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fenristheorem · 3 years

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Hi! First of all, I just wanted to say that I fell in love with your writing and the way you analyze the characters. Now, there is something that has been on my mind for some time, since I found out that Huang Hua can feel other people's feelings, I just imagine that she found out how Lance started to develop feelings for the Guardian. The secret looks he gives her, the restlessness he feels when she enters.

Hello! Thank you so much for the compliment! ❤

The request wasn’t exactly formatted in the way of the typical ask, so I wasn’t exactly sure if you were requesting this as a hc / scenario or just commenting for a discussion, but since my page is primarily writing requests I can only assume it’s a request lol.

I’m not entirely sure what Huang Hua’s special power exactly is to be honest. Some people say it’s the ability to read souls, or sort of read minds, or emotions, things along those lines. I have a general idea that she can read someone’s inner heart, energy/aura, and true intentions, which sort of combines many of those ideas as well as your ideas in the request, so I’ll be writing with that in mind. I hope you don’t mind! It won’t really have much of a difference on how I write this as the general idea (how it’s used) is the same.

~ Under the cut ~

Huang Hua’s observations as Lance falls in love with Guardienne:

Huang Hua, of course, observed Lance during his years of change at the guard. He certainly did become someone different; wiser, more resilient, more composed. She knew him once before his years of being Ashkore, but if asked, she would say that she would like this new Lance better. His actions have humbled him and made him wiser, and he has a more realistic perspective on life now. She’s not pleased with what he’s done in the past, but she realizes that sometimes someone can be their own worst enemy, and if they rise above that and don’t give in to living their life in self-pity, they can become even greater than they once were and provide greater things than they once could have. It seems like this was one of those cases, so instead of holding his past against him, Huang Hua lets him thrive in his new era and provide what he can for the guard.

However, there was one thing that always bothered Huang Hua about Lance: it was nothing but work with him.

Even prior to being Ashkore, Lance spent very little time to himself. He would take care of himself, of course, but aside from the occasional friends or acquaintances, or the occasional one night stands (I don’t think it’s confirmed that Lance had a lot of one night stands, but looking at Valk’s history we can say it’s probably true), he didn’t really spend much time to himself.

This still holds true in this new era, but Huang Hua understands his reasoning better. Even so, everyone needs a bit of a break sometimes; a time to wind down and de-stress. She’s mentioned this once or twice to him when he seems to be carrying the weight of the guard on his back, and he says he’ll keep it in mind... but never really does anything different.

This changes when Guardienne emerges from the crystal.

Immediately, Huang Hua picks up that Lance is high strung and stressed - although he hides it very well (after all, a soldier shouldn’t be easily visibly stressed out right?) - at her presence... but there’s something else, too. Something... deeper. Admiration? Respect? ... Fear?

And even deeper than that seems to be some other sort of distress... Longing?

This genuinely shocks Huang Hua.

Lance, the destroyer of Eldarya, is scared of Guardienne? Sure she saved the world and put up a good fight, but physically she’s completely out of shape now! A great warrior like him has nothing to fear now!

Except, she’s aware that Lance knows the art of warfare much better than her, and he knows personal things about himself that she doesn’t know, even despite her abilities, so perhaps there’s something she’s overlooking or can’t see.

As leader of the guard - with the ability to learn about some of the most private areas of someone’s life by simply wishing to know - she’s basically promised herself to not use her ability unless necessary.

But Lance being terrified of Guardienne is a valid call for her to use this ability to monitor him, right?

Huang Hua has roughly mastered the art of balancing work and her personal life, so she carries on day to day life with little issues relating to this. She knows how to not let this effect the guard, and knows how to hide it so well that nobody would know that anything is going on, so she allows herself to indulge in the sudden mystery that is Lance and his emotions.

And then she realizes just how deeply Lance feels emotions, and just how influential they can be, and it nearly takes her breath away.

All of the emotions flooding through him at once; the regret, shame, sorrow, anger, and even fear, all have a special place in him. They’re always so consistent, and so overwhelming. For a while, Huang Hua wonders if it’s these emotions that drive him in general.

Yes, this is not the first time she's looked into his inner being to know him better - after all, looking into him is how she knew it was safe to release him back into the guard to train new recruits - but this is the first time since then that she's bothered to truly observe him again, and she's shocked by what is revealed. Huang Hua did not know that Lance still carried the burden of his past actions so heavily upon his heart.

But every once in a while, when Lance and Guardienne aren’t feuding with each other, Huang Hua sees the dark cloud of those horrific emotions clear away, and something... wonderful happens.

Lance holds a tender spot in his heart for Guardienne.

Beyond all of that fear, and anger, and sorrow for everything that’s happened to him and because of him - including what Guardienne went through - is a soft spot for the woman he hurt most.

Huang Hua nearly gets whiplash from the sudden realization.

And then she gets curious, perhaps more curious than she should have been.

How long has that been going on for? Did he feel this way before the final war? Is this another reason why he kidnapped her and ran to Memoria? ... Would he have even have been able to feel this way back then?

Huang Hua has never been more interested in someone else’s relationship drama.

She takes to observing his actions over time, trying to decipher what he does for what reasons, and then finds that when he’s not doing things out of responsibility, he tries to make things a bit easier for Guardienne. He keeps his distance, sure, but if there’s anything subtle that he can do behind the scenes to help her, he typically does so.

On occasion - when Guardienne isn’t paying attention to him - he’ll observe her as Huang Hua observes him. She can’t read his thoughts, but she can at least guess what’s going through his mind by the emotions that flood through him, and a common emotion she’s picked up on is cautious hope.

Hope for what? That Guardienne will manage to fix a future mistake he fears making on accident? That she’ll someday forgive him, or move past looking at him and always seeing his past actions? That perhaps someday they can actually be close with each other?

As much as Huang Hua understands why Guardienne is so persistent on being cautious about Lance, she can’t help but hope that one day soon she may relax around him and trust him, perhaps even grow closer than just co-workers or friends.

After all, the savior of Eldarya and destroyer of Eldarya in love? That’s a story of impossible odds, tragic stories, and bending the world’s rules that people write legends and stories about! But it’s also a symbol of hope and faith; that if Eldarya’s savior can one day look past the actions of Eldarya’s destroyer and fall in love with him, then who’s to say that anything is in vain? Who’s to say that moving forward alongside one’s past enemy - despite their past wars - is a fate hopeless and filled with inevitable hurt? Their story could be passed down through legends, and teach important stories to future generations. Among that, she would be a good influence on him! She knows how to relax and spend time with friends, and knows how to stand up and fight and hope for the best even in the darkest times. If the sky were to fall in their future, and their loyalty lie with each other, Guardienne’s hope and faith could be the sole driving force for Lance to perform wonderful miracles. He has the strength, stubbornness, and resources to do so, he just needs the faith.

And then Huang Hua realizes he does have hope and faith... but it’s invested in her.

Guardienne - just like for everyone else - is a representation of hope, but in different ways for Lance than with everyone else. He’s aware of the possibility that she may never be able to see past his former actions but he still works hard regardless, and not to impress her or make anything up, but because he knows that that’s what she would want from him, even if she has her doubts about him.

The Phoenix begins to see a side of the Dragon that she’s never seen before, and she doesn’t know if she approves or disapproves.

Lance begins to work even harder in Guardienne’s presence, and this concerns Huang Hua for a while. He works himself hard enough, how is it possible that he can still give more? Doesn’t he ever get stressed? Will this somehow kill him from overworking? And yet, as she continues to observe him, he still manages himself just fine, and now he’s even more driven to protect Eldarya.

These observations carry on for a long time, and as time continues on, Lance manages to sort out his emotions a bit more, identifying exactly how he feels about Guardienne and learning exactly what pleases her. He does his best to provide what he can for Guardienne, in all aspects of life. However, Huang Hua notices that Lance continues to keep a distance from the Aengel.

This makes her wonder; why is he being so cautious with her? Surely they’ve calmed down to each other by now?

But a small look at how Guardienne is feeling makes her realize why Lance is still keeping away from her; she’s still scared of him, and Lance can sense this.

The Phoenix gains a deeper sense of respect for Lance.

He loves Guardienne, and craves to be closer to her, but notices subtle gestures that she may not even know she does that tell him she still can’t fully accept being around him. Despite his want to be closer, he respects her need for space, and Huang Hua has a feeling that he would keep doing that for the rest of his life if that’s what Guardienne needed. However, even while knowing that she can’t stand to be around him, he still works hard with her in mind.

His loyalty to a woman who can barely stand him nearly makes Huang Hua swoon. This is not a common thing with people, others rarely have this deep of a sense of loyalty to one person - especially someone they hurt who keeps pushing them away; they usually just split up in time - but Lance is firm in his loyalty and persistence for Guardienne.

And then Huang Hua starts to catch him displaying subtle physical signs of his interest. Perhaps he’s decided it’s time to push the boundary? Was he really willing to take the risk of upsetting her?

His eyes will linger on her, no matter where they are, only looking away when he feels as though he’s at risk of being caught. He’ll try and stay physically close to Guardienne when he can, standing close to her side, and on occasion when he leads her somewhere he’ll touch her gently, even if for a moment. He’ll place his hand on her back or shoulder for a few heartbeats, guiding her in the direction they need to head in, and he’ll take her arm softly when he pulls her aside from somewhere to talk to her. Guardienne’s reaction really depends on her mood. If she’s irritated or is feeling threatened, Huang Hua observed, she’ll pull away from him, possibly even snapping back with a blatant statement of “don’t touch me!”. Lance remains calm and collected, but Huang Hua is aware of the jolt of pain that thunders through him when she rejects him, as that same jolt ripples through her as she observes his emotions. However, he never holds it against her, and almost seems to be expecting this sometimes.

On the other hand, every once in a while when Guardienne is having a good moment where she seems to be more trusting of Lance, she’ll allow him to touch her for longer, and Huang Hua could swear she could pick up some sort of... longing, or perhaps disappointment, from her when he pulls away.

And during these times, there’s something that happens between them when they touch. A tension seems to crackle in the air, so thick that Huang Hua is sure that they can see it, and is shocked that no one else can see it. But how could they? No one else has her powers.

This tension is what sparks Huang Hua to become truly invested in their possible relationship. Most of the time Lance and Guardienne don’t seem to know what to make of their relationship, but Huang Hua knows there’s something there that can’t be ignored. Sometimes she finds herself thinking to Guardienne “Oh, kiss him you fool!” when Lance is being particularly tender with her, laying all his tragic emotions bare in front of her as they talk about a harsh topic for him, or when he tells her that he’s glad she talks about important things with him every once in a while, even if it is hard for him. Guardienne didn’t seem to realize that this wasn’t a common thing with Lance; he wouldn’t lie about his emotions, but he was very evasive with talking about his past. To get him to talk openly about his past and have him openly admit his regrets was a rare sight - not because he didn’t like to admit his regrets, but because he felt it wasn’t relevant anymore. It was seven years ago, and he had clearly changed since. He regretted his actions, he wished it never turned out this way, he tries to keep it from repeating in the future; what more needed to be said about the subject?

In this time, Huang Hua begins to realize just how deep his emotions for her run.

Lance had a respect for Guardienne, for every part of her, even when she screwed up a bit or caused a bit of chaos, even if he was angry with her. He admired her stubbornness and diligence at defending the guard and Eldarya, and her optimism even in the darkest hours always had a tendency to shake him to his core and snap some sense back into him. Huang Hua began to notice that his emotions on him pursuing her reflected her emotions during dark hours of their story; it wasn’t over until it was over, and as long as there was a possibility that something could change for the better, that possibility should be sought after.

The Phoenix begins to understand why Miiko once had such intense feelings for the Ice Dragon. Even though so many things have happened to him and because of him, he refuses to be held back or muted. He still allows himself to be who he is at heart, and doesn’t care if others like his personality or not. He had confidence in himself, even after the terrible things he’s done. Lance knew very well the extent of his abilities, and was aware that the most important thing about those abilities were how they were used. He had committed atrocities, sure, but he was confident in himself now because he knows he’s not using his strengths for wrong anymore. He has chosen to fight for good, he can see clearly now, and his loyalties lie with the guard, and, overall, with Guardienne.

However, Huang Hua picks up another emotion as she observes Lance over time, and she’s unsure of if it comes from him, or from herself because of what's beginning to be revealed to her about him.

Some sort of hollow loneliness pierces her chest every once in a while as she watches him. He doesn’t have close friends, he doesn’t pursue any other women, and he doesn’t allow himself much time to relax. Lance is a ghost that drifts around the guard, searching for some true place not within the responsibilities, but within the people he protects.

His past makes him hard to relate to, his perception vastly differs from most faeries, and his emotions are a deep well of running water, constantly shifting and redesigning who he is in any given moment, and yet he strives to find his own place within the guard, not as the Leader of Obsidian, but as Lance; the Ice Dragon, the man, the deep ocean of emotions and history who may very well never find a home among a people he can truly call his. Still he remains the same person inside, but always he is adjusting for the outside world, and he had yet to find someone who would risk unraveling his constant adapting to truly know the man underneath.

But everyday he rises to that challenge, brushing off the echoing thought that perhaps he doesn’t belong among these people - that perhaps he may never find peace here at the guard - because he knows he’s best fit for this responsibility. He can protect these faeries better than anyone else could, and his morals lie first with that, and second with his own fantasies.

Even so, Huang Hua doesn’t miss the hollow echo in Lance’s soul as he watches the guard celebrate, or witnesses close friends embrace each other and confide in each other, and she realizes that Lance doesn’t truly feel at peace here, not at all - not among the people who he’s betrayed and become an outcast from. He feels no peace at all among these people, they are not his people... but perhaps, when he looks at her - Guardienne - within her hope he finds peace, and someday, perhaps, he may find peace, a home, within her arms.

Was it possible that, even as Ashkore, he felt he felt he could find solace within her? Some opening within the dark clouds that overshadowed his existence for him to strive towards?

Did Lance believe that Guardienne made him a better man, even more so than he already is?

By mere chance Huang Hua managed to piece together everything she knew of Lance and his relationship to Guardienne, and she came to realize that there was something between them for a long time. It was deep, and complicated, and was never able to be pursued until now. The Dragon’s emotions for Guardienne ran deeper than any of Eldarya’s oceans, farther than the furthest mapped points, and was purer than even the Aengel’s powers.

Lance was truly in love with her. Not her powers, not her history, he fell in love with a woman who moved something within him that no one has ever touched before.

The Phoenix almost begins to feel guilty over time.

There was something there for a long time. Did Guardienne know this? Did she need a wake up call in order to realize what was happening before her? Was Huang Hua supposed to intervene and help get their relationship going?

If only she knew...

I shouldn’t interfere with this, Lance would feel violated and Guardienne wouldn’t trust me ever again...

But isn’t it a shame to let them possibly waste their life away not telling each other how they feel, or giving this a chance?

Stress eventually invades Huang Hua throughout her days, even when she's not around Lance and Guardienne. The Dragon and the Aengel, in time, grow ever closer, ever more comfortable with each other, and may even be expressing signs of interest for each other! But no one is doing anything about it!

But no one can see the deep roots of their feelings like Huang Hua can, and she's nearly certain that Lance and Guardienne will continue to tip toe around each other in a fearful dance of figuring out where they fit into each other's lives, never daring to test deeper waters in fear of hurting the other and sparking off another bout of painful emotions that may haunt them, and the guard, for years.

It's very possible that their relationship could change the guard and Eldarya - positively - forever, so doesn't this give Huang Hua some right to try and push them together? But romantic relationships are so personal, especially ones as special as this. A unique relationship like theirs shouldn't be interfered with, it will bloom in time if given the right opportunity... but what if Huang Hua can create the right opportunity!? But that's still interfering in their relationship!

Without even knowing, the emotional toll of observing and pondering over Lance and Guardienne's relationship does begin to take effect on her, and Huang Hua's own partner, Ewelein, is the first to notice and call it out.

The leader of the guard then needed to decide if she was willing to indulge her partner, someone completely unrelated to the matter, in her almost stalker-like tendencies of observing the simmering relationship between the guard's resident Dragon and Aengel.

Eventually she breaks and admits to the Elf that she's been observing the inner worlds of Lance and Guardienne as of late, and has realized just how much of a mistake and a blessing it's been.

The first thing Ewelein jumps to is the fact that it's an invasion of privacy, something that - of everyone in the guard - the leader especially should not be partaking in. Huang Hua doesn't really fight back on that idea; she knows it was inappropriate, she should have just approached Lance and asked if he was alright.

"But of course he would say that he's alright! Maybe a bit unsettled, but come on, at the end of the day nothing shakes him for long, and to him that translates to he's alright!"

Eventually its clear to Ewelein that regardless of how Huang Hua came to be in this position, she's trapped in it now, and feels very passionately about the possible romance brewing within the guard, to the point where it truly is stressing her in possibly unhealthy ways.

Ewelein does her best to comfort Huang Hua as she spills everything that's been revealed to her, starting from the beginning of when Lance and Guardienne were still fearful of each other, to the most current moments of when they've been relying on each other, talking civilly, and even possibly shyly flirting. The Elf is quiet and attentive all throughout, knowing that - even as she's surprised in many ways as well by the things time has revealed about Lance and Guardienne - her shock and emotions couldn't begin to rival what Huang Hua has been feeling for the past endless days that she's been observing them.

“I can’t believe it! This is love that stories are written about, that changes worlds and changes people. And he’s hiding it so easily!”

"But would it be right of you to intervene? This is their story, not yours."

"I know, but couldn't this be good for the guard, too? And possibly even Eldarya? And as the leader of the guard, shouldn't I try and do what I think could benefit us?"

"You first started observing Lance under the excuse that it was for professional reasons, to make sure that he was alright to remain in power and carry out his responsibilities despite her presence, but we both know you did it for selfish reasons, too. You were curious as to why Lance felt what he did about her, and now you have your answer. However, you kept observing them after that, even going as far as reading into Guardienne's responses to Lance. Is that professional at all? And instead of invading her privacy, don't you think she would have told you the truth of her fearful emotions for Lance if you asked her heart to heart?"

Huang Hua lowered her head and avoided her gaze.

"You've gotten your professional answers and now you've seen into a very private portion of two people's lives. None of this is professional anymore, so you can't act professionally on it. You need to treat this as what it is; intimate, personal, and something that should be respected, not exploited. I know it would make sense to try and get this to help the guard, but really, there is no guarantee of that. What if they got together and then broke up a while after? What would the message be then, especially if it were known that you set them up together? My advice is to stay back and let this develop in time. Sometimes when I'm with a patient there is nothing I can do for them, sometimes leaving the body alone to heal itself is the best thing to do. I think this is a case where that rule should be applied. The best thing you can do is let them figure out their relationship in time. You can support them, but do not influence them."

Huang Hua knows Ewelein is right, and forever appreciates her partner listening to her thoughts. If Lance and Guardienne's relationship were to be true, they needed to figure out what they meant to each other in their own time.

So Huang Hua follows the Elf's advice. She bites her tongue and hides the fact that she’s witnessed almost every moment of him falling in love with Guardienne, vigilantly awaiting the day where Lance decided to emerge from the dark and shake the guard’s history for a second time.

Goodness this took a while to write, but I'm very pleased with the results! I think I got a good idea of Huang Hua's reaction and how her reaction developed in time in response to Lance and Guardienne growing closer, especially since I don't think her reaction would begin and end within one day of realizing what was going on.

Thanks for asking!

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heartlesslywhumping · 5 years

Text

I got an ask regarding some touchy subjects and rather than just respond to the ask and have it pop up in everyone’s feeds, I decided to copy/paste the question under a cut.

Here are the trigger warnings,

TW: Loss of a loved one TW: Guns TW: Shootings

im writing a story about my oc’s life after she finds out that her boyfriend died in a school shooting he was responsible for & im having trouble writing the grieving process for her. her facing the fact that she misses him & still loves him but is shocked & appalled @ the actions he committed, not wanting to believe that he was planning something so horrific, or wanting to believe he was even capable of doing something like that. (i get it if u don’t want to tho, it’s a bit controversial)

Before I start, I’d like to remind everybody that all the research I put out is taken from the internet, conversations with people I know, and the occasional book. I am not a professional in the matters of mental health and this is not infallible, my word is not law and this is for fun and writing purposes only. Seek out real help in the form of counselors, doctors, and therapists if you are affected in real life.

So I’m sure everyone is aware of the five stages of grief. A lot of people use that for the end all, be all of writing grief but the thing is, there is no end all be all when it comes to emotions or brain stuff.

Some people fit that mold exactly whereas others skip all but one. Some speed through and some take ages in each stage. There is no neat lineup of emotions, more like a roller coaster that never ends. An unfortunate side effect of the firm belief in the five stages means that some people criticize themselves for “not grieving correctly”. Each grieving process is unique as each person is unique.

Of course, misunderstanding the grieving process can lead to some fun internal angst!

That being said, I think it’s important to know and acknowledge the five stages of grief. To keep this from being a crazy long, college essay length response, I’m going to try to keep all of this brief. If you (or anyone) would like further information about any of these individual steps and would like my help in research, just let me know!

Denial: Denial is stage number one. It most often shows itself by being unable to acknowledge situations, avoiding the facts of a problem, and downplaying the consequences of issues. It can show up in regards to anything that makes one feel vulnerable or out of control. Which is basically grief. These days, doctors say that a bit of denial is actually good and can be helpful. It gives the brain little doses of what has happened, protecting us from taking in too much too soon. The brain naturally gives us little breaks to process, regroup, and try again. However, denial can easily become unhealthy. When one avoids a problem altogether, the denial stops one from taking important actions, or a person becomes unable to face anything or delaying getting help

Anger: Lashing out at others, at yourself, and even at the person who died. There’s anger at being left behind, being in pain, that life has changed, at the events that led up to death, there’s even anger at being angry. This is probably a lot of what your character will feel, potentially even the majority or getting stuck in that feeling. There’s the anger that the boyfriend did this, anger that there was nothing your character could do, anger that the boyfriend died, anger at themselves for grieving or being angry at the dead.

Bargaining: This most often shows up before someone dies. The sudden return to faith, the praying, the thought of karma, all those things. After death it shows up in “What if I did [blank], then could I have stopped this?” “If only I had done, said, noticed [blank], then this wouldn’t have happened”, “What if when they said or did [blank], that was a sign?” It’s a lot of blaming oneself for something that was completely out of their control. Were there signs? Was there something I could have done? It can turn utterly unreasonable, too. “If I had eaten the carrot first instead of the potato, maybe this wouldn’t have happened.” People can even go into the somewhat fantastical idea that if they do one thing or another, than they will wake up and it will all have been a bad dream or misunderstanding. It can also turn into “If I do XYZ, then this will never happen to me again.'' This is another stage I wouldn’t be surprised if your character kept returning to.

Depression: This is when the “sad” part of grief shows itself most clearly. It feels as though it will last forever. This term doesn’t mean the mental illness, it means the response to loss. People often withdraw from life, they wonder what the point is of anything, they get lost in a fog. The realization of loss hits hard and is understandably depressed. Can this all lead to a mental illness? Of course. But having depressive reactions to depressive situations is a normal response. The odd thing would be to not experience depression after depressing situations.

Acceptance: This is often confused with the sun coming out and everything being okay again. The reality is, nothing will go back to the way it was. One may never be okay with what happened. And that’s normal. Acceptance is accepting the reality that a loved one is gone and recognizing that this reality is your new reality. One may not like it or find it to be “okay” but it’s reality now. People learn to live with it and keep going. They learn how to live in a world where their loved one is gone. They readjust and realize that they can’t live in or change the past. There is no replacing someone but one can move on, make new connections, new meaningful relationships, new lives overall. Many people see this as a betrayal of a loved one but it’s not. It’s continuing to live life. You aren’t replacing someone, you can’t replace someone. But you can make new relationships and lives while respecting and loving those who have gone.

Now, of course everyone grieves differently. These five stages don’t always occur in this order, some last longer than others, some don’t show up, some keep coming back for more. There’s no right or wrong way to grieve, it just happens. Some show their pain externally, some keep it internal. It’s all different and it’s all okay. Understanding these stages is important but they fluctuate.

Some Final Notes about Grief: Grief shakes faith. That doesn’t just mean religion, although yes, that too. Faith in the world is shaken, faith in ourselves, each other, anyone that could be perceived to have “stopped” this. Law enforcement, medical professionals, caretakers, etc. Some ask how such a thing could have happened to such a good person or how the world is so unfair. People also are shaken in themselves and their relationships. Who are they without their loved one? Who were they before? Who are they going to be after? Some people may try to go back to the way they were before but come to realize that there is no going back. We are often defined by others. We define ourselves by our relationships to people. We are certain people to our spouses, our siblings, children, friends, coworkers, etc. We’re mentors, we’re caregivers, we’re the mom friend, we’re the bad influence, etc. When someone passes away, it can feel like we’ve lost that part of ourselves as well. That is part of grief. Your character may wonder where they stand now, they’re the “girlfriend of a school shooter”, what does that mean? This of course, spurs the whole bargaining and blaming and all of that stuff.

Second thing I want to mention: Trauma. This is a traumatic event, regardless of whether your character was there or not. The moment she is told turns into a traumatic event. She may feel that she doens’t have the right to be traumatized because she wasn’t affected. But she was. She is just as traumatized as anyone else, just in a different way. She will likely have some post-traumatic effects. This may or may not lead to PTSD, but there will be lasting effects.

Side note: PTSD can happen to anyone. Most people refer it to war events but it can happen to anyone that has had a traumatic event occur in their lives.

People affected by trauma tend to feel unsafe. Whether that’s in their bodies, in their abilities, in their relationships with others, what have you. Regaining a sense of safety can take anymore from days to years. It’s often hard for people to regulate or soothe difficult emotions in their lives that they may not associate directly to the trauma. They may also find speaking about their trauma overwhelming. There are actually researchers trying to find nonverbal ways to help emotional regulation.

Processing trauma puts words, emotions, and meaning to it. This is most commonly undertaken with a therapist or a counselor. Attending to safety allows one to move through processing and integrated it rather than reacts to it. Now, people often can be overwhelmed and emotionally flooded while processing. The feeling of safety and stability must be regained before moving on with a personal recovery or story. The point of processing is not to relive the trauma but it’s also not meant to tell a story without any emotions. This involves exploration, mourning, and remembrance of what happened, along with the space to grieve and express emotions.

Eventually, people find their new sense of self and reality. They redefine themselves in the context of new reality. Trauma no longer becomes a defining aspect of their life. They are not organizing their life around their traumatic experiences. Trauma becomes integrated into the story of their life but it is not the story that defines them. Eventually, people come to recognize the impact of their trauma but are able to take concrete steps towards empowerment and a new way of living. Some find this through a mission to help them heal and grow further, such as mentoring. Regardless of how it’s achieved, recovery is different for everyone. Many feel this burning desire to get better quickly and can feel frustration that a process is taking too long or they’re not doing it right. Sprinkle heavy air quotations around all of this. Recovery is not defined by the complete absence of thoughts or feelings around trauma but the ability to live with it in a way that it’s not controlling your life. It’s important for those recovery to be gentle, patient, and compassionate with themselves. However, because emotions are wack, they’ll likely need someone to help them with this as they will not be at all kind to themselves.

Now, I’ve thrown around the term “Integration.” What does that mean? Trauma integration is a process in which trauma is acknowledged to be a part of a new, ongoing reality but is no longer the center of experience and life because it is surrounded by awareness. In better terms, it’s realizing that trauma happened and is a part of your life story but it does not define your life story.

Here is a helpful image that explains what happens before, during, and after trauma. The creator says that her view of this “roadmap” is a circle, not a line. None of these stages are “one and done”. Survivors of trauma usually go through every stage multiple times with varying lengths and intensities. It’s a spiral, not a line.

I’m going to post more research regarding trauma later, because I think it’s neat for writers but especially whumpers.

The final thing I want to offer is that I would not be surprised if your character dealt with survivor’s guilt. If you don’t know what that is, it’s exactly what it sounds like. Guilt that you survived where others did not. Now, your character may not have been in any direct danger but her guilt over the fact it was her boyfriend that killed others will likely be the same. I know people that have dealt with survivor’s guilt because their house did not burn down in a wildfire and their friend’s did. It’s the feeling that one has done something wrong by surviving a tragic even where others succumbed. It can even show up in an employee who kept their job when an equally qualified co-worked was laid off. Emotions are wack.

Of course, it’s not logical for someone to feel responsible for another person’s fate but humans rarely have control over their guilt.

There is the obvious guilt over surviving. That one stayed safe where others didn’t, even if the person in question was whole countries away. The feeling that one does not deserve to be safe or should have been harmed/affected as well. One finds themselves questioning the fairness of the world or hating their “good fortune.”

Then there’s guilt over what “should” have been done. There’s remorse that maybe one didn’t do enough. They should have known, should have tried harder, done better, etc. It’s an inflated sense of failure or responsibility. Back to bargaining with the sense that someone should have done something differently. Eventually, one has to realize that there’s only so much a single person can do.

There’s more guilt over what you did. Leaving behind family for better or safer opportunities, pushing someone out of the way while running from danger, etc. There’s also the potential guilt for coincidence. Waylon Jennings was supposed to be on the plane that crashed and killed Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens. Jennings told Holly that he had given up his seat to a flu-stricken Big Bopper and Jennings would instead be taking the unheated tour bus. Holly joked that he hoped Jennings froze on the bus. Jennings responded with “I hope your ol’ plane crashes.” Later, Jennings said that for years he thought he caused the plane crash.

Now we know there was no way Jennings caused the crash through a teasing comment, but guilt is funny that way.

Survivors often try not to think or talk about an event. Additionally, many feel on edge, vigilant, paranoid, detached, easily startled. They may obsess over what happened, feel confused, unworthy about living, unsure of the meaning of life, or are plagued by the sense that no matter where they go or what they do, they're never safe. This may appear in your character feeling that she never truly knows someone else and can never trust another person.

Eventually your character will have to learn to forgive herself, even though she didn’t (or did, depending on your story) cause anything to prompt her boyfriend to do that.

Final notes: Grief doesn’t just go away. It sticks around for years after. Sometimes you’re hit by it out of the blue random. The wounds remain but the pain lessens and life goes on. Recovery is possible and reachable, but grief will always stay. Recovery, peace, and healing are not found in another person. A new relationship or a discussion with another victim will not heal your character. She may find closure in talking with others, she may find help from a therapist, but one person cannot heal another. There is help, there are resources, and it will all help her to heal but ultimately that comes from her. A physical therapist cannot touch you and presto! You’re healed and strong again. They can train you and help you work through your pain until you body is strong but it will be your muscles that heal and your body that fixes. It’s the same way for mental health. A therapist or counselor will help but they cannot give you a new brain or heal it for you. Of course, your character can be in a new relationship by the end of the story but I would be careful about framing things to seem like her new boy/girlfriend is the cure for her. They cannot fix her or give her peace. They may love and support her but I would just be aware not to frame things like a new relationship is her cure.

That’s it from me! Already this is pretty crazy long and that’s the gist of things. If you would like my research and input on other things, let me know!

#tw guns #tw shooting #tw violence #tw death #tw loss of a loved one #anonymous #heartless answers

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hydrospanners · 6 years

Note

A-Z on the writing meme because I need to know absolutely everything immediately.

WELP okay but just remember you asked for what’s about to happen. meme is here. most of this is under a cut cause i’m longwinded as hell.

A. If you could rec a piece of music to accompany one of your fics, what would you pick? Why?

Um I absolutely was vibing to Lips by The xx when I wrote a wish your heart makes and you should too.

B. Who’s your favorite side-character from something you wrote?

I feel like the answer here is supposed to be Doc because he is not The Main Character in the game but also I have written about him and from his POV so much it feels unfair to call him a side character at this point. So instead I’m going to say this random woman named Cherita who was just trying to make a midnight snack for her pregnant wife from a little eggstra. I thought she had a lot of character for someone I pulled out of my ass for the sake of an outside perspective.

C. Get any good comments on your stuff this year?

I am thirsty for praise and I feel every single comment is a good comment but I think the one that sticks out to me is when I wrote a wish your heart makes someone said something like “if you like doc at all you have to read this” and I don’t remember who it was or where they said it but it really stuck with me!!! If that was you, thank you!!!!

D. Any drawings or pictures that had a big influence on your writing?

No!!! I feel guilty about this answer somehow but it’s true. I think it would be a fun challenge to try to write a piece of fic inspired by someone’s art so I may play with that idea next year (Editor’s Note: it was still 2k18 when I wrote the answer for this one) but for 2k18 the answer is no. :(

E. Who’s your favorite main character you’ve written?

I feel like this answer is obvious but it’s my girl Rea. I’ve reincarnated her as an Inquisitor and a Pathfinder but the OG Jedi Knight is still my fave.

F. What stories are you planning for the future?

I won’t pretend that a lot of planning goes in to my fic. I normally only write short bits so it kind of goes like this: I have a concept, I write the bit I fixate on, and then it sits in my WIPs for five years until I get motivated during some Fictober or something to finally finish it.

I will say I do have serious designs to finally finish the second chapter of the things you do for love are gonna come back to you one by one as that one is a little more complex than stuff I usually write. I have plans to do some kinda flashback-y thing that finally lays out The Velaran Backstory in clear and obvious terms after years of hints and tidbits I’ve been peppering through my fic. I also have a thing planned and kinda partly written about the first instance of horrific violence in the lives of all the Knight’s companions. Also I have a long series of AU vignettes that glimpses into universes where Rea is a Sith or Kira never made it off Korriban or Rusk remained a pacifist or where Rea never joined the Jedi after losing her family the second time. Stuff like that.

G. Where do you think you grew the most this year?

Structure? I’ve been really working on trusting my reader to bridge some gaps and not letting myself get caught up in details that are important for me to know to write the next part but that don’t necessarily need to be in the story. I think I’ve really tightened up my game where trimming the fat and staying focused are concerned.

H. How do you write? Paper, pen, computer? Music, no music?

My fic writing process is very different from when I am trying to write original stuff and is even kind of different depending on the mood I’m going for? I always write fic in Google Drive cause I write fic from a lot of different machines and need the easy cloud saving.

My ideal condition for fic writing is listening to instrumental music or ambient sounds playing through headphones either in a coffeehouse or the library or when I am at home completely alone. Angst and smut are best written at night with the lights low and warm. Comedy and fluff are best written in the late afternoon/early evening after one single alcoholic beverage (any more than and one I am drunk and no longer capable of writing).

Realistically though, I usually write in whatever time I have. Mostly at work. My job requires me to sit at a desk and wait for things to happen. Since I start work at 5am, things usually aren’t happening. Even with me going out of my way to create new work for myself and excel at what work I do have, I have a lot of downtime. I spend it writing fic. I get interrupted too much to have the focus I need for original writing, but fic writing is much easier so mostly I write my fic at this bland little desk under the terrible fluorescent lights with lots of noise and interruptions, occasionally playing a thematic playlist very quietly in the background.

I. What’s your favorite work you did this year? Why?

This is a very tough question. Surprisingly, I published a lot of things that I really liked? ([not pictured: me high fiving me for finally allowing myself to state that I like my own writing]) I think I’ll go with when the wicked play if I have to pick just one. Relative to my other work I think it’s very structurally sound and thematically focused and pretty efficient with its characterization and imagery without ever getting too sparse. Also I’m a slut for examining the commonplace nature of violence and brutality in the Star Wars universe.

J. What are the best jokes you told this year? Any jokes you thought were funny that people didn’t catch? Vice-versa?

I’m gonna say the pun I used as the title for bars and stripes. Honestly the whole fic is a joke and I like it and I don’t care if anyone catches it or not because I know that I am hilarious and no one will ever convince me otherwise.

K. Who have you killed this year? Why did they have to die?

No one, I think? I don’t think I even mentioned any specific off-screen deaths except for shit from the decades old Tragic Backstories. Not even Valkoriate. I’m not an especially murderful writer, maybe because I haven’t had to deal with a lot of that kind of loss in my own life. Mostly I write about things that are somehow adjacent to my own emotional state/journey. That’s why I fixate a lot on the weight of duty and moral philosophy and the nuances and complications of relationships, of how you can hurt someone and be hurt by them and still love them and how messy yet fulfilling the whole thing is. Thankfully--for me--not a lot of grieving the dead in there yet.

L. Which character did you most write about this year, and why do you like ‘em?

Pretty sure it’s Rea. Maybe Doc because of the Docember thing I squeezed in at the last second but I’m still pretty sure it’s Rea. Pretty sure it always is.

There’s a particular kind of release I get from writing her because her whole sloppy person is a part of me that doesn’t often see the light of day. I won’t say she’s aspirational because I like who I am and I don’t have any special destiny or Force powers or anything to save me when the consequences of living like she does catch up. But there are pieces of her that I admire, pieces that are still part of me that I have a hard time expressing, and spending time with her gives me a little more strength to unlock those dark musty corners of who I am, I guess? Writing Rea makes me a little more bold, a little less apologetic, a little less prone to overthinking and anxious fretting and a little more prone to doing. She makes me feel strong enough to ask for the things I want and confident enough to feel like I deserve them.

Also she is a damn good time, even when she’s falling apart.

M. Meta! Have any meta about a story you’re dying to throw out there?

Of course I do. I could ramble for hours about the story behind any single one of my stories. Aren’t all of us creative types like that??? Don’t we all love to talk about what we were going for and why we made the choices we did??? What we liked and what we think needs improvement??? Why we wanted to make the thing we made in the first place???

I could ramble about this for hours and honestly the possibilities are overwhelming so I am not going to go into any detail and just say yes. Obviously I am willing to ramble about the story behind every single story I’ve published but there’s 63 of them so if there’s something specific you want to hear about you’ll have to ask about the specific one!!!

N. Anything you were planning to write that never got written?

Nothing will ever be “never got written” until I am dead and unable to write. I am still going back to WIPs from 2014. I am rewriting garbage exercises I wrote in 2013. I like to think everything in my WIP folder will eventually be moved to my Published folder and I am going to keep thinking that until I am physically incapable of writing.

O. Do you believe in outlines? Show us one!

I believe in them very much and yet I do not practice them usually. I rely on them more with my original work which is longer and more involved and doesn’t already have a convenient structure to follow in the form of 300000 hours of video game. Most of my fic is really short, just a single scene or so. I usually start out by writing the moment that inspired me to write the fic and fill in the before and after. I do have an outline for the second half of the things you do for love are gonna come back to you one by one but I don’t really want to share it for something that isn’t written yet!

P. What are your pet peeves in other people’s work?

This question makes me kinda uncomfortable so here we go with some disclaimers: I write the stories that I want to read or that I really need to tell to satisfy something inside of me and I assume other authors do the same. I don’t want to say anything here that might have a chilling effect on someone exploring some idea they really need to explore, even if it’s tired or cliche or offends my own tastes. Writing is very personal and I think everyone should tell the stories they want to, whether anyone else likes them or not.

That being said, I am always desperately wishing for more media about close, intimate friendships and familial bonds. As someone who isn’t interested in sexual or romantic relationships, it makes me weep basically every time I read a story about characters who are friends or family that give that kind of relationship all of the value and weight and nuance that you see romantic relationships getting. It is a very special kind of feeling to see that it is possible for people to value what I have to offer them as much they might value someone who will romance them and sleep with them. It is very validating to see the possibility of emotional intimacy with people outside of romantic/sexual partners.

But I would never want anyone to feel bad about or stop writing their romances and their smut. That stuff speaks to people and that’s what fic is about. Telling the story that speaks to you. I want everyone to write what they want to write and if that leaves gaps, well that’s why I started writing fic in the first place. There was a story I needed to read and no one had written it yet, so I did it myself.

TL;DR Genfic & friendfic & familyfic is the greatest gift anyone could ever give me, but no one should write to satisfy other people. Always write for yourself first and foremost.

Q. Quote three bits of writing you read his year. Can be your writing, or not.

I keep little quotes everywhere--index cards and sticky notes scattered among all my belongings, snippets on my phone, untitled documents on every cloud service there is, random word docs hidden amongst my many hard drives--but the only ones I can find right now are from @meonlyred‘s Dark Horse so please enjoy three bits from that fic that I loved:

They remained sitting on the floor, Rossa leaned against him, eyes staring into the distance. Her silence might as well have been weeping.

I just love how I can feel the vacant, numb quality of her despair in this line. How it feels more poignant for its lack of drama.

“You're an idiot and I hate your hair,” Jonas said over the rim of his glass.

I mean.... Do I need to explain this?

He had never believed in happily ever afters. Not for him, at least. But the cruelest thing about being with Rossa was that he had begun to believe that maybe, just maybe, it was possible.

Closing his eyes, Theron didn’t expect to open them again.

This little snippet still punches me in the gut no matter how many times I read it. It’s so relateable and so Theron and so painful.

R. If you had to rewrite one of your stories from scratch, which one would it be? What would you do to it?

I don’t think I’d rewrite any of them? At least half of my fic has been completely rewritten once or twice before it ever gets published so I mostly have it out of my system before anyone else sees it.

S. What’s the sexiest thing you wrote this year?

a wish your heart makes. It may also be the saddest thing I wrote this year which I consider an achievement. (I was asked for smut but I literally do not know how to write just smut without anything else going on in the story.)

T. Themes, motherfucker, do you have them? What are they?

The importance and nature of family (it is what you make it and not what you were born with! but sometimes you get lucky and get to choose the one you were born with!)! The cost/impact of violence and war! Failure and coming back from failure! The nature of what is right and what is wrong and how much responsibility any one individual bears for the moral direction of their society!!!!

I don’t think I’ve ever written anything that didn’t include at least one of these concepts and most of my stuff deals heavily in at least two of them.

U. Any stories that took a abrupt u-turn from where you thought they were going?

Yep! I was trying to make a stupid joke about a haircut when I started making take back what the kingdom stole but in working my way backward from the joke I ended up with a heartfelt exploration of my character’s past emotional trauma, her character growth, and the nature of friendship and forgiveness.

V. Which story was the most viscerally pleasing to write? Tell us your narrative kinks.

I don’t know that I would necessarily call the sensation pleasing but, once again, the things you do for love are gonna come back to you one by one was probably the story that made me feel the most, that I was the most connected to. It hit on every single one of the themes I find compelling and I really got to play with telling the story in the white spaces, which is something I really love. I’ve been working a lot on trusting my readers and not over-explaining and I think this story really saw the impact of that work, stylistically. It’s peak self-indulgence honestly.

W. Who are your favorite writers?

Does this mean like authors of original published works or fic writers????? How am I supposed to choose???!!!! Either way my reading habits this year have been abominable. I have really been going through some shit, lifewise, (not bad shit but emotionally consuming and time consuming nonetheless) and I had to let the reading go a little bit.

I have been really into NK Jemisin though. Her stories are complex and challenging and there is so much poetry and power in the straightforward way she tells them. I also was obsessed with the Temeraire series by Naomi Novik. The characters were so textured and real with such clear voices and the relationships and ideas were so complex and compelling, yet the story never got weighed down by the heft of the subjects. She has a very light touch as a storyteller that makes her work so easily digestible without making her tale any less impactful or profound.

As for fic…. I’ve got about forty million fics bookmarked, waiting for me to get around to reading them and I am the worst kind of person because I have not yet read any of them. I’m behind on reading one of my very favorite fics right now. I think I’ve read a total of like ten fics this year and straight up probably only read that many because I was doing a bit of beta’ing.

I’m gonna do better in 2019 and I’ll get back to you on all the good shit I’ve read then.

X. What’s your least favorite work of this year?

crapshoot. It was a really old concept that probably would have been better as visual art than a fic but my artistic talents were too limited so I wrote it instead. It could probably stand a little more meat and a lot more polish, but I don’t have the time to try and turn every goofy image in my head into a fictional masterpiece.

Y. Why did you write? For fun, for a friend, for acclaim?

For fame and fortune obviously. It’s why most of my fic is about a super popular ship in an enormous fandom.

Or, y’know… not. I write for fun and because I have to. Because there are stories inside of me I want to tell, ideas I feel compelled to explore, things I need to say. It doesn’t matter if anyone else hears them or likes them; I need to get them out of me. Also it’s a really great way to work through my own emotional turmoil at a safe distance, so I can engage with what vexes me without being consumed by it.

Z. If you could choose one work and immediately finish it, what would it be? How would you end it?

the things you do for love are gonna come back to you one by one. It’s the most self-indulgent thing I’ve written probably but it means a lot to me and if I knew how it ended I would have finished it months ago. D:

#memery #writing tag #long post #Anonymous

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seizethecringeofproduction · 3 years

Text

Flashpoint 2: Advent Solaris - Chapter 3

Author’s Note: Before you point out inaccuracies regarding the suit, wait until the Angel Island chapter okay. Also this chapter contains my hand at writing severe PTSD hallucinations. So yeah, content warnings.

I feel bad for people who liked AW reading this fic, y’all gonna feel so guilty lmao.

Also obligatory “LOLOLOL THIS CHAPTER’S NAMED CRISIS CITY IN A DC FIC” comment

For most people, making a superhero suit instead of immediately going after the supposed destroyer of the would be seen as rather strange. However, with his speed restored to its former glory the Flash was capable of putting together a new suit for himself in a matter of seconds. Though he did not gain his powers through the use of lightning as he originally did, he still kept his classic lightning bolt symbol just because frankly it wouldn't feel like him without it. Similarly, he also kept the golden lightning bolt 'ears' and the overall red coloration. There were some minor changes to his previous suit due to the limitation of suitable materials he could find, but he found just enough to create something suitable. He found the nearest shattered pieces of glass and tried to look at what little reflection he could find.

His skin, body and hair had by this point healed to near perfect condition - and he was feeling stronger and more pumped than ever. It was almost unnatural how much energy he felt, honestly. He couldn't tell any difference in his speed though, but the sparks that came from him did appear to be purple in coloration rather than the typical white color of lightning. Thankfully the blur he created whenever he zipped around the place remained red.

As did his body. Everything from his muscles to his firm behind was in perfect, working order. Whatever he couldn't see in his 'reflection', he could feel or see with his own two eyes. Even though his face now was finally properly hidden beneath his crimson red mask.

Alright, lookin' good.

Feelin' good.

Now, time to go see about that Shadow character...

"Alright Mephiles, I'm ready to go find that Shadow dude now! Where's he at?"

There was no answer.

In fact, Mephiles wasn't even in the room. Nor was he seemingly in the facility anymore. All that accompanied the Flash was an empty, darkened building. And occasionally, the sound of rats scurrying and screeching, though all purely hidden by the cold darkness that was the poorly lit building.

"Yeah, just so you know this is why I'm still only trusting you cuz you can time travel!"

I'm still not sure if I trust this guy, or believe him one hundred percent, but I'll do anything to prevent another timeline from ending.

This isn't happening again on my watch.

With that having been said, the Flash hurried out. Now fast if not possibly faster than Sonic himself, it was practically milliseconds before he was out of the facility in a burst of red wind and back out into the harsh breezes and heavily heated air of the once great city outside.

Not having any real clue as to where Shadow was besides him being in this same very city at this same very moment in time, the Flash mostly just wandered rapidly throughout the torched streets and shattered highways, dashing up to the rooftops to briefly stop and get better views - though it proved difficult to make anything out in such a vast and expensive landscape of destruction. He wasn't sure if he'd be able to find anything, if he was being honest.

It was all the same.

Death, Destruction, Fire and Lava.

That was truly all that there was.

Nothing more, nothing less.

I can feel him laughing right now..I can hear him in the wind…

He got them killed…

My friends…

My family…

He won, even though we got him in the end, he still won…

And he knows it…

He's laughing at me…

Taunting me…

Get out of my head!

The memories of what longer existed yet again overwhelmed the Flash as he overlooked what remained of the future. Holding his head as he fell to his knees with a scream, all he could hear was the cold, maniacal laughter of the sadistic madman known to him as 'Darkseid'. He could not see the monster, but the sound of his laughter was as clear to him as if the demonic 'god' was not more than a foot away.

He began to sweat profusely. The purple sparks were ignited left and right from his body, and even his vision was flashing from normal to purple as the laughter of that monster intensified. Visions of those lost wouldn't go away either. It was as though they were standing directly in front of him, even though he knew they were long gone.

Conner…

Hal...

Barbara…

Billy…

Zatanna…

J'honn…

Arthur…

Mera…

Dick...

Wallace...

Iris...

Thinking of whatever fate Iris had met in his previous timeline finally set the man over the edge. His vision firmly turned purple as his eyes were surrounded by electrified purple energy. He let out a loud scream into the heavens, his sweat still coming profusely from his body, heart racing to it's limit, and lungs being just as equally stressed.

"LEAVE ME ALONE YOU SADISTIC BASTARD!" he screamed as he stood up and turned around, having expected Darkseid to be there. At first, he was, and the Flash charged at him with more anger than he honestly knew he had. He didn't want Darkseid defeated. He wanted Darkseid dead. Except the moment he would have made contact with the warlord, the tall red-eyed conqueror vanished. Flash had to stop himself from rushing over the ledge of the rooftop he was standing upon, as it was a one way drop into a massive lake of burning hot lava.

The Flash's eyes widened as they returned to reality. His heart and lungs still raced, but his vision returned to normal. He fell to his knees again, holding his forehead as he comprehended just what was going on.

I should be forgetting this happened…

I want to forget that any of this ever happened...

Why can't I? Why can't that sadistic monster and everything he did just leave my memories forever?

Barry closed his eyes, letting out from them a long stream of tears. For most of those he remembered, he did not get subjected to their horrific fates - though he was informed of those he missed. Now their memories echoed throughout his fragile mind. With every second he spent here in this hellish place, it felt as though his mental state was increasingly close to shattering. Yet somehow, the actual destruction of whatever weak piece of string held it all together did not come. Whether through sheer willpower or some other force, he did not know. All he knew was that while he certainly wasn't as there as he wanted to be, he wasn't all gone either.

The worst part for him was for those fates that couldn't be confirmed.

He never found out what happened to Iris or to the first Kid Flash, 'Wally', in the previous timeline. They were only presumed deceased.

He knew better than to think too hard about the previous incarnation of Iris. Even beginning to imagine it filled his mind with feelings of both intense grief and equally intense rage. He wanted nothing more than to give Darkseid true justice for the lives his army ended and ruined. The only solace he had here was that Darkseid no longer existed.

But it still feels like he does….

Standing up and looking back on the skyline of the lifeless cityscape, the Flash took a deep breath. His quest to locate the 'ultimate lifeform' in this mess was not going to be easy, but if Mephiles was telling the truth then it had to be done in order to prevent this horrible future from being a reality.

His motivation restored, Barry resumed the quest.

The best way for him to not let that beast continue to rule over his mind, was for him to focus on running. To never let his mind stay on the subject for too long. He hoped that as soon as he was no longer in this nightmare of a future, perhaps he would be able to be his completely old self again.

Wishful thinking always was a hallmark of humanity.

Deep down, he knew that Barry was slowly dying. Decaying away, soon to be gone forever. He most likely would never again feel like 'his old self', and to be honest he didn't really know what that meant anymore.

He was convinced he never truly would ever again.

For the most part, there wasn't much to this city. All he had to do was maintain his fast speed and resulting momentum and the massive canyons of molten magma were easily avoided. There were moments when the remnant highways he landed on would begin crumbling not long after his weight was added to them, sending large concrete balls and other debris his way, though with his speed restored they were nothing to dodge - and he likewise was capable of jumping from the dilapidated highway roads to the destroyed remains of buildings easily.

It was ever impossible to tell what purpose any of these buildings served in 'life', however. He was sure most of them were residential or office buildings, based on their shape. He thought he had seen one or two malls while scaling along some of the rooftops, but nothing of use appeared to be inside.

All in all, so far there wasn't much to traversing the city as long as he had his powers. Finding Shadow on the other hand…

"I know what he looks like" Barry said to himself while scoping out one of the abandoned city blocks he managed to come across, taking a break from collapsing highways and rooftops, "Black with red stripes. Red eyes. About three or maybe four feet tall. Once I saw him, I could never miss him. But how do I see him?"

Barry saw a series of road and sidewalk fragments led upwards, almost like a staircase made up of the destroyed city itself. Figuring he could get a better look he quickly dashed over to it and climbed it until he reached the top 'stair' and with one hand over his eyes scoped out the horizon around him.

Still nothing but ruins. And….that..

'That' referred to a usually rare tornado of fire. Despite common belief, they did exist even in the previous timeline, though as to be expected in this world they were likely more common. This one however, was far more massive than any tornado the Flash had ever seen before - it's size and diameter both were akin to a kaiju in sheer scale, the superhero appearing as little more than a blip to it as it stood in place within a lake of red magma - the heat could still be felt by Barry even though he was far beneath it, let alone the fact he could see the waves of it in the air the closer he was to it.

The more he looked at this tornado though, at how it remained in place, at how it was made purely of fire. At how it did not seem to have a natural origin from the sky. The realization soon hit him:

This is not a normal tornado...

I should probably not spend too much time near it…

Barry was about to speed away from the tornado, when suddenly he heard a loud, bellowing roar from the direction of the tornado. In a flash he turned around to face the fiery 'tower' once again, not wanting to believe that a tornado had roared. He even mentally remarked:

If that thing just roared at me, then it's definitely not a normal tornado…

As if to prove him correct, from the tornado suddenly spawned a small army of creatures. Creatures seemingly made of molten rock, fire and magma. Barry couldn't believe his eyes. These were the same moderately large, screeching bat-like beings that he had witnessed while walking these streets with Mephiles - only now they were outright hostile towards him.

Illuminated by the fires they were made of, these creatures screeched just like the earth creatures they reminded Barry of. However, even though these creatures were small and nimble in appearance, that wasn't how his mind soon began to portray them as.

Within seconds, these creatures became paradooms - horrifying abominations. Some of the ugliest creatures he'd ever laid his eyes upon. Dark, soulless eyes. Large, hulking bodies caked with scarlet red armor, and two metallic bat-like wings protruding from their backs. Their snow white hair that dropped from their heads was unmistakable and gave off their relation to Doomsday - from whom half of their DNA was taken from.

Seeing them again, Barry shook. He was frozen in terror.

These things had no right to exist. These things were abominations, a spit on the face to existence itself. These horrible monstrosities had killed so many people, ruined so many lives. These mindless, heartless creatures. These beasts. Yet here they were, charging at Barry as though they didn't care at all - like true creatures from the deepest pits of Hell itself.

No...

Not these things…

NOT AGAIN!

Barry ran from them. He ran from them as fast as speed could, though they did not give up the chase.

No!

Not again!

He could still hear their nightmarish roars and hisses. Those horrifying sounds. Forever etched in his mind. The last things so many good, innocent people heard before they died. Besides the sound of their own screams as they were slaughtered as though they were nothing but trash.

He was willing to run for as long a distance as he could to get away from these hideous creatures, these insults to creation itself. These things did not deserve existence. These things did not deserve life - not after taking so much of it away from others.

Conner...that poor kid...they took him out like he was just nothing to him, threw him away like he was garbage…

Hal...Zatanna...Billy….they ate a fucking kid. They. Ate. A. Fucking. Kid.

All those people...all those innocent people...slaughtered. By these fucking monsters. These fucking abominations from Hell…

These things don't deserve to fucking live…

It was just as that last sentence crossed his mind that he was stopped in his tracks by a piercing headache. He fell directly to the heated asphalt beneath his feet as he ached and writhed in pain. His eyes yet again flashing purple as he groaned and gritted his teeth, the pain truly unbearable. It was as though something were scratching and gnawing on his brain itself, making him scream out in absolute agony.

Purple sparks and bolts flew from his body as he dealt with this pain. All while the paradooms began to surround him in the air above. Just as he looked up to see them, he was just as quickly distracted by two more bursting from the ground itself - large craters now situated beneath them. That's not to mention the ones walking in towards him from the shadows - resulting in the Flash being absolutely surrounded. In the midst of his piercing, agonizing migraine.

Nnngh, ugh, my brain feels like it is on fire right now.

And now these things are surrounding me...again…

I guess you win again, Darkseid...I can only hope that eventually someone gives you everything you fucking deserve...

Barry closed his eyes at that point, between this headache and witnessing these beasts again, he was ready for the cold embrace of death. He could only hope that once in death, he would finally be rid of these horrible memories, never again to be plagued by them.

That was, until he began to imagine the pain and suffering these things caused.

Conner...they snapped your neck….like it was nothing. They threw you away like you were garbage...when you weren't...you were a bright kid. You had so much potential...you deserved to experience more of the world, more of the actual world. You deserved so much more than to just be treated like that…

Billy….you were just a fucking kid. You were just a fucking kid. One of the best members of the League too...I'll never forget you. We should've never gone there. We should have thought of a better way….if only...if only we had.

J'honn...Mera...Arthur….bringing you guys to a fucking fire world….you guys deserved better than that. Should've left you guys behind to help protect the Titans. They could've used the help….

Wally, Wallace….you kids...you guys were awesome. Sometimes you were pains, but I couldn't ask for better nephews. If I had known what was going to happen to you guys, I would've done something….I'm sorry your new future's going to end up sucking again, because of me...

Then, one final person crossed his mind once more.

Iris...I'm so sorry...I don't even know if they….if they….what they…..what they…

"What they..."

Suddenly, his acceptance of impending death had transformed into rage. Remaining on the ground, he looked up at one of the paradooms looming over him. An intense, rage filled glare. The purple filling both his eyes as well as his vision now served almost like fire quite literally in his eyes - and his migraine as flames burning within his head. Seeing Iris impaled upon his monster's garish claws, blood seeping from her stomach as well as dripping from her mouth while her lifeless pupils locked themselves directly down on Barry himself proved all the motivation that he needed.

With an enraged leap he lunged onto the creature and managed to tackle it to the ground with the sheer amount of speed and kinetic force that his anger had managed to generate.

The beast screamed in agony, but Barry was not done yet. He grabbed a rock from the crumbling street and began to relentlessly bash in the monster's face. With absolutely nothing being held back. He bashed at this beast's eyes. He based at it's cheeks. He based at it's jaw. It's teeth. He even could see some of them flying out, the creature's blue goop 'blood' flying alongside them.

He heard this thing crying. Perhaps for mercy, but it would receive none. He wanted to see this thing die. He bashed that stone into it hard and fast enough that the stone itself was chipping away. Enough times so that the creature's entire head was virtually non-existent. Reduced to a puddle of it's tar-like blood and what few remnants of it's head remained.

Then came it's 'partner'.

Seeing Wally and Wallace impaled by that thing's two claws as though they were food on the end of a fork as it roared out in anger - before it began spitting fire directly at him. It was all he needed to know where he stood with this thing. Circling around it with his speed for a few rounds, he first grabbed hold of a large shard of broken glass from one of the dilapidated shops this specific street corner had lined up along either side. He decided to give this thing the feeling it had given his nephews, and using the massive broken window pane as a shield from the fire he jammed it directly into the monster's torso. It gave but one final shriek of pain before it fell over, still writhing and bubbling up it's own blood, before he sped over to another rock and tossed it as head - just to make sure it was deceased.

Hearing these things cry out in pain was music to the Flash's ears.

The fight wasn't over yet though. Still glaring and in battle stance, he was greeted by one who had done something particularly horrific. One of the ones which walked out from the shadows held in his hands the young, once energetic Superboy. His black fade haircut and all, though his eyes closed. His neck snapped out of it's place as he lay lifeless in the arms of this devilish beast that killed him.

It didn't deserve to live.

None of them did.

Snarling at his foe, the Flash first tried to attack with his speed and a direct body slam - though had to detour due to being attacked by this thing's fire breath - as well as dodge the fire breath of the other three on the field. He headed over to the corpse that he had impaled with glass. Moving quickly, he jabbed out a small piece from the glass - a piece thick enough to do the work he had planned for it.

Without even cracking a smile, he dashed back at the abomination that held Conner in its arms. The moment it tried to fire it's breath at him once more he jumped for it. He flipped in the air and actually easily kicked one of the flying paradooms into the wall of a nearby building - impaling it on a rusted flagpole, before landing behind the creature he was actually targeting.

Before it could even turn around, he leaped onto his neck and within less than a second jammed the shard of glass into its neck. Though it cut into his own flesh as well, he made sure it sank far deeper into its own with its jagged ends. The abomination screeched, but soon gurgled as the makeshift knife was drilled deeper into its throat - soon rendering it incapable of crying for mercy, let alone anything for that matter. Flash was not done however. He wanted this thing to know what it feels like to have it's neck so brutally broken. As hard as it was with such thick skin and flesh, he slit the beasts throat wide open. As it continued to gurgle and choke, clawing at its punctured throat - he repeatedly stabbed it. As hard and as fast as he could. Whatever arteries it had in there, they were soon reduced to mush. Barry stood on top of it's back once it finally fell to the ground, a puddle of it's tar 'blood' forming beneath it within seconds afterwards.

Even still, Barry felt it deserved worse.

As for the others, they did not last much longer either. With his powers restored Barry was easily able to make short work of them.

The ones in the air attempted to send spiked fireballs down at him like exploding bombs - with enough force Barry was able to kick each and every single one of these balls immediately back at them as they came down towards the ground, all virtually in mere milliseconds. Once they made contact with their own producers, the 'paradoom's were set ablaze, screaming in agony as they were roasted and fried alive, falling to the ground and dying as their bodies burned like pathetic sheets of paper.

The ones on the ground were tougher. One attempted to lunge at Barry, though he was swiftly taken out when he managed to pick up a parking meter that had long since fallen from its original position. Before the beast could even land he tossed it like a javelin into its mouth. It burst out the other end by the end of the second, making it drop to the ground before Barry's feet. Dead.

The remaining two on the ground attempted fire breath one more time. A sewer manhole cover easily whacked them both in the head with a well timed strike - and Barry crushing some glass to fire at them like shurikens tore their faces and throats to shreds in an instant, ensuring their demise as they too soon collapsed to the ground.

With all of the visible paradooms dead, Barry's migraine finally faded and his eyes returned to their normal state. However, the bodies of the paradooms did not go away. In fact, to his shock there appeared to be more of them. Far more of them. Legions of them. Crawling from the buildings. Descending from the air. Ascending from the ground.

They were everywhere.

Their horde even extended for miles beyond. They were only form of life for virtually the entire span of the city, it seemed.

A few minutes ago, Barry would have cowered in fear.

Now, however, he showed no fear at all.

He was going to give these beasts exactly what they deserved.

"Let's Dance."

The following few seconds can best be described as a massacre. A massacre of 'paradooms'. Barry spared not a single one of them as he blazed through time. At times the mere act of ramming into them at full throttle was enough to shatter their entire bodies to pieces. Others caught fire from the trail left behind him. When he did make direct moves on them such as punches, slides, or kicks, the majority of them died from just the one strike. Barry didn't know if it was the new strength and energy he was feeling earlier, or if they were just genuinely this pathetic as of now.

Either way, he was not complaining.

With each of these hideous beasts that fell, another of their victims was finally avenged. Given the justice they deserved.

It was a long time coming.

He felt little to no sympathy for any of these demons. Not after what they did to Iris. To Wally. To Wallace. To Conner. To Zatanna. To Hal. To Billy. To Mera. To Arthur. To J'Honn. To Diana. To Dick. To Jaime. To Garfield. To Donna. To Roy. To Karen. To Everyone.

Normally, heroes were not supposed to murder, or kill. He took no pleasure in the act of killing these things.

He took pleasure in avenging the lives they ended, and the timeline they ruined.

Blazing through the destroyed city taking out Paradooms all the way through, Barry left a trail of their remains in his wake. For some of his 'victims', there was hardly anything left to even consider remains. Those were usually the ones destroyed by how fast he was charging into them.

He had no idea where his legs were taking him anymore, or if he was anywhere close to finding Shadow. As long as he was decreasing the population of paradooms however, he did not seem to care.

By the end of the horde he was standing on a rooftop, panting and huffing. The flashing purple vision had returned as he recovered his breath - though thankfully not the piercing headache. At least, not for now.

Looking behind him, he could still see the trail of deceased paradooms extending for miles behind him as he recovered his breath and gave a moment for his racing heart to calm itself down. He was not proud of the act of killing, in fact he was ashamed of it. However, these were not civilians. These were not ordinary villains. These were monsters. More lives are saved by their deaths, than by their continued living. They needed to die. Perhaps if they had let their victims have burials, he would have been more merciful to them.

He overlooked the skyline one final time - no remaining paradooms. All of the flying ones had either been impaled with broken parking meters or otherwise set aflame with their own fireballs - screaming while they burned to death.

It was only when he looked down at the abandoned streets below that he saw something that made his eyes widen once more - as though he was seeing ghosts far below him.

"It...can't be."

There they were. Victor Stone - Cyborg, and Zatanna. Victor's silver-and-red cybernetic upgrades were unmistakable, as was him being the only dark skinned man for miles in this hellscape. Zatanna's long dark hair and black-white outfit was the same one she wore during the assault on Apokolips - though she seemed completely fine, as though she too perfectly regenerated from all of her wounds. What concerned Barry however, was two things. One was that Victor seemed to be unconscious or dead, as he was in a sitting position with his head lowered - completely unresponsive. The second, was that Zatanna was talking to a man he dreaded as though she was doing business with him it seemed.

Darkseid.

It was undeniably Darkseid.

He was huge, charcoal black, with horrifying red eyes. His armor was just as black as his soul, if he even had one. He dwarfed Zatanna in size, and his face alone could be considered a weapon of mass destruction. Let alone the rest of his hulking, imposing body. Worst yet, he seemed to be pulling something out of Cyborg's body. Something green, and glowing. With a gasp, once it was in the light of the fiery sky, Barry saw precisely what it was.

"It's a chaos emerald! Oh crap, Darkseid's got a chaos emerald! I don't know what those things are even fully capable of but if they can restore my powers then that is no good! No good at all! What the heck am I gonna do now?!"

Slapping himself before he fast-talked himself into further levels of insanity, Barry refocused himself on Darkseid and Zatanna. He didn't know why Zatanna seemed to be standing beside and talking to Darkseid so casually, though two reasonings arrived in his head before long:

Either she's betraying us and joining his side, or she's under his mind control.

Either way, I've got to get that chaos emerald away from his ass a.s.a.p! Gotta act fast!

Without wasting any further time, Barry immediately rushed for Darkseid. At the speed of light he slammed within Darkseid within the second, managing to slam him into a building on the other side of the street by using only one arm - with Barry himself taking a sharp turn with intent of striking again after turning back - not even letting Darkseid recover before slamming into him again. And then again. Then about two more times, before Darkseid finally had just enough seconds to hold the chaos emerald into the air, and let out but two words:

"Chaos Control!"

Within an instant a green flash came from the emerald, and Barry was stunned. Just before he slammed his fist into Darkseid, he was practically frozen in place. As though time itself around him had just suddenly stopped. What's worse, was that it did not stop for Darkseid. He was able to move around completely unaffected by whatever it was that the emerald had just done. Barry was fully at his mercy.

Then Darkseid jumped in the air, and roundhouse kicked Barry directly in the back of the head.

In an instant, Barry was snapped out of whatever stopping of time he was a part of - though he felt every bit of the hard slam to the back of his head. It immediately brought back both the flash of purple vision for a few more seconds as well as the splitting migraine - making Barry hold his head in pain for a few moments before standing back up and looking at where Darkseid was standing. Except once he did so, there was no Darkseid at all. Instead, there was only a certain black furred Hedgehog, holding the green chaos emerald and holding a strong battle stance while not removing his eyes from Barry for a single second.

He had located Shadow.

Zatanna and Victor were 'gone' as well. In their place was a deactivated, bulky robot that sported colors of red, gold and black though was covered in exuberant amounts of dust. Not a single ounce of flesh present on the machine. Zatanna was 'replaced' by a 3-4 foot tall literal bat woman, that is to say a woman with the ears of a bat, wings sprouting from her back, and a black latex outfit with pink 'hearts' on her boots and chest. As well as lipstick. She seemed just as battle ready as Shadow himself.

Nope, this timeline is still crazy weird to me.

But no time to think about that, I'm in the middle of a fight, focus Barry! Focus!

Barry gazed at his opponent with a glare in his eye, trying to get a good read of him. Judging by the look in Shadow's eyes and on his face, he was doing much the same. The look in Shadow's eyes especially was familiar to Barry. It was almost as though Shadow knew one hundred percent what was doing, or was planning on what to do for his next move. Or perhaps even both. Yet again did a chill run down Barry's spine.

I'm getting a lot of Batman vibes from his voice already, I hope he's more like Bruce and not like Thomas...

It didn't take very long for both to figure out that the two of them were both waiting for the other to attempt the next strike. Remembering what Mephiles had said of Shadow in his briefing, Barry did not want to underestimate him any more than he already had. Shadow, for his part, seemed not the type to underestimate an opponent either - especially one that's already gotten a few surprise hits on him.

Rather than a direct strike, Barry decided to instead at least get some confirmation to what he technically already knew:

"Shadow? Shadow the Hedgehog?"

Shadow grunted in response, not saying a single word. His only response was a nod, confirming that Barry's assumption was correct. Without removing his eye contact, Barry responded:

"Well alright then."

Barry wasted no further time in engaging in battle with the so-called 'ultimate lifeform' - though he dared not get too close. Instead he used his arms and rapidly twirled them around, using his sheer speed to create two large vortexes of wind - like tornadoes being generated from his very own body. The aim was to get Shadow to 'come' directly to him, though naturally quite a fair bit more than just Shadow was hurled around.

The bat girl herself had to extend her wings and visibly struggled not to get sucked into Barry's swirling spirals of fast moving wind, though the moment she had almost slipped and surrendered Shadow had swiftly managed to resist the wind enough to get her out of it's direct path, before letting himself fly towards Barry.

Barry had honestly thought he was ready to pull in the Hedgehog and and was prepared to strike him, though he didn't expect one thing:

"Chaos Spear!'

Suddenly, a bolt of yellow energy struck Barry directly in the chest - interrupting his whirlwinds and sending him onto the ground upon his back. For anyone without a fast acting healing factor, those burns would certainly sting. The 'spear' felt not too unlike Clark's heat rays or Victor's own energy weapons, though thankfully he was not incinerated.

Either way, soon Shadow had his foot on Barry's chest, standing atop him. Having Shadow's shoes step on a fresh and just healing burn made the Flash let out a bit of a hiss as he looked up at this enemy - the look of the light behind Shadow made the Hedgehog almost look like an eclipse before Barry's eyes, mostly darkened out with an aura of light behind him. Coupled with the look in his eyes, that glaring, unamused look that demanded answers as well as respect - it was a very familiar glare.

Hi Bruce…you've really shrunk, ya know that?

Shadow however, was not Bruce by any means:

"Identify yourself and state your business."

Still glaring at his opponent, Barry did at least give him enough respect to be technically correct:

"Me? Oh I'm nobody special, just the Flash."

Suddenly smirking, Barry used another one of his recently restored powers. Vibrating and ultra fast speeds he was able to soon enough make himself intangible. Caught off guard, Shadow's feet went from standing atop Barry's body to touching the ground, while Barry himself rolled to be directly beside Shadow - standing up before letting himself become entirely physical again. Before Shadow could strike him with a second chaos spear Barry made sure to take off at his fast speed again, intending to do another hit-and-run move on the Hedgehog.

However, Shadow was now onto him and used his own speed - revealing his shoes to indeed be 'rocket shoes' that allowed him to hover over the ground as though he was skating on it. He was actually able to skate practically just as fast as Barry could run - making himself into a formidable adversary for the human speedster as he had just performed his turn at the end of a ledge at the street and was on his way to make contact with Shadow once more.

Seeing his enemy barreling towards him at seemingly matching speed was not an expected sight, but the Flash was never one to back down from a challenge. He prepared for impact.

And then it was made.

Shadow and the Flash clashed. First they punched each other directly in the face - both grunting as contact with each other's skin was made. With the Flash using his sheer momentum and Shadow having natural super strength, both were sent flying back to either end of the street they were on - both of them just barely evading falling off into the pits of lava beneath them. For Barry, it felt as though Clark had just decked him square in the jaw. He was beginning to understand the meaning behind 'Ultimate Lifeform', and pondered…

I wonder if this guy has any equivalent of Kryptonite...if not, then Meph basically just sent me on a suicide mission…

Both Shadow and Barry wiped blood that had managed to come from their mouths from their punches, and immediately charged at each other again, all while the female bat watched. A black blur charging at a red blur was all she could really make out due to how fast the two were. She could see them constantly crashing repeatedly, slamming each other with their speed over and over - sending each other into the buildings around them as she watched, unable to match their speeds.

However, while Barry's strength was an illusion caused by his use of inertia and momentum, Shadow had both speed and strength, meaning every time it was his punches or kicks that strucke Barry - the latter took more damage than when it was the former getting struck. However, Barry's healing factor as well as ability to evade getting into a string of repeated strikes and properly strike back proved invaluable in avoiding defeat.

However, there was one major weakness that Barry had which he overlooked. At only three or perhaps four feet tall, Barry could hardly tell, Shadow was an easy target to miss and easily dodged the larger human man's punches and kicks more than he was struck by them. Adversely, Barry's larger size made him an easier target for Shadow to strike. Still, the Flash's endurance at the very least allowed him to compensate for this.

Barry could tell one thing, however:

Either the chaos emerald made me stronger and-or more durable, or this guy is holding back. Or both.

If it's both, then I really wish he was on my side.

The battle raged on for a few more moments. Shadow would stop in the air only to deliver chaos spears towards Barry, though the red blur would successfully dodged them, only be struck into the window of one of the street corner stores by Shadow curling into a ball and ramming directly into him, and then proceeding to ram into the Flash again by spinning in ball form along the ground like a homing bowling ball. It hurt just about as much, too.

Barry got up and managed to take things back out to the street outside however, and managed to successfully evade a surprise karate chop from Shadow, only to get kicked in the gut by the rodent's foot - yet again sent to the ground.

"I don't have time for this" Shadow remarked as he looked at Barry getting up again, with his bat companion descending from the air to be at his side. Keeping his eyes locked on Barry, Shadow continued to be ever demanding, "I suggest you give up and tell me who you are now, because I'm not going to entertain you much longer than I already have."

"Heh" Barry smirked as he readied his battle stance once more, "You really think it's gonna be that easy?"

"Very well."

One last time, Barry charged at Shadow with intent on a direct hit. However, pulling out the chaos emerald one more time Shadow was yet again able to freeze Barry in place with a swift use of chaos control.

The Flash could only watch as Shadow jumped into the air and kneed him directly in the jaw - breaking him out of the freezing as well as sending him into the air with strength akin to Barry's old timeline friend 'Clark'. Barry had little time to react before in a flash of green chaos energy, Shadow seemingly teleported directly above him, slamming his fists down on Barry's head and sending him barreling back down for the ground below - before Shadow appeared repeatedly in mid-air, teleporting in order to smack Barry around in the air with punches and kicks as though he were a ball on a pinball table. He fought with the strength of an irritated kryptonian, despite his size managing to effortlessly toss around the full grown human as though he were nothing.

The final hits came when Barry was again smacked upwards, and in quick succession back down to the ground - creating a sizable impact crater upon landing due to the sheer strength of Shadow's hit mixed with the momentum picked up by Barry as he fell.

Wanting to end this battle as quickly as possible, Shadow generated two flashing purple-blue spheres of chaos energy from his hands, and with perfect precision fired them as beams at Barry with only seconds needed to charge them. Barry braced himself for their impact - though that didn't stop the burning heat. It was though he had just been struck with Koriand'rs own energy attacks, though perhaps it was still more like Clark and Conner's eye beams. Either way, it was a searing heat of an energy blast - whatever chaos energy was, one fact remained true in that it burned.

Barry was grateful for his healing factor, though it could not heal that the wind had been successfully knocked out of him and there was no way that he was able to continue the fight. He had to concede defeat to Shadow, at least for now.

Shadow and his bat companion soon stood on the edge of the crater that was created by Barry's impact with the ground, watching as Barry struggled to stand up once more - though it was clear by his panting and huffing that he was not in any condition to continue the fight any longer. As much as he continued glaring at Shadow, who silently stared at him before asking him once more:

"I'll ask again, who are you and why are you here?"

After catching his breathe enough to speak, Barry replied:

"I said who I was, I'm the Flash. As for why I'm here, I'm here to stop you."

"Stop me from what?"

"Mephiles sent me, to stop you from destroying the world."

Hearing the dark one's name made both Shadow and his companion widen their eyes, looking to each other silently for a moment before turning back to Barry - Shadow with more angry look as all he said to Barry was a very blunt line of truth:

"Mephiles?"

Barry nodded.

"Considering it was him who sent me into this future, I can only assume he wanted you to kill me, sending you to do his dirty work. That, or he sent you on a suicide mission to serve as a distraction for me."

"Wha-what are you talking about?" Barry responded, approaching Shadow with minor bouts of stumbling, "The files, the articles, they talked about..."

"Whatever they said, I'm sure it was a lie!" the bat companion exclaimed, interrupting Barry could continue speaking. Her voice was young, though not that young. She was at least 18, or perhaps in her 20's -30's. "If you're putting your trust in Mephiles, then you must be seriously naive!"

"Hmph" Shadow huffed, crossing his arms. He agreed with his companion, though seemed to still be curious about what precisely the 'articles' said. Still, he did not question it further.

Barry was still reeling from his prior hallucinations and the battle itself, though seeing as how Shadow did not kill him in cold blood and while brutal did not seem to be truly bloodthirsty - at least not yet, he had good reason to believe Shadow to be more trustworthy than Mephiles. While Mephiles did see his powers restored, it did seem as though Shadow's side of things perfectly complemented Mephiles' own.

Still, there was a massive share of unanswered questions:

"Still, if you're not the destroyer of this timeline, of this world...what are you?"

Shadow closed his eyes for a few seconds, before opening them as he bluntly informed Barry of just who he was:

"I am Shadow the Hedgehog, the ultimate lifeform created to protect the planet earth as well as G.U.N.'s top elite agent operative."

"And I'm Rouge the Bat" the bat companion beside Shadow said in an almost flirtatious voice, "World renowned treasure hunter, and also a G.U.N. agent on the side."

Government Agents…great…

"And, well, as I said before, I'm the Flash" Barry said, to Shadow's continued silent suspicion, by now fully having put himself back together following the battle. "I'm really glad we're all acquainted with each other!" he then dashed to join Shadow and Rouge on the outside of the crater, "Now I do apologize for that attacking you thing, but if you don't mind, can you explain to me what the heck is going on?"

"From what me and Shadow found on a computer not that long ago" Rouge explained, "We've been sent 200 years into the future. As to how we encountered Mephiles in the first place, all you need to know is that it was on a mission and most of the details are classified, Honey".

"Yeah, I get it, your government agents."

"Hmph" Shadow almost rolled his eyes, though he kept distrustful eye contact with Barry.

"So basically" Barry responded as he was finally mentally placing all of the pieces together, "Mephiles sent all of us to this future, and then convinced me to go after you in order to kill you."

"It would seem so", Shadow nodded.

"And, where'd you get that emerald from?"

"From this future's version of my team member, E-123 'Omega'" Shadow explained, gesturing to the dust-covered robot, "And that's enough questions for now, we have work to do."

Shadow began to storm off at that point, with Rouge following him. While Shadow clearly could care less, Rouge at least turned back to Barry to say in a much more pleasant tone of voice:

"Don't mind him, it's just always business with that one."

"Oh, I can get used to that kind of attitude no problem."

Rouge chuckled, Shadow grumbled, though let the two continue speaking - he wasn't that much of a jerk.

"You might want to tag along with us too" Rouge continued to say, "Considering you probably wouldn't want to stay here longer than you have to."

Barry was quick to catch up to Shadow and Rouge as they traversed the hellish landscape of the destroyed city, this time together. Having companions managed to minimize the risk of Barry having further hallucinations - at least for the time being. Something about how familiar yet different Shadow and Rouge were managed to make him feel as though he were still in a timeline that he would consider recognizable.

He wasn't quite sure who precisely they reminded him of entirely, though he had some mental comparisons being made in his head.

Still, traversing the lifeless landscape of death, destruction and ruins even with two impromptu teammates still was quite a lonely endeavor. Jumping - or in Rouge's cases flying - from cliff of street to slowly sinking building onto another cliff of street or slowly melting segment of highway with only the ambience of fire as background noise persisted to make Barry long for a return to the present, even the war against Apokolips had a more hopeful outcome for earth than this. As Barry realized that the two were leading him to the outskirts of the city where things looked less like the ruins of a civilization and more like a genuine hellish dimension, he decided to ask at least a few more questions:

"So, quick question, but you guys do know where you're headed to, right?"

"Yes" Shadow replied as the three were dashing along a long enough stretch of highway to warrant actually running along it - Rouge's flight miraculously managed to keep up with the other two as Shadow explained, "Sonic, Tails and Knuckles were sent here by Eggman. They're waiting for us in the outskirts of the city."

"Wow, wonder how that happened…"

"Hmph"

"And one more question?" Barry asked, with Shadow silently looking back at him again curiously, "Were you holding back against me back there? Or what? I never thought a Hedgehog would be able to hit that hard."

"You're lucky that I was."

Barry did not know what to say in response to that, and so just continued following Shadow and Rouge silently, heading for the outskirts of the city. Watching the skyline of destroyed buildings become replaced by a skyline of black volcanoes - and what light there was in this nightmarish world continued to grow dimmer the further the three were from the city.

Hopefully we'll get out of here soon…

And I definitely have some words for Mephiles next time I see him…

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oscopelabs · 6 years

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Moving: On the Cinema of Kate Bush by Willow Maclay

“Experimenting with film is exciting to me. It feels like it has purpose.” -Kate Bush, Egos and Icons, 1993

Kate Bush has always been more than your average musical artist. It’s not ordinary to have a chart-topping single when you’re 19-years-old, let alone a number-one hit about a classic literary text of all things. From the onset, she was more than hooks. She was a wizard of merging artistic interests, folded together into a stunning presentation of everything she could offer as an artist. Bush is never satisfied, but geniuses so rarely are, and when she masters one art form, she moves onto another with a ravenous appetite for perfection. In her art she has combined music, dance, mime, literature, fashion, and cinema into one. Her art is overwhelmingly dense and, from the beginning, few could truly reckon with her talent. Her music videos and concert television specials, in particular, are the purest distillation of her skills, and in cinematic terms, share a kinship with the likes of Maya Deren, Jacques Rivette, François Truffaut, and Terence Fisher.

In an interview with a British Television station from 1978, Bush recalled a moment in her childhood which would have a lasting effect on her psyche and her engagement with art. She was struck by an image from a television adaptation of Wuthering Heights. She caught the last five minutes of it and, without context, the image of a ghostly Kathy (the protagonist of the novel) haunted her. It was an extreme close-up, with Kathy begging for a window to be opened so she could enter her old house. From her earliest inclinations as an artist, she was first and foremost interested in visual imagery. Bush would also say in this interview that she wanted to write a song about the image that had stuck with her, but she needed to read the book first so she could “have context and get the tone right.” What would become of this collision course of image, text, and music is her first number one single in Britain, “Wuthering Heights.” The music video that followed would be one of the best the genre has ever seen.

There are numerous videos for the “Wuthering Heights” single, but two are widely recognized as the canonical examples in Bush’s oeuvre: The red dress video and the white dress video. Both present different formal takes on the single, and both are altogether dynamic in their connection to the song. The first of these, the white dress video, is shot on a sound stage with golden, harsh lighting, emanating from Bush’s body as she does her interpretive dance of the song. She makes big, swooping gestures with her limbs and has wide Clara Bow-like eyes. The image is split into two separate sections to create one fluid image—one a close-up so you can see her facial reactions to the song, the other with a wider scope so you can see the gestures she’s making to emphasize certain lyrics and passages of the song. Occasionally time-lapse photography is used to give off the illusion that Bush’s body is splitting into parts as she moves like Da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man.” Cinematically, this video shares DNA with some of the earliest short films, more specifically the Serpentine Dance experiments that many different directors used to showcase how images could move in a certain way, but updated to aesthetics that would be more commonly used in early experimental music videos. These techniques were used to better capture singular movement and siren, ghostly feminine images, like in Bruce Conner’s groundbreaking video for “Breakaway,” starring Toni Basil. It would be startling in its own right if it were the only video for “Wuthering Heights,” but Kate Bush did one better when she donned the red dress.

The red dress video is overwhelming, shot in 4:3 and comprised almost entirely of medium shots to accentuate the visual language coming from the entirety of Bush’s body. Where the white dress video uses flashier techniques to evoke a very specific luminescent feeling, here the cinema is coming completely from her interpretive dance, as she uses the entirety of her body as sign language to emphasize the lyrical and tonal content of the song. The dance is note for note the same as the one in the white dress video, but the camera almost never pulls away here beyond the occasional close-up shot of Bush’s own facial acting, which in and of itself is also presenting the narrative of the song through her expressive, maximalist acting. The video evokes an almost mythic, idealized England of deep greens, where ghosts and ghouls roamed the land alongside the living. It’s a land of beautiful old gardens, and cottages (much like the one she grew up in), but the beauty is unnerved by a cerebral pull towards death, and in “Wuthering Heights,” that very nature is in the soul of the video. It’s set in an old forest, intensely green, but beset with fog, and Bush breaks the image with her stark, loud crimson dress. The wider framing allows us to see exactly what she’s wearing and how she moves. The medium lensing is reminiscent of many of Jacques Rivette’s high fashion pictures like Duelle, Noroit, and ironically enough his own adaptation of Wuthering Heights, where the outfit was always presented in full from head to toe and worked as an extension of the characters. In this video, the red dress is worn as a means of seduction. “Let me into your window,” Bush beckons, pulling her arms in closer. She’s speaking for the ghost of Kathy, begging to get out from the cold, but in addition to the narrative conceit of the song, it also works as a device of temptation for an introductory single. “Let me into your window” could just as easily be “Let me into your lives,” and after “Wuthering Heights,” England and the rest of the world obliged.

The zenith of Kate Bush’s music video career was between 1978 and 1980, when her videos were barebones soundstage productions, for the most part, capitalizing on her ability to dance. “Them Heavy People” was the follow-up music video single to “Wuthering Heights,” and again the video didn’t disappoint. Shot in one continuous take on a sound stage, Bush is projected as a Humphrey Bogart figure if Humphrey Bogart were a pendulum of hips. Bush wears a tilted fedora with bravado, and pairs that up with a magenta knee-length skirt. She’s accompanied by two back-up dancers who follow her throughout the narrative of the song. Here, the music is about Bush learning to dance. (“They break down my body. I feel like it’s killing me. What a lovely feeling.”) Throughout, these two back-up dancers engage Bush in a dance of combat before getting Laurel and Hardy-esque or WWF by bashing chairs into each other before the song concludes. Bush’s greatest skill as a choreographer is interpreting the lyrical content of her own songs and painting a picture with her body on top of the image we are already seeing, creating a kaleidoscope effect in which different cinematic gestures are moving in and out of one another to create a full unified statement. Bush’s auteurism, if you will, is how she moves her body in a way to create a narrative surrounding the song she’s already written. With enough time, she would soon move behind the camera as well, but director Keith “Keef” MacMillian gave her earliest dance videos the space necessary to let Bush tell the story.

Her video for “Hammer Horror” works for the same reasons that “Wuthering Heights” and “Them Heavy People” do, but with the additional context of moving into genre cinema through dance. This time, her soundstage is shrouded in darkness with a blue spotlight on Bush and a masked man in an an all-black body suit that renders everything but his uncovered arms nearly invisible. Bush is wearing a low-cut, slinky, sequined black dress, complete with the vampiric cleavage of the eponymous studio vixen. It’s equal parts vampire film and a dance exhibition, as Bush taps into the recently bankrupt Hammer Pictures’ ethos of blood, boobs, and gothic chills. The man who dances with Kate acts as a pseudo-villain, always lurking behind Bush’s frail damsel-in-distress in the verse stanzas before she erupts into a violent demoness herself in the loud, plunging chords of the chorus. Bush rarely had time for hard rock, let alone heavy metal, but this could easily be described as such, with its horror-movie lyrical content and killer riffage. This video, like much of her earliest videography, is shot in one take, but here the camera moves with Bush to create movement alongside her body, making it one of the more visually ambitious works “Keef” did in collaboration with Bush. In particular, when the camera idles side to side in an extreme close-up on Bush’s back as she alludes to running, it gives off the illusion that we’re sprinting too. When Bush turns and the camera captures her cold, horrified glare, it moves us into the third act of the horror film where the dance centers entirely around choreography of her neck. The neck is an essential image in any horror film involving vampires, but it was practically one of the Ten Commandments in Hammer cinema. The closing image of the video is Bush dangling in the arms of her faceless villain, head tilted back, with her neck exposed completely. She’s faceless at this point, and the man takes his seemingly gigantic left arm and runs it down the nape of her neck slowly before clamping down completely. The camera zooms in a little and a perfect horror-movie image closes the video before cutting to black. It’s an image both sexual and horrific, the lifeblood of vampire cinema.

It was around this time, 1980, when Kate Bush started shifting her ideas of what she wanted to convey in music videos into something more traditionally narrative-based, with a less heavy reliance on interpretive dance and pantomime. In this period, she made “The Wedding List,” as an homage to the Truffaut film The Bride Wore Black, about a wronged bride who sought revenge for the desecration of her romantic life. Additionally, there was the Jean-Luc Godard-influenced experimental video for “Another Day,” with Peter Gabriel, which showed the unravelling of a couple by using frame-within-a-frame imagery to convey two separate stories of past and present simultaneously. Bush’s best video of this time period, however—and one that births a new period of her music video career—is her apocalyptic science fiction short for the song “Breathing.” The song saw a shift in Bush’s interests from her pop-inflected, piano-based dance music to something harder and altogether more experimental. It was a shift that would characterize her career for the next 30 years.

In the video for “Breathing,” Bush represents a fetus, begging and pleading to be given a chance to live and be with her mother in the outside world in the wake of nuclear annihilation. It’s a song that has deep ties to maternity, childbirth, and pregnancy, and when compared with the majority macho considerations of science fiction, it becomes something complex and unique within the genre. The video is matter-of-fact in its simplicity, but deeply moving in what the images convey about the lyrics. Once again, it’s mostly shot on a soundstage, where Bush is inside of a plastic orb, with deep amber lighting underneath her frail frame. She’s wearing a sheer outfit with white trim to portray the relative innocence of the fetus, and she spends the majority of the video either in the fetal position or pushing the orb back and forth to represent the kicking or pushing a mother may feel while pregnant. The words “Breathing my mother in” are a gently affecting and deeply harrowing sentiment when set against the context of nuclear war, and the video becomes a barrage of dissonant images. Our greatest possibility for love (giving someone life) and our greatest possible evil (the nuclear weapon) collide to create a pure statement on the human condition. When the mother’s water eventually breaks and Bush leaves the womb, what follows is a slow-motion dip into experimental imagery of one girl, bathed in shadow, peaking out from underneath a cloudy image reaching towards the reds, oranges, and bright lights of what she hopes will be a welcoming world. Only here she’s greeted with an atomic explosion that sinks into the earth in the shape of Kate Bush’s silhouette. This is a woman’s story of creation caught in the crossfire of what man creates and mourning the death of a world she knows will inevitably fall. It’s a complicated, resonant question for any time, but made even more evocative by the terror of a supposedly inevitable nuclear war between the United States and Russia in the 1980s. In terms of cinema, it’s probably the greatest exhibition of pregnancy and childbirth this side of Stan Brakhage’s “Window Water Baby Moving.”

In an interview for British Television series, Egos and Icons, Kate Bush stated that her music video for “Running Up that Hill” was her way of saying goodbye to the pantomimed, interpretative dance of her earlier music career in favor of dancing that was more serious and elegant. The choreography of the video would be a pure dance, stripped of theatricality, with its footing in a bolder narrative sophistication. For this video, she brought in choreographer Diane Grey to take the reigns in constructing a dance around the narrative of the song, about a woman who wishes her partner could see things through her eyes, because it would fix their problems. Bush’s work has always been heavily gendered in a feminine context, but there’s a deliberate decision here to present two bodies working in jarring competition with one another while being punctuated with bursts of synchronicity, as Bush and her male partner move in and out of one another’s grasp and bodies with a fluid grace. The dance is the most complicated and daring of her music video work, while still gravitating toward a narrative interest in reflecting the lyrics of the song. But what follows in all of its beautiful lifts, cradles, and slides is a dance of two people starkly different from one another finding occasional momentary symbiosis. It’s a melding of both the masculine and the feminine into one perfect image, only for it to slip away.

Bush’s work has always highlighted the female form, with real emphasis on her body as it relates to its present state in the world of the song. It’s reminiscent of the work of Maya Deren, whose work frequently foregrounded womanhood in the deep waters of experimental cinema. Deren’s “At Land” bears stark similarities to “Running Up that Hill” in this regard, where Deren’s body is more like a curving liquid at one with an elemental earth rather than in man’s creation. In the Deren short, the ocean moves in and out, which is a dance in and of itself, and the woman (played by Deren) enters into a chess game that’s representative of her own push-and-pull conflict with being a woman in a man’s world. Her body, ever present and always in frame, sometimes looking toward the sea as if the murky deep would offer a tranquility, and in Bush’s video, she reaches toward a sun, maybe even to God, to bring her closer to understanding the conflict within her own life. Fittingly, Deren’s short ends with her running up a hill.

Kate Bush continued to stray more and more towards cinema as she raced through the ‘80s and become close friends with Terry Gilliam, who introduced her to many people in the industry who helped her put together the funding needed to make her first feature, 1993’s 50-minute The Line, The Cross and the Curve. The film is a riff on The Red Shoes (she made an album of the same name), and even includes a thank you to Michael Powell. It’s a shaggy affair, with all of her eccentricities, strengths, and weaknesses laid bare. It’s most apt comparison point is probably Prince’s Graffiti Bridge in the sense that it is both the most Kate Bush a project could possibly be, full of quirks that are very take-it-or-leave-it depending on how big of a fan you are of the music. Bush’s most base filmic interests are Gilliam with a dash of Jean Cocteau and Twin Peaks-era David Lynch. Much of the visual imagery in the film is reminiscent of the Black Lodge, with an obsession over red curtains, flames and mirrors. The greatest weakness of the film is that it would obviously draw unfair comparisons to Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1948 masterpiece and no film under any circumstances could live up to those lofty expectations. But that’s Kate Bush: She’ll aim for heaven even if it means her own hell. Nevertheless, The Line, The Cross and the Curve is not without some truly breathtaking moments, such as the callback to her earlier soundstage videos of the late 70s in the yo-yo’ing “Rubberband Girl.” In that segment, a man dances behind Bush, serving as her shadow, bobbing her back and forth to create a dance where Bush’s body personifies a rubber band. The title track features a breathtaking choreographed moment between her and the man who taught her to dance, Lindsay Kemp, while dazzling sequins splash all over the screen as Bush and Kemp dance around floating multi-colored fabrics. The sequence, set to “Moments of Pleasure” is the film’s absolute high point, with Bush merely twirling, as if wound up from her back like a music box ballerina. Throughout this sequence she’s covered in falling snow, but it looks more like bursting starlight and against all this black, she’s adorned in hellfire red, singing her heart out. It’s a startling image, one that takes its time and is deeply moving in its straight-forward theatricality. Bush considers the film a major disappointment, but underneath her own perfectionist tendencies, anything less than equaling Powell and Pressburger would have been a failure.

Kate Bush’s music video library is epochal, constantly rewarding in its zealous fusion of artistic forms, and her fundamental understanding that cinema, movement and dance are intertwined. When watching feature films, we tend to point out whenever a scene has great music accompanying it, whether it’s Claire Denis’ use of “The Rhythm of the Night” in the disco denouement of Beau Travail or the montage set to “Layla” in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, but why are music videos so vastly ignored when we canonize movies? If there’s to be a music video canon, then it’s important to understand what makes a music video cinema in the first place. Through dance, rhythm, and movement, music videos truly find their identity in the lexicon of cinema, and with Kate Bush in particular, she immerses her entire body into that very idea. Stop Making Sense is widely considered the greatest concert film of all time, thanks in part to Jonathan Demme’s understanding of rhythm and how he captured the jittery quality of David Byrne’s dancing. If the same can be extended to the work of music videos, then the entire world of images bursting out of Bush’s body time and time again must be holy and it must be considered cinema.

#kate bush #running up that hill #stop making sense #Emeric Pressburger #Michael Powell #the red shoes #rubberband girl #maya deren #twin peaks #david lynch #jonathan demme #goodfellas #oscilloscope laboratories #musings #film writing #hammer pictures #Wuthering Heights

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lessonsinkindness-blog · 7 years

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for what it’s worth, i’m sorry for the hurt.

The end of September marks a few reminders of some of the significant change I've been through in the last few years. Sometimes when I feel really fed up and like nothing is moving on, I remember how far I've come and how much water has passed under the bridge, and it reminds me to sit back and take stock from time to time.

I only have to look back at Facebook flashbacks and old diaries, even from a few years ago, to see a stark contrast between the "me then" and the "me now". The constant is my broad belief system, the baggage I bring with me (good and bad) from my upbringing, my value system, my sense of core identity, my general personality...but even these have shape shifted along the way. I can look at old photos and remember the story behind the picture, and where I was at in my life - how I was feeling, what big event was happening at the time that felt it would never end, or how easy it felt to truly be myself. It's so obvious it feels slightly trite to say it this way, but when I get the chance to mull it all over, it the reassuring constant is that I made it through these things. Not all of them are anywhere near as significant to me now as I thought they would always be, and I don't have many regrets (I never believe anybody that says they have "no regrets" - a post for another time!). But some of them were bitter pills to swallow.

So what have I learnt? Of course, when you are in the middle of a defining moment, it doesn't feel like that at the time. It just feels really hard. But a few months or years on, for what it's worth, these are the top lessons I've learnt in life from my experiences...

Given the right circumstances, "good people" will do "bad" things

Working for 8 years in the addictions field helped me to establish a core belief that we can't put people in to neat categories of "good" and "bad", or even "evil". We can't even make the assumption that if something is important enough to someone, they will prioritise it. This argument often gets confused with "excusing people" from taking responsibility for their actions, and once again that's something I will write about another time, but to summarise for now, these are different topics that get conflated.

Sometimes, when people are severely depressed, in the grasp of addiction, or have such low self worth, they will self-sabotage their life, because they don't believe they deserve happiness. This manifests itself in all sorts of behaviour, that whilst not taking away any issues of accountability, can wrongly convey that they do not care about the loved ones in their life.

This is something I have tried to remember at times when I have felt wronged by other people. I try to think about the "back story" that got someone to this point. That's not to say I absolve them of all accountability, but I have become hyper-aware of the mitigating factors that influence all of our behaviour and interactions with other people. Not least because I know I've been prone to them myself, and I am no angel. The truth is, even good people will make poor choices or mistakes, or lash out when the mix of conditions is right. This may come down to survivalism, self-hatred, selfishness...but very rarely is it as simple as we want it to be.

I work on what the evidence to date tells me about this person. Do they have a pattern of behaving this way or is it out of character? On balance, have they let me down or helped me out more often than not? Is there a possibility their action was misguided but their intentions were good? Asking myself these questions helps me clarify my position.

It won't always hurt like this (but it might "ache")

There are sharp stabs and pangs in life. The huge traumas, the massive disappointments, the big conflict Really significant stuff that just seems like it could never feel any less intense. You tend to get people on 2 sides of the spectrum here - those that tell everyone to "put things in perspective" and minimise everything before the other person has had a second to grieve, and those who almost revel in self-martyrdom all their lives. I've known both.

I think it's too simple to say that one day, all of these things will just not matter anymore. I'm always very sceptical of those "I've completely changed my life around!" magazine articles where because people have

discovered yoga and eating avocado on toast for breakfast, their life is sparkly and fresh all day, every day. But what I can say, is that it does get better.

Those stabs become a "dull ache". There are some things in life that won't leave you. Grief, loss, bereavement, trauma. And by the way, don't let anyone tell you there's a timeline on these things (there's not and you are perfectly entitled to feel whatever you feel, for as long as you need to feel it). But what you may find is that with time, what used to be at the forefront of your mind, will start to take back stage a little more.

Yesterday marked a year since I ended a 30 day challenge where I blogged on my experience of infertility and my diagnosis of Premature Ovarian Failure. By that stage I had been diagnosed over 2 years and had already processed a lot of my grief, but even looking back at my blogs one year on, I can see there's been more progress, and my take on some of the issues I wrote about wouldn't be the same if I'd have written them this year. The overwhelming emotion I know I felt at that time was anger. And that was justified. It also allowed me to use it as a driving force to speak out and raise money for a good cause. But now some of that anger has faded away and I am left with a subtle pang at the back of my mind, that occasionally comes out to play when things trigger it. But I can put my hand on my heart and honestly say the central role my diagnosis plays in my life has diminished. Some of that is stability of my medication, and some of it's just the fact I have well and truly processed how I feel about it all. I took the time to do that and now it doesn't define me in the way it once did. A place I thought I'd never get to.

There is no monopoly on grief

At any given moment, someone else in the world is in unimaginable physical or mental pain. People are living in war torn countries, are homeless, are being abused, all sorts of horrific things. It is a fact of life that there will always be someone "worse off than you". I do get a little frustrated with this "pull your socks up" mentality though, as firstly, trauma and grief are culturally and socially relative to the context we find ourselves in, and secondly, empathy is not mutually exclusive. You can empathise with the big, Earth shaking issues, and you can choose to empathise with your neighbour, friend, or relative who is going through a life crisis that feels significant for them.

There is still very much a "stiff upper lip" mentality in our society about mental health issues, despite some good progress made in recent years - we still have a very long way to go. Coupled with this, it is human nature that we may find it very hard to empathise with issues we have not experienced directly ourselves. This means that we can project our own priorities and perception of what is worth grieving about on to other people in our lives and this can affect our ability to be truly there for them.

The easiest way to get around this is to accept that people are experts in their own grief, and what matters to them. It's not our job to help people "put things into perspective" - it's our job to listen and be there. And if we can't be there, help them to reach out to something or someone else. One day, when life hits us with what it chooses to, we can then expect that helping hand ourselves.

Family is what we make it

I come from a large, complicated family, that is no stranger to conflict. It's fair to say not all conflict is justified and is just a result of historic dynamics that are just so entrenched now, they're not going to change any time soon. I feel disappointed and sad about some people in my family who I really wish I saw, but I don't, for reasons that don't make much sense. Then there are family members I've made a conscious decision not to see such as my Dad, where there are legitimate boundaries I've had to set, to protect myself and others in my life, and to stay true to my morals.

My infertility has also made me view the concept of family very differently, in that I have had time to learn about all the different ways a family can be put together. I think my experiences in my own family have helped me on this journey, in that I don't have a natural pre-set towards biological ties, and so I'm able to be open to whatever "family" will look like for me in the future.

I am able to understand that blood is not thicker than water, and that in fact, family is made up of the people that truly care about your wellbeing and prove themselves to be there for you. This outlook has helped me in my world view, in that I don't believe in giving people a free ticket to being close to me because of sharing my blood type, or genetics. Some of the worst things that can happen in life happen to people under the protection of the nuclear family being untouchable, and I think that's a dangerous place to be.

So when I think of family, I think of who I can trust, who has been there for me through thick and thin, and who makes me feel good about myself. I think that's a pretty good basis for any family.

Integrity is everything

Being true to yourself is really hard sometimes. When I think of the times I've really disappointed myself, it's when I've contradicted principles that are really important to me, like honesty, kindness, empathy. I make the best effort I can to live a life to be proud of, but we all have situations when we let our need for immediate approval or satisfaction get in the way of our beliefs, and that's my "red flag" for knowing I've not acted with integrity.

I suppose this comes down to that cliché of treating others as you wish to be treated yourself. A lot easier said than done, I know. But it's all we have. If we're not acting with integrity, we don't really have a sense of self. There needs to be some sort of "code" or commitment we hold ourselves accountable to. This will change based around our particular beliefs, but there needs to be some kind of consistency as to how we act, so people know they can trust us.

This is a lesson I've learnt many times over, in lots of different situations. And it shows up on people's faces if you look hard enough. I still haven't figured out why some people struggle with this more than others, but I think a lot of it comes down to a need for approval, and a tendency towards individualism which is just how some people operate.

Integrity is a goal to work towards - I don't think it's possible to act with 100% integrity. As humans our actions will always somewhat contradict our ethos (for example, think how easy it is to blank out inconvenient truths about the clothes we buy, the drugs we use, the privileges we have), but being conscious and mindful of these contradictions is, I suppose, the first step.

It can, and it will, disappear

There's no originality in my revelation that I've learnt not to take situations or people for granted, but it's a cliché worth repeating. If there's one constant in life, it's loss, and to protect ourselves from this reality, it's often easier to pretend everything's going to stay exactly the same until the day we die.

But in reality we all do it - we take our partners for granted, we don't appreciate the smaller things in life, we make assumptions about how things like homelessness and addiction don't happen to "people like us". Until they do.

Everything is transient, and nothing lasts forever. And I know I coasted through a lot of moments in my life I wish I could go back to and savour more, because now they're gone forever. Complacency has taught me harsh lessons at times and kept me stuck. There are plenty of situations I wish I had appreciated someone, or something, more - and then it's too late. The damage has been done.

So I'm working on being much more present in the moment (which is tough for someone who always races ahead with my anxious thoughts!) and appreciating what I have right here, right now. Because I now have the knowledge that one day, the things and people I love could be lost, and I want to have made the most of every minute with them.

I could go on...but these are the thoughts that ruminate in my head when I think about change and loss, and what I've learnt along the way. I'd be curious to know your thoughts, and your own life lessons.

#blog #regrets #lifelessons #morals #trauma #lifeexperience #anxiety #family

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