#also i wrote this on a plane and i never write in public usually so that was super weird but also kinda fun

[irismfrost]

I've taken some mental notes of little differences between Taiwan/Japan (they have many similar customs) and the US. Just some little culture shocks that I had to get used to.

- Taiwan and Japan have cool toilet paper holders. Not all of them, but in some hotels and public bathrooms - I've never seen it before in the US.

- In Taiwan, sometimes, especially in public bathrooms, you cannot flush toilet paper. Also, sometimes the toilet paper is located outside the stalls and you have to remember to grab some before you go in or else.

- They don't have squatty potties in the US. In Japan, every toilet is also a bidet.

- There is no uncomfortably large gap between or under stalls in Taiwan/Japan.

- People on this side of the world don't use napkins like we do in the US. There are limited napkins and you usually don't get one with your food.

- In Taiwan they drink hot tea instead of water at restaurants. Sometimes they will give you normal cold water though.

- In Taiwan, many buildings (especially the hotels) will not have a 4th floor, it is bad luck as I mentioned in a previous blog.

- At the hotels in Taiwan, most of them served fries and chicken nuggets at breakfast, in addition to veggie noodles, congee, rice, etc. In the US, these are dinner items and never would be served for breakfast. I think the US has more of a separation between different types of foods for different types of meals.

- Space orientation is different here. People will walk right in front of you/ very close which would be a little rude in the US, but is totally normal over here.

- The driving has less rules. In the US, there isn't much room for interpretation, and in Taiwan, everyone pays attention and so people feel more comfortable getting super close to the people in front of them, and scooters (which are everywhere) don't really follow any rules.

- You get towelettes with every meal to clean your hands before you eat.

- Hand sanitizer stations are everywhere.

- There are prayer rooms in most large buildings.

- Unisex/ disabled bathrooms are more common.

- sugar syrup in addition to the granular (only saw this at the japan airport KIX)

- Heat protection: little battery operated fans (and other fans), and umbrellas are very common

- The vending machines usually just have drinks. I didn't see many food vending machines. There are some, but the drink ones are much more common.

- People dress nicer. I didn't see many people in leggings or sweatpants or loungewear. People are very put together.

- To wait in line at a restaurant, a lot of places there is a clipboard at the front and you just write your name and how many people and they will call out your name in order of when you wrote it- not sure how well this would work in the US - I feel like people would scratch out or erase other people's names.

- Most of the women's clothes have built in bras with a lot of padding.

- Wide pants are big here for women and baggy pants for guys.

- Foreign airlines are better (maybe it's just the international flights one but much nicer- more space, monitor thing, chargers, meals on every flight no matter the length).

- I'm not sure if they do this in other countries but the immigration cards that you are supposed to fill out on the plane were new to me and I had no idea they would do that.

- On Asiana Airlines, they have privacy screens on the airplane monitors.

- There are basically no trash cans on the street. You have to hold onto your trash for a while or just not create trash. There are also people who literally clean the streets in the early morning.

- Everyone here smokes cigarettes. That's the only trash on the streets, but like there are people who clean up the streets every morning, so it doesn't get too bad. However, it smells like smoke everywhere. Even in the airports and some large buildings, there are designated smoking areas.

[searchingforstarss]

irondad prompt: accidental poisoning, peter whump? pleeease? love your writing! hope you enjoy your time away!

hi lovely anon!! this took me a little longer to do because it kind of got away from me and turned out a lot longer than i was thinking! i hope you like it because it’s not as whumpy as i originally intended but as soon as i saw accidental poisoning i couldn’t get this idea out of my head so here you go. i hope you enjoy :)) x

---

Morgan’s gleeful yells are the first thing Peter’s greeted to when he arrives at the lake house on a Friday afternoon.

“Peter’s here! Peter’s here! I can hear him!”

The six-year-old barrels through the living room and out onto the front porch, excitement practically radiating off her in waves.

No matter how many times they try to explain to her that it simply isn’t feasible for Peter to stay with them any more than two nights a week because he has school in the city, she whines about how long he’s been away whenever he arrives, without fail. Today is no different.

“You’re not allowed to stay away for that long anymore, I miss you too much,” she declares. “Daddy can’t do the right voices when he reads Harry Potter to me either. You’re wayy better.”

Petter grins broadly down at her, about to open his mouth to greet her properly, ask about her week at school and whether she learnt how to do fraction multiplication like she had excitedly told him that she was going to during their Wednesday night phone call. He can’t even get a word in edgeways though because before he can, Morgan is babbling on again in her same gleeful tone that Peter adores.

“I have a surprise for you!” she announces proudly, tugging him up the creaky porch steps with her smaller hand tucked inside his.

“Whoa, that’s cool. What is it?” Peter asks. He tries to hide the apprehension from his tone, because Morgan’s surprises always swing one of two ways.

He’ll either end up trying to pretend he isn’t choking up when she presents him with a hand drawn-picture and note or craft project that she made at school during their art hour. Or, he’ll end up as a victim to one of her latest ideas, experiments and schemes. Last week it was her determination to teach Peter how to roller-skate on the cul-de-sac a few blocks over, which ended in Morgan clumsily pressing an excess number of band-aids onto his scraped knees. The month before he ended up as a human canvas to entertain her desire to learn how to face paint (that was all-around just as much of a disaster as it sounds like it would be).

“You can’t know what it is, silly!” Morgan sing-songs, “you’ll ruin the surprise.”

“Silly me, of course,” Peter deadpans, but he’s ignored as she tugs him through to the kitchen as soon as he’s dumped his backpack on the couch.

“Surprise!” she exclaims as soon as they’re both in the room. She guestures excitedly towards a few slightly sad looking lumps of something drenched in icing and severed onto sticks. There are sprinkles as well, which look like they might have been a nice touch to cheer the entire thing up, had the majority of them not ended up scattered around the surrounding bench space.

“Daddy and I made cookie pops! Well, I made them, he just helped me use the big scary whisk-y thingy. They’re for Katie’s birthday party tomorrow because we all have to bring something yummy to eat, and Daddy wanted to do regular cookies but I told him that was boring. So we made these instead!”

“They look great, well done you guys,” Peter praises. Secretly, he’s almost certain that Tony was onto something with his suggestion. Cookies would have definitely been the safer option.

“I want you to try one! I saved the first one for you because I’m the best sister in the whole wide world.”

Peter eyes the pink ball of cookie dough being waved in his face dubiously, but Morgan’s creations often look worse than they actually are so he bites the bullet and accepts the treat that she’s thrusting towards him.

He takes a bite, partly because he’s being watched expectantly by large brown eyes and partly because he’s absolutely starving. He’s had a long day. Decathlon practice in the morning, AP classes back to back all afternoon and then the drive up here. Plus, he really wasn’t planning on Spider-Manning today, but there was a gas station robbery on the side of Interstate 87 that he pulled over to break up on his way because the man was threatening the poor guy behind the counter with a gun for a raspberry slushie, a hot dog and two packets of cigarettes and Peter had to intervene because that was just stupid on so, so many levels.

The shopkeeper gave him a free hot dog in return which he gladly scarfed down before he disappeared back out to his car, but that’s all he’s eaten since lunch. So as he chews Morgan’s baked concoction, he figures that the cookie dough is crumbly, sure, and maybe they went a little heavy with the icing sugar in the icing but Peter is so hungry that he thinks anything would probably taste good to him at this point.

Footsteps thud down the stairs, and Peter hears Tony’s voice before he sees him.

“Morgan, I swear if you’re force-feeding Peter. Your dear old brother doesn’t want any of our atrocious attempt at baking-“

Tony rounds the corner, eyes falling on Peter, mouth full of icing and cookie dough.

“Oh, I’m too late. Great.”

“Hey, Tony.”

“Hiya, Pete. Enjoying your snack?”

Peter carries on chewing on the food his mouth. “Mhmm. Definitely. Good job you guys.”

Tony shakes his head. “Nuh-uh, not a good job, not at all. I just got off the phone with Pepper, turns out you actually have to partially bake the cookie dough first. It honestly just seems like a lot of extra work if you ask me, but she’s the boss.”

“You’re starting again?” Peter asks.

“Yep, and since you’re here you can actually make yourself useful,” Tony snarks but there’s a fond smile on his face. Peter nods willingly. “Don’t just stand there then, kid. Grab the flour from the cupboard would you?”

Peter grins and turns to grab the flour like Tony requested. He doesn’t even have to think about it anymore, he knows exactly which shelf to reach for with the same sort of instinct that he has in his and May’s apartment.

(Even with all three of their hands on deck, the second round of cookie pops only end up looking mildly more appetizing than the first, but at least all of Morgan’s tiny friends won’t have uncooked, crumbly cookie dough forced on them so Tony claims it as a win - he’s never had the patience to deal with other kids’ whining parents anyway.)

---

Peter sleeps in the next morning, and the house is silent when he wakes. The first thing he notices is the way he’s shivering, even in the balmy morning sun streaming through his windows. There’s nausea as well, constantly threatening to make its way up his throat as it sits at the bottom of his stomach, churning and rolling uncomfortably,

The second thing he notices is a note sitting on his bedside table as he fumbles out one arm to grab his phone and check the time. Peter recognises Tony’s scrawl immediately.

Morning, sleepyhead. Gone to drop Morgan off to her party. Be home soon. T

He’s content to lie there for a while and wallow in his own misery and how dreadful he feels while he’s all alone in the house until his stomach lurches violently and he’s hauling himself out of bed, sweaty covers pooling around his feet. The room around him is spinning, but the singular thought occupying his hazy mind is get to the bathroom, Parker. Just make it to the damn bathroom.

He does, even though his legs are shaky underneath him, and he just manages to stumble through the open doorway of the bathroom and drop to his knees in front of the toilet. He doesn’t even register the pain that shoots through his knees and up his legs as he slams into the tile.

A charming mix of gas station hot dog, Morgan and Tony’s tragic attempt at a cookie pop and the lasagna Tony made for dinner last night ends up swimming at the bottom of the toilet bowl.

Gross.

“Peter?”

That’s his name. It sounds like it’s coming from somewhere down near his bedroom. He tries to call back, but acid coats his raw throat and he can’t seem to get the words out. He retches again, before dipping forward to lean up against the ceramic of the toilet.

“Peter, oh, there you are-” Tony begins, but he drops off as Peter sees him appear around the corner of the bathroom door and take in the scene in front of him. “What’s going on?”

He blinks up at Tony through cloudy eyes.

“Think ‘m sick.”

“I thought you couldn’t even get sick?”

Peter tries to give a coherent answer, he thinks, but all that comes out is a whine. He looks up at Tony, eyes pleading. He’s not sure what he’s asking for, really. He just wants someone to make it better.

“Okay, okay, got it. That’s not really the point right now.”

Peter isn’t quite sure what he’s expecting as Tony hovers around the doorway. He wants comfort, he wants Tony, but he doesn’t dare to move far from the toilet.

“Oh, shit. Kid, you actually ate that garbage attempt of baking that Morgan gave you yesterday, didn’t you? There was raw egg in that.”

Peter just nods feebly, not entirely listening. His head is head still resting on the toilet seat. He doesn’t have the energy to lift it.

“I hate to break it to you, kid, but maybe Spidey is just as susceptible to food poisoning as the rest of us.”

Peter’s certainly listening now, his glazed eyes shooting open. Weak displeasure simmers within them.

“You poisoned me?”

Morgan’s surprise has now definitely landed on the bad side this week, leaning towards absolutely-fucking-awful.

“Technically, Morgan poisoned you. I just operated all the heavy machinery,” Tony says. Peter glares at him, but it’s so pathetic that Tony’s own stomach clenches in sympathy.

“You’re the adult-” Peter points out, feeble indignation in his voice before he cuts himself off with another round of heaving.

“Oh, Pete,” Tony sighs, stepping further into the bathroom at the sight. He lowers himself to the floor right next to Peter. A warm hand finds his back, rubbing in slow circles right at the base. A fraction of the tension leaves Peter’s body.

“You’re alright, bud” Tony soothes. His voice is gentle and calming, and Peter lets it wash over him. He’s always loved just listening to Tony talk. “You’ll feel so much better once it’s all back up.”

Peter finds that hard to believe because caught right in the throes of pain, shivering and feeling like a total and utter mess, he struggles to remember a time when he wasn’t wholly consumed by Morgan’s attempt to poison him.

There’s nothing left for Peter to bring up eventually, and he’s left gasping for air.

“Think you’re done?”

Peter nods, stomach still clenching painfully. He shoves himself away from the toilet, legs giving way underneath him as he slumps into a pile of shaky, sweaty limbs against the bathroom counter. This doesn’t seem to faze Tony though, and Peter watches through bleary eyes as he goes into Dad Mode. It all fades in and out in front of him, but he registers the corners of his mouth being wipes gently with a warm washcloth, the hair being brushes back from his sweaty forehead, a cool glass of water being tipped down his throat.

It was because of moments like this that after the snap, it took Peter a while to correlate his Tony with Morgan’s Tony.

His Tony had only ever cared from afar and he usually shied away from physical affection and comfort unless either of them were on their deathbeds. They always loved each other, but it was sort of a given. An undeniable fact with little physical expression. Now though? Morgan’s Tony tucks her into bed at night and smoothes kisses into her hair and lets her curl into his lap during lazy evenings on the couch with absolutely no reservations or qualms. He tells her he loves her at least five times a day.

It then took Peter even longer to realise that Morgan’s Tony wasn’t exclusively hers. He’s just Tony, softened around the edges a little with parenthood and settling down, but he’s Peter’s as well, still.

That’s evident in the way that instead of leaving Peter to his own devices once he’s taken care of him and cleaned up his mess, Tony just leads him gently downstairs instead, a warm solid hand wrapped around his forearm to make sure he doesn’t stumble forward and end up on his face.

Tony lies him down on the couch, before taking a seat himself. He lets Peter pillow himself against him, head buried into the soft cotton of his t-shirt. Tony’s hands trail along their time-worn path in Peter’s hair, the action almost second nature.

“I’m never eating anything you make me ever again, I swear,” Peter mumbles into Tony’s chest. His words are quiet, scraping against the rawness of his throat but Tony hears him loud and clear. He chuckles.

“Fair enough, buddy.”

---

Peter’s nap is only interrupted when Morgan bursts into the room sometime in the afternoon. He blinks slowly from where he’s resting against Tony’s chest, head tucked up against his collarbone.

Morgan has a goody bag clutched in her grip and a few flyaway pink streamers caught in her hair. She beelines for the couch.

“Petey, Mommy said that I need to apologise for poisoning you!”

Peter feels a deep rumble in Tony’s chest as he attempts to stifle a laugh. He can’t quite muster up the energy (and he’s far too comfortable anyway) to get up from his position resting against Tony to hug Morgan, so he just gives her the warmest smile he can manage.

“It’s okay, bug, I know you didn’t mean to. I forgive you.”

She beams up at him. “There was one cookie pop left so I saved it for you, see?” she says, rattling her goody bag around, which Peter presumes contains the cursed treat. “They’re really good, I promise!”

Peter’s stomach churns again at the thought.

“That’s really nice of you, Mo, but I think I might give cookies a miss for a while.”

[alwaysahiccupandastrid]

How Bad is Sia’s “Music” really?

I watched it illegally (because there was no way I was paying for that bullshit) and found out. It’s not as bad as we thought... It’s worse.

TW for ableism, Sia, drugs, alcohol, just in general a terrible movie, meltdowns, blackface

Literally the first thing you hear while they’re showing the production companies is THOSE stereotypical noises. If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ll know what I mean.

And yes, she does this for the WHOLE fucking movie

What was the need to show her in her underwear? Maddie Ziegler was 14 when this was made, so what was the need??? And why did Sia prolong the scene by having her hitting herself?

Less than a minute in and my reaction was already “what the fuck is this shit?”

So the opening number not only had stereotypical exaggerated facial expression, it has Maddie in BLACKFACE?!? And with culturally appropriated hair?!?

The exaggerated facial expressions are literally constant and I took photos during the film to show it, more later, but I’ll keep mentioning it

ITS LITERALLY THE WHOLE FUCKING TIME SHE IS ON SCREEN

Even her way of walking is fucking offensive, Jesus Christ

The vocalisations just had me cringing so hard, I cannot describe how awful it made me feel

Why do all the neighbours need to be paid off and help her when she goes for a walk? I don’t-

Yes, by about the five minute mark I was already seriously debating all my life decisions. It was that bad.

Kate Hudson really didn’t give a fuck that her grandma died

I will keep saying it but WHY are the facial expressions/vocalisations CONSTANT?!! Literally they do not stop at all. I work with a child who is actually similar to this in that he’s nonverbal and he makes similar noises/faces, but the way they’re in this movie is so over-exaggerated?!? And even the kid I work with doesn’t do it 24/7?!?

Sia, calling your characters Zu and Music doesn’t make them interesting in the slightest. They’re still painfully terrible and one dimensional

Literally ONE minute after being left alone with her autistic sister, Zu calls the mental health service asking if they could “theoretically” “pick up” her sister?!? Like she wants to get rid of her already?!?

“A magical little girl” - autism isn’t a magical power?!? And Music is a young woman, not a little girl?!? Why are you infantilising her?!?

Okay I’m not being funny but this choreography is NOT hard. ANYONE can do it, so claiming that you needed to hire a dancer to be Music because of the numbers is literally bullshit (and even so, there are so many amazing autistic actors and dancers?!?)

20 minutes in and I wanted to give up

So she had her first meltdown because her hair didn’t get braided immediately and that’s... certainly interesting??

The fact that Leslie Odom’s character says “I’m going to crush you now”?!?

AND THEN HE FUCKING PICKS HER UP AND FULL-BODILY PINS HER DOWN ONTO THE FLOOR

“I’m crushing her with my love” - oh fuck you, just fuck you

So Sia lied, the restraint scenes were NOT removed and there was no warning. She’s a fucking POS liar

I have no idea why he’s called Ebo or why he has such a cliche African accent?!? I might have missed out on why because I was busy trying not to bang my head into the table while I watched this film but just... yikes

“He (his brother) liked to be held” - YEAH, HELD. NOT FUCKING CRUSHED

“He is dead now” - IM NOT FUCKING SURPRISED IF YOU CRUSHED HIM LIKE THAT

The constant babying and patronizing of the autistic character is so exhausting to watch. I’m so tired

“Planning on sending her to the people pound but I guess I’ll keep her a little longer” - SHE WAS JOKING BUT THAT WAS NOT EVEN REMOTELY A FUNNY JOKE. NOT EVEN IN AN AWKWARD WAY

STOP THE FACES IM-

^ YEAH, Sia, totally a fucking love letter to the autistic community here ^

So Zu finds this necklace she made as a kid that had a little dog on it, and she says to Music, “He had seizures too, just like you”... MELTDOWNS AND SEIZURES ARE NOT EVEN REMOTELY THE SAME FUCK THIS MOVIE-

It’s like Sia is trying to make the movie funny but it’s really not at all

Is Zu implying that Music is autistic because the mum was a junkie?!?

For real though, the dialogue in general is so fucking awful and cringey. Whoever wrote this should never be allowed to write again

Did she seriously leave her autistic sister alone to talk to who I’m presuming was her dealer or loan shark?!?

Also why is he - a white dude - wearing cornrows?!?

So who is the film really about? The autistic girl or the older sister saviour? I think we all know the answer to that one

WHY IS SHE WALKING AROUND WITH HER TEETH JUTTING OUT LIKE THAT ALL THE TIME

The musical numbers are literally so painful to watch. The overly bright colours, the flashing... my eyes were hurting and so was my brain

Autism representation aside for a second, the musical numbers/choreography are all fucking atrocious. Ditto for the costumes

LIKE WHAT THE FUCK WERE THE PINK OOMPA LOOMPA FRUIT THINGS?!? THEY LOOK LIKE THE PINK VERSIONS OF VIOLET BEAUREGARDE THE BLUEBERRY

I wanted to cry by this point, this movie is far more awful than I thought

“I’m not saying she doesn’t want to change, I’m saying she can’t” - FUCK YOU. Why is it okay for him to assume what she can or can’t do

Can I just say that autistic people aren’t constantly in a coked up wonderland state?!! We don’t see the world as a wonderland fantasy world 24/7?!!

“She can hear you from two rooms away” / *shows her listening through two brick walls to a conversation* — Also, we don’t have super fucking sonic hearing?? WE CANT HEAR THROUGH FUCKING BRICK WALLS?!?

“She can understand everything you’re saying to her” - she’s autistic not fucking deaf

Less than 45 minutes in, there’s another meltdown in the park

“I’m not climbing on top of a small screaming white girl in public” - yeah please fucking don’t

So Zu fucking pins her down with her weight 🤦‍♀️

“She doesn’t know who she’s hitting” - IM SORRY WHAT

EBO LITERALLY SAID “TREAT HER LIKE A BEAR” when talking her through the prone restraint, I fucking CANNOT

“Tell her she’s safe” - NOT IF YOU FUCKING RESTRAIN HER LIKE THAT SHE IS NOT

The fact that she gets up, smiling and happy after a meltdown and immediately is excited to get a snow cone... I can honestly say that after a meltdown, I am in no way happy or smiling. I am often not very verbal and I’m withdrawn/not myself for at least several hours, usually the rest of the day. Fuck this film

This film is literally just about Zu, and Music is there for a plot device to give her character development. That’s all she’s there for.

Love how Sia shoehorned Zu being suicidal in there. You know, just to try and make her more easy to sympathize with (it doesn’t work)

This film is literally just a 1 hour 47 minute Sia music video with ZERO plot

WHY WERE THEY WEARING PILLOW DIAPERS IN ONE NUMBER-

I really did not feel into the side plot with that guy who was fighting but it was still better than the actual movie so...

I am SO DONE with the NON STOP CONSTANT vocal shit. So tired.

LOJ’s only role in this film is to be the stereotypical wise black guy who assists a white woman’s story. There’s like hardly any other depth there

The Ebo/Zu romance is so fucking stupid and pointless and out of NOWHERE. I couldn’t even tell if they were into each other or not

I was already so bored of the musical numbers by this point. They added NOTHING to the plot but they pretended they did, and I was so over it. And it’s not because I’m not “creative enough” or anything to understand, I love musicals and I think it could have been cool if done right... but it wasn’t. They were a mess. It’s just bad.

Sia really tried to pretend her movie was deep but really it’s a shallow mess

So Zu is meeting rich drug clients and says to Music “try not to have one of your freak outs up there” and “if you could try to get it out now”... FUCKING YIKES. It’s not an on/off button, shut the fuck up

YEP THIS WAS THE SIA CAMEO FUCK THAT BITCH

The fact that she just calls “DRUG DEALER?!? DRUG DEALER IS THAT YOU”, fucking end this please-

I fucking hate this bitch I’m dead serious

“We’re gonna send them to Haiti cause there’s been an earthquake. All these buildings fell down, children’s bones were dislocated” - WHY WAS SHE SO CHEERFUL ABOUT IT

“Gonna buy a shit load of pain meds, gonna but them on my private plane” - FUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOU

“Pop stars without borders” - Sia thinks she’s so clever but I would give anything to punch her I swear-

ANOTHER MUSICAL NUMBER JUST STOP IM BEGGING YOU

There’s this awkward conversation/bit with Zu and her drug dealer/loanshark about his outfit that was clearly meant to be funny but was just flat and painful

Yep, Sia really showed Music eating chewing gum off the underside of a park bench. Of course.

Look, the kid I work with does similar stuff by putting literally anything and everything in his mouth but like... why would you put that in your movie?

And there’s no indication before this that Music puts everything and anything in her mouth, she just randomly decides to get on her knees, under the bench and eat chewing gum, like she calculates that it’s there and gets it???

She has a THIRD meltdown after an allergic reaction to a bee sting and her sister just yells at her before realizing... I’m not here for this movie, I feel like I drifted off and was not really there

So Zu got angry because she left the drugs at the park but she’s not that upset that her sister had an allergic reaction???

Zu gets absolutely drunk because a) she lost Sia’s drugs and b) she’s stressed out by her autistic sister... wow, great message, Sia!

She really fucked off and left her sister alone to go clubbing/on a bender

The less said about the musical number here the better

Sia’s movie also checks the box of having stereotypical Asian parents, specifically stereotypical Asian dad being harsh/angry and hitting his wife!

ALSO HE PUSHED AND KILLED HIS SON WTF IS HAPPENING

Less than 3 minutes after the last, there’s a musical number that I think was about this side character going to heaven... another shitty Sia-esque number

The patterns during the number made my brain hurt.

Also there are so many autistic actors who can also dance, and yet Sia chose the neurotypical one because ✨ N E P O T I S M ✨

I just want to know how it was deemed necessary to show the fact the autistic character peed/wet herself? I mean... ??? It’s just so undignified and not at all necessary to the plot. Nothing happens after that, it just moves onto the next scene and it didn’t do anything

“I have no one” - 1) YOUR FUCKING SISTER. 2) GEE I FUCKING WONDER WHY, couldn’t be that you’re a shitty human being?!?

There’s a scene where Music is walking and she does ALL the stereotypical behaviours at once... just YIKES

Zu somehow stopped another meltdown just by grabbing Music by the shoulders and sitting her down???

Aaand yep. Another shitty musical number

Zu really goes to put her sister in a fucking facility and claims it’ll be “better for her” - BULLSHIT. Better for Zu, maybe, not Music.

Ah yes - the girl who the characters have said has problems with routines being changed/change in general... you’re now going to fuck up her routine by dumping her in a facility. Perfect Plan.

The nonverbal autistic girl suddenly speaking to say “don’t go” - you can just predict it from the off, can’t you?

Love that as soon as Music starts talking, Zu is like “fuck it, I’ll keep her!”

Zu really went and crashed Ebo’s brothers wedding... in a fucking bralette... YIKES

“I almost gave Music away” - SHE IS NOT A DOG YOU DONT GIVE PEOPLE AWAY

“We should sing a song” - PLEASE DO FUCKING NOT

Also that kiss/romance montage between Zu and Ebo was the CRINGIEST fucking shit ever

This movie seems to be implying that Music has locked in syndrome or something, like she’s locked in her own head or whatever it’s called, and I just... *sigh*

Oh and now Music magically fucking sings in a room FULL of strangers... this is literally embarrassing, please let this end

I mean it, this movie was fucking painful to watch on ever level

She got a service dog puppy which... okay?

Oh look, it’s the only decent song on the soundtrack but with an absolutely shitty over-stimulatory music video with the credits!

I can only name 5 characters in this film. Maybe 7 at a push, but even then I would be guessing

AND YEP SHE THANKED AUTISM SPEAKS OVER THE CREDITS. FUCK YOU SIA 🖕🏻

Let me reiterate: this is a movie about a neurotypical former drug addict whose character development comes from the autistic character, from having an autistic sister she has to take care of. I’m so tired.

We are NOT plot devices or tools for character development. Not once does anyone in this film treat Music like a human being - she’s treated as a burden, a problem, and then like a pet that they decide to keep. Not once is the film focused on how she is feeling - it’s always about Zu or Ebo. The performance itself was so over exaggerated and it made me want to cry when I watched it because this is how the world sees us, and this movie will make it ten times worse. It’s stuff like this that made me think “I don’t want to be labelled as autistic because people will think I’m a certain way”, that made me wait so long before going to the GP to get a referral.

As I said, poor autistic representation aside, the movie is just so appallingly bad. It truly is one of the worst films I’ve watched. If you’re going to watch it, please don’t - or, if you want to because you want to see how bad it is/to raise awareness/critical posts, at least do it illegally. Do not give Sia your money.

[cellsshapedlikestars]

I feel terrible that I haven’t been participating in the last couple events, so I decided to write something for day 3 of the @jonsaseasonalbash​

Prompt: crow and little bird

posted on ao3 here

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.

When Sansa steps into the tattoo parlor, she nearly loses her nerve and runs back out.

But no, she made this appointment and she will keep it (plus, if she runs away, Arya will never let her live it down and she cannot let that happen). She just wishes she'd waited until Arya was free instead of declaring, loudly, that she could do this by herself.

It's a Tuesday morning and so she isn't surprised when she notices the shop is practically empty and that there's only one other customer. As she goes to the front desk and then waits for the tattoo artist she booked with – a woman named Val – she tries not to look over at the other customer to see who they are and what kind of tattoo they're getting. That would be rude.

She can't help it, though, because the other customer is distractingly half dressed (and distractingly ripped) and no matter how hard she tries, her eyes keep flitting over to him. He's only in a sleeveless undershirt and she can't help taking in the corded muscles in his arms, eyes sweeping down his forearms and to his hands and-

“Sansa?”

“Yes!” she turns to face a woman who must be Val, trying to look as innocent as possible. It doesn't seem to work, because she's pretty sure Val gives a slight snort of laughter and looks over at the man with a smirk before leading Sansa to a chair that... has a perfect view of the only other customer.

She keeps her focus on Val as the woman applies the stencil to her skin and they both agree that they like the size and placement. While Val preps her needle, Sansa stares at the line of small birds in flight across her inner wrist.

Little bird.

She is free of the Lannisters now and that taunt will never hurt her again. She will never allow herself to be used like she had before and she is getting this tattoo to remind herself.

(Not that her new job is any better, she sighs internally. After leaving Lannister Publications, she'd gotten a position at The Mockingbird, but her creepy boss had relegated her to writing fluff life and style pieces. Not that Sansa has anything against life and style, but the pieces he gives her are incredibly stupid, to the point where it almost seems like he's doing it on purpose, and Sansa aches to write something better, something more. She wants to be a real journalist.)

The needle doesn't hurt as badly as she was expecting (though it's still not pleasant) and Sansa can't help when her eyes wander over to the other chair – or, more specifically, the man sitting in it. His dark hair is pulled up into a man bun that she should hate, but he somehow makes it work. In fact, she should hate his whole look – scruffy beard, battered boots and old jeans – but it just... well, it works for her, ok? Even the way his face has settled into a resting scowl works for her, against her will or better judgment.

But then she sees the tattoo.

He's already got a few of them, and the new one is being added to his upper arm and she almost rolls her eyes when she sees it – a black crow.

He must be a fanboy.

Ever since The Crow showed up in Winterfell almost a year ago, she's seen normal men go absolutely insane over the superhero. He's only been seen a couple times, a man in all black with a mask who leaves one black feather as his calling card.

He'd made quite the splash with his debut – dumping Ramsay Bolton on the front steps of the Metro Police, bound and gagged, with a trunk full of evidence so concrete there was no way that even his father, politician Roose Bolton, could get him out of it. And, stuck into the bindings around Ramsay's wrists, a single black feather.

Newspapers had dubbed him The Crow – even her own newspaper wrote about him nearly every single day, even when he wasn't active. The Crow wasn't like the other superheroes that had been popping up in other cities – he didn't fight petty crime, he didn't seem to prowl the streets at night looking for minor assaults and thefts. No, he went after the elite, the ones the police couldn't (or wouldn't) touch.

(There had been a time when Sansa had wished desperately that The Crow would come for the Lannisters and save her, but he never had. The Lannisters might be cruel, but they weren't criminal masterminds, and in the end, it had been Sansa that had saved herself.)

Sansa sighs and tears her eyes from the stranger and back to her own tattoo. He may be one of the most attractive men she's ever encountered in real life, but she doesn't think she wants anything to do with one of The Crow's fanboys. She has mixed feelings about The Crow himself – she has no issue with someone taking the law into their own hands when the law refuses to do it themselves, but superheroes come with consequences. Consequences that look exactly like the stranger sitting across the room from her – men who decide that they, too, will mete out their own justice. Those copycats usually turn out to be less heroics and more violence for the sake of violence.

Yes, Sansa has very mixed feelings about The Crow.

She looks up again (determined that this is the last time she will look) and she nearly jumps out of her skin when she sees the stranger staring straight back at her. Their eyes catch and Sansa feels a wave of something rush through her. He doesn't look away and she finds herself caught, breathless, until Val declares that she's all done.

(When Sansa's legs almost give out when she stands, she laughs it off to Val and pretends she has a low pain tolerance and also her blood sugar has dropped and it definitely has nothing at all to do with the stranger who's eyes she can still feel burning into her as she walks away.)

SIX MONTHS LATER

Sansa tries very hard not to cry.

If she cries, her nose will stuff up and then she'll have an even harder time trying to breathe around the gag in her mouth. She tries to take deep, calming breaths, fighting against the panic that is swirling through her chest. Her hands are bound tightly behind her, her legs likewise bound with industrial zip ties, the plastic cutting into her skin whenever she tries to move or struggle.

How did she get here?

She'd sworn, six months ago, that she would never allow herself to be at the mercy of a man again - she'd even gotten a tattoo to remind herself. But here she is.

From her vantage point, lying sideways on the bed, she watches Petyr Baelish fold and pack his clothing into a suitcase. To anyone else, he would probably look calm, but Sansa has been around him long enough to see how pale his face is, the tight line of his mouth, the slight flaring of his nostrils - he is terrified.

But why?

Four hours ago, she'd been working late in the office when Petyr had found her and told her to come with him. He wouldn't explain where or why and when she refused - when she tried to leave, tried to run - he'd had his right hand man bind and gag her and they'd shoved her into the back of a car and driven her to Petyr's penthouse.

It hadn't registered then, but Sansa knows something has happened to scare Petyr. Something has forced his hand. He has been making advances towards her for the past few months, making sweet promises of a promotion (she'd finally be able to write something real), trying to take her out to dinner and giving her little gifts that made her stomach turn sour. She'd given the gifts back, refused the dinners.

But something has changed and now he is kidnapping her.

She'd overheard him and Brune talking about a private plane – about an island where he would never find them. Sansa knows that she is going to be taken to this island, that Petyr will no longer accept her refusals.

She wants to vomit, but she tamps it down, afraid that she'll choke behind the gag. She may be bound and helpless, but she refuses to die. She'll find her way out of this, somehow.

The door bursts open and Brune comes in, face a hard mask, and Sansa watches Petyr's eyes get wide and somehow even more fearful. Then something dark fills the doorway and Brune's hand comes up, gun at the ready, and Sansa closes her eyes tight when the first shot goes off. There's a second and a third in rapid succession and then more noises, but Sansa's heart is pounding so loudly in her own ears, she can barely hear.

Eventually there's silence, though it takes her a while to notice it.

No, not silence.

Someone is moving about the penthouse, and when Sansa finally opens her eyes, she nearly lets out a sob when she sees a dark figure dressed in all black standing over the bodies of Petyr and Brune.

The Crow.

There's a rip in The Crow's sleeve and she can see blood seeping out from where a bullet must have grazed him. Her eyes won't leave the blood on his arm as he bends down and begins to tie up first Brune and then Petyr. There's a lot of blood, but underneath she thinks she can see something, almost like a tattoo-

“Are you ok?”

She tears her eyes from his arm and looks up at the masked face that's now turned towards her. His voice is low and rough and even though she can't see his eyes behind the mask, she can feel them on her.

He stands up and walks over to her and carefully unties the gag, finally pulling it away and she coughs and nearly chokes when it's gone. Her mouth is so dry, but she manages to croak out, “water?”

She should be asking him to untie her, but she feels like she still can't breathe with how dry her mouth and throat are and The Crow leaves the room and comes back with a cup of water. He helps her sit up and holds the cup to her mouth, with his other hand on the back of her head, holding her steady, as she gulps down the water.

“Police will be here soon,” he tells her, setting the cup down on the side table.

Then he goes back to the bodies (she sees they're still breathing, which doesn't surprise her – The Crow has never killed anyone, as far as she knows) and he pulls out a single black feather from somewhere and tucks it into the bindings at Petyr's wrists.

“Aren't you going to untie me?” she asks when he starts moving towards the door again.

He turns to face her and says, “no.”

“What?” she gasps, twisting to try and face him better.

“You're evidence,” he shrugs.

“You're just going to leave me here?” her voice raises an octave in disbelief. “You're supposed to be a superhero!”

“I'm not a hero,” he says, the words biting. “Just because the news-”

“You help people!” she cuts in. “I read about what Ramsay Bolton did,” she swallows hard, remembering the horrific things that had come out in the wake of his arrest, the things he'd done to countless women and gotten away with because of his father's position. “You stopped him.”

The Crow stares at her for a while – or, she thinks he stares at her, she can't see his eyes. But she feels it, feels his gaze burning into her and something like a shiver rolls down her spine.

“You're evidence,” The Crow says again. “I'm not going to untie you.”

She knows, deep down, that she will be ok. The police will get here and untie her and she will be fine, but she can't seem to focus on that because there's a primal fear coursing through her at being tied up and helpless. She breathes deep and tries to calm herself.

“Then let me interview you,” she blurts out. He jerks back in surprise and she can't blame him, the words surprise even herself – she hadn't meant to say them. But she has, so she continues on. “Let me write an article on you.”

“No.”

“You owe me!”

“I just saved you,” he says and she thinks if he weren't wearing a mask, she would have seen him roll his eyes. “If anything, you owe me.”

She ignores the strange feeling that flits through her stomach and struggles to sit further upright. “I can help you,” she tries. “Isn't there some message you want to get out?” He's silent and she tries again. “Something you want to tell your fans?” She watches his mouth twist in disgust and she thinks yes! There it is.

“I don't want fans,” he grits out through clenched teeth. This is it, this is her chance.

“You could tell them to stop. Let me interview you and you can tell them whatever you want.”

She waits, heart in her throat, pulse pounding in her wrists, against the zip ties that bind her and the ink of her tattoo. She is not a little bird.

For a long while he watches her, eyes hidden behind his mask, mouth set into a grim line. The silence stretches out between them, crackles with a sort of energy Sansa has never felt before, except maybe once, six months ago in a tattoo parlor when-

Sirens wail in the distance, startling both of them. Time's up, she thinks as he begins to back away towards the door.

“Let me interview you,” she says one final time, and she's surprised at how low and breathless her voice is.

The sirens get closer, red and blue lights flickering on the ceiling through the penthouse windows. He's a shadow in the doorway, almost gone.

“Maybe,” he rasps and she feels a thrill go through her.

“When?”

“I'll let you know. If I decide I want to.”

She doesn't get the chance to say anything else because he's gone – no flash, no notice, just gone. Seconds later, there's the pounding of feet in the hallway and the door bursts open and police pour into the room. She's subjected to questions and she's photographed while still bound, but the indignity of it doesn't touch her.

She's going to get her story, she can feel it. As the police cut the ties and help her up, she knows it's true. She's going to get her story and something else bubbles up in her chest, a new determination. She'll get her story and-

And she's going to unmask The Crow.

[winterscaptain]

infirmity.

Aaron Hotchner x Gender Neutral Reader

a/n: part four of our 100 arc, covering 5x02, haunted! I forgot how much i love this episode, so i really leaned into this one. it’s a labor of love!! i can’t wait to hear what you all think (i crave feedback and affection) and if you reblog, i’d love to see your cheeky lil thoughts in the tags!!

an ajf fic arc that happily stands on its own! one | two | three | four | five | six | seven | eight | nine | ten | eleven

words: 4.3k warnings: language, bad decisions

summary: “a friend should bear his friend’s infirmities” - william shakespeare, julius caesar.

masterlist | a joyful future masterlist | requests closed!

You knock on the door at 8:30 sharp. Almost thirty seconds pass before he answers, and you note the hand on his holster as he opens the door. 

“Hey.”

“Hi,” you chirp. “Ready to go?”

He turns, gathering his things. “What do we know about this case in Kentucky?”

Thrown a little by the lack of greeting, you follow him into the apartment. The sight of the Foyet files on his desk aren’t foreign to you, nor are they a surprise. They’ve been there every time you came over during his leave (in fact, you’ve sat on them more than once), so why you expected them to go away once he was back you had no idea.

“Um, no connection between Call and his victims. They’re canvassing, but no sign of him so far.”

“Start with his recent history. Find the stressor.” His voice is flat, impassive, and you frown. 

He was just getting better…

You’re about to head back toward the door when -

“Don’t move.”

Right. The alarm. 

He stands by to arm it. “Ready?”

“Are you?”

+++

You arrive at the tarmac, Hotch in the passenger seat of your car. He looks a little resigned, but straightens and takes a breath before he opens the door, settling into his role as he steps out and straightens his suit jacket. 

It’s always a little funny to watch him transform. You’re honored you get to see it, even if he’s in rough shape. 

Especially then. 

You climb the stairs and follow him in, settling in your usual place. 

“Good to see you,” Dave says as Aaron scoots down the aisle. It makes you smile. 

“You, too.”

Aaron gets settled and you shift, trying not to hover but finding it difficult to be separated from him after his weeks of absence. He greets the rest of the team, exchanging pleasantries and checking in with Reid about his knee. 

“Any other attacks?”

JJ shakes her head, while Spencer elaborates. “Call’s proven hard to track. He’s never had a driver's license so he’s probably still on foot.”

“Or public transportation,” Emily notes.

You hum. “He wouldn’t take the bus. His face is everywhere.”

“Has anyone found a stressor?” You weren’t sure if Aaron’s brusque affect was going to continue once you made it to the plane, but his tone just about answers your question. 

Stepping back into authority quickly, there, Aaron. 

“He just lost his job,” Garcia supplies. “He’s worked at a factory since 1990. Made appliances since forever and not a single promotion.”

Derek tilts his head. “That’s a long time to be bitter.”

“Or he doesn’t care?”

JJ looks at Spencer and shakes her head. “Not if he’s got a family to feed.” 

“Actually, he’s of the hermit variety as far as I can tell. He’s got no one. No wife, no kids, no parents.” You watch Garcia’s eyes flicker around the screen as she talks to you, doing what she does best. 

“Nothing to live for.”  Derek’s looking a little too pointedly at Aaron for your taste, but your evaluation is interrupted. 

“So why hasn’t he killed himself yet?”

Your brain sputters at Aaron’s offhand delivery. “What?”

“Sprees usually end in suicide. If he’s got nothing to live for, why hasn’t he ended it?”

The energy in the room grows uncomfortable, fast. Aaron’s voice is still flat - you might go so far as to say it sounds dead, but that inspires a kind of heavy sullenness in your chest you’d rather not subject yourself to. 

You wish Haley was around for no other reason but to kick his ass. 

You’re thankful for Spencer when he answers Hotch’s question. “Because he isn’t finished, yet. We know he has displaced anger. He took it out on the first victim.”

“Well,” Aaron continues, “the stock boy represents someone. We need to know who.”

You meet Derek’s eyes and you can tell he’s trying to read you - trying to see if you’re as concerned as he is. You don’t give him the satisfaction. 

+++

Later, you corner Morgan on the plane before landing, keeping your voice low. The case is in your lap so there’s a valid distraction when you need one. 

“What’s wrong with you?”

He stops and turns. “I thought Hotch was cleared to drive.” 

“He is.”

“Then why did you pick him up this morning?”

You shrug. “I wanted to.” His eyes bore into the side of your head and you look up with an exasperated huff. “What?”

He sighs. “He’s only had a month off.”

“Well,” you say, aware that you’re being pedantic before you even get there, “thirty-four days. That’s a little more than a month.”

His stare is withering, but you’re impervious. “And you think that’s long enough?”

“Are you asking me as his coworker or as his friend?”

“Is there a difference?”

You shrug. “Maybe.” Yes. “But if you don’t think he’s had enough time, you should tell him.”

He scoffs. “No thanks. I like my job.”

“You like him more.” A little smile crosses your face. “Though, I know you don’t like to think so.”

“No. I like you.” Derek corrects. “He also happens to like you, so I tolerate him for your benefit.”

“Much appreciated.” You return to your work, but Derek’s eyes linger. You don’t look up as you ask, “What?”

“What if he has PTSD?”

Still writing, you answer with a general air of nonchalance. “He was evaluated.”

“Oh, come on. We wrote those questions. Hotch knows exactly -“

You slam your pen down and lean back with your arms crossed. You draw Spencer's eyes and lower your voice again. “So, what? Are you going to pick at me until you get me to say something you want me to say?” You let out a sardonic chuff, settling back to work. “If that’s the case, you’re gonna be here a while.” You tip your head a little toward the little table by the window. “Your coffee’s getting cold.”

You admittedly feel a little bad for being short with him, but everything seems to be testing your patience today. 

And if you’re honest, you’re worried about Aaron, too. 

After a few minutes of work in silence, you call out to him again. There’s the smallest of apologies in your voice. “Derek?”

He looks at you, dark eyes open and yielding - concerned and forgiving. “Yeah?”

“He’s back because he has to be. He needs to know we’re here for him.”

“He knows that.”

You offer him a small smile. “Don’t let him forget it.” You pause, your head wavering a little bit as your tone turns a touch facetious. “I can’t do all the heavy lifting around here.”

You get a laugh out of him - just a little one - and it’s enough. “Don’t push it, kid. I remember when you were dead weight.”

You roll your eyes. 

That’s enough, for now. 

+++

Even your seemingly-endless patience with Aaron rapidly wanes as you spend more time at the crime scene. It’s frustrating. 

“He was on an antipsychotic?” You ask with a little frown. 

The pharmacist nods. “Well, that’s why I wanted him to calm down. He’s been off of them at least a month, now.” 

“And when were you going to tell us this?” Aaron asks, harsh and sharp. 

You look at him, your frown deepening. 

What the fuck is that attitude?

“He’s armed, he’s delusional. Who’s his doctor?” Hotch’s tone grows even pointier, somehow, as he pushes harder. 

“I don’t remember - my computer…” She gestures behind the desk, where the computer has been fried by a bullet. 

“Great. That’s great.” He walks away, already making a call. 

“Excuse us,” you say in an attempt to recover. Derek echoes you and you try to avoid running after Hotch as he strides down the aisle. 

Long-legged asshole. Slow down. 

“Hotch,” you call. He doesn’t listen. 

“Call JJ and tell her about the meds.” He’s still walking. You’ve caught up. 

Derek chimes in, gesturing back at the pharmacist. “This is not her fault.”

Aaron turns on him. “Morgan, he’s in a psychotic break. It changes everything.”

“You want to talk about this?” Derek asks, taking another step closer. 

Squaring up to Derek’s shoulder, you’re ready to pull them apart if they get really heated. 

Wouldn’t be the first time.

In some ways, Morgan’s admission on the plane was truer than he let on. You are the link between Derek and Aaron, almost like a balm. You see things in them that they can’t see in each other. It helps. 

With a pang, you think of Haley, for some reason. 

You miss her. 

“No.” Aaron’s interruption is sharp and it startles you out of your thoughts. “I want to find him - Garcia,” he turns, continuing on his warpath forward, “he’s been off his antipsychotic for a month. What else did you miss?”

Your mouth drops open and Derek’s about to deck Aaron while his back is turned. You push in front of Derek, getting between them to give him a chance to cool off. The last thing you want is to handle more wound dressings - for either one of them. 

Aaron hangs up and walks out after what you imagine is a rather unilluminating update from Penelope. You turn, putting your hand on Derek’s shoulder and looking him in the eye. 

Still think he’s alright? His eyes ask.

 You grit your teeth. I don’t know. 

+++

The psychiatrist and patient lay dead on the floor, Call nowhere in sight. Derek directs the local officers to check the perimeter, just in case. 

You look at Hotch, who still doesn’t look completely checked in, himself. 

Or maybe he looks too checked in?

I don’t know. 

You’d be lying if you said his behavior didn’t freak you out. Though he’s standing beside you, you miss him. 

Come back to me. 

You miss the man who pliantly sat under your hands as you washed his wounds and brought him takeout and forced him to take naps in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday. 

You miss the man who fought you for the remote and stole far too many of your fries, who would change the channel if you made the mistake of going to the bathroom on a commercial break. 

That man was with you as late as Saturday. Returning has brought something else out in him, the part of him that spent (often very) late nights looking for Foyet has risen to the forefront. 

“We’re too late.” 

Before the rest of you can do anything, Aaron leaves the room, pushing past Dave in his haste to leave. 

Emily calls after him, but he’s long gone down the hallway. They look at you. 

All you can do is shake your head with a downturned curve of your mouth. 

+++

After a little while, you go downstairs and find Hotch outside. Before you can say anything - 

“I should have seen the blinking on the video.” 

You huff at him. “Hotch, it could have been a nervous tic. You couldn’t have known - none of the records were available, yet.” 

“But it wasn’t a tic. It’s a classic sign of long-term antipsychotic use, and I missed it.”

You step in front of him, squarely meeting his eyes. “We all missed it.” 

He’s got another pessimistic jab that you choose to ignore just before Emily and Dave arrive with news from Garcia. 

Oh, Aaron. 

+++

The officer huffs. “I don’t care why he took him.” 

Aaron had, once again, escalated the situation with local police. Tensions are high, and you only hope he can get his shit together at some point. “You should.” 

Goddamn it, Aaron. 

He continues, advancing on the police captain. “Call’s memory is no longer suppressed. He’s reinventing his past and unless we understand how, we’re not going to find either of them.”

“Well, I’m not gonna just sit around and speculate.” 

It’s an old-fashioned Western standoff, now. 

Who’s Clint Eastwood?

Well, Hotch has the looks but -

Quit. 

Fine. 

“Then don’t.”

The captain turns to you, Emily, and Dave. “You don’t think we should chase him either?”

“We need to get ahead of Call,” Dave answers evenly. 

The captain looks at Aaron once more before storming off. The rest of you approach Hotch, and Emily’s a little frustrated when she reminds him, “There’s a kid missing.” 

“They don’t need the extra manpower.” 

You squint at him. “Since when?”

“If we had studied Foyet’s initial crimes -”

Oh for the love of fuck. 

“- we would have known that a survivor didn’t make sense.”

“What does he have to do with this?”

Great question, Emily.

“All we had to do was stop and look at Foyet’s history. But we didn’t, and we lost two couples and a bus full of people. I am not making that mistake again.” He leaves the three of you stunned in his wake. After a moment, you follow him. 

You always do. 

+++

“Let’s go.” 

You’ve got the address to the unsub’s home and you take the car with Aaron, the rest of the team following behind you. 

He drives fast, but that’s nothing new. He throws the siren and floors it. You call SWAT yourself, getting Derek prepared for staging. 

When you get out of the car, you throw your vest on, helping Emily with the straps across her shoulders before she can reach them themselves. 

“Prentiss,” Aaron says, putting his earwig in. “Check in with the lieutenant, see if there’s anything we can use.” 

She nods. “Yes, sir.” 

“You good?” You ask, looking over at him. 

“Yeah, I’m good.” 

You throw your head to the side, and he takes your flank as you get closer to Emily. Her briefing with this particular lieutenant could go sideways, but you don’t want to leave him feeling trapped. 

“...The kid’s in there. We got this. Tactical teams are covering the exits. He’s still focused on the old man.”

Emily squints, adjusting her comm. “For now, but we’re gonna have to figure out the safest way to get that kid out.”

“I’ve got a team in the back and one on the way. We’re going to infiltrate.” 

“You do that and someone else dies.” The balance of firm and collaborative rests delicately on her tone. She’s doing well. 

“Either Call or a child murder. Flip a coin.” 

His tone frustrates you, but you leave Emily to her devices, checking your magazines for the third time. Your sidearm is in place, as is your backup. 

“It doesn’t have to end like that. We get a confession out of Jarvis and he goes away, and Call gets his answers. No one else has to die.” She pauses, and a streak of white flashes in your peripheral. “Hotch!” 

You whirl, ready to sprint after him as he walks decisively past the rest of you, past the gate, and into the house. After a moment’s hesitation, you make a break for it. A wall of arms stops you, and you know Derek’s behind you when you hear, “What the hell is he doing?”

No vest...Is he even carrying his gun? 

“Let him go.” 

You turn on Dave, your face plastered with fear and fury. “What do you mean let him go. Rossi -”

“I’m not letting him go in there solo.” Derek pushes against Dave again, but to your surprise, he’s locked in tight. 

“We have to trust him.” 

That cools Derek off, but not you. You thrash, freeing yourself from one of the local cops. “The hell we do.” 

“Kid - wait, no.” The roles reverse, and Derek catches up to you and locks you in his arms before you can breach the perimeter. Your elbows don’t land against his vest, but you sure try. “You’ll get him killed.” 

There’s only stress and silence as you stop struggling. All you can do is wait. 

Derek keeps his arm around you, but you almost feel like the contact is for both of you. You take deep breaths, trying to slow your heart rate. It’s through the roof. 

“What’s he doing?” Emily asks into her mic. 

Dave leans into his comm. “Stalling.” 

You can almost feel Derek’s jaw tightening. “He has nothing to lose.” 

He has everything to lose. 

You have everything to lose. 

Don’t be a hero, Aaron. Don’t do anything stupid. 

You hope that he can hear you somehow. 

Too late. 

Hotch appears in the window, followed by the boy. 

There’s a quick SWAT conversation in your ear. 

“Do you have the shot?”

“Negative, negative.”

He’s blocking the shot. 

Goddamn you, Aaron. Goddamn you. 

“Bringing the boy out,” a faceless voice on the radio says. The hostage runs down off the porch and you catch a glimpse of Aaron before he disappears behind the door again. 

You turn your head a touch, keeping your eyes on the door. “Get him out of there.” 

Dave shakes his head. “That’s his call.” 

Your body is wound tighter than a coil and you’re not sure if you’re ready to storm in there or just start walking home. 

There’s a gunshot, and you’re out of there like a bat out of hell. You launch yourself over the short fence and attach yourself to the first SWAT agent you see, remembering your training at the last moment. 

You breach the house and find Aaron cuffing Darin, whose father is dead in the armchair in front of him. Your jaw has never been tighter. 

Once you confirm that he is in fact still alive and still only has nine holes in him, you turn on your heel and you storm out of the house. You don’t stop until you’re leaning on the front of one of the cars, trying to catch your breath. Your hands shake and you don’t trust your knees to hold you up. 

The relief wars with something hot and unpleasant, leaving you more exhausted than you’ve been in weeks. 

You keep your head turned away from Aaron as he approaches you. It’s petty, but you also don’t want him to see the fear on your face. 

He calls you with a sigh in his voice and it finally ignites the fear into anger. 

“I can’t fucking believe you,” you spit. Your voice isn’t loud, but it certainly carries. JJ’s eyes flicker to you from the other side of the yard. “What kind of stunt are you trying to pull? Are you trying to get yourself killed?” 

His jaw tightens. “Let’s not do this here.” 

Your brow draws across your eyes and your mouth opens, indignant. “Let’s not do this here? You’re fucking kidding me.”

In his current state, nothing is off the table. His temper is running short and you know you’re capable of pushing him until he breaks. It hasn’t happened yet, but today might be it.  

Much to your surprise, a sigh leaves him, and he knows he’s stepped in it. “It was stupid. I’m sorry.”

You scoff, shaking your head. 

His remorse only stokes your anger. Go figure. 

“You’re sorry? You’re sorry. You could have died, Hotch. What you did was so beyond protocol I don’t even know if I should start with the necessity of your life because we need you as our unit chief or the importance of your safety as my friend -” You cut yourself off and look away from him, frustrated you even got that far. 

He has nothing to say to that. You’re completely right. The guilt might as well be written across his face in Sharpie. 

His absence fucked with you, to say the least. It felt awful, empty, in the field without him. And then when you were home - well, back at the apartment, he was only ever in pain. 

Overall, your anxiety regarding his health and safety is riding high. 

Much to your frustration, your eyes water, and your lower lip shakes - angry tears an ever-present threat. Your arms cross over your chest. “I can’t even look at you right now.” 

He reaches out for your arm, but you throw him off before he can make contact, turning your head. You stare at the ground, watching him flounder out of the corner of your eye. 

“Go. Go do your fucking job, Hotch.” His nickname is acid in your mouth. It feels like a punishment, a lash of a whip. He doesn’t move, and you turn on him, meeting his guilty brown eyes with your flinty ones. “Go. Make the arrest. They’re waiting on you.” You throw your chin to Derek and Emily, who are indeed waiting for him on the porch with the unsub. 

With another heavy sigh, he turns and rejoins the rest of your team. 

You stay where you are, directing coroner and local law enforcement personnel to relevant staging areas as the crime scene is processed and handled. Aaron’s eyes try to find yours, but you avoid them, focusing on someone, anyone else with crisp professionalism that hardly belies your fear. 

You’ve never been so angry in your life. Even if you have, you can’t remember it feeling this wretched.

+++

He sits beside you on the plane once you’re up in the air and leans forward with his elbows on his knees. The rest of the team sleeps scattered around the cabin, but you suspect that at least one of them is faking it, waiting for some kind of spectacle or spectacular blowup between the two of you. 

You haven’t spoken to Aaron since leaving the crime scene. You drove back to the precinct with Emily and Dave, staying close to JJ and Spencer while you packed your things. There’s a part of you that feels bad for creating what Strauss would call a “hostile work environment,” but the other part can’t bring itself to care. 

You can’t even begin to articulate the fear that coursed through you as you waited for him outside that house. You couldn’t begin to explain the extent of your fear, but after the stabbing and the removal of Haley and Jack from your lives, the prospect of losing him in the field was beyond unbearable. 

It’s frustrating to feel so comforted by his proximity while you’re still so angry with him. The familiarity of it all hardly blunts your anger. If anything, the relief at having him back at your side sharpens your anger into something that scares you. 

The impossibility of it is beyond measure. You’ve known for some time now, but this is the first you’re willing to admit it. 

I love him. 

Fuck.

You love him. You love his son. You love his wife. 

You love the weird look he gets on his face when he has to say “penetration” while he’s delivering a profile. You love the way he tries not to smile when Emily beats Spencer at chess. You love the way he twiddles with pens when he’s thinking or nervous or both. You love that each of his smiles feel like a gift just for you. 

There’s nothing you don’t love about him. 

Except, of course, the way he, with profound idiocy, endangered his life today for no particular reason in addition to his generally asshole-ish behavior. 

“I would say I’m sorry, but I’m sure you know that.” 

You do.

He waits on you, quiet and still. 

You take a deep breath, finally looking at him. “You scared the hell out of me.” 

He nods, his jaw flexing. 

“Don’t do it again.” 

He blinks once, slowly. You know he can’t promise that, but you appreciate his acknowledgment nevertheless. There’s quiet for a moment. 

“Aaron…” You look at him, nothing but concern in your tone. 

He shakes his head. “Don’t.”

“I was just going to say…” You swallow, trying to find better words but coming up short. “We’ll get him.”

+++

Derek’s voice echoes down to the bullpen as you finish up the last few pieces of your paperwork. “I will not stand by and watch this man kill himself.” 

Aaron’s door is closed as he works. You’re not sure if you’re thankful for that, or if you’d rather he hear it. You can’t really hear Dave - not that you’d want to, you’re almost as pissed at him as you are at Aaron - but it doesn’t matter. You know what he has to say. 

Derek’s voice drops lower than you can hear. Dave drops his head. 

Moments later, Derek flies back down the stairs, grabs his jacket, and takes his leave with a cursory goodbye thrown in your direction. Dave returns to his desk and Aaron’s door finally opens. 

You look up as his lights turn off, gathering your things at your desk. With a little sigh that looks a bit like defeat, he stops at your desk. The smugness doesn’t completely leave your tone. “Need a ride?”

Of course, he does. “Please.” 

You rise and walk to the elevators together. In the silence, you tell him, “I’m still really mad at you.” 

A sigh. “I know.” 

+++

You walk him upstairs and take care of the alarm while he removes his suit jacket and throws it over the couch. 

“Do you think Call’s gonna be okay?” You ask, still facing the alarm. 

“I don’t know.”

“He got his answers,” you note, turning to him. “He killed the man who haunted him.” 

His eyes are fixed on a spot on the carpet. “And what else is there?”

“Years of torture.” You both know you’re not talking about Call anymore, but it’s nice to pretend. It gives you the opportunity to say things you wouldn’t - shouldn’t - say to him. “Fear. Grief.”

“Think he’ll get over that?” 

“How could he?” A humorless smile pulls at one corner of your mouth. “But at least he doesn't feel like he’s alone.”

He finally meets your eyes. “He doesn’t have anyone.” I don’t have anyone, his brow says. 

“He has Tommy. He’s not alone.” 

You have me. You’re not alone. 

His brows pull low over his eyes, and you take another opportunity as it comes. “Do you want me to stay again tonight?”

“No, I’m alright.” He takes a little breath and you round the corner, pouring him a couple fingers of whiskey before making a slow, purposeful trek across the room. “Thank you,” he says, taking it. 

“Of course. Anytime.” Now, you both know you aren’t talking about the drink. 

Nevertheless, you pat your pockets for your keys, phone, and various federal paraphernalia, finding them all where they belong. “I should head out, then. Call if you need anything.” 

He nods, watching you with quiet eyes as you close and lock the door behind you. 

+++

tagging: @arganfics @quillvine @stxrryspencer @agenthotchner @hurricanejjareau @ughitsbaby @rousethemouse @criminalsmarts @shrimpyblog @genevievedarcygranger @ssaic-jareau @good-heavens-chris-evans @davidrossi-ismydad @angelsbabey @writefasttalkevenfaster @venusbarnes @hotchsflower @ogmilkis @marvels-agents100 @hotchslatte @risenfox @mrs-dr-reid @captain-christopher-pike @dwellingsofrosie @pan-pride-12 @sunshine-em @word-scribbless​ @jdougl-love​ @sageellsworth05​ @dreila03 @forgottenword @aaronhotchnerr @ssa-morgan @buckybau @sana-li @tegggeeee @abschaffer2 @ssacandice-ray @ellyhotchner @lotties-journey-abroad @mrs-joel-pimentel-23-25 @laneygthememequeen @violentvulgarvolatile  @mooneylupinblack @ssareidbby @violet-amxthyst @bwbatta @roses-and-grasses @lcvischmitt @capricorngf @missdowntonabbey @averyhotchner @mandylove1000 @cevanswhre @qvid-pro-qvo @jeor @spencers-hoodrat @infinity1321 @zizzlekwum @popped-weasels @evee87 @nuvoleincielo @this-broken-band-girl @reidtomestyles @hotch-meeeeeuppppp @winqhster @spencerelds @the-falling-in-the-danger @nattylite49 @crazyshannonigans

[goodguydotmp3]

two questions: why don’t you like harry and do you really think harry villanized the weed video or do you think that was the people attempting to court him (azoffs)

Whew, this is a long one folx!

Why don’t you like Harry [Styles]?

Let me preface this response by saying that I’m a pretty new “fan” if one can still call me that. I got into the One Direction fandom in the summer of last year, and much of my opinions of the boys where shaped by fan reactions. After gathering more and more information however, I realized that the fandom and I were wrong about some things, and over hyping others. 

Still, it wasn’t until this year that I actually broke out of the Harry-centric bubble to realize that the shady goings on where much worse than I originally thought. Add to this my realization that Harry’s music really doesn’t withstand the test of time, and that his persona is pretty Stagnant, and I’ve come to feel rather bamboozled.

Of course I know that the entire point of his PR team is to sway public opinion of him one way, and if I ate it up that was part of the plan. That doesn’t mean I have to like it. It also doesn’t mean I feel any less hurt about it. It also doesn’t mean that I like when other people fawn over him, as quite a lot of what I’m going to say has been public knowledge, and some of it before I was even a fan.

A. Music

 Actually getting to a big part of the problem here, his music isn’t good. Well, not long term like I said in the preface. He doesn’t really have much of a vocal range despite being a singer for more than ten years. He does not care and acts like he does, often leading to him sounding like he’s screaming instead of singing. He’s lyrics are boring and flat, and his melodies are fine, they just don’t make up for his unmemorable lyrics. I personally think that the cause is him more heavily relying on song writers to fill in more in more, but that’s mostly because I don’t want to believe that the same person who wrote Happily and Olivia also wrote At the Dining Table and Treat People With Kindness, because that would just mean he’s getting worse or putting forth less effort. 

Of course one could argue that I’m not a professional, I don’t have the necessary Jargon to correctly critique, and I’m no longer a singer so I can’t even do what he does. But to that I say fuck off. I know what sounds good! I know what I like! 

Even more than that though, If you bought a product (non food), and you could only use that product for the first two weeks you bought it, you’d say it was a shit product! You’d scream from the rooftops that no one should ever buy this product because it’s crap! Well guess what? I pre-ordered Fine Line just to listen for two weeks and never pick it up again except for golden, she’s a funky tune every couple months. 

Besides the test of time, there is still the subject of actual talent/listenability if you will. I feel there’s four main categories when I listen to music that makes it worth listening to

1.Amazing voice

2.Awesome lyrics

3.Funky/ cool ass melody/Beat

4.Catchy as hell

Now, a song doesn’t need to be all four, however the more they have the more likely I am to like the song. Also, I’ve said “main categories” because I’ve definitely had songs were I just through the beat drop was cool, or maybe the bridge was sick as hell, or maybe I just liked the pacing or the way the singer/singers stressed a note. Alternatively there is a sweet spot for me of super depressing lyrics but a melody/ that makes you want to dance. See: most of After Laughter by Paramore, Lola By Mika. But in general, those four usually make me love a song long term.

If it’s an album, it usually Just has to sound like it belongs on the same album/ tell a story. Like I really don’t like albums that sound like it’s just a playlist of songs personally. I should be able to listen to a song and go “oh yeah, that’s off --- album” or I didn’t like the album as a whole. An album is a bit like an outfit to me. It’s not going to be all tops, nor does it need to be monochromatic, but it does need to go together

For Example, I love Four as an album. I thought it was amazing. I still hate Spaces and Illusion. I hate both of their melodies, I don’t like the Illusion intro, I’m not to keen on those lyrics, and they’re definitely not catchy, I skip every time. 

So taking that logic to Harry’s music, I think HS1 works very well as an album, almost all of the songs sound like they’re supposed to be there. And I hate every song but Kiwi. The lyrics are boring/don’t make a ton of sense, the melodies definitely don’t make up for that, he doesn’t have the range, and none of them are catchy! And then you get to Kiwi and she’s got that vibe you know? She’s a pop punk bop and I cannot fucking believe that Harry has one pop punk bop among unmemorable pop rock album.

Going to Fine line, It’s not as great as an album. There are some songs that don’t really feel like they fit? Like just going through the album, cherry doesn’t have any business being there? Like the lyrics fit sure, but what is that weird intro and outro? It probably would have been fine If the song didn’t have those two, but having them there upset the pace a bit I felt. And then there was Treat People With Kindness, which was really Jarring and doesn’t feel like it belongs on the album at all? It  actually feels like it’s trying to be Kiwi - it’s loud and garish, and the lyrics are trying to be carefree, but! It just doesn’t work! TPWK sounds like Hippie music! Kiwi sounds like Brendon Urie could sing it and people would be like “good ol Panic!”. And then the album goes back down into Fine line the song, which again is Jarring because you’ve had this TPWK monstrosity right before it.

Then, looking at the overarching theme of his music, It’s whiny piss baby music He hates to take responsibility for his actions! It’s all in his lyrics! And don’t get me wrong, I love Honest lyrics, but not if the person is an asshole! LIke I fucking hate confessions by Usher specifically becasue he’s talking about how much he’s a piece of shit in the most whiny and piss baby way, making it all about him and no the people he hurt. I also really hate that one song that Zayn did with Usher and Chris Brown, because you have these awful men completely misunderstanding what it means to write a love song, and then you have Zayn at the very end all like “actually I really am in love tho…” Esp Chris browns verse! It boils down to “Hey I know I was a asshole seven billion times but I miss you tho :(“ GIRL BYE! 

Harry sounds the exact same though, Except he can’t even blame himself for his own mistakes, and just wades through self pity about how the object of his affection won’t love him even though he didn’t even do anything except it wasn’t his fault and why are you still mad it wasn’t even his fault and he was young and reckless and drunk and horny. Like??? WRITE A NEW SONG TAYLOR SWIFT 2.0! There’s only so much you can repackage the same narrative before it becomes stale no Cinderella does not count keep that shit coming. And It really jumps out in his writing, even through 1d, although I will say there were some catchy beats, and awesome lines to keep him afloat back then. Although wtf was Walking in the Wind??? Choke!

Then there are the melodies I’m talking post wondee here which often give this 70’s pop rock vibe. Which fine I guess, it’s his brand, but that doesn’t make it interesting. Or new. Or fresh. Or an interesting take. 

Now I completely understand relying on nostalgia to boost people’s opinion, but you could at leas have the decency to actually have good music. For Example, Miss you by Louis Tomlinson has a very distinctive pop rock feel, but it’s also an amazing song. Great lyrics, amazing voice, catchy liddle diddy that happens to be reminiscent of that 2005- 2010 punk pop/emo pop feel. Sour diesel has that like,,,basey 90s pop feel, and it fucking works with the lyrics, and of course his voice is beautiful. When Walls dropped and Lou put out that playlist of songs that were an inspiration, you can hear the influences when you listen to the album, but they’re also really good songs in their own right, with amazing lyrics, and Louis’ distinctive voice. Comparing that to Harry, it seems like he’s mostly relying on people’s nostalgia rather than actually good music.

Okay so this last point I’m making on music is a little petty but it’s been like a week and I’m still pissed about it so I’m saying it now. Someone said that Harry Styles is the best pop rock artist right now???? Just admit that you don’t listen to pop rock tf. Louis Tomlinson is right there. Brendon Urie is right there. Mika is right there. Haley Williams is right there. Janell Monae is right there. I don’t listen to a lot of pop rock lol but i feel my point has been made

B. Public Persona

He get’s so much clout! SO MUCH CLOUT! For doing the bare minimum (this is not specifically about the fandom, that’s for later)! People will write all these glowing reviews of him for him??? Being polite??? Like okay and? Just because a person is polite doesn’t mean they’re fucking Jesus??? There’s a million and one stories so i’m not fucking looking them up but there’s the pizza story and the fish story and the plane story and the snl story and the Stormzy story and the WS story on and on and on! Stop giving this man brownie points for basic human decency. “I didn’t expect him to be like that!” okay is that because of their perception of what a rock star is supposed to be like? Because in that case we need to start holding people accountable for being assholes. Or is it because he seems like an asshole. Cause valid.

I also don’t like him leaning so heavily on the queer image thing. Like! If that’s how he likes to express himself, Fine, But so much of it is just...so manufactured! And I Know I’ve heard people say oh well he wore the one rainbow on his lapel that one time or he wore the shirt or he wore the Keith Harring.

1. That Rainbow pin is sus as hell I don’t care what ya’ll say It absolutely screams set up, if he wanted to not be seen he would have not been seen 

2. That goes for literally every other time. I can’t believe it’s not a set up to push a queer image. (that he profits from!)

3. If he actually did his homework on Keith Harring he’d know that the man was a predator, and he wouldn’t have worn those shirts. It seems so performative! To add to that, does he know now? If so, why isn’t he using his platform to correct his mistake? Why didn’t he come out and let people know not to buy Harring’s stuff??? He knows the pull he has! He absolutely could have been like “I’ve made a mistake, if you are looking for queer artists to support, here’s some” But he fucking doesn’t

4. To add on to that last part, It is actually sus that he gets to profit off of this queer image, and yet the only queer voices that he’s propping up are white gays. And then not even directly? Not a “queer artists, esp queer artists of color are important and need their voices boosted because they are the back bone of society” but this wink nod type of deal, where again, he mainly boosts white gays.like??? One queer black woman that doesn’t work for the Azoffs, and then a bunch of white gays. Like?? That’s not racist to anyone else???????Just me? okay.

Now from a professional point of view, it’s even worse. I’m not saying that artists can’t be campy or blurr gender lines, or imply that they ‘re queer subtly. But I think it’s fucking disrespectful to play both ends. Like, he profits off of using the queer image, all while Dancing around the subject, but then on the back end he never says that Homophobes/Transphobes aren’t allowed in his fandom. He gives this empty ass tpwk and then washes his hands of it. 

Don’t get me wrong, I am always upset when people who have lots of queerphobes in their fandom bullying and harassing the actual queer people never say anything to let queerphobes know they’re unwelcome (clearly money is better than morals) but for me it’s an extra kick to the gut for it to literally profit Harry to seem queer. Look at that time that  gay company sold out shirts in less than an hour,because harry was wearing it and tell me people aren’t throwing money at him because they feel he’s queer. 

C. Fashion

This one is a really rough one for me because this is partially what drew me into Harry in the first place. But he’s really not all that in terms of fashion. He’s expensive certainly, but sometimes, the things that are more expensive are worse. Even When He’s not looking like a grandparent out on the town, his style is very dated, and yet he gets paraded around like he’s the freshest new thing?? Like who is his team paying of for him to get that many articles about how he’s fashion’s biggest star. And the thing is, his style is even dated for the mainstream. There’s already a post about how he copies prominent pop/pop rock stars of the 70s, which means that his style is 50 years old for the mainstream. Now don’t get me wrong, I think it’s totally fine if you’re addicted to seventies wear. I don’t think he should be heralded as this huge fashion star if his wardrobe is this dated

Even more than that. Gucci???? The Gucci with a history of Racism?? The Gucci with the child labor??? The Gucci with the 14 hour days Gucci??? Ugly ass Gucci????? Soulja Boy don’t even fuck with Gucci no more and he fuck with Gucci since like 2007. (although that was because of the racism, not cause it’s ugly)

I think that bothers me the most though. Like it’s not enough to exploit people, you also have to be tacky ugly and expensive???? For what??? @Gucci cease to exist please.

If Harry wants to be tacky ugly and expensive, that’s of course his rights to do so! But don’t act like he’s at the very pinnacle of fashion every time he does. 

I’m actually always very conflicted about that. I personally prefer a style that’s very loud and campy and avant garde but like,,,,that ain’t it. Maybe it’s something you got it or ya don’t??? Like for example Billy Porter could wear a trashbag and make it work. The expensive sweaters and the slacks? The suits? Not a good look on one Harry Styles. Maybe it’s because they’re expensive sweaters and slacks and expensive suits. What are you, Ted from accounting??? Grow up.

D. Treat People With Kindness

Ugh this is the thing that pisses me off like the second to most. This phrase is so fucking empty. You could not have made up a more corporate mandated phrase if you fucking tried. It stands for nothing! Just like him!

Let’s break it down. “Treat people with kindness” is, at face value, a call to action. It’s asking you to do something. But it doesn’t actually tell you what to do!! So it’s pretty inoffensive! You don’t actually have to change your behavior in anyway for two main reasons:

1. What the hell is Kindness??? This phrase never actually says what it is??? It’s just this short little punchy thing that assumes you know what kindness is! What if you didn’t actually know? What if you have differing ideals of what is considered kindness? I mean to my mother, Misgendering me is kindness, but I don’t think that’s kindness. To my father, not letting his children have autonomy is kindness, but I don’t find that kind. And yet they could both use that phrase and feel confident that they go around treating people with kindness. After all they cooked dinner didn’t they? They smiled at Janice from public relations didn’t they? That’s kindness right?

2. It also assumes you know what “people” are. Queer people are people. Queerphobes don’t consider queer people, people. Racists aren’t going to consider some people, people. So they can continue their harassment and dehumanization of them and still be treating people with kindness, because they never harmed actual people (to them)

E. Harry bots

Bitch?? Corporate spies?? Tf ??? That’s not weird to ya’ll ?? I think the thing that shocked me more than someone from Colombia records admitting that he manufactures the hype around people signed to Colombia, is the fact that the Fandom been knew!!!! Ya’ll been knew and ya’ll wasn’t gon tell me???????? I just found out last week wtf????????

Another thing I don’t like about them Harry bots, is it’s one thing to hype up Harry, but why tf do they need to shit on the other boys??? Is it because they’re more talented, good looking, and charming??? How about you get good!!!! I esp hate that it’s usually Louis. What is Corporate’s obsession with putting Louis down like? What a bunch of fucking weirdos?? It’s not enough to be a Harry fan and live up his ass, I gotta hate Louis too?? You lost yo damn mind. If you reading this and you a spy? Die.

F. Capitalism

Honestly that should be the end of it but here the fuck we go I guess. Now I get that there is going to be some capitalism involved when you get music, especially mainstream music, there are tones of articles out there with people who used to be in the industry telling you about how fucking awful it is, all in the pursuit of money. (Which isn’t fucking real by the way! We made it up! People out here getting traumatized! Belittled! Bullied! Married off! So some corporation can make all the money! The Imaginary Credits! That we made up! I hate it here!) 

But it’s another fucking thing to participate in a capitalist system? He invested into that one sleep app, even going to do one of the voice sessions (So you could have Harry Styles themed sleep paralysis) and you pay for that! He makes money off that! It’s not enough that you buy his mediocre music or his ugly ass merch, you also have to give him money through the sleep paralysis app. 

Then there was that Google Camp for Rich People Only! I don’t even want to fucking hear that it was on Climate Change oh wow all the rich people took helicopters and Yachts to a resort with manicured lawns??? To talk about how they treat the environment? That’s not at all Counter intuitive! Not at all for show! Fucking disgusting.

Oh and the Covid Shirt! Really bitch??? You need to Profit off a deadly pandemic? Are you profiting off of AIDS next you fucking bastard. And he can of course get a tax write of for his “ charitable donation” fuck off.

G. Racism

This! This is the thing that gets me the most! YA’LL CAN EXCUSE RACISM???

No, I’m not talking about the Native American Headdress thing, that was plenty despicable on it’s own, No I’m talking about the on going racism. The whole, using black people for clout and then dropping them and never returning the favor when they sing his praises thing. Specifically I’m thinking of Sis the activist, Stormzy, and Lizzo. 

The Lizzo thing pisses me off the most actually. I think it’s very fucking convenient that Harry started taking interest in Lizzo after there was uproar from black fans noting his hypocrisy of performing for Pepsi (Notoriously racist) and Having BLM sticker on his guitar. So he shows up at one of her concerts dressed like a senior citizen that got lost on the way to the retirement home bathroom. She looked fucking amazing and he couldn’t put forth the effort to at least not look senile. Then there was the covering of her songs, and then there was the cuddling up with her at the awards show. Funny how I haven’t seen any interaction after the fact! And Of course everyone forgot about the Pepsi concert! Fuck all the way off!!

Also! Are we just never going to talk about the fact that he didn’t comment on the blm protests earlier this year until his team could gauge whether or not it would be profitable to do so by DATA MINING HIS FAN BASE???? And then when he actually did he got the most praise for it, truly fucking hate it here. Also when he marched with those protesters he made sure we knew it was him. There were posts flouting around everywhere on how to best cover up to make yourself completely unrecognizable should you wind up on camera or fucking worse, get attacked by the police. Funny how Close Sprouse could follow the advice and not Harry? Also supper funny how he got the hell out of dodge before things got super bad and I have not heard anything on the matter since. Guess what Harry??? We’re still out here fighting for the rights to exist! Still wanna have a photo op while our own government tries to squash us with force????? This is like that Jenner Pepsi ad but with sunglasses and a pandemic.

H. Fandom

I think I would hate him less if I didn’t have to hear about him every hour of everyday. Stop Hyping this man so much. Even after unfollowing and blocking a bunch of Harries and Larries he’s all across my dash. And twitter. And insta. KURTIS CONNER FUCKING LIKES HIM I JUST WANTED CRACK CONTENT AND NOW LOOK. 

I. Conclusion.

After writing all this I think the running theme is that Harry Styles isn’t even a person, he’s a brand. I do not like or trust brands! And I definitely don’t like being advertised to! Just like It’s fake as fuck when Absolut is all about queer rights, it’s fake as fuck when Harry does it too. Just like I know Target doesn’t actually care about Black lives, I know Harry doesn’t either. People are always like “oh he’s so nice!” no! He’s polite! There’s a difference. Zayn Is a truly kind person. Liam is a truly kind person. Louis is a truly kind person. It shines though so brightly all the time, and yet people are really out here worshiping the Brand Harry Styles. 

Do I think It was Harry or The Azoffs throwing Zouis under the bus. 

Truly doesn’t matter! Whichever one did it, Harry was totally fine with it! Which tells me that he doesn’t give a shit about anyone but himself. He’ll go along with anything as long as it gets him to the top, and that’s fucked up on one million and one levels

[obsidian-aurora]

As I’m about to dive into the events of 227 in my fanfic, I thought now is a good moment to take some time to reflect on the past year.

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If you can believe it, I started writing this fic almost a year ago now.  I’ve written the equivalent of a novel a month this whole year! Nuts. I watched The Untamed for the first time over a year ago.  My soul was captured by the light that I saw in Xiao Zhan’s and Yibo’s eyes when they looked at each other. And I haven’t stopped believing in the power of love since then.

Sounds corny?  Yeah, kind of is.

It’s hard to imagine that when I started writing this fic, the Special Edition hadn’t come out yet.  There was only the official BTS on the Tencent channel to watch - as well as a pile of interviews and fanmeetings.  There were no secret Discord groups, I didn’t even have a Twitter account.  I had this old blog of mine on Tumblr and an old AO3 account that I dusted off to start writing some fanfiction again.

Did you know I’m a self-published author?  Oh yeah, for years I wrote nothing but my own novels.  You can check them out here at lillybirdsong.com

I thought to myself, I’ll just write a short fanfic over the course of December.  I’ll publish it in January and rid my system of this bug I’ve got and then move on.  Now, a year later and I still can’t stop writing about these boys.  What is it?  It’s all about love.  It’s about the belief that against all odds, whether it’s living in a society that doesn’t support LGBT individuals, whether it’s struggling with management companies that don’t support you in your own careers, against all odds Love Wins™.

Or does it?

I’m about to embark on writing the 227 part of the fanfiction and I thought it was really important for me to remind everyone that what I’m writing here is not a bible, it’s not a biography, it’s a piece of fiction that’s my own personal interpretation of what might have happened.  I’m saying this because it’s soul-crushing to imagine what might have taken place behind closed doors, the conversations that would have happened, the thoughts that would have spun out of control.

I mean, I just remember my own journey.  Some of which is documented right here on Tumblr.  I wrote one of my first artist blogs when I hit 50 chapters on Yizhan in early Feb.  I wrote a post when Xiao Zhan fans first started calling out AO3 for hosting inflammatory material. I wrote a post when I considered whether this fic should be abandoned. I wrote a post when Coronavirus brought me back home on a plane way earlier than expected.  I wrote a post in April when I completed 80 chapters, and at the end of May when I completed 100 chapters.

I’ve gone a bit dark on Tumblr since I moved to Twitter where there’s a lot more BJYX interaction going on, but Twitter is not a good place for a long post so I’m once again spilling my thoughts here on Tumblr.

Writing about 227

As I start to write about this, I’m going to pick and choose which rumours I will write into the story and which I’ll discard.  Because let’s get real - there are a lot of rumours out there, and no one except those people intimately involved will know the truth of the matter.  I do choose to believe some of the malicious rumours.  And so I will include some of them.

Don’t start a war in my comments section. I beg you.  I’ll just have to end up moderating my comments which I never wanted to do.

Disagreements within the fandom

I’ve noticed more and more “extreme” behaviour within the BJYX fandom.  I feel like ever since the “secret” BTS (which are mostly the same as what we saw in the official BTS just longer cuts) have whipped turtles up into a frenzy! And when someone has a different opinion or when someone likes to spout theories about what their small interactions might mean in the context of the bigger picture, that can cause harm.

So I’m saying right now - everyone’s entitled to their own points of view. No one knows the truth but the ones involved.

Don’t bring your disagreements to my fic.

Respect in public spaces

I have also stated this on Twitter but I want to put my 2 cents here as well.  I’ve also been uncomfortable lately with the amount of public discourse about body parts, about sex positions, really really intimate things. If you want to write fanfics or draw fanart to explore these interpretations, I say go for it! That’s appropriate because it’s within the realm of fantasy. But when it comes down to really speculating about what’s going on in the private lives of these two men we love so much, I personally would rather those conversations be relegated to private spaces - Discord, WhatsApp.  Not Twitter and Tumblr. So you’ll notice that I’ve unfollowed and even blocked some accounts recently that cross a line I’m not comfortable with.

When I do that, it’s not about you, it’s not a personal attack. That’s just me not being comfortable with the content that’s being created in the space it’s being distributed. If you want to chat with me about it, I’m very open to having that discussion in DM. I’ve been called a hypocrite for my views given that my story is an explicit one, but in my mind there’s a clear distinction between me publishing a story on AO3 and people discussing their real private lives in public spaces like Twitter.  That’s just my point of view and I mean no offence to those that feel the opposite.

As usual, I always have my finger on the trigger to take Yizhan down the moment it causes harm to the boys in question.

Other interesting things I’ve done lately:

I’ve been publishing some Fanart.  (See the pic at the end of this post as an example). Follow me on Twitter @ObsidianAurora to get the latest as I usually post things first there. I’ll try to remember to post things here as well.

I started a YouTube Channel. It’s called Queer Stories and it’s my space to talk about all things queer - video games, TV shows, and yeah sometimes even how harmful it can be to assume you know someone’s gender identity, whether they’re feminine or masculine, and that this has nothing to do with a person’s sexuality. This video I made in the context of BJYX/LSFY/ZSWW and Yizhan.

I opened a Patreon account since some people wanted to know how to support me. I have been jobless since our visual effects studio closed down in May and I’m starting up a new job again next week (finally!) but if you want to contribute for the work I’m doing this would be the way.

Be Kind.

I’ve rambled on for quite a bit now so let me end it here. Let me just say please be kind. Be kind to each other. Be kind to those who disagree with you. When you’re tempted to lash out, consider the other person’s point of view first.

Remember that what started this was love. Not hate. Don’t give in to the temptation to participate in fanwars. Remember the love.

Thanks for listening to my Ted Talk.

~Obsidian Aurora~

[sparkles-and-trash]

modern!London Gaang/Zukka AU, part 1 ~ Zuko

based on a quick concept I wrote a while back, this may turn into a fic some day, but for now, have a bunch of headcanons! 

Zuko’s family is all important, old money, classical Upper East Side of New York type of rich 

they basically think they are royalty, only more important 

Zuko never really fitted in with his family or their friends, tho 

he always disliked crowds, parties, attention and empty small talk, which is all important in the socialite world 

when he finishes High School, he gets in a huge fight with his father, and it ends with him packing his bags and hopping on a plane

he goes to London, to the only person he ever felt at home with; his uncle Iroh 

Iroh runs a little café in the Marylebone area, close to Regent Park, and lives in a gorgeous little apartment over it 

Iroh does well for himself, but isn’t nearly as rich as his brother, so Zuko has to learn how to be a Real Person™ 

boy has no idea how to cook, or take public transport, do normal grocery shopping etc 

Zuko did use to spend his summers staying with Iroh tho, so he’s pretty good at working at the café 

Zuko loves that café so much 

he also comes to love London a lot, and after just a month there, he realizes it feels more like a home to him that NYC ever did 

Iroh also notices, and so far he hasn’t really asked too much about why Zuko is there and what happened with his family; Iroh knows very well how his brother can be and doesn’t wanna push Zuko 

but as summer nears an end, Iroh realizes that Zuko isn’t talking about his plans, and Iroh carefully suggests that he is very welcome to stay with him, as he enjoys his company so much and Zuko is a great addition to the café 

Zuko 100% cries

Iroh pretends he doesn’t see it 

but later that night Iroh may or may not wipe a tiny tear himself 

Zuko hasn’t really thought out what he wants to do with his life, he always kinda figured he would have to follow is his father footsteps, but now, the world is suddenly all open to him 

and it’s kind of scary? 

but also amazing 

for now, he decides that it’s enough to work at the café and maybe take some classes on the side 

he kind of needs to learn how to live all over again 

he signs up for some art classes, specifically photography

he loves photography and is pretty damn good at it 

as he starts taking on a bigger role at the café, he starts noticing some regulars 

mainly, it’s that one guy with dark skin and clear blue eyes, hair that falls perfectly around his chiseled face, or pulled up into a ponytail or bun to show off his strong jawline even more, with the big smile with a slight gap between his front teeth and always a sparkle in his eyes 

...not that Zuko had really looked at him, or anything 

the boy used to come in almost everyday and order chai tea to go, usually accompanied by his friend, a slightly shorter guy with messy brown hair, big cheerful eyes and a almost childlike positivity radiating off him 

but lately he’s been spending more time there, coming in at early afternoon, and sitting in one of the tables by the window until closing time, either writing on his laptop or drawing in a sketchbook 

Zuko is dying to know more about him and what he’s doing, but he’s always alone when he comes in to sit down, and it’s usually his friend that strikes up conversations 

Zuko used to dislike people he didn’t know that just started talking to him, but the handsome boy’s friend, Zuko think he said his name was Aang, is just so genuine it’s hard to dislike him 

he also talks very warmly about Iroh and the café, which is always a huge plus in Zuko’s book 

one day, when the two boys come in together around noon, Zuko manages to catch that the handsome guy’s name is Sokka, and he can’t stop thinking about it

somehow, having a name to the face makes the boy seem more real

like he’s an actual person and not just a extremely attractive daydream 

one time, Zuko mentions Aang to his uncle, trying to be all discrete and maybe get some information of Sokka, and Iroh gets very excited right away 

he really wants to see Zuko make some friends there, and Aang and Sokka has been coming to his café for years now, and he feels pretty confident that they are good people  

but Iroh mentions something about Sokka being very chatty, and Zuko gets a little drawn back after that, and Iroh finally manages to pry out why of him 

and Zuko mutters something about how Sokka is never chatty with him 

so he goes on to explain that he’s not rude or anything, but he seems to never look him in the eyes or talk in long sentences around him, and Zuko mutters that it’s probably his scar or something 

and Iroh just ...

B O I 

because Sokka did NOT use to spend hours sitting in that café on his own before Zuko started working there 

and now Zuko is saying Sokka can’t seem to keep eye-contact with him without getting flustered 

and Zuko is just so oblivious it’s insane 

but, to be fair, so is Sokka 

Iroh comes to find that out when he’s alone in the café one day when Zuko is starting the photography class, and Aang comes in alone 

Aang kinda hints at something, thinking he’s clever, but is in fact very obvious 

Iroh gets very excited lol 

he tries to be professional and keep private life private, but... 

in the name of love, he is willing to let that go a little bit 

and, as it turns out, so is Aang...  

this will be like 100 parts, won’t it? 

I think it will 

anyways, to be continued... 

[dear--charlie]

Dear Charlie,

It’s been a while. I know. I’m sorry. I hope you are okay, that you are healthy and that your loved ones are okay too.

I was feeling better, genuinely. Even with a global pandemic and despite the fact that I have not hugged my girlfriend in a year, I feel better. Happier, somehow. I think it’s because I told my parents about A. They took it pretty well considering the fact that I kept it from them for more than two years and that my dad is quite homophobic - turns out he is not when it’s about his own flesh and blood. I don’t know if I told you that I told them. But here you go.

Did I tell you that I started dance classes again? Well due to Covid they stopped again, like in march. I miss it. They usually keep me sane. Now, since yesterday, I feel like I am going crazy. I finished my last exam but I still have to work on my thesis. Mind you, I even applied for an Erasmus Mundus, Glasgow, Aarhus and Barcelona, maybe even Vancouver are the cities I would live in for six months each more or less. It sounds really interesting but it’s so expensive. In some weeks they tell me if I’m admitted to the scholarship. If I don’t get that scholarship, paying might get tricky. I am looking for apartments right now and I found one I really like. It’s around 50cm2, has a kitchen/living room, a bathroom, a room and a tiny room. It looks amazing but it’s expensive. Then again, it’s cheaper than anything else I saw. It’s 400 000€, when all the others started at 600 000€. Housing situation in Luxembourg is hell. It’s so expensive. The apartments I went to take a look at aren’t even in a central region. They are all on the countryside and so so so expensive. Did you know that for an apartment that size in the capital you nearly pay a million? In other countries you get an entire house for that prize, but hey… that’s life I guess. Well, when I saw this particular apartment, I fell in love. And if everything goes right, I will buy it and borrow money at the bank, hello depts for 15 years, but hey I’m only 22. I saw the apartment and I imagined A living there with me. We have talked about names for children and Samira or Alia are the ones we stuck with. What do you think of those? I know they aren’t typical names and if I’m not wrong they have arabic and/or hindu origines, but we fell in love with them. We’d like to adopt a girl, but there are many procedures until that can happen. She will probably move in with me as soon as we both finish our studies. We want to marry. Who would have thought that? It makes me genuinely happy and the distance has made us stick together even more.

I also finished my internship with the extra third graders. It was exhausting but I miss the kiddos. They turned out to be great as soon as I found out how to handle each of them and their extra behaviour. Some of them told me they wanted me to be their teacher till the end of the year. I nearly cried when I heard that, but hey, I held back the tears.

Not-Rose and I are sometimes talking, I am on friendly terms with Sally again, and I just completely dropped the 9. Lena is distant (yea, we share that name, I’m not talking about my secret alter ego) and never wants to do anything. I told Laura and Daniel about A too. They took it well. And Lisa is like always. They are my friends I guess. But I don’t think we will stay in touch after uni. We just don’t have many things in common and some of their thoughts and ideas are… quite challenging for me. I don’t want to say they are utterly stupid, but they kind of are dunderheads. I love them though, I just don’t feel like we have a lot in common. I hope the Glasgow will accept me… because that Masters degree would give me a chance to work in a higher field, maybe even research, so that I can bring about the change I strive for. Sometimes I do feel weird for telling you all of this. I’m sorry for oversharing (if it’s bothering anybody).

Oh, also, I cleaned my emails (went from 6000 to 120, huge, huh?) and I stumbled upon some form my Spanish teacher (2014-2017) The way I wrote made me cringe, but her messages were kind. I think she is one of the people who made me change for the better. A is too. And me changing my way of thinking and being more open. It think it has helped me improve a lot. I reached out to a therapist for my dermatillomania and have an appointment in march. It’s public therapy and they have long waiting periods, but at least I reached out. Right?

I wrote the TOEFL again and the DELE C1, I hope to get my results soon. The DELE is taking 3 months already, and TOEFL should arrive in about 5 days. I think I did good. I hope well enough to be admitted at a university in Madrid if they don’t take me for the Erasmus Mundus programme.

You know what? Writing to you always makes me feel serene. I’m calm right now. Freya Ridings’ Lost Without You is my company and I am okay. Yesterday I wasn’t. A’s mom might have cancer… and it might be spreading. She was destroyed and I wanted to help but I don’t even know when the next flight are going to Spain from here… I mean, there are flights, but what if no plane flies back and I am stuck there with uni starting again here… I cried. Because of her and her mother and because some days ago she asked me to read to her out of my “Essays” (aka the crap I have been writing on my phone since 2015, which mostly is utterly depressing and consists of the things I don’t really tell people. That, and some letters to you, that is. And she asked me to read the bad parts about her to her… so I did. And oh I hated myself for those words. She is okay with them, says they make her learn what to do and how to improve, but I felt like a huge a**hole because those things were not fair towards her. I was so deep into my own misery that I didn’t realize how bad I was treating my girlfriend, even though it was only on the screen and my head. That’s too much. After reading some to her, she had to leave, and I read through the entire 268 pages again and deleted every single bad thing I ever wrote about her. That didn’t make the bad feeling go away though.

I’m sorry for having written so much. It’s just been a while. I truly hope you and everybody reading through my thoughts is okay (and hey, thanks for having read until here, I know it was a lot this time).

Be safe,

Love always,

Lena.

P.S. Listen to Daughter (“Tomorrow”, “Youth”, or whatever really. The band is great and has been my company for a loooong while now)

(22.01.2021, 11:09h)

[nisrinafm]

greetings   bubs   !   the   way   i’m   posting   this   late   because   i   spent   most   of   my   time   staring   instead   of   writing   asdj   .   i’m   gi   ,   and   wow   ?   i   am   so   excited   to   be  here   .   i   hate   to   say   it   ,   i   hope   i   don’t   sound   ridiculous   ,   but   rich   kids   plots   own   me   .   i’ll   be   bringing   you   the   complex   but   loving   nisrina   ,   and   if   you’d   like   to   know   more   about   her   just   keep   on   reading   .   

❝   UPCOMING   SINGER   NISRINA   VASQUEZ   SPOTTED   IN   A   SCREAMING   MATCH   WITH   AN   UNKNOWN   NUMBER                         WHO   COULD   IT   BE   ?   ❞      

        only   five   minutes   ‘till   midnight   ,   and   we   just   spotted   nisrina   vasquez   ,   known   for   a   single   diamond   hanging   between   collar   bones   ,   painted   fingers   ,   &   the   eagerness   to   lose   herself   in   the   moment   ,   at   club   nouvea   ,   ringing   in   the   new   year   !   the   twenty   one   year   old   is   usually   known   for   their   job   as   a   musician   ,   but   tonight   ,   they’re   just   another   reveler   in   the   crowd   .   when   they   wrote   down   their   new   year’s   resolution   ,   they   wished   to   find   forgiveness   not   for   her   mother   ,   but   for   herself   ,   release   her   first   album   ,   &   break   it   to   her   father   that   she   does   not   want  to   take  over   his   hotels   .   funny   enough   ,   they   had   also   mentioned   how   they   hoped   to   forget   about   the   time   that   they   REDACTED   .   for   what   it’s   worth   ,   i   truly   hope   they   can   put   the   old   year   past   them   .      

full   name.   nisrina  lluvia   vasquez   .   

 gender   ,   pronouns.   cis  woman  ,  she  and  her   .   

 date   of   birth.   august   seventh   ,   nineteen   ninety   nine   .   

 age.   twenty   one   .   

 zodiac   sign.   leo   .   

 hometown.   las   vegas   ,   nevada   .   

 current   living   place.   new   york   .     

orientation.   bisexual   ,   biromantic   .   

 languages.   english   &   spanish   (   fluent   )   ,   italian   (   conversational   )   . 

 tattoos  ,   piercings.    asdfgh   . 

occupation.   musician  .

voiceclaim.   sabrina   claudio   .

  had   nisrina   been   the   answer   to   a   couple   that   longed   for   a   family   ?   no   ,   not   even   close   .    she   was   a   solution   .   the   product   of   desperation   that   panicked   at   the   discussion   of   divorce   and   a   future   lost   of   riches   :      for   the   vasquez’s   ,   marriage   was   not   fabricated   to   contain   genuineness   ,   but   to   benefit   both   parties   while   providing   a   stable   front   to   the   media   .   what   was   expected   from   one   another   was   not   love   ,   it   was   to   withhold   the   agreement   that   landed   two   bodies   muttering   the   words   ,   “   i   do   ,   “   .   a   child   ?   was   never   spoken   of   ,   nor   wanted   .   getting   pregnant   was   a   hidden   trick   of   manipulation   ,   silent   words   of   leave   me   and   your   unborn   child   now   and   see   what   happens   .

    nisrina   was   a   pawn   in   her   mother’s   selfish   games   ,   an   accessory   placed   in   matching   outfits   and   paraded   around   .   motherhood   ?   it   was   everything   sabine   has   ever   dreamed   of   .   so   much   that   the   minute   the   door   closed   ,   the   minute   the   camera’s   clicked   off   ,   nisrina   was   placed   in   whoever’s   hands   were   the   closest   and   dismissed   .   such   a   loving   mother   ,   right   ?

      so   where’s   nisrina’s   father   in   all   of   this   ?   the   hotel   tycoon   was   the   complete   opposite   from   his   cold   hearted   wife   .   aloof   and   stern   melting   into   a   surprising   pool   of   pure   tenderness   for   his   child   .   he   might   have   been   angry   at   getting   stuck   in   sabine’s   trap   ,   but   that   anger   never   looked   at   his   daughter  ;   while   ezequiel   never   dreamed   of   fatherhood   ,   he   embraced   it   .   it   taking   all   of   one   second   of   staring   down   at   his   daughter’s   face   to   understand   that   she   was   now   his   sun   .

     growing   up   in   the   presence   of   someone   who’s   honest   about   their   lack   of   desire   to   be   a   parent   ,   was   not   something   nisrina   could   stay   ignorant   to   for   too   long   .    her   innocence   normalizing   it   until   she   was   old   enough   to   perceive   the   world   around   her   .   after   that   ,   it   became   something   that   was   sitting   right   in   front  of   her   face   .   it   was   in   the   books   she   read   ,   the   movies   she   watched   ,   and   in   the   feeling   she   got   as   she   surveyed   her   friends   mother’s   who   looked   down   at   them   with   tenderness   spilling   from   their   hues   .

     nisrina    ,   she   clung   to   the   good   in   those   around   her   ;   no   matter   how   many   times   those   people   proved   themselves   to   be   anything   but   deserving   of   her   love   .    and   with   her   mother   ?   she   tried   .   again   and   again   ,   nisrina   would   reach   out   for   sabine   .   cry   for   her   affection   ,   plead   for   an   ounce   of   interest   .   she   could   offer   gentle   smiles   ,   present   her   achievements   ,   even   tried   acting   out   in   hopes   that   it   would   earn   just   the   slightest   reaction  ..   but   nothing   ever   worked   ,   in   fact   it   seemed   to   just   drive   sabine   away   .   until   eventually   ,   nisrina   was   pushed   into   the   arms   of   a   nanny   and   sabine   was   on   a   plane   to   whatever   country   would   get   her   the   farthest   from   her   daughter   .

     ezequiel   smothered   nisrina   ,   went   to   the   extreme   lengths   to   get   her   anything   and   everything   she   could   ever   want   .   he   wanted   to   fill   the   hole   that   sabine   engraved   in   her   ,   swore   that   if   nisrina   would   let   him   ,   he’d   love   her   enough   for   the   both   of   them  .  

    with   sabine   always   mia   ,   and   her   father   never   staying   too   long   in   one   place   for   work   ,   nisrina   would   be   pulled   from   public   school  ,   and   enrolling   in   private   studies   .    giving   her   the   opportunity   to   learn   without   being   present   in   a   school   setting   ,   and   allowing   her   father   to   bring   her   along   with   him   .   nisrina   would   go   from   an   empty   house   with   staff   members   to   her   father   and   his   hotel   staff   .   not   the   biggest   difference   ,   but   to   have   her   father   always   one  room   away   made   her   feel   less   lonely   .  

   during   these   years   ,   she   would   only   speak   to   her   mother   less   then   three   times   a  year  ..   but   at   that   point   ?   she   was   long   over   begging   her   for   affection   .   the   media   would   brand   her   as   a   daddy’s   girl   ,   the   future   face   of   the   vasquez   hotel   chains   .   her   life   could   consist   of   penthouses   ,   ruling   the   hotel   kitchen   ,   running   aimlessly   around   hallways   ,  singing   in   the   dinning   hall   ,   and   finding   family   in   the   strangest   of   places   .   her   father   would   expand   from   las   vegas   ,   to   new   york   ,   to   the   caribbeans   ,    and   eventually   to   italy  .  

    before   her   eighteenth  birthday   ,   her   father   would   divorce   sabine   officially   .   putting   all   of   his   assets   in   his   daughters   name   .    this   would   cause   chaos   in   the   media   ,   and   land  sabine   on   their   front   steps   in   false   tears   and   apologizes  that   meant   absolutely   nothing   to   either   of   them   .   two   year   later   ,   sabine   would   remarry   and   final   ties   would   be   cut   forever   .

      where   is   nisrina   now   ?   nisrina   is   located   in   the   beautiful   city   of   new   york   ,   in   hopes   of   gaining   peace   and   mind   to   construct   her   first   album   since   being   signed   a   year   ago   .   she   is   still   an   absolute   daddy’s   girl   and   has   an   insanely   close   relationship   with   him   .    constantly   on   the   mission   of   bettering   herself   ,   and   moving   on   from   old   wounds   .

*   CONNECTIONS   .

YOU’RE   MY   BABY   ,   EVEN   WHEN   YOU   LEAVE   ME   .  

                                                      that   one   ex   that   she   cannot   let   go   of   ,    their   hold   on   her   too   great   .   it’s   something   she   refuses   to   admit   ,   is   embarrassed   at   how   much   she   loves   them   ,   how   she   keeps   coming   back     .   

I   DON’T   NEED   A   MAN   ,   SHE’S   MY   OTHER   HALF   ,   WE   GOT   SOMETHING   NOT   A   LOT   OF   OTHERS   HAVE   .  

                                                     their   relationship   has   surpassed   besties   ,   their   souls   were   made   for   each   other   .   they’re   each   other’s   person   ,   can   speak   without   communication   ,   bicker   like   sisters   ,   and   are   willing   to   hold   each   other’s   secrets   to   the   grave   .   a   package   deal   to   the   end   .   it’s   a   forever   thing   .

JUST   CAUSE   I   FUCK   YOU   ,   DON’T   MEAN   I   TRUST   YOU   ;   I   DON’T     .  

                                                     a   complex   relationship   of   something   more   but   it   never   crossing   that   line   .   these   two   can   share   a   bed   and   even   affectionate   touches   but   communication  ,   trust   ,   and   commitment   are   not   in  the  books   .

THE   NIGHT   IS   DARK   BUT   THE   MOON   IS   BRIGHT   ,   WE’RE   STARING   AT   THIS   SUMMER   NIGHT   ;   TAN   SKIN   LOOKS   DAMN   GOOD   IN   WHITE   ,   STRIPING   DOWN   BY   THE   HOLLYWOOD   SIGN  

                                                    her   girls   ,   the   definition   that   family   is   not   always   blood   .   from   spontaneous   girl   trips   ,   to   clogging   each   other’s   feed   ,   this   group   of   friends   are   known   for   their   closeness   .    you   either   hate   them   or   you   love   them   ,   but   regardless   they’re   always   going   to   ride   for   one   another  .   

OTHER 

                                                   confidants   ,   ex   friends   ,   close   friends   ,   flings   ,   hookups   ,   rivals   ,   people   she   just   bumps   heads   with   ,   on   and   off   friendships   ,   will   they   wont   they   ,   literally   anything   !!!   give   me   drama   ,   angst   ,   and   cute   friendships      .

[surveys-at-your-service]

Survey #331

my head hurts way too badly to think up some intro lyrics, so just g’night.

Have you ever become good friends with someone you never met in person? Oh yeah, I've had best friends over the Internet. Hell, I'm closer to many online friends than I am most irl ones. They know "the real me" more. What do you consider your default mood to be? Stressed, probably. Discontent. What’s the longest amount of time you’ve ever kept a goldfish alive for? Not long. Proper goldfish husbandry is a very neglected topic, and I sure as hell never knew how to set up its tank adequately. Have you ever been paintballing? No, don't plan to. It looks like it hurts like a bitch. Do you want a large wedding? No. Did you ever collect any sort of cards? I had a very small collection of Pokemon cards. I didn't collect them avidly. What’re the best and worst books you ever had to read for a class? The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton was the best. The worst was some book we had to read in the 6th grade about a kid during some war that moved around a lot... I don't remember the name or who wrote it, but it sucked. What’s the best meal you had at an amusement park, or If you haven’t been to one, how about a good meal at another place like a zoo, aquarium or museum? I don't know. I haven't been to many. Who, whether a person or company, emails you the most? My PHP therapist emails me a check-in sheet and Zoom link every day there's a therapy session. What kind of sound or noise freaks you out the most and why do you think it scares you? Let's seeeee... I don't know if there's a sound that actually freaks me out. There are some I don't like, but none that like, frighten me. At least that I can think of. What’s the strangest art piece you’ve come across? Biiiitch there's a painting in Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs I'm not gonna go into, but shit fuckin wild. What’s the most clever or unique name you’ve come across for a business? I've definitely heard some cool ones, but I don't know about one that really stands out to answer this. If you had to name one of your hypothetical future children after a song, which song would you pick? Maybe like... okay, I'm blanking. Good thing I'm not having kids to name then, right? What’s the last song you heard? "Down in the Park" by Marilyn Manson is on atm. What is your favorite line from a TV show? *shrug* Any current family issues? No. How many hours do you spend online a day? How do you feel about that? I'm doing something on the computer pretty much... always. I hate it, and I hate it a lot. I don't want my life to be tied solely to the digital plane. I want to do more than bounce back and forth from website to website. Do you think that people have the power to make their own lives better? Absolutely, but there are some things they simply cannot change. It's about perspective and how you play the deck you're dealt. What is the biggest problem in your life right now? Right now, the most limiting thing is my physical health, probably. Just walking being torture affects my ability to exercise, and my body is a major reason - if not the biggest, at this current time - for my depression. This also plays a massive role in jobs I can handle. Not to sound like my emo self writing middle school poetry, but my body feels like a prison. Do you feel that you are loved? I know I am by some people, though I have a hard time understanding why a lot. What is the one thing you want most from life? Life satisfaction. Pride in what I've accomplished. A regular state of being content. Birthplace? I'm just gonna say in eastern NC. Do you believe in love at first sight? No, merely infatuation. Love is much too deep for that. Do you think dreams eventually come true? Some can, but usually only if you put effort into making that so. Favorite fictional character? like ummmmmmmm have you heard of this sassy bastard called Darkiplier- Go to the movies or rent? Before Covid, I loved going to the theater. It was something to do, plus a giant screen is nice. McDonalds or Burger King? McD's. I'm not a big BK fan. I only really went there during my vegetarian phase for the veggie burger. Current annoyance? This motherfucking headache. Last thing you ate? I have a meal replacement shake with me right now, if you consider that "eating." I didn't have a proper dinner. The last solid food I had though was some cookies and cream Greek yogurt. Last thing you bought? With my own money, I think I bought Mom and I some cheap McDonald's order semi-recently? Or maybe paying my $100 deposit for my tattoo was most recent, idk. Soonest thing you are looking forward to? For Mom to get her CT scan and find out what's going on in there. What did you do today? It was a pretty average day. I woke up way too early, though. The only thing even semi-unique about today was I played World of Warcraft for a few hours again; I've been quite unattached to it lately, but I went through an episode today of actually having fun playing. Oh, and I've been battling a migraine. It's more of a severe headache now, at least, but it still sucks big time. Do you like to see it snowing outside? Oh yes, absolutely! When you were in high school did you ever have bomb threats? I believe once we did from a very volatile student that honestly caused quite a lot of trouble. He's dead now. Who knows ALL of your secrets? Nobody. Did you have a job before you were in college? No. Have you ever thought about what it would be like to have a baby right now? That's a terrifying thought, no. Are you on birth control? Yeah, but just because it tames my menstrual cramps. Without it, they could be debilitating some days. Who is your last sent text to? My best fren. Have you ever eaten at Chipotle before? Possibly? Idr. Do you swear often? Excessively. I had a dirty mouth prior, but my swearing got really bad when I started staying at Jason's house a lot. He and especially his mother swear like mad. Do you own any shirts with a peace symbol on it? No. Do you have your national flag hanging up anywhere outside your house? Not at this house, no. Would you ever go to Japan? Oh, yes. I would love to. It's... very morbid, but I would really like to walk the (public) paths of Aokigahara Forest, nicknamed "Suicide Forest" for the horrible amount of, well, suicides that happen there via hanging. Like, you might just casually run into a dead body. I want to just... feel it there, walk in silence and empathize with people who didn't know what else to do and hope so deeply that those departed know they were never alone in their pain. I know with absolute certainty I'd probably be teary-eyed the whole time and cry a whoooole lot, but it's just an experience I want to have. What was the last thing you went to Walmart for? Some basic groceries. What should you be doing right now? Sleeping, given this headache... I just don't want to yet. Are you afraid of getting your heart broken? I'm fucking terrified of that ever happening again, far more than words can properly express. Have you ever been in a choir? Yes, actually; when I was a Catholic kid, my sisters and I were in the church choir for a year or so, idr. Do you have a Twitter? Yes, but only to like Mark's tweets, haha. Oh, and very rarely enter giveaways I'm interested in. Describe your retainers to me, if you have them, that is. I have a permanent metal one behind my front row of bottom teeth to keep those straight. My upper teeth had one of those normal retainers you take in and out, but I didn't wear it enough, so now it doesn't even fit. Would you like for someone to call you right now? No. I'm tired, my head hurts, and I'm enjoying the song I'm bingeing. It's so weird, I rarely ever go on music hunting trips (no real reason, I just... don't), but I've found great shit lately. Do you like to brush your teeth? No; it's a chore. I only do it because I don't want my teeth decaying, falling out, or getting too yellow, and the taste in your mouth and gritty texture on your teeth isn't exactly great when you don't brush. Have you ever had a surgery? Two. Give out your phone number over the internet? I have over private messages. Do you look older or younger than you actually are? Given my wardrobe (like graphic tees and band shirts), I probably look younger in the eyes of especially older people. I personally say I look my age, though. When is the next time you’ll be up on stage? I never plan to be again. What is the last show that you watched a full episode of? Some cooking show with Mom. Nailed It!, I think? Do you know anyone who lives in Utah? No. I love Utah, though; it's actually a place I'd be willing to live in with just how pretty it is and not super populated. Do you get your feelings hurt easily? VERY. I'm probably one of the most sensitive people you can meet. Do you still talk to the person you last made out with? Yeah. Have you ever seen your best friend cry? Ugh, yes. What kind of vitamins did you take as a kid? First we took those nasty, chalky Flintstones kinds, but as time passed, Mom moved onto giving us gummy bear vitamins that were perfectly fine. Did you get any compliments today? No. Are you friends with your neighbors? Not "friends," no. What towns have you lived in? Three different ones. That's all you're getting. Have you ever thrown up from drinking? No. Done any illegal drugs? No. I mean I've had some alcohol underage, but I've never done anything remotely hardcore. What’s the longest amount of time you’ve been on an airplane without changing flights? Idk. Who have you texted today? My mom and best friend. What time did you wake up this morning? Ugh, like five in the fucking morning. I couldn't go back to sleep. What is your favorite condiment to go with french fries? Ketchup. What do you have a habit of doing when engaging in a conversation with someone? Making shitty eye contact, and I'm one of those people who "talks with [their] hands." I also lose my train of thought a whoooole lot. Have you ever layed in a hammock? Yeah; we had one growing up. Have you ever lost a pet in a tragic way? How did you cope? Well yeah, I've had lots of pets, so thus lost some in particularly painful ways. The most scarring loss of a pet though is as follows: Teddy, my dog, picked up one of our cat's very young, wandering kittens in his jaws in a manner that looked as if he was trying to carry it like Aphrodite (the mother cat) does when she would bring them back behind the couch, where she gave birth/had her little "nest." I absolutely freaked and had to pry the kitten from his mouth, and it slowly died in my hands. I think Teddy accidentally crushed its ribs. I. Was. A. Mess. Then, there was Aphrodite herself. I've told the story before of our former neighbors calling animal control because our cats would wander through their yard, and all of our cats were taken away while I was unaware at school. Came home, and they were all gone. Aphrodite was my baby, so I was devastated. Screaming, sobbing, cursing on the porch for like 20 minutes... It was awful. What type of curtains do you like? I don't... know? I don't know the actual names of any types... What type of quality is a must-have in a friend? I absolutely cannot be friends with someone who thinks they're above everyone else. Are you any good at reading someone's body language? I think I am. What goes good with a nice cold glass of milk? Cookies! Especially Oreos. Dip it in there for around five seconds, and it's perfection. What fruit is too sweet to you? Grapefruit came to mind first. How did you feel after your first kiss? I had butterflies galore and was so giddy and smiley. After the first, I just wanted to kiss him a billion more times. What’s your favorite constellation and why? I don't have one. Shower curtain or door? Curtain. The glass doors are too revealing. Have you ever thought to yourself that you’re the luckiest person in the world? Most deeeeefinitely not. What time of day do you most enjoy looking at the sky? Sunset if there are clouds present, but sunrise if the sky is pretty clear.

[matildainmotion]

The Monstrous Shame of Motherhood and the Quest for a Cure

I feel exhausted. Even-more-than-usual exhausted. Whoever knew that staying at home could be so incredibly tiring. We have our daily outings – mainly to the golf course, which is the nearest green we have. The other evening, when we had finally made it out the house, and the children were running ahead of me across the fitted-carpet grass, I had a thought: “Maybe it will be okay,” and instantly I wanted to cry. It wasn’t a thought only about the pandemic. It was about the lot: the pandemic, plus how to get an autism diagnosis for my son that supports him, plus my 78 year old mother staying well, plus my husband’s work and the theatre community surviving in a post-Covid world, plus managing to finish my book, plus both my children’s long term futures, plus the world’s long term future and climate change, plus racial inequality, plus economic inequality, plus gender inequality, plus, plus…..

In that moment I realised that a kind of deep worry is such a constant for me now that I have grown accustomed to it, so that it is like the planes that used to fly over our house in London – a noise so familiar that after a while I no longer hear it, and yet it is there, every few minutes, unnoticed, another monstrous metal groan. And when it stops - when the planes stay down, when the worries lift up - the sudden silence is startling, enough to make me cry. But – here’s the thing- thanks to the lockdown I have realised that it isn’t just worry to which I have grown accustomed in this way. There is something else, even more monstrous, which it has taken me a long time to name – and its name is shame.

I believe the shame comes from a thousand ‘shoulds,’ from the many things I feel I should be doing as a mother and am not.  Motherhood, along with the paraphernalia of nappies, wipes and purees, comes with a huge bundle of shoulds. The very first thing I did, nine years ago now, on discovering that I was pregnant, was to rush out to Waterstones and buy a book on what I should and shouldn’t eat during the next nine months– and that was only the beginning. The shoulds come from everywhere, a mountain of well-meant advice, not only from books, but from doctors, midwives, family members, partners, friends, other mothers, even complete strangers. I remember standing in a shop queue with my three-week-old son in a sling, when the woman behind me leant forward and touched one of his toes. “Where’s his socks?” she said, “He’ll catch his death of cold.” On the one hand I felt reasonably confident that carrying my son around sock-less was not going to endanger his life, on the other, as a brand new mother, I was nonetheless shaken by the idea that my son’s survival was up to me, and that many different people had many different ideas about how best I should fulfil my role of raising and protecting him. At times, even my instinct, that famous maternal inner guide, seemed like a mysterious thing that someone else had told me I should follow.

Mothers Who Make began, in part, as a response to all these shoulds. When I went along to the new mother and baby groups, that I also believed to be obligatory, I noticed a distressing pattern. All too often we were simply swapping ‘shoulds’ with each other and coming away feeling worse than when we arrived. No place or position was safe: I met mothers who felt they should be breastfeeding, mothers who felt the need to put a label saying ‘breastmilk’ on the bottle they fed their baby in public, as well as mothers who felt they should be weaning their baby and moving rapidly onto solids. I met mothers who felt bad about co-sleeping and mothers who felt bad about not doing so. In those early days of mothering - when you should be feeling overjoyed - there are even charts that tell you what should be happening when, how much your child should weigh, by when they should be making eye contact etc. It is not that these charts are entirely unhelpful or inaccurate, but they certainly encouraged my constant questioning: is my child okay? Am I okay? Am I doing this right? And if I thought I wasn’t, if I was not doing what I should, I felt ashamed.

I have felt many parallels between lockdown and early motherhood – the sudden cessation of all usual activity, the focus on ‘intensive care’ and care-taking, the washing, the sense of vulnerability, the way leaving the house seems like an epic adventure, the isolation and longing for connection. And, as in early motherhood, our diverse lives are again apparently aligned. We are all in the same situation: all the mothers in those baby groups had a new born / all the mothers I know now are in lockdown due to a pandemic. This makes comparison seem possible, even appropriate. There is a set of scales around again – I weigh our lives on it and find myself at fault.

Let me give you a small sample of some of the shoulds that fly low over my home, through my mind, like aeroplanes, a few of the many that I have collected over my nine years of mothering. I should get my children to bed earlier. I should give them less screen time, or it shouldn’t happen first thing in the morning, or I should manage the whole issue of screens in a better, different way. I should give them less choice about what they eat. I should make sure they eat more fresh foods and less sugar. I should make them help around the house more. I should hold the structure of the day better. I should make sure everyone stays at the table when we’re eating. I should take steps towards weaning my daughter. I should never resort to threats – to the ‘if you don’t stop x, you won’t get y’ pattern. And so on and so forth – you get the gist. And because I do not do these things - and I imagine a thousand other mothers who are doing them wonderfully - I feel ashamed. I realise as I write this that my ‘shoulds,’ as listed here, are nice, white, middle class ones- signs of privilege. Shame is a heavy word and it is associated with far darker things than letting your kids watch too much telly. I want to acknowledge that my issues are trifling compared to those many have to navigate, but shame, whatever the context, is still shame and it is powerful. As someone who was once anorexic, I know that shame can sit alongside privilege and that, where present, it undermines the ease of even the most comfortable life.

Back in Jan 2019 I wrote a blog about guilt. I now think I was muddling up some of my guilt and my shame. In general, I feel guilty about specific instances that have an immediate, present moment, ground-level reality: I shouted at my son when he blasted water over the bathroom with the shower head and that triggered one of his big, aggressive rages. If I feel guilty about something, I can say sorry about it, to the person or people I have wronged, and then it’s over. Shame, for me, is more like the ongoing aeroplanes, it is long term - a long haul flight. On the bad days, motherhood seems like a very lengthy exam, the end of it still twenty years away. My children are not the examiners – certainly not for now – they are the results. Depending on how the children turn out, I will pass or fail. There are external examiners, keeping track, making notes, of all the things I am doing or not doing. And who are they, these examiners? I think, somewhere in my psyche, there is an impressive panel of them, made up of everyone who has ever shared ‘a should’ with me, from the author of the book on what to eat during pregnancy, to the woman in the queue who wanted my son to be in socks, to the many other authors, friends and strangers who have offered me advice - they are all sitting there, scribbling on their notepads, shaking their heads. They are not bad people. Many of them are people for whom I have enormous respect, which makes it worse. I believe in their advice – seriously, I should be following it.

In my blog on guilt, I found my guilt a figure – made it into an image that helped me connect to the things that mattered to me, lying underneath the guilt. It turned out to be a Mary Poppins-like character, flying a kite. I think my shame has a very different form. There is the panel of judges, frowning from a distance, and then there is the shame herself, much closer in, and, like the sound of the low-flying planes, she’s monstrous.

My son’s latest obsession is the Beast Quest books (he has moved on from My Little Pony - woe betide you if you mention his former interest to him). There are over a hundred Beast Quest books, all with the same basic formula – boy meets monster. Giant birds, snakes, insects, spiders, bears, apes, hounds, trolls, ogres, dragons – you name your flavour of nightmarish monster, it will be there. I am glad to say there is a reasonable spread of gender representations across the monsters – sadly none of them are trans but there are some mothers. My ‘shame monster’ is definitely a mother. She is immense, stinking, gruesome and green. Her roar is the soundtrack of my days, to which I have grown accustomed. In some of the Beast Quest books the beasts are evil and must be destroyed, but in some they are good, set under an evil curse, from which they must be freed. I think my monstrous shame mother is one of these – good at heart but under pressure, after years of judgement, she has turned malevolent. And here is the irony: I believe her malevolent aspect has a more toxic impact on my children and our household, than any of the things such as screen time, sugar, late nights, unstructured days, which have driven her into this terrible state. Her constant growling makes me tense, fractious and very, very tired. I don’t think I can go on like this. So, what to do? How to release her from the curse? And who would she be without it?

Often the opposite of shame is presented as pride. But I think pride too is problematic – the panel of judges, external examiners, is still present in the dynamic, it’s just that they are giving out good marks instead of bad. So, if the shame-beast, when transformed, does not turn into the proud mother, who does she become?

As ever, when I am wrangling with a question in my mothering, I look to my making for answers. Throughout the lockdown I have been writing whenever I can. Always, when the children are having their screen time. Often, when I should be getting them dressed, or focussing on making us breakfast, or preparing them for bed. I don’t write because I should. I write because I want to do it, because it helps me give things meaning, because it brings me joy. I think back to that teary moment on the golf course, watching the children run ahead of me over the grass. What made the worry lift, the planes stop, the monster turn out good? Yes, I think it was a moment of joy. I think, when the gory green monster is not sweating with shame, she is lit up with joy.

So much, so often, is laid at the mother’s door. On the one hand we are ‘just’ being mums, with minimal status, doing an insignificant job, and on the other, we are accorded huge significance – everything can be traced back to us, to our care or the lack of it, our early influence. I do not wish to deny our responsibility as mothers, but I do not believe our shame helps us to shoulder it, or that we should shoulder it alone. When I started Mothers Who Make I wanted it to be a held peer-support space where women could share their challenges without shame, and celebrate, even cultivate, their joy. I wanted to create a group in which we did not find further fault, did not inadvertently end up undermining or judging one another, adding to the great big bundles of shoulds already carried. It is why it is still vital to me that we welcome every kind of mother – breastfeeding, bottle-feeding, those who keep their mothering and their making strictly separate, those who take their children to work – every kind. It is also the same impulse that lies behind our Matronage scheme. Rather than a panel of judges telling us whether or not we are worthy, I want to see whether we can hold each other up. We have been asking people to become our ‘Matron Saints’ by giving us the price of a coffee a month - £3. We need 300 of you to become self-sustaining. So far we have a fantastic 99! Once we reach 100, I am going to announce a new project in celebration– a way, I hope, to keep the same ethos of grassroots peer-support alive and kicking – kicking off the shoulds, turning them into wishes and dreams.

And in the meantime, whilst you are all rushing to bring us over the 100 Matron Saint mark, (go here to do so: www.motherswhomake.org) these are your questions for the month: as a mother and/ or as a maker what are the ‘shoulds’ and ‘should nots’ you carry around with you? Do your ‘shoulds’ turn into shame? And then- as an antidote to this -what brings you joy? In your mothering? In your making? As we slowly emerge out of this pandemic, can you do more of this? Can you create a more shameless world? Can you help make the monsters joyful?

[tessatechaitea]

The Invisibles #3

This is exactly what taking drugs isn't.

Our world is composed of geniuses and not-geniuses. That's the kind of statement a not-genius makes because it's so fucking obvious. Do you ever have to say anything that pretty much says "All of the people on the world are either this or that"? Anyway, the point I was making wasn't that I'm one of the not-geniuses even though it's the point I accidentally made. The point was that in the non-genius camp, we have those who are smart enough to recognize genius and those who sit grumpily in their pee-puddles whining about how the high-falutin' elites are trying to make things different. Different, in this case, generally means better but if you're a non-genius who can't recognize geniuses, you're just mad that somebody said french fries might not be the most nutritional side dish (even though you could still live in a world where you acknowledge that french fries are both not even close to nutritional and also the best food on the planet. I mean, you have that choice. But I guess the pee-puddle you're sitting in (which is slowly leaking into your gun cabinet) has probably distracted you from rational thought). Again, that wasn't the point I was going to make (about the french fries!) but I have a problem staying on topic. Partly it's because I've never been able to stay on topic (you should read some of my college essays which I'm not going to release to the public so even though I suggested you should read them, you won't be reading them. Ever) and partly it's because of another reason that I forgot while typing the college paper parenthetical statement. My point might have been that you can recognize a genius because they can state plain what other people are obfuscating in their pronouncements. If you're not smart enough to recognize the genius, you might think the genius is spreading propaganda, mostly because you really want to believe the thing that isn't true because it shields you from guilt or blame or repercussions stemming from following your own selfish desires at any cost. The genius is reviled by people who can't recognize genius and viled by people who can. Or unviled? Previled? Maybe I should have just gone with lauded. You might think I'm saying all of this in regards to Grant Morrison but you'd be wrong. I'm actually saying this about A.R. Moxon, the author of The Revisionaries, whose Twitter handle is @JuliusGoat. He did not pay me to point out that he's a genius although he probably should have. I suppose it's not too late. Being that he's a genius and knows the smart thing to do, I'm sure he'll buy my RPG when he Googles his name and/or Twitter handle and finds me sticking my tongue way up his asshole in this post. I mean, I'm basically saying he's smarter than Grant Morrison! Getting back to Grant Morrison, is he really a genius? I'm not so sure. I think maybe he's just a libertine who did a lot of drugs and traveled to a lot of sort-of-spiritual places (not to be more spiritual but to get his hot genius take on spirituality in a place that smells of burning corpses and goat semen while he shits his guts out back at the hotel high on hashish). Sometimes when you've done acid and other illicit substances, you feel the need to think you've risen above the flock by doing a thing most people will never consider doing. Maybe Grant doesn't exactly feel this way but some of his stuff sometimes comes across as that. I mean, sure, if you've ever done LSD or the like, you've definitely experienced a sort of melding of yourself with the profound and the mundane and the timeless in a way that usually only schizophrenics experience. You have done something that has changed you from the person you were before. But thinking that it has somehow made you different or better than those who haven't done it just means that you've never talked to people who went to high school in the flyover states. I've known some really boring and backwards people who did a lot of acid simply because there wasn't anything else to do out in the cornfields. It really did surprise me, a resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, to discover how prevalent psychoactive drugs were in the Midwest and Plains states. I thought that was just the hippies and children of hippies! What I didn't think, though, was that it made me a non-sheep (like the guy in my San Jose State creative writing class who once wrote a story about how he had broken from the flock because he dared to try LSD. The teacher loved his take and luckily for me, she was blind so she didn't see me rolling my eyes and making jerk-off motions from the back of the class. I mean, wow, dude. You dared to try LSD. I was probably on LSD while listening to the teacher read that stupid ass story!). Okay, maybe my whole take on "Grant Morrison thinks he's better than everybody else" stems from my envy of the idiot jock who wrote a stupid story that the teacher loved while she mostly just reacted to my stuff with "WTF? I guess I see how nostalgia can seem like a dream and the pop culture death of Superman can sometimes be more powerful than the death of a close family member but why did you choose to make none of this linear and what the hell do your Star Wars figures have to do with your future death? Also, the baseball game between Heaven and Hell where Heaven wins because Hitler snarls 'Jew' and then beans Jesus with the pitch to push in the last run was decent." Now that we've resolved some of my issues (I mean, maybe not "resolved" but at the very least "put out there in the open so you know where my biases are coming from"), let's get on with The Invisibles #3. When we last left our homophobic pouting white suburban "my mother doesn't hug me enough" anarchist protagonist, he was about to be hunted to death by a mystical group of human fox hunters in the secret London hidden beneath the one everybody thinks of as the "real London." I sort of hope the kid gets murdered. But then we won't get to see him learn his lesson which allows viewers to also maybe a learn a lesson. It's sometimes why you need characters like Mrs. Oleson from Little House on the Prairie. Although it was kind of enough to have Laura Ingalls who was a selfish devil child who was always learning lessons from humble and righteous Pa (who probably only killed one or two Native Americans, making him a stalwart saint of the frontier). I suppose the audience didn't need an over-the-top scurrilous villain like Mrs. Oleson. Although without Mrs. Oleson, how could the show have glorified the true saint of the frontier, Nells Oleson? The patience and kindness of that man were a testament to, um, patience and kindness!

I'm assuming Dane spends the next twenty pages snot-crying into a used coffee filter.

Dane continues to hang out with Tom of Bedlam because Dane can't survive on the street on his own and he knows it. He's not hard at all. He's a little wanna-be suburban gangster who read half of a book on anarchy and now thinks he's better than the slack-eyed populace going about their normal day-to-day bullshit. But he also thinks he still needs money and a place to live. He's not really great at the anarchy thing. But maybe if he listens to Tom, he'll learn a little bit about life and his heart will grow three sizes. Not because he suddenly cares more about everybody; it'll be a side-effect from learning the Dark Arts. Tom casts a spell so that Dane can look through the eyes of a pigeon as it flies about London. While Dane is seeing the hidden, creepy monsters lurking behind reality that pigeons can see (just as Pigeons can enter the afterlife in Moore's Jerusalem. I'm sure there are other urban horror stories that tell of the magic of pigeon vision. Did Lovecraft ever right any pigeon poems?), Tom tells Dane the secret history of cities. They're a virus that has propelled man from small villages which barely change across the centuries into huge population centers that use up the life force of the hosts as they build more and more and more, bigger and bigger, until, one day, they can build a rocket to propel the city virus into space and onto a new planet. Tom has seen, in visions, other planets affected by the virus, dead planets where the buildings stand as gravestones for the previous used-up races that contracted the virus. It's all very Lovecraftian. Not in the racist way but in the visions of other realities that change the nature of your own reality once you realize their existence. Hmm, that can actually kind of describe racism. I suppose Lovecraft's xenophobia was what made his stories about strange, unknown terrors so compelling. After teaching him loads of magic, Tom decides to teach Dane the most important lesson:

It's a really good lesson but also it's just Tom's attempt to get Jack Frost to appear.

Tom teaches Dane not to be a sheep or, in Tom's words, a robot. It's one of those weird lessons that everybody thinks they learn but nobody really learns it. Like when people read just that one Frost stanza on some poster in their English Lit class from "The Road Not Taken". Everybody gasps in air as the profundity of that single stanza (extracted from the context of the larger poem, much to the detriment of all of us) washes over them and they suddenly believe they've seen what life really is. Life isn't doing the thing you're supposed to do! Life is living to the fullest! Carpe diem! But the feeling of that moment erodes. It is eroded by the path we all take as we pretend we've taken the other path. We stop seeing that their weren't just two paths but many. And we get a job and we get a spouse and we get a house and we get a child and we occasionally think of Frost's single stanza and we decide, "You know what? I'm going to find the time to jump out of a plane!" or "I'm going to climb Everest!" or "I'm going to sleep with somebody of my same sex because I've always wanted to and hopefully my wife won't find out!" And sometimes we do and sometimes we don't; it doesn't really matter. Because the thing about taking the path less traveled is that it's still a path and it still represents the path you took and, you know what, there's that other path over there that I never got to experience and it's just shitting all over the path I'm currently on. Some people somehow block out the phantom possibilities and they're the lucky ones. The ones you can claim they have no regrets and maybe they're speaking truth when they say it. But mostly they just try not to think about it. Because once you start peeling at the wallpaper of your current life because the wallpaper, which others upon first glimpsing might think is beautiful and extraordinary, but which you've looked at every day for thirty years, you're done for. And you don't do it to find the beauty of what's underneath; you simply do it to see something different. And the new thing hasn't been scrutinized and deconstructed and critiqued; there's been no time to obsess over it. It's imaginary and if you happen to be like most people, imaginary must be better because why imagine the worst?! Okay, okay. I've just outed myself as not an anxious or depressive person! But I also don't go peeling at the wallpaper, so who knows? Maybe I do imagine the path less traveled was an intense tragedy?! The Invisibles #3 Rating: A. It's still pretty good and I'm still upset that I only have a few issues. Recently, I was thinking of writing an essay about how the worst thing about growing up is how you stop feeling things. Not that you stop feeling anything at all! Just that you stop feeling feelings that were once overwhelming and all-important. Like the crush you had in junior high. Can you imagine if, at forty, you still felt those feelings so intensely (among all the other ones you've felt across your life)? I understand that feelings must abate over time or we'd all be fucked up from not being able to get over our first crush while simultaneously not moving past the death of our closest grandparents. I get it. And some would say it's a mercy. But lately I've been wondering, "Is it?" Maybe I want to still feel those seemingly inexhaustible passions. I was reminded of wanting to discuss this because Tom says in this issue, "They made you forget how to feel, eh? Remember it now? Like everything new and the sun itself spinning behind your ribs, filling you up with silver. Like the way it was before they made robots of us, sentenced to a life behind bars we're trained to set in place ourselves." Now, that Tom speech was more about the whole "we're the shepherd of our own sheepdom" thing but in a robot and prison analogy. But the other thing about feelings made me remember how I was recently lamenting not feeling all of the things I once felt. Like the basket case from The Breakfast Club says, "When you grow up, your heart dies." And while you can argue whether that's true in the sense that you just stop caring about things, I think it's absolutely true in that it just slowly winds down and isn't capable of feeling how it used to. It's like a rechargeable battery that can no longer keep a charge. When I was in my late teens and early twenties, every single one of my friends, at one time or another, wound up weeping in my basement apartment about something in their lives (usually a woman!). I can't even fucking imagine that now. Maybe they'd be a bit upset or hurt or depressed but hardly disconsolate. I thought I would never get over the sadness at the loss of my grandfather or (and this might sound ridiculous to some but others will understand) the loss of my first cat as an adult, my precious little Judas. And while I obviously won't ever "get over" them (my eyes tear as I write this), I am no longer destroyed by the mere thought of their non-existence. A week after my Judas died, I saw Guardians of the Galaxy in the theater. Judas was always my Raccoon Boy so I almost broke down near the end when one of the characters put their arm around Rocket to console him. I made it out of the theater before absolutely losing it and snot-crying all the way back to the car. And so I can see how retaining that level of feeling over anything would be counterproductive to actually living, I absolutely miss it. I profoundly miss it. I want to be kicked in the stomach until I can't breathe by my feelings. I want this every day even if I know it's the cursed wish of a Monkey's Paw. How can anybody feel everything so palpably for their entire lives? And yet, how can we not?!

[goodbyecringe]

(Un)Natural Selection Chapter 18

Éponine

Enjolras spent the plane ride jumping from each Elite girl arranging date after date. I knew forcing the kiss last night would throw him over the edge. He would have never considered me to be anything more than his political partner if I hadn’t initiated that kiss. I could tell that he was questioning how long he would keep me in the Selection and I wasn’t here with the right intentions. But I must have offended him because he hadn’t made eye contact with me since we boarded the plane.

I fidgeted with the black sleeves on my dress until Cosette moved to sit across from me. She, like the rest of The Elite, was in a conservative black dress that had long sleeves, since the weather had begun to grow colder. I had never seen her in any remotely dark color, but even in black, she radiated positivity. We sat together in silence preparing for the solemn occasion while Claudia made rounds to each group of girls to brief them about the proper protocol.

“Under absolutely no circumstance should you smile, grin, doze off, or move your eyes excessively. You are not to take any of the attention away from Prince Enjolras and the meaning of this trip,” Claudia said in a serious tone.

“Where should we look? Should we look directly at Enjolras or out into the crowd?” Cosette asked.

I would have never been able to think of that question.

“I would encourage you to give your attention to His Highness. If the press believes you’re disinterested they might try to create a new story.”

Cosette gave a deep nod of understanding.

“Do you have any questions Miss Éponine?” Claudia asked.

I felt like I had to come up with something, even if Claudia would berate me for it.

“How should we sit? Are we all tucking our left or right ankles?” I asked.

“Well you will all be sitting stage right, so I would recommend universally tucking the right ankle so it points to His Highness,” she thought, bringing her hand to her face.

“What a great question, Éponine! I would have tucked my left ankle,” Cosette lied to make me look better in front of Claudia.

Claudia quickly began to clarify with the other Elite so there wouldn’t be any misconceptions about how we were to sit. I rolled my eyes as Cosette laughed.

“You didn’t have to lie just to save me from the wrath of Claudia,” I smiled.

“I didn’t lie, the nuns taught me that lying is never acceptable. I really could have tucked my left ankle,” she shrugged as I rolled my eyes.

We sat in silence, watching Enjolras move from May to a solitary seat towards the front of the plane. I could only assume that he had exhausted himself socializing with all of the girls so quickly.

“Don’t you think it’s refreshing to be out of the palace, Éponine?” Cosette asked.

“I guess. I don’t really mind being stuck in the palace all of the time.”

“Yes, it is rather beautiful. But I did start to get cabin fever a few months ago, but thanks to Enjolras I can now go out to the garden whenever I want,” she smiled.

I was surprised to hear that since none of the Selected girls were permitted in the gardens without permission due to safety concerns. Enjolras had bent the rules for Cosette, so were they closer than I had realized? Then again, Enjolras bent the rules for me every time I went to a meeting with Les Amis.

“When is your next date?” I slipped, not thinking before I spoke.

“He wants to go horseback riding after breakfast tomorrow. Listening to the other girls it sounds like he has a busy week ahead of him,” she frowned.

“What’s wrong with that?” I asked, wondering what had upset the usually bubbly Cosette.

“I’m just worried that Enjolras doesn’t reciprocate any of our feelings. I mean he’s jumping about to make all of these dates so quickly that I’m not sure what's going through his head,” she frowned, looking out of the window.

“Do you love him?”

“He’s very kind to me and I can tell that he cares about me, but I don’t know if I would say I’m in love with him. Papa told me that when you’re in love, you just know. I’ve read books that say when you fall in love it’s like being born again and it’s like nothing else matters. Have you ever felt like that?”

“I think, maybe a little,” I smiled.

I felt my face heat up as I began to picture Marius, who had been so kind to me since we met. Of course, Enjolras was also kind and generous, but he felt more like an intellectual challenge than my soulmate. Whenever I became sad or angry I knew that his calming letters could fix any situation. Even the pictures of Paris had become a sanctuary after listening to Teresa brag for several hours in the Women’s Room. And even though my life would be forever changed for good if I won the Selection and married Enjolras, Marius was different. We didn’t spend any of our time talking about politics, even though Marius was a lawyer. We spoke about poems and the worlds we wished we could live in. Marius was the only person that knew of my family’s origin. And yet, despite knowing my horrible secret, and he still wrote to me regularly.

When we landed in Carolina, there were more press members than I had ever seen, even more than the day I flew to Angeles. We were instructed to keep a solemn expression as long as we remained in the public eye, to express the seriousness of the occasion. The airport was louder than anything I could remember. Reporters were screaming their questions at all of us and while some of them focused on the crime, most of them concerned the Selection.

“Lady Teresa, who are you wearing?”

“Lady Adele, have you and the Prince kissed?”

“Lady Éponine, how does it feel to cheat the caste system?”

I felt the anger begin to grow so hot that my blood could boil. Illeá was divided on a Six making The Elite. Some thought that I was the perfect picture of Lower Caste representation while others thought that I was a greedy, heartless whore that had slept my way to the top. But both sides were wrong because I wasn’t pristine or heartless. But the longer I was in the palace the more I agreed that the money was a large influence and after last night’s kiss, how far would I go to stay here? Justine had written to me that there was enough money for Azelma, Mercer, and me to attend the most expensive university in Illeá. I didn’t have anything to gain by staying in The Selection any longer. Although, as I sat on the stage with my right ankle tucked I remembered what Enjolras said last night.

He didn’t want me to leave, even after I told him that I was a Six. I had completely forgotten that Enjolras knew I was just like any other servant that worked in the palace. I stared at him while he delivered an emotional and empowering speech on the importance of unity. His blonde curls appeared darker, like the circles under his eyes, showing that he hadn’t slept after he left my room. I noticed that here he stood firm and tall which opposed how he spoke wildly with his hands at the Cafe. Was I really the only member of the Elite that had seen the real Enjolras? Did Enjolras bring the other girls to kitchens to make them sandwiches? Was he lying when he said he didn’t have feelings for me?

Just as Enjolras began to reach the conclusion of his speech I could hear the crowd begin to scream. Enjolras stopped speaking, something I had never seen unless it was me that interrupted him. A loud bang rang through the crowd and all hell broke loose. Citizens ran in every direction trying to move to safety away from the shooter. Another gunshot rang through the area and my body began to move before I could control it. I felt myself jump past the guards that were beginning to shield the Elite and Enjolras. I felt my heel snap beneath my weight as I collided with the Reports that were fleeing.

I smelled him before he grabbed me. The smell of alcohol and cigarettes brought me back sleepless nights on the pull-out couch while Azelma snored lightly. All of the memories of screaming matches, beatings, and the slow-burning pains associated with being a human ashtray made me stop in my tracks. My father grabbed me by my arm and marched me into one of the many buildings that surrounded City Hall. The knife pointed into my side would tighten whenever I would try to fight him and eventually Babet caught up to us so he could hold his gun to my back. When we finally reached our destination, I was handcuffed to a pole on the wall.

“Are you crazy?” I screamed at my father before he slapped me across my face.

“You don’t write, you don’t call, if I didn’t know any better I would say you’ve been avoiding your dear Papa,” he growled.

“Well it’s good to know there really is something in the space between your ears,” I spit at him.

“You little brat, I’ll kill you right here!” He screamed, holding the knife to my neck.

“Go ahead. I’m sure you’ll get away even though the Royal Family would pool all of their resources to find my killer. Your little gang would be discovered and you would all hang,” I snarled.

My face was numb after the third slap.

“Listen here you brat, you’re going to do a job for us. Call it insurance, in case that Prince finds himself a better hussy for his bed. You’re going to start giving Montparnasse the attention he deserves or you’ll get some well-deserved visits. Of course, you should know that If you tell anyone, you can kiss your loverboy goodbye,” he sneered.

I wanted to scream but I was being suffocated as something was held over my face. Everything was becoming fuzzy as I felt myself slipping into unconsciousness. When I woke up, it felt like a fever dream. Joly and Combeferre were above my head having a serious discussion.

“We should tell Enjolras about these scars and burns. She was clearly being abused before she came here,” Combeferre whispered.

“That would violate confidentiality, ‘Ferre. We can’t make exceptions to the rule,” Joly refuted.

“If Enjolras knew how bad it really was he might stop ignoring his feelings for ‘Ponine. If his mother didn’t tell him that he needed to see the other Elite, he’d probably stayed here until she was discharged.”

My mind started racing just as everything began to go fuzzy again.

[dates101]

The Park Date

Before we get into this, I want to give thanks to Awkwardmarine for this awesome date idea! Also, I’m going to write this one a bit differently than other blog posts, because I have a bunch of ideas for the park, yet they aren't big enough to have their own post. So I’m just going to write all of them down, and you can pick and choose which ones interest you. Now with that being said, I present to you dear readers 12 date ideas to do at the park!

The Date

Like most of my date ideas, planning ahead of time will be essential. BUT, I hear you say, what if I wanted a spur of the moment, no planning required, back up idea. I hear you loud and clear, so I’m going to include free date ideas that don't require any planning! But no matter what idea is your favourite, you're going to need a public city park to do this in, so hopefully you have one near you. Can you do all of these ideas at once? Of course, but I would recommend only picking a few, or at least having them in the back of your mind in case one of your dates ends quickly and you need to think of something fast to do. Hope you have fun!

The 12 Park Date Ideas

People watching: Simply put, you and your significant other are going to sit somewhere and watch people walk by you. But of course there’s a little more to that. Try to figure them out before they walk out of sight. Guess their story, occupation, favourite colour, whether they're vegan or not, that sort of thing.

20 questions: Ever play 20 questions before? You’re going to think of something (literally anything) and your partner has 20 questions to find out more about what you picked. Also, you can only answer with yes or no. Oh, and did I mention you're gonna be doing this on the swings? If you're asking the questions you push. Switch once its the other persons turn!

Kite Flying: This one is super fun on a windy day. You can easily pick up a dollar store kite or make your own! Better yet, if you go on “The Arcade Date” I wrote about many moons ago, make sure to get one of those build your own toy planes and have races!

Catch: A football, Frisbee, tennis ball, or baseball can work for this activity. Bonus points if you're practising for a coed sports league (date foreshadowing??) 

Cloud Watching: It’s actually a lot more fun than it sounds. The more ridiculous the object in the sky the better!

Eye Spy: Ok hear me out first. You're gonna walk the full length of the park, making mental notes of things that catch your eye. Once you've picked something, your partner has to try and guess what it is. Start at the entrance (or wherever you want) and give hints about your selection. Hints could be how big it is, the colour, if your partner is “hot or cold”. But the catch here is they can only ask for 5 hints!

Events: Look to see if there is an event happening in your local park. There’s usually something happening during the summer months, you never know what you might stumble upon. 

Painting/Drawing: Bring some art supplies and paint the scenery of your choice! Bonus points if its sunset.

Picnic: Bring a blanket, maybe some food, and enjoy eating outside. Need a spin on this idea? Well lucky for you I’ve already written about a super awesome picnic date idea!

Ice Cream: Theres always some kind of ice cream vendor near city parks (hopefully). So grab a cone in one hand, your partners hand in the other, and walk through the park, enjoying your delicious treat. Just watch out for bugs.

Talk: This one is pretty self explanatory, but just sitting and talking could make for a great date! Especially if you don't know much about them yet.

Make Out: And of course, a romantic classic. Find somewhere secluded and hidden from the other park goers, and just have a really fun and passionate make out session!

Wrap Up

What did you think of this different blog post style? Usually I like to go into great detail about my ideas (as you obviously know), but for this Sundays post I wanted to mix it up a bit. Also, I’m surprised nobody called me out on this, but last week I didn't post anything. I have good reasons though! I’m working on something pretty cool, but more on that when its ready. 

Remember, make every date a story.

-Dates101

[scarlettswxtch]

You Feel Like Home | 1/2

Pairing: Bucky x Reader

Description: You’re a therapist with a tragic past and Bucky’s your new bedmate. You try to deny your feelings for him but he keeps working himself into your heart...and your bed. Will you fall for his charms or keep him at bay?

Words: 3.1k

Warnings: Little bit of angst. All my fics are intended for 18+ readers: this mini series will contain + death.

A/N: I wrote this in a plane, on my way home from Easter holidays so I’m v sorry for any spelling mistakes! :) This was written for an anon - I kinda slightly changed your request up a bit, hope that’s okay ! hope this is (kinda) what you were looking for x Also Jesus Christ I can’t do one shots I just write a fuck ton. Lol. I’m posting part 2 tomorrow!! :)

MASTERLIST

You were in a grocery store when you first realised you were in love with him. He wanted ice cream even though it was cold outside - the wind was biting, chilling and New York was covered in perfect snow. He couldn’t decide what flavour of ice cream he wanted and you teased him about his indecision. “Why don’t we buy every flavour?”

He laughed - soft, innocent laughter in the air like glitter. The kind of laugh you could listen to forever. “You’re silly,” he said, green eyes sparkling with adoration and he kissed you.

You’ll never forget that kiss. Breath pale against the numbing air, you blinked thoughtfully as the frost patiently kissed his face and you were captivated by the soft, dusty illusions of light that sat heavy on his eyelashes. In that moment, you knew you loved him more than anyone, a once in a lifetime.

***

2 years later

“Talk to me,” you whispered to no one, sitting alone in the very early morning of crisp November. It was cold outside but, you didn’t care. It was snowing again, thick and deep and freezing cold. There were a few clouds but the moon shone bright and gilded you in silver but, you didn’t notice it. You saw nothing and heard nothing.

You’d been up here countless times before their deaths. His death - etched in your memory like it was yesterday.

It happened so fast. You were wrapped in his arms; laughing, kissing, telling each other sweet nothings. His lips tipped up and he looked at you like you were sunshine. You’ll never forget that look - how moments later it filled with horror and panic.

A figure appeared out of a bright, blinding red light; an ominous warning of what would come. It was a woman - beautiful, slender, with eyes uncanny to his; round, green as new-born leaves. She had his eyes but she didn’t look at you with adoration. No. Her eyes slithered on your form like it was insulting, gaze almost red with resentment. When she spoke it was melodic yet she spat her words with hot-red fury. “I have to kill you,” she said and when you asked her why your heart wanted to leap out of its chest. Your daughter. His daughter. Our daughter. “HYDRA’s orders,” she spat and he pulled you behind him without a second thought, sacrificing his life for yours, blood marring the dirt as his form became nothing but a corpse.

You stared at the ground - snow once blood stained long washed away or mingled with dirt. You didn’t know why you kept coming here. You wanted to hear his voice, see his face, replace that final look of fear and tell him everything would be ok. Instead, you sat there, dominated by a profound sadness, fatigue engraved on your worn face. No longer could you see see that inquisitiveness, that desire, that fire in your eyes. All that remained was the deceiving hollow soul. You were just a shell of a person.

***

3 months later

“Would it kill you to come to dinner?,”

You drew absentminded doodles on the piece of paper in front of you as your lips pursed in discomfort. Yes, yes it would kill you to go to dinner at Jane’s house.

“Jane,” you said into the phone “like I told you, I’m really busy,”

“But I thought you said you’d have some free time coming up?,”

Your eyes closed over in exasperation. Jane was your dead boyfriend’s sister and there truly was nothing worse than being around his family. “I was but things got busy. Very busy. I can’t make dinner this week,”

“How about next week?,” she pushed.

“Janey...”

“I’m worried about you, I haven’t seen you in months! I mean, who’s taking care of you?,”

“Jane honey, I’m a grown woman.”

“But I worry about you. Ever since you took that job I haven’t seen you,” she whispered, this time sad and concerned and, because you loved her, it killed you. You knew she was worried. You and Jane had been the best of friends before his passing, attached to the hip like sisters. When he died, you couldn’t bare her presence - she looked so much like him it physically hurt you. Jane was flighty, sensitive and nervous by nature. Therefore, she constantly checked up on you despite your excuses to avoid her. That, and, you now lived in New York with hero’s that needed your constant attention.

“Don’t worry,” you assure her quietly “I’m fine. Just busy.”

“Pardon me, Miss, but Mr.Barnes is requesting your presence,” F.R.I.D.A.Y says from above you and your pen comes to a halt.

“Jane I gotta go,” you say quickly.

“But-“ she began.

“Somethings just came up, honey. Really, gotta go. I’ll call you back later,” that was a lie.

You heard her sigh then, “Okay, I’ll be waiting for that call.”

“Love you Jane, bye.” you hear her say goodbye but vaguely.

“Send him in,” you say to F.R.I.D.A.Y, fingers now tapping nervously on your mahogany desk. Being a therapist for the Avengers has its perks and downsides - on one hand, you were generously paid (courtesy of Stark himself, of course) but on the other, you were on call 24/7. Not that that was an issue for you, no - not at all. Helping other people with their problems had helped your own inner conflict and you did it rather readily.

The problem was Bucky Barnes. He's not usually the kind of guy you fantasise about. For starters, he's brunette and you’ve always liked blondes. Dreamy men with bright blue eyes who were emotionally stable, preferably. Until you met Bucky. He’s someone with his own issues, issues that made your own seem totally minuscule. Life taken by Hydra, experimented on endlessly. He‘s emotionally volatile, prone to aggression and...drop dead beautiful in every way.

There was also the fact that you were sleeping with him. Non-stop. Like two damn bunny rabbits. It was insane. He’s the only healthy drug there is, the one that puts your mind into a frenzy of sparks. Makes you...forget. When you’re with him, your past life seems like a dream - something that never happened. The simple touch of his hand leads you into moving in ways you never learnt but know so well. In those moments, you are only alive in the present, all thoughts of past and future melted away. You weren’t sure if that was good or bad but, the guilt you felt over it was overwhelming.

The elevator opens directly into your office and you watch him step in, phone to ear, he hasn't looked at you yet so you gaze freely. “Yeah yeah, Steve I got it,” he says into the phone. There's something about him, a slight confidence and inflated ego, that has you muddling your words and blushing uncontrollably whenever he's around. He looks up at you and smiles a dazzling smile, making his way to your desk. “I’ll see you later punk, I got a woman that needs my attention.” he says, eyes still on you and you can hear Steve’s hearty laugh through the phone before he hangs up.

“Hey darlin’,” his voice is smooth as silk as he leans over, placing a kiss on your warm cheek. He’s holding a coffee cup that he places in front of you and he sits down on the velvet green chair opposite your desk - looking all handsome and comfortable. You suddenly felt small in your own office - his energy completely enveloped the room. It was always like this with Bucky. He was an intense guy who commanded everyone’s attention - it was completely impossible for him to walk into a room unnoticed.

You eyed the coffee cup, smiling “That for me?”

“Got your name on it, doll,” He said lazily, head bent as he tapped away on his phone. You took it giddily, bringing it up to your face and smelling the hint of hazelnut. You smiled to yourself - you only ever ordered coffee with him once and ever since, he’s remembered exactly how you like it: a little milk, 2 pumps of hazelnut syrup and no sugar. It was a small thoughtful thing but, so very heartwarming.

“Hmm, what’s the occasion?”

“Consider that a gift,” he said, sliding his phone back in his pocket.

You raised a brow, scanning your memory for anything you’d done to solicit a gift and you came up blank “What for?” you were frowning now as you sip your coffee.

He kept a straight face, he was looking at you with those gorgeous, irresistible icy blue eyes that could make the whole of the Arctic melt in seconds. “For you coming to Tony’s event with me.” That almost made you choke. Bucky and you were many things but explicitly public was not one of them.

Your eyes turn round as you abruptly placed the coffee cup on the table, a little warm droplet spilled on your hand and you unconsciously wiped it on your skirt. Well, say hello to a stain now, idiot. “What?”

“You and me, Tony’s charity gala,” he said simply, completely un-phased.

“What? Bucky I never agreed to that”

“Don’t need you to agree doll, I’m telling you,”

You stared at him speechlessly. Bucky was a dominant guy - you knew that the second he first walked into your room and sat his ass down on your chair like he owned the place. The only vulnerability he ever showed was during your therapy sessions, when you’d both speak about Hydra and his past with Steve. Other than that, you could be damn well sure Bucky Barnes would dominate you in every way possible and damn if it wasn’t hot. Sometimes, only sometimes, you felt like you could see some of that softness when he was in your bed but, he never let you see it for long enough. You didn’t blame him - you pushed him away a lot.

He raised a brow at your quietness and you realised you hadn’t said anything for about a full minute now. “Uhh,” you began, damn him and his tongue-tying effects! “Bucky I’m not so sure that is professional considering I’m your therapist-,”

“Darlin’ I think we’re way past professionalism,” he interrupted, leaning closer to you - he was looking at you with heat in his eyes as his gaze lazily flickered from your desk to your eyes “Whole of New York heard you scream my name when I took you on that desk,” he muttered, loud enough for you to hear.

You swallowed, heat flushing your face as a sudden tingling sensation took over your stomach. “Bucky I cant - I...it’s different for the public to know. You’re not exactly lowkey.” It’s true. He isn’t. The Avengers are all high profile people constantly all over the news - from dating to getting a coffee cup across the street, you could be sure their faces would be somewhere on the front page. You experienced that first hand when you were spotted out with Steve. Headlines covered both newspapers and magazines in bold red letters: AMERICA’S SWEETHEART? They read - totally ridiculous considering you were only getting coffee but apparently, the public obsessed over Steve’s love life. Jane had called you asking if you were dating and you panicked so much you vowed to never step foot outside with any of them again. Except for Tony and Barton who were happily married.

Bucky stood up, face flashing with something that faded too quick for you to spot “Doll seriously, I’m tired of you denying that we have something here. It started off as just sex,” he leaned into the desk, face dangerously close to yours “we both know it’s a lot more,” he whispered and your heart started beating irregularly fast. He wasn’t wrong. It was...more. He made you feel good in ways no one else ever has - not even him. Bucky made you forget him. That made you feel incredibly guilty because he was supposed to be your soulmate - he still is in some ways. Yet Bucky got this response from you, a different kind of response - like necessity - as if your soul yearned to knit itself to his and it killed you. So much so it hurt to ignore it.

“I-I I can’t,”

“Why?”

“I have...I just can’t do that to him, Bucky,” your eyes lowered as you looked away from him “I still love him,” you said, jaw tight “please, let it go.”

You were met with silence and you peered up at him. He was staring at you with that hardness in his eyes - the same hardness you saw each night when you asked him to leave your room. His jaw twitched in what you could only guess was impatience, frustration, annoyance...perhaps all three?

“The more you hold onto the past the more it haunts you,” he mutters and his eyes search your face - voice lowering, almost soft. “Don’t think I don’t see the way you look at me across the room, sugar” his hand curls around your neck, squeezing it and your body shivers at the contact. “I know that look,” he whispers - gaze so raw you could only squirm beneath it. “I’m here right now, in the present. I won’t wait for you forever.”

You swallowed as your heart clenched “Bucky let go,” you said, so quietly that if he hadn’t been so close to you it would’ve been inaudible.

But Bucky Barnes was not done. You’d know this when he was not across the table but in your space. So far in your space, you were now standing and your soft body was pressed against the length of his, his hand curled around the back of your neck, demanding, putting pressure to bend your neck up as your lips connected. You put your hands to his shoulders to push him away, your mind filled with how you could do that as gently as possible when his tongue came out and the tip touched your lips. And at that, your body and mouth made another decision before your mind could catch up. This being your arms closing around him tight, his mouth opening yours, his tongue spiking out, pushing yours back into your mouth and then he kissed you, very hard, very wet and very, very deep. He tasted like mint - sweet and fresh and fucking fantastic.

You kept one of your hands locked tight around his bicep while you slid the other hand up his spine, his neck and into his hair. He bent forward slightly, arching over his arm, forcing your body deeper into his and you moaned a sweet, soft moan against his tongue. It was the best thing you’d ever tasted in your life until he pulled away.

You looked up at him, breathless and outraged at the same time - smugness was written across his features as he stepped away from you. He was smirking now as if you’d just told him what he needed to know “I’ll wait for that RSVP,” he said and finally strolled out of your office.

***

3 hours later

Nat was looking at you from across the table, face totally impassive. You told her everything to the minutest detail that happened between Bucky and you. And it was fair to say you remembered the minutest detail.

Through this, she listened.

When you were done, you asked quietly, “Well?”

She simply stared at you, eyebrow raised and book in hand, “Was there a question?”

You looked at her incredulously “Yes! What do you think I should do?” You slumped back into your chair, hand covering your face as you grumbled: “God Nat I’m so torn, he makes me feel good but-“

“All I’m hearing is excuses,” she interrupted suddenly and you peeked at her from behind your fingers. She was looking at you with her judge-y jade green eyes.

“Nat he freaks me out!” You exclaimed and she suddenly took your hand in hers. She was staring at you with an unusual softness and you felt incredibly lucky at that moment. You knew this caring side was something Natasha rarely showed to people - it was something she had only gifted you twice in your time of knowing each other and each time, you took that look of hers and locked it away in your heart to keep forever.

“I get that,” she says softly “I also get why. You’re scared of moving on, feeling guilty because of what happened. I’ll tell you this though, nothing good comes of dwelling on the past,” she echoed Bucky’s earlier words and your heart clenched because you knew she was right. “You should know that - you’re the therapist here. Follow your own advice. Besides, from what you told me, who you were with was not a selfish person. He would’ve wanted you to be happy - not be a nun and never find love again. I think we both know that...you’re just having trouble accepting it.” She let go of your hand and leaned back in her chair, face turned up to the February sun.

“God I hate it when you’re right,” you grumbled, fingers massaging your temples in contemplation.

“I’m always right,” she says without looking at you. “You already know Barnes. He’s got a lot of demons, but he’s good around you - we all see that he’s been better ever since you.”

You closed your eyes “Oh God-“

“What we gossiping about here?” A voice said from the kitchen door and you squealed at the unexpected interruption. It was Tony.

Nat was about to say something before you quickly interrupted her with wide eyes. “Nothing!,” you said, and Tony’s eyes assess you in thought but (thankfully) chose to say nothing of what he was thinking.

“Right...” he drawled before he distractedly began pressing at the advanced looking gadget on his hand.

“Need you in the office, sweet cheeks, ASAP.” He said, waving at you to follow him and you promptly got up from your chair.

“Right away boss,” you said and followed him. You turned around quickly to face Nat “Thank you,” you mouthed to her. She only nodded in response and went back to reading her book.

As you followed Tony, something told you you’d have a very, very difficult time trying to get Bucky Barnes out of your head and the truth is...you weren’t even sure you wanted to.