symptoms in victims/survivors, witnesses and torturers but also effects on culture, community and organisations.

It would probably be easiest for me to break this down with an example or two.

I’ve talked briefly about both of these stories before. One of them takes place about two decades after a military coup ousted an absolute monarchy. Ilāra, one of the major characters, was embedded in the old regime and tortured people. They were also tortured by the regime and helped make the coup successful.

And part of the impact torture has on the story is in Ilāra's symptoms. But it’s also in the way other characters relate to them. Normal people are afraid of them or disgusted/enraged at the sight of them. They’re ostracised by their own community and treated with contempt by their military superiors.

One of the major themes running through the story is the question of how we deal with people we love when they’ve done horrific things. And how countries, cultures, move on from atrocities.

Most of the major characters aren’t Ilāra's generation, they’re the kids who came afterwards. The people who just about remember the Revolt but grew up in a world without the monarchy. They’re navigating a legacy of blood and bitterness, things that aren’t their fault but nevertheless have shaped the world they live in.

Part of it is about how the children Ilāra helped raise respond to this personal (and national) history. How they try to square the fact that this person was good (and in some ways defining) for them, while being monstrous to others.

I felt that torture would add to this story because the point of it is those fault lines. In society at large and in personal relationships. It’s about exploring how we try to bridge or heal those fault lines and how, sometimes, we make them deeper.

Torture (and indeed the other atrocities that are part of the country’s legacy) serve to raise the stakes. They deepen that initial emotional trench between the characters. And they also… Pull the camera back I suppose? The story may be about a single family but it isn’t an individual story. It’s about how larger patterns of abuse effect everyone in a society. Torture serves to make it about the culture, the country, instead of just the individuals within it.

There are similar ideas in the other story I’m working on, societal divides and how we bridge them, but I think there’s a slightly different focus.

Both of these stories are fantasy stories, but while Ilāra's story is in a sort of circa 1900s past Kibwe’s is in the future. It’s extrapolating the political oppression and systems from the places I’m interested in (in this case India, the Philippines, Kenya and Nigeria.)

The story takes place across generations starting when Kibwe was a teenager but continuing to his daughter’s formative years and into his children becoming independent adults.

And there’s torture in this story because the entire family is involved in politics. Because I grew up knowing that the natural consequence of acting for major political reform/justice was arrest and torture.

The story is about trying to change unjust systems and generational violence. It’s also about the unhealthy ways people can engage in activism, putting the theoretical good of the community above their health and their families/friends.

I didn’t really have to think about including torture in any depth, it was a natural fit. In fact I’m not sure I could talk about politics in any meaningful way without talking about torture.

So some more specific questions that might help with your story. Is the structure of the Yiga clan important to the story? Is the effect they have on society at large important to the story? Is this primarily an individual/personal story or one with a wider focus?

There aren’t ‘wrong’ answers to those questions, it’s about what you want to write.

Do you want a more personal focus with the relationships between the major characters being more important then the world at large? I think of this as a character focused (as opposed to a character driven) story.

For instance in the Lord of the Rings trilogy while we care about every member of the fellowship the important thing throughout, the focus, is the destruction of the ring and the systems that are harming all of Middle Earth. By contrast in Howl’s Moving Castle we care about the war and the fate of the missing Prince, but the important thing is what happens to the girls from the hat shop.

Both of these approaches to a story can include torture in a meaningful way. It can add to both kinds of stories. But it’s generally adding different things.

In a character focused story (with the kind of plot you’re writing) torture is mostly adding a sudden change to all of the relationships a character has. There might be focus on symptoms, a recovery arc, character development etc but the first and most obvious thing it’s adding is a major change to how these characters interact.

In a story that’s more focused on the big picture of the world torture can add world building elements and it can be used to map out divisions and allegiances in the societies you write.

Part of the reason I’m making this distinction is that in this scenario you can very easily tell a character focused story with trauma-recovery and not have torture. Kidnap and seven years imprisonment is enough to be traumatising.

That doesn’t mean torture couldn’t/wouldn’t add anything to that story. But it might not be necessary for the story you want to tell and the focus you want it to have.

On the other hand if this is primarily a broader story about communities and cultures growing and changing, the decision of whether or not to include torture has much more potential to direct the plot. It could create opposition to reforming the Yiga clan, both inside the clan (wanting to stick with how things are) and outside it (with people wanting it utterly destroyed).

Different factions and cultures might band together on the basis of shared opposition to the Yiga clan. And the clan’s reformation could effect those allegiances.

There could also be knock on effects based on where the clan operates: cultures that have been targetted by them in the past might not want this new ‘reformed’ (and more obvious) Yiga clan on their lands. And that in turn could stir up trouble within the clan because hey they’ve been here for generations it’s their home too!

There are lots of ways torture could add to this plot and these characters. It could also feed in to broader themes.

For instance the main character and her father haven’t seen each other for seven years. The difference between how we remember or idolise someone and the way they actually are is a theme you could add to here. The Yiga clan is going to end up reformed: what does it take for people to accept that reformation and forgive? The main character is friends with a former Yiga assassin: how do we process the fact people we care about might have hurt others?

That isn’t an exhaustive list, I’m just throwing out ideas to see if anything interests you.

In terms of timing and character being physically able to escape I think you’re already hit on a pretty good idea.

Torturers don’t tend to stop when ordered to. Part of the reason a lot of organisations reject torturers is because they… tend to disobey orders. A lot.

So if you wanted to write a scenario where this character is initially tortured and then held for a much longer time without torture the realistic way to do that is to have the character transferred from the ‘care’ of one group of Yigas to another. Torturers tend to exist in groups as sub-cultures within larger organisations. Which means that their presence in an organisation does not necessarily indicate that everyone in the organisation supports/carries out torture.

You could even have the Yiga’s take a (perhaps half-hearted) anti-torture stance and have them punish the torturers.

Wrapping up, the decision of whether or not to include torture is up to you. I can see ways it could add to your story but the points and themes I’ve spoken about might not be things you’re interested in.

Just because an element could add to a story doesn’t necessarily mean it’s adding something you want. There’s nothing wrong with deciding that an element doesn’t interest you, takes the story in a direction you like less or causes more stress then you want as you write it.

Ultimately the question is whether you want to write torture. And there’s no wrong answer to that question.

I hope that helps. :)

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#lia-wild-english #writing advice #tw torture #tw kidnap #writing survivors #writing torturers #effects of torture #effects of torture on society #worldbuilding #fantasy ask #torture survivors and relationships

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i-need-entertainment · 3 years

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Sweet Home Hyogo: Chapter 6 Is that him?

Chapter 5-Chapter 7

It’s been one week since Y/n arrived in Hyogo. Her and Kita are on better terms…I guess? I mean, they don’t really argue, they just kinda coexist. The two have been hanging around each other more. Oh yeah, about the fight…only one of them remembers that fight. Y/n remembered them having a fight, but due to the alcohol content in her blood, she didn’t exactly remember it.

So, she apologized to Kita for whatever it was she said, he did also and the two made up. While Y/n has been ‘enjoying’ her vacation, on the other side of the country, someone has been tirelessly trying to convince someone else to accept what he has told them.

*Changing POV to <3Akaashi<3*

“Mom, I’ve told you before, I’m not breaking off my engagement because you want me to.” Akaashi groaned as he dragged him hand down his face. “But, Keiji, dear, think about the bigger picture. If you marry this girl, which I- you know near nothing about, our reputation could be tarnished. We don’t even know if she’s from a wealthy family!” Akaashi shook his head as he turned around to face his mother who was seated at the dining room table. “Just because she isn’t one of the tramps you’ve tried to set me up with doesn’t make her a threat. Y/n is genuine and trustworthy, she has been since I met her. I don’t know much about her past, that’s true. But don’t you go saying I don’t know her. I’m not stupid. Mom. I wouldn’t have proposed if I wasn’t serious.”

His mother shook her head in disappointment. “Fine. But, at least try and figure it out, go see her I don’t know. Just don’t go into this marriage blind, that would be stupid.” Ignoring the spite laced in with her words, he thought about it. A visit couldn’t hurt, I mean, the two of you were on good terms. Plus it had been a week, and it would be nice to meet the people she had spoken so little about. “Yeah, you’d know all about making mistakes in marriage, seeing as you made mistakes in all four.”

His mother gasped as he began to walk to the door. “I will take your not-so-friendly-advice and go see her. And mom?” Taking a deep breath to stop from scolding him for his disrespect she nodded, ”yes?” He stopped at the door way to turn around and look at her. “Please, leave my love life alone.” Begrudgingly she nodded, waving him off with a ‘Have fun.’ Before Akaashi left his mother’s home before returning to his own to pack for an impromptu trip to Hyogo.

The drive there wasn’t too bad he decided, it was calming, peaceful and it allowed him to sort out his thoughts. It had been a fairly busy week. The publishing company he worked for had him working till odd hours of the nights, Bokuto had called him on three separate occasions asking ‘How to use the dishwasher’ or ‘why won’t my oven turn off’ and his personal favorite, ‘why is my oven on fire’. That had been a fun one to explain to the apartment land lord.

Perhaps worst of all, he hadn’t been able to see his fiancée the whole week, and contact between he two had been limited. He figured she would be busy, five years is a lot of time to catch up on after all, but he would be lying if he said he didn’t miss her. The drive was only about 3 hours, so he got there at just under noon. He didn’t really know where she lived, so going to her house was a bit of a no go for now, but he figured he’d walk around a bit.

He had never been to Hyogo after all, and the small town vibes were a welcomed change to the bustling city of Tokyo. “Can I help you?” Akaashi turned around to see a tall, fairly well built man with dark, parted hair come up to him looking at him with suspicion. “I don’t know, I’m here visiting someone, but I don’t know where they are, and they don’t know I’m coming.”

Suna hummed in acknowledgement. “Who are you lookin’ for? It’s a small town so I might be able to tell ya where they might be.” Akaashi’s eyes slightly widened at this and his face got a little brighter. “Ah, I’m looking for Y/n L/n. I’m her fiancé.” Suna was about to point him in the right direction but the last word of his sentence threw him off. “Wait, fiancé?” Akaashi nodded, “For just over a week.” Suna shook his head, giving the man a confused gaze.

“Y’can’t be her fiancé, Y/n’s married.”

Akaashi felt time itself come to a halt. ‘No, it can’t be. This is a friend of hers so he’s probably playing a prank, right? She wouldn’t- no she would have told me. But…I also don’t know that much about her. Y/n…what haven’t you told me.’

“S-say that again.” Suna looked a bit surprised at the man, but it quickly turned to one of sympathy when he got what might be going on. “Y/n’s been married for about 8 years now. Wait, you didn’t know.” Akaashi silently and slowly shook his head side to side. “L/n automotive shop. Its downtown, Y’can’t miss it. Pretty sure she’ll be there.” Akaashi looked at him “Thank you, really.” Suna nodded, a small smile on his face, “No problem, you deserve to know.”

*Meanwhile AT L/n automotive shop.*

“Two more weeks.” Y/n sighed, she figured as much. “Sorry sweetheart, there’s just nothin’ more I can do, not with a busted engine anyway.” Y/n smiled towards her father, giving him a quick hug. “Don’t worry about it dad, it’s not your fault. Plus, you’re the best mechanic I know, so I have faith in you~” Her father chuckled as he walked back into his office. *Ding* the bell on the front door of the shop chimed. Y/n turned to see who had entered when she felt herself freeze.

Standing in the doorway was none other than her fiancé. “U-um Keiji! HI! I-“ He stopped her from continuing her sentence, he was doing his best as it was to keep his anger under wraps, but after what he had just learned? He wasn’t sure how much longer he could keep it up. “When were you going to tell me.” Y/n gulped, “Keiji, I can explain!” The look on his face was enough to render her speechless. It was pained, it showed hurt and most of all betrayal. “I don’t want an explanation. Y/n.”

She snapped her mouth shut at hearing the tone of his voice. He was dead serious. And she knew she was in no position to be asking for him to listen. “I want the truth. About our relationship, about your previous relationship. I want to know what you’ve lied to me about, Y/n.” The ding of the bell rung once again, and Mr. L/n had exited his office. “Ah, Shinsuke my son, come with me. Yer tractors almost- Y/n? Who’s this?”

Akaashi turned towards the door to see who had walked in, noticing Y/n’s reaction to him entering. “Is that him?” He asks her, and she just nods. Akaashi mutters out an ‘I don’t believe this’ while he started walking towards the door. “Keiji, wait! Please!” He stopped for a moment, looked her in the eyes before frustratingly sighing. “I just!- I need time….Y/n…” Without another word he left the shop, going back to his hotel to think things through.

Shaking herself free of her trance she went to follow after him, try and fix things before they became unrepairable. But a firm grasp on her bicep stopped her, she turned around to see Kita with a regretful look on his face “Give him some time. Let him think things through before you go after him.” Y/n’s breathing was getting shallow as she started to freak out. Y/n’s father pulled her into his chest and held her, comforting her with a comfort only a father could.

“Shinsuke’s right, honey, he needs time.” He patted her shoulder as he headed back into his office. “Y/n.” She turned toward Kita. He held his hand out to her, in it was a yellow folder. “I hope you fix things with him.” He said before he gave her a final nod and walked out of the shop, hiding his pained and distraught expression from his wife. Y/n watched him leave as she wiped a tear from her eye. Opening the yellow folder, she scanned it just to see Shinsuke Kita signed in neat cursive on the line she had seen blank for so long. Shinsuke Kita had finally signed the darned divorce papers.

A/N: OuChiEs that hurted AND IM THE ONE THAT WROTE IT ☹ n e ways I hope you enjoyed…h a h a. I hope you have a nice night/day! Bye!

#kita x reader #akaashi x reader #fluff #angst #crack #akaashi keiji #kita shinsuke #Haikyuu!!#akaashi angst #kita angst #y/n #akaashi x y/n #kita x y/n #love triangle

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sheliesshattered · 4 years

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This Isn’t A Ghost Story extras for Chapter 6: The Future

Chapter 6 of This Isn’t A Ghost Story has been posted! You can find it here on Tumblr, or here on AO3. Spoiler-ish extras under the cut!

With chapter 6 under our belts, we’ve made it through the main portion of this fic! The next two chapters will wrap up a few loose ends -- and possibly create a couple more, of the open-ended variety -- and if I hadn’t gotten quite so deep into the world-building for this, I might have actually ended the story here. All the research I did for the world-building directly inspired the next two chapters, which were both written and finished before I had anything more than a basic sketch in place for chapter 6.

Egyptology in the 1920s has clearly been a huge part of the world-building for this story from the beginning, and we get a bit more of it in chapter 6. The Doctor mentioned Howard Carter briefly in chapter 5, and here we loop back around to that and find out that Clara and the Doctor knew Carter well. I didn’t want to derail the chapter too much with talking about their friendship in any detail, but large portions of the timeline of when they were in Egypt in the 1920s was built around the historical events of the discovery and documentation of Tutankhamun’s tomb, and there are a few passing allusions to it in the journal entries in chapter 3 as well.

Howard Carter (pictured above in 1924) and his team of excavators found the entrance to Tutankhamun’s tomb in November of 1922, which would have been during the phase when Clara and the Doctor are exchanging letters and falling in love. One little historical detail that I sadly couldn’t quite use was that 23 November 1922 was actually a date of minor significance in the discovery of the tomb. It was the day that Carter’s financier, Lord Carnarvon, arrived at the dig site to witness the opening of the tomb, along with his daughter Lady Evelyn Herbert, who would have been about a year and a half younger than Clara. This picture of the three of them was taken at the entrance of the tomb in late 1922, and is similar to how I imagine Clara and the Doctor’s picture with Carter would have looked:

As the tomb was being excavated, Carter and Carnarvon assembled a team of experts to help with the huge task of cataloging, preserving, and translating all the many items found in the tomb, and though I never called it out specifically in This Isn’t A Ghost Story, I figure the Doctor was part of that team, probably specifically focused on translation work. In late February 1923, there was a short halt in the excavation that lasted a few weeks, which was what led, in our fictionalized version of events, to the Doctor briefly returning to Glasgow, and Clara’s impulsive decision to follow him there. After their wedding in May of ‘23, Clara and the Doctor went directly to Egypt, and the Doctor returned to work on Carter’s team.

Family members, tourists, and the press were all known to visit the dig site during that first year of excavation and the resulting media craze:

Given that, and Clara and the Doctor being ‘disgustingly in love newlyweds’ it seemed reasonable that Clara would have visited the site at least a few times, and been on good terms with Howard Carter. Carter actually got his start in Egyptology when he was hired as a young man to paint reproductions of ancient temple walls and other Egyptian artifacts:

During the excavation of Tutankhamun’s tomb, he made detailed sketches, including careful measurements, of every item removed from the tomb and where it had originally be found in the tomb. Much of what we know about King Tut’s tomb now is down to how methodical Carter was in documenting the original untouched state of the tomb, both with measurements, drawings, and photography. These are both drawings Carter did of the tomb during that period:

Chapter 3 mentions that Clara decided to learn to draw in the summer of 1923, so I liked the little detail that it was Howard Carter, with his meticulous and beautiful art, that suggested she take up the hobby. Modern Clara also notes in passing that she drew all throughout her childhood, particularly her ghost, which all connects back to those early days of their marriage in 1923.

I’ve got more up my sleeve about the world-building elements for the next two chapters, but since chapter 6 was the last chapter I finished, long after chapters 7 and 8 were done, I thought I’d talk a bit about the writing process as well. The final scenes I wrote for the entire story were near the end of chapter 6, and despite knowing what I needed this chapter to do, what needed to be in place to set up chapters 7 and 8, chapter 6 gave me a bit of trouble along the way.

I imagined this chapter in a lot of different ways as the story was evolving, but I always knew I wanted to emphasize the possibility of future travels for Clara and the Doctor. The theme of ‘101 Places To See’ is so strong in canon that echoing it for 1920s Clara was a big part of my world-building from the beginning, and I felt like any version of a happy ending for Clara and the Doctor had to include travel. An early draft of this chapter ended on Clara’s final line from Mummy On The Orient Express, ‘Then what are you waiting for? Let's go.’ to help emphasize that travel theme -- and because I can never resist borrowing a line from canon whenever I can find an excuse.

Another early sketch for this chapter had Clara and the Doctor venturing out for grocery shopping, with the Doctor complaining up a storm while Clara tried to carry on a conversation with him without any strangers taking note of it. Originally I had planned to include more of Clara’s work week, and had scenes roughed in where her friend and fellow teacher Amy Pond found out that Clara had gotten “engaged” over the weekend, leading Clara to have to make up something on the spot about how she’d been in a long-distance relationship that had only recently turned serious, which was why Amy had never met him. There was a whole thing about how Clara and Amy (who taught ancient world history) were co-directing Coal Hill’s production of Antony And Cleopatra, and Amy wanting to make sure that Clara wasn’t going to run off to see the world with her new fiance before the night of the play. Eventually that all got boiled down to just a single exchange between Clara and the Doctor, as I decided to keep the focus tight in on the two of them and their relationship, and not even include dialogue from any other characters.

One thing that comes up again and again in my writing projects is that when I’m imagining the plotline early in the process, it always takes up a lot more calendar days than the final product does. I imagine events taking place over the course of weeks, but then find that the emotional flow works much better condensed down to a handful of days instead. Despite my stories following that same pattern in development for more than a decade now, it somehow always seems to surprise me, lol.

Really early on in working on Ghost Story, I knew I wanted to keep Clara’s canonical birthdate of 23 November 1986 and build the rest of the timeline around that, and I picked out November 2014 as the time period for the main part of the story because it corresponds roughly to when the end of s8 of the show originally aired. But in a very early outline of events, Clara didn’t have the nightmare that led to her memories coming back until the night of her birthday, a full week later from what ended up happening in this final version.

Even as recently as a few weeks ago, I was still planning on ending this chapter on her birthday, and it wasn’t until I started digging into the scene by scene and line by line breakdown of the chapter that I realized that it really wasn’t necessary. And leaving her birthday as an upcoming event folded in nicely with the ‘Future’ theme I wanted for this chapter, so again I decided to keep the focus tight on Clara and the Doctor’s relationship as they unravel the mystery and deal with the fallout of what happened in 1927.

Figuring out what I actually wanted to happen this chapter versus what could be left on the cutting-room floor, as they say, was a huge part of the final phase of writing This Isn’t A Ghost Story. Once I had cut out extraneous scenes and meandering plot tangents (and poor Amy Pond), I was left with a very specific list of scenes and conversations, and I wrote them much the same way I write everything, jumping around to a given scene as dialogue or internal monologue occurs to me. To me it always feels like putting together a large jigsaw puzzle, filling in holes and connecting up pieces as the puzzle comes together.

I find that technique works really well for me when I’m in early and mid development of a story, but once I was down to just a couple of scenes that still needed written, progress slowed way down. I got to the point where I knew the emotional content of a scene and even most of the dialogue, and needed just a little bit of stage direction to stitch the whole thing together. Those of you who have been following along with my #process thoughts posts here may remember me posting about working on that last scene just a couple of weeks ago, trying to wrestle it into shape.

@tounknowndestinations, @praetyger, and a few others of you have asked about it, and I can now reveal that the very last bit to get written was the sequence with Clara preparing for bed and then the two of them getting into bed. I had the awkward sex conversation and the final scene the next morning already written, I just had to connect the first part of the chapter up with those last scenes. I’m happy with how it eventually came together -- and very curious to hear if any of you could pick out that that was the last bit written? -- but not having the option to work on anything else, just those specific words in that specific place, made it more of a struggle for me than writing most of the rest of Ghost Story.

My husband and beta reader Jack was more involved with the editing of this chapter than he was with any of the other chapters, and in several places helped me rewrite individual lines or conversation beats until we were both happy with how they read. @praetyger asked how I know when writing is ‘done’, and I have to admit it’s mostly a process of reading it over and over again, and then getting Jack to read it and taking his feedback seriously. I tend towards overly long run-on sentences, so if Jack gets lost while reading a sentence, that’s one he’ll call out as needing to be reworded for clarity.

There’s one sentence in this chapter that we went back and forth over quite a lot: ‘The feeling of what might have been that seeing their wedding photo had elicited in her wasn’t some strange, misplaced jealousy, but rather the knowledge she carried deep in her soul, buried in her subconscious, that their story wasn’t over yet.’ It was originally even more wordy, and Jack would have preferred the final version be a lot more simple, but it just didn’t read right to me without ‘elicited’ so I stuck to my guns on that bit, even as I filed down some of the wordiness in other parts of the sentence.

Both for reworking a sentence and for writing big sections in the first place, my method is generally to write it and edit a little as I go, trying to get the word choice and pacing as close to what I want as I can on a first pass. Then I’ll let it sit, at the very least overnight but often for days or longer at a time, then come back and reread it when it isn’t so fresh in my mind. At that point, sometimes a phrase will jump at me as awkward or something I used just a paragraph or two earlier, so I’ll rewrite it, let it sit, come back and edit it all over again. Sometimes what seemed like plenty of room for an emotional beat when I was writing it will go by way too fast when I reread it, so I’ll add to it, give it space to breathe. Rinse and repeat.

For the record, Jack’s favorite line from this chapter is this bit of dialogue for the Doctor: ‘“Yes,” he allowed warily, clearly not sure where she was going with this.’ I imagine it’s probably for similar reasons as why he liked the ‘she didn’t add again but knew they were both thinking it’ bit from chapter 5. I try not to put my own marriage into my writing too much, but there are some experiences of being married that I think are probably pretty universal.

@ephemeralhologram asked about my writing inspiration, and for me my writing is always driven by a kernel of a what-if idea and a desire to convey a certain emotion. I almost always start out with a ‘plotbunny’ idea, some tiny thing that I daydream about and consider from multiple angles until a plot and emotional tone starts coming into focus.

For Ghost Story, it was actually a shitpost here on Tumblr about a real estate agent having a conversation with the ghost who haunts the house they’re trying to sell, along with wanting to try telling a Twelve/Clara story in an alternate universe completely separate from the show canon, which I had never done before Ghost Story. The emotional tone started out much sillier, more in line with that Tumblr post, but as I got into the world-building and decided I wanted to have a mystery and mutual pining at the center of this story, the tone shifted quite a lot.

The other major drivers of writing inspiration for me are that I enjoy putting words together into interesting and emotionally evocative combinations, and I enjoy conveying character emotion and eliciting emotion in the reader. No matter what fandom I’m writing in, no matter how close to canon or how AU, how short or long the story is, those two things are always at the center of my writing.

I walk around the house or do chores that I don’t have to focus on too much (dishes are excellent for this) just tossing around bits of dialogue in my head until I find an emotional beat that grabs me or a bit of phrasing that I really like. I jot those down into a googledoc -- most of my DW stories start out in a doc called “Doctor Who Bits” that is in fact just fragments of multiple stories, and then eventually a story will graduate into having its own dedicated googledoc. Figuring out the plot is just as much about deciding on the emotional journey I want to take the characters and/or the readers on as it is deciding on an order of events.

Thank you to @tounknowndestinations, @ephemeralhologram, and @praetyger for the questions! I am more than happy to answer any questions about my writing process or details about this story, or anything really, so feel free to hit me up in my ask, or in the comments on this post, or in a comment over on AO3. Thank you to everyone who has followed along with this story, and for all the support and encouragement you’ve offered along the way, I couldn’t have written this story without this wonderful little corner of the Whouffaldi fandom! ❤️

Extras for Chapter 7: The Museum

#This Isn't A Ghost Story #This Isn't A Ghost Story extras #process thoughts #my writing #Doctor Who #Doctor Who fanfic #Clara and the Doctor

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entriesfromangels · 3 years

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Journal Entry (#20) ~

One of the ways my therapist said to let my feelings out was to write letters. Doesn’t mean I have to send them to these people but rather talk to them in a way that gets my thoughts out. I did this with my ex-best friend and my ex-fiancé. I didn’t send them. I didn’t tell them I wrote one. I just wrote it and you know it did help. It helped me close the book on the relationship and move forward.

Now this one is a little different for me. This one is going to be for my ex-bf. Honestly doesn’t feel like he is my ex... guess I’m kinda denying it? But after everything, he still wants me to go back to WA and still wants to keep me around. I truly don’t know if it’s to work on our relationship or stay friends but I just have to write this. I gotta let this out so I can either move forward or continue to fight for it. I feel there is still hope so... I really want to get this out there.

———————————————————————-

Dear R,

The moment I met you and we started talking... I knew you were someone special. I felt this instant connection with you that I never really had for anyone else. Sure in the past I’ve met people and potential partners and felt that closeness but with you it was different.

We became so close so fast and really made me see relationships and love in a different light. I saw that there are second chances at love and just because it didn’t work out with others in the past, no matter how serious or committed it was, doesn’t mean it’s not out there. Those days we spent together before I moved back to TX were really special. I wasn’t alone in this fast, genuine connection... you said you felt it too.

When we first kissed, it felt like I’ve kissed those lips before. It was a connection, a warm feeling of genuine romance that I never really experienced. I was engaged to someone (twice) and never felt that. I was with him for almost 5 years and never felt that. You told me too that with your last serious relationship, it being your ex-wife, that it took a few years to even feel that comfort or closeness; we only knew each other a few days and already felt it. To me that meant something and I know it did to you too.

I didn’t know you had previous relationships before me that were really ways to try to fill the void that your ex left. I know your reason for wanting that closeness again was only from a genuine place. I don’t know if you expected us to move as fast as we did but in a way I’m glad it did.

The decision to move up there was mine and the decision to live together was yours. As I was home in TX, my love and affection for you only grew. Every time I saw you on video chat and heard your voice when you called me, it just made the butterflies in my tummy go crazy.

But despite all these good feelings... I could tell you were still struggling with the loss of your divorce. I don’t think you missed her as an individual because she really hurt you. She cheated on you and took you for everything you had. That on its own is toxic and manipulative and I’m sure you didn’t want to go back to that.

I think what you missed was the closeness, being connected to someone in that way, having someone to call yours. Just to be in a relationship again. I wasn’t prepared to meet you. I got over my ex fast because at the end, I saw how manipulative and toxic he was; maybe our exes should meet since they have the same mindset.

I do think you wanted to build a life with me, join a partnership with me and grow our relationship. I do believe you when you said you fell for me and I do stand by what I told you when I said I was falling in love with you. Maybe it’s too fast, maybe I’m getting ahead of myself and that scared you but I do mean what I say.

I know getting over a relationship that you built and have it crumble is never easy. When you told me how you proposed to her, it made me cry because she didn’t deserve all the pure love and affection you gave her. She deserves to go about her day thinking, “fuck. I let a good one go. Maybe I shouldn’t have cheated.” But people like that never get to that point. All they think about is themselves and don’t realize how good they have it. I know having something that you poured your whole heart and soul into and having it disappear in front of you, isn’t easy. But with this time we have and the effort you are putting into dealing with it, I know you can do it.

In terms of us:

I know my disorder isn’t easy to deal with and as I’ve been home in Texas, I’ve realized so many negative patterns I’ve been doing; not only with you but with my past relationships. For that I am sorry. I wasn’t aware. I wasn’t noticing what I was doing and it hurts me to know that I put you through all those moments I had and for having you worry. I know you only worry because you care and I’m sorry you had to go through that. You deserve so much more and for that I am truly sorry.

This disorder is SO new to me and as the days go by in slow af Texas, I’m learning more about it. I’m doing the work, reading in depth about it, realizing the things I’ve been doing wrong for so long (not just with our relationship) and watching videos about it that make me cry because I know it’s what I’m doing. In those moments of me crying, being impulsive, wanting to harm myself, I didn’t take a step back to really think about how it was affecting you. I just did it because that was what my brain was used to doing. It was programmed to continue to these negative patterns because that’s just how it had been for so long. I know time and time again I said, “sorry. I’ll do better.” Or “it’s my bpd flaring up.” And I’m just realizing that even saying those things are extremely harmful because it feeds the bpd monster in my brain... it doesn’t help.

But now I’m realizing it, I know what I have to do to move forward; not only in my life but with my relationships. I’m learning to take a deep breath, slow down and think about how it makes me feel, then move forward and don’t EVER bring it up again. It already happened and that’s that. No matter how small or big it is, I now know how to handle these situations when they come up. The breaks in my mind are oiled up and ready to work again. For the first time in my life I actually feel like I can get over this bpd. I will always have to deal with my mental health, like taking meds everyday, but bpd is something you can get over and I finally feel like I can do it. The more I learn about my disorder and the more I learn these different techniques, why these negative patterns were bad and taking the steps to make sure my brain double checks itself, the more I feel like I can conquer it. I discovered this over the time I’ve been home and it honestly makes me cry because I didn’t think I’d ever get here. I thought I was stuck with it and that’s it. My ex’s family definitely made it feel that way but for once I believe in myself and no one can tell me otherwise.

The purpose of writing this is to say that I still want to try.

I still want to continue to build this life with you. I don’t care if we have to start from chapter one, which is what Dr. Daniel Fox calls it (he’s the author of my bpd workbook), I don’t care if we have to slow it down so you can catch up, I don’t care. All I know is that this connection that we just scratched the surface of is something I want to continue to explore. I do care for you, I do like you a whole lot and I am starting to have love for you. I know us coming to this decision to break it off wasn’t an easy one. When you said you still want me to come home, that you still want me in your life and don’t want to loose me and consider me a best friend... I know you meant every word.

Maybe I’m hoping for something that might not happen right away. Maybe I’m holding on to something that has already ran it’s course... I don’t know. But when I told you I was falling in love with you... the tone in your voice to me sounded like someone who didn’t want to let go so easily. Maybe breaking up was good for us for right now. I know you are in a spot where you don’t know what you want. I know dealing with your last relationship impacted you a lot. I know you aren’t wanting her back or still have unresolved feelings for her. You just didn’t take the proper time to HEAL.

When you told me you needed extra time to speak with a therapist, figure out what you were feeling and actually deal with something so traumatic ON YOUR OWN TERMS is something to be proud of. I’m really happy that you are taking this time to do this for yourself. I’m glad you are realizing that you need help and I guess in a bittersweet way... our growing relationship helped you see that.

I do support you and whatever you decide to do but I just want you to know that I don’t want to give up. I will see you again on April 19 and I hope by then we can figure it out together. That either be us moving on or working on our relationship. I’m in therapy again, I’m taking my meds regularly, I’m putting in the work on my disorder, I’m making goals that I want to accomplish and setting my priorities... and all it took was a few weeks to actually take the time to work on myself. Not only for me but for our relationship. I do want to work on this. I do want to show you all the progress I’ve made and show you how happy I’ve been lately. I want to grow this relationship, I want to build a future with you, I want all of that... and I know you do too. If we have to start over, take it slow, regularly take time to better ourselves and be there for each other... I’m down for it.

Is it crazy? Is it even worth it? I believe it is because you captured my heart and I know we can build something beautiful together. We had fun times together and I want to continue to have that with you. I also want you to take your time. Don’t feel pressure to move this relationship fast, if slow is what you want then we can do that. I want you to be as comfortable as you can and always know I’ll be here to help you whenever needed. I think our relationship is worth it. I think the care and closeness we have is worth it. I want to fight for this because i know it’s something that doesn’t happen everyday.

But until I see you again, I want you to take the time you need to work things out. To figure out what works for you and actually take the time to heal and realize that what happened to you IS NOT YOUR FAULT. You are deserving of love. You deserve the world. You are an amazing person with a pure and kind heart. If that’s with me or someone else... always know that I’ll always be on the sidelines cheering you on.

I just have to keep fighting for us because I know with the growth I’ve made and the growth you’re working on, I know we can have something amazing. Again... as slow as you need and at your own pace... we can fall for each other again like it was intended. I want this, I want to work and grow on this with you and even if it doesn’t happen..... I know I’ll be okay.

But I can’t give up just yet. I can’t close the chapter on you so soon. I still have fight left in me and I hope you do too. These next few weeks aren’t going to be easy. Self-reflection isn’t the most fun thing to do but once you start making strides and breakthroughs... it starts to all seem worth it again. I promise you will come out of this happier, better and more understanding, that you are not what happened to you. You are you and yes life comes with it’s daily struggles but it’s how we come out of it that matters. I’ll always be here for you and I just wanted to say all of this because I believe in our relationship and I want to show you the growth and self-reflection I have done and just grow into a better person. You did tell me you are noticing the growth and want me to continue, and I have been. It’s been good for me but now it’s your turn to do the same.

Whatever outcome comes of this... I know you’ll always be a special person in my life.

I just can’t give up just yet... my heart won’t let me and I want to fight for US.

Love,

#personal #journal entry #my thoughts #staying strong #bpd #borderline personality disorder #borderline things #relationships #moving on #self reflection

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