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almostnothuman · 2 years

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EMDR Fun - Thoracic Battleground

CW: long af (at least that’s the way the first draft was trending before I saved it as a draft and it disappeared from existence in the interceding time (and I forgot all the jokes I initially had, so long and boooring)), middle-aged moroseness/malaise, some suicide talk.

I’ve never been great at holding myself accountable, except when it comes to blaming myself for everything, regardless of how much responsibility I actually bear for whatever trespass, real or imagined. That’s one of the reasons self care - journaling, posting here, writing shitty poetry and shittier songs, riding my bike, going to the gym, etc - tends to slide for the right for me. I doubt I am unique in that sense, but maybe relatable. I went through an angry at everything phase (which I think is almost over, hopefully I haven’t just gotten used to it), a really fucking hard to get out of bed phase (it’s always hard, but harder lately, so I added “fucking,” a word that has become solely an adjective anymore, though I do find myself missing the verb form, but that’s a whole other thing (sorry, I got frustrated for a minute about the lack of non-solo sexual activity in my life, which probably stems from a larger frustration regarding a stark lack of any form of intimacy in my life, but not so frustrated I’m inclined to do anything about it because... people)), am on the fence about suicide (though currently getting my affairs in order seems like work, and who needs more work, but disconcerting that it feels like a viable option - again a whole other thing), a “I’m going to buy a lot of stuff to keep me busy and distract me from my problems” phase, and I’m working into a “shit, I should probably stop spending my money and act like an adult” phase. Still hard to get out of bed though.

I was told by my therapist a few months ago that, thanks to my marriage and childhood, I have complex PTSD. She recommended EMDR to help with some of the traumatic experiences in order to try to gain some traction on a sense of self worth. This is something I’ve struggled with for quite a while. Since middle school my baseline mental state was somewhere between the call of the void and passive ideation. I just thought it was like that for everybody, and the crap I had to endure (partly from childhood but mostly during marriage) were things everybody dealt with more gracefully, at least outwardly, than me. It occurred to me recently that maybe my baseline could be better, discussed it with my therapist and set some goals for EMDR.

Initially it was fantastic. Cheap ass bike my rich dad and stepmother got me for Christmas because she didn’t feel I was worth spending more than the bare minimum on? Boom, done! (Little disappointed in myself for the material nature of this particular touchstone but hey, I never claimed to be anything more than a trope). Ex telling my buying a new wedding set would go a long way towards her getting over her cheating on me? Rapidly fading memory! (Still salty though, this was one of my favorite things to get all twisted up about - stupid personal growth). Being ghosted by a person I didn’t mean to get feelings for but accidentally fell all the way in love with? Fucking Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind that shit! Wait... why didn’t it work on that last one?

Instead I had pain ping-ponging around my chest and left shoulder for 2 days and for the next week I experienced what can only be described as aggravated, full-body nausea. The only real respite I had was taking a day road trip, putting on an audiobook to avoid the doldrum of driving and destressify any traffic I would hit. Otherwise, with any idle or otherwise unaccounted for clock cycles my brain tends to gravitate towards this person. For better or worse I tend to get stuck on certain people, places or things. Basically, for any proper noun there is a low likelihood of fixation, but a high severity if it happens. And in the case of people, when feelings hit holy shit do they hit hard. Sometimes this leads to me getting in incredible shape, or writing a shit ton of songs, or hand- wringing about people. Brain-wringing maybe more accurate? So there are weeks like the last one when, aside from 37 minutes I had to try to pay attention in a meeting but ended up obsessively picking at what I though was a zit on the bridge of my nose (it was not, I basically just scraped of the top layers of skin) while composing a lighthearted conversation with a not-very-close friend (that I would do anything for regardless) complete with two alternate endings where she ended up sending me nudes (trope alert! And none of the predicted variations of this conversation materialized, nor did any actual conversation for that matter, but better over-over prepared I suppose ), that any spare brainpower I have reverts to maladaptive daydreaming (maladaptive my ass, I doubt I would’ve ever developed any social acumen without it) about scenarios involving this person, how things went, and how things could go. But I’m straying from the point.

[insert time passing here]

Ok, it’s been like 3 weeks and another EMDR session on the same memory writing/procrastinating this. The sensations weren't quite as acute in the days after the last session, but I still had the full body roiling nausea for a couple days. Then a couple days reprieve, probably due to emotional exhaustion. I thought I was finally in the clear when a few days ago I started to feel that bottomless pit level of nausea I tend to equate with interminable sadness. And my therapist says she wants to go one more session on this memory. Holy fuck.

This does remind me a bit of when I started antidepressants. Initially I had an amazing, halcyon haze where I did not give a shit about anything. It was... amazing, I guess I said that already, but it was that good. After a couple days it felt like my brain was actively fighting the medication. It almost literally felt like a knock-down, drag out fight was happening inside my body. That largely equilibrated to moderate tension and my thoughts were toned down to a dull roar versus constant, full on stampede. The largest benefit of antidepressants is I am not in a near constant state of passive ideation, though that makes it somewhat more disconcerting when my thoughts drift back to more morbid territory.

Hopefully my experience with EMDR will even out like the antidepressants did. Maybe I’m just being petty and am unwilling to give up the hurt because I don’t want the feelings that developed to be invalidated. I mean, even with a heavily asterisked list, I’ve only had post-superficial feelings maybe a half dozen times, and non of the previous really even compare what I felt with this one.

We’ll see what happens after then next appointment. I can’t really drag this post out much longer, I feel guilty for not finishing and continuing to put off something that’s supposed to be self care. Plus I’m pissed I lost the running joke I had in the first draft. I’m sure I’ll get over it, but I’ve gotten stuck worse on less.

(ok maybe just long and not long af)

#emdr #suicidal ideations #not a cry for help just is what it is

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thefanficmonster · 3 years

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Inky Memories

Corpse Husband x Reader (Female)

Warnings: Swearing, Drug Use (Past), Domestic Violence (Past), Shoplifting (Past)

Genre: Angst, Fluff

Summary: Tattoos can reveal a lot about a person. What will Y/N’s tattoos, which she has kept hidden for so long, reveal to Corpse? Will it change anything between them?

Requested by Anon. If you’re reading this you know who you are 😊 Thank you for the request, hope you like what I did with it. Sorry if I made it too angsty! And my most sincere apologies for publishing it so late. Enjoy XOXO ❤

“Guys, come on now! I’m not hiding anything!“ I laugh, looking up from the comments to the camera, “You know how much I hate being embarrassed! Believe me when I say these tattoos are EMBERRASSING. I got them while I was either drunk or in my emo phase and I’m not too proud of them.“

I’m currently doing an Instagram live Q&A session that I scheduled last week. I do one every month and it’s my favorite way of connecting with my audience. An hour of chill lo-fi and questions and answers. I get really excited every time I schedule the session. My fans are such amazing people and they are all so supportive, funny, intelligent...I could go on and on about their positive qualities. One thing I’m not too fond of is their persistent curiosity. Here’s why.

Yesterday, while streaming, I got an unexpected pain in my forearm. Instinctively, I lifted my shirt sleeve to see what was wrong, flashing a few tattoos at my viewers in the process. I’ve never mentioned my tattoos to my audience, not even my boyfriend, actually, so to have this much attention on them so suddenly makes me want to hide them even more. People started commenting on them during the stream and I tried to dodge the majority of the questions, but I knew they would be inevitable during the Q&A. If the session hadn’t been scheduled for like a week at that point I maybe would’ve postponed it until the dust settled.

“I have several. Not only on my arm.“ I only answer these vague questions. I avoid the ones that are asking details like what is depicted with the tattoos and what’s their meaning, bla, bla, bla.

Here’s the thing. I got my first tattoo when I was fifteen at this shady alley tattoo shop and I’ve been obsessed with tattoos since. I made a deal with myself to get at least one every year.

Needless to say, I’m twenty years old and have almost the same number of tattoos. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not ashamed of them. And I lied when I said they were embarrassing. I am quite happy with them, the way they look, at least. Each of them represent something different. Unfortunately, they are representative of some dark and depressing times. Times I want only the fewest of few people to know about.

“Yes, he’s here. You can’t see him, but he’s waving. He says hi.“ Corpse is the perfect distraction. My viewers love him just as much - maybe more - as they love me.

He knows how easily I get overwhelmed by the attention and pressure of thousands of eyes on me and whenever I’m having a hard time while streaming all he has to do is walk in my recording room and just say the most random thing. Recently, his go-to phrase has been ‘Chicken wing’ and it always cracks up both me and my viewers.

Speaking of Corpse, him and I have been dating for over a year now. We moved in together a month or two before quarantine was officially a thing so we have been together 24/7. It’s scary how many things you can pick up on when you spend so much time with someone. That, of course, means he has noticed some of my tattoos. He has asked me about them, like why I cover them up and why am I so secretive about them and I’ve always been vague and indirect with my answers. He’s the sweetest and most patient person ever, so he has never pressed me with the questions, but I’m still hoping to gain the courage to reveal them to him someday.

“Thanks for tuning in, guys! See you tomorrow for my regular stream and next month for a chill hang out like this one. Love you, stay safe. Mwah!“ And with that the live video is done and I can finally breathe out a sigh of relief.

“Now we can order dinner“ I smile at Corpse who is chilling on the couch in my recording room. He looks up from his phone screen, returning my smile. “Were you recording a Behind The Scenes again?“

He does that often, not only with my Instagram lives but sometimes my streams as well. That’s actually how we revealed our relationship to our fanbases.

He nods, “Yeah.” He pauses for a second, switching to a sitting position with his feet touching the floor. We’re almost at eye-level now. His arms snake around my waist as he pulls me closer towards him. I take the hint and settle in his lap, my legs on either side of him. “I admire how well you handled the pressure back there. I know how you feel about that topic.”

The small bit of anxiety that has started spreading throughout my chest disappears. He has that calming effect on me. Like my own personal safety blanket that’s with me at all times. “I wouldn’t have handled it so well if you weren’t here with me.” I say as I run a hand through his hair, moving a few stray curls away from his gorgeous eyes.

He shakes his head, making the strands fall back over his eyes, “It has nothing to do with me, Y/N. You are simply an amazing person, that’s all.“ His cold hand cups my burning red cheek, leaning my head down so our foreheads are touching. “Nothing could change my mind about it.“

That sentence causes a small pang in my chest. I feel like a manipulator. I’ve led this man to fall in love with me without knowing the past versions. I realize it’s incredibly manipulative of me to reveal my dark aspects only after we’re head over heels for one another, but I can live with it. If it were up to me, he’d never have to know. He would never have to find out that I’m not the amazing person he thinks I am. I have been broken countless times before and all my pieces are just glued in place. Not all of them are where they’re supposed to be and some of them are on the verge of breaking off. Just like a mirror. You can put all the pieces together but not only will you see the cracks, the shards can fall at any moment.

My tattoos are to me as the cracks are to the mirror - evidence of my fragility and the many falls and breaks I’ve had throughout my life.

“Are you sure about that?“ I whisper, trying my hardest to engrave every detail of this moment in my mind because, after what I’m about to do, I’m afraid we might never be like this again.

The softness of his curls, his scent, his warmth, the way he makes me feel. I can hardly believe I’m risking losing all of that, but I owe him the truth.

I feel him nod against my forehead. I tense up and pull away so I can look him in the eyes. It’s hard for me to maintain eye contact especially when I’m fighting back tears. I can’t even say I’m about to lose him. I’m about to let him go. It’s up to him if he stays or decides that he deserves better.

No backing out, Y/N.

I grab the hem of my sweater and lift it up, revealing the many ink drawings on my skin. I discard the sweater on the floor, leaving me in only my bra meaning all my tattoos are on display. Not exactly all, I have some on my legs as well, but these are some of the most important ones. The ones which reveal most about who I used to be.

Corpse takes my hands, tilting my arms so he can take a better look at the tattoos that go from my wrists to the bend of my arm. His thumbs caress the tattoo on each of my wrists. “This one... “ I nod to my left wrist, “I got on my friend’s birthday. We both did. They’re matching.“ The tattoo depicts a heart with a keyhole. “She got the key.“

“I thought I had the key.“ He says, smirking up at me.

“You do now.“ I feel the pang again but this time it doesn’t go away. It’s a constant pain - a constant fear. Being scared of something inevitable is the most nerve-wracking feeling. It makes you feel small, helpless, like you’re standing aside watching your life be controlled by a force you can’t see.

Before he can break me even more, I go on, nodding to my upper arm, a little below my shoulder where there’s a rope tattoo that bends around my arm, its ends connecting in a bow, “I got this one after my shoulder healed.”

His brows furrow in concern as he tilts my head for me to look at him, “Healed from what?”

Here we go. Let the cat out of the bag. “Um....well...” I instinctively reach up to touch my shoulder, running my fingertips over the inked rope. “My dad wasn’t a very nice guy.”

I can pinpoint the second his heart breaks. I don’t want to hear what he has to say, I know it will kill me, so I just continue, moving onto the one on my other wrist where the word ‘Shadow’ is written in cursive writing, “This was my nickname in my friend group. I was the only one to never get caught shoplifting.”

The tears are gonna start rolling at any moment so I deliver the final blow, moving onto the most traumatic event, aka the tattoo on my collarbone of a heartbeat turning into a dead line and kicking up again, “This one I got after I woke up from my almost overdose.”

As if on cue, a tear falls from my eye onto his hand that’s still holding mine. My voice remains still, to my surprise, but I know it won’t be long before it too gives and breaks. I can’t look at him. I don’t want to see any sympathy or that look like he doesn’t recognize me. I feel like I’ve let both myself and him down.

“Why didn’t you tell me any of this?“ he asks me in a whisper. He sounds almost hurt. “You know you can tell me anything.“

I see another tear fall, “I know. I just...didn’t want you to think any less of me.“

Again, he lifts my head so he can look me straight in the eyes. He knows how much I struggle with eye contact and how much I hate crying in front of people, he knows how vulnerable I feel when someone’s looking me in the eyes or when someone sees me cry. He also knows that he’s the only exception to that rule. He knows I never feel out of place when he’s around.

“Think less of you? Babe, you’re a fighter like no other. You picked you life back up. You did all that on your own. You’re a warrior, Y/N.“

I smile through the tears which are now ones of joy instead of fear and dread. “I was a dumb teenager, Corpse. I had no idea what I was doing. I just wanted to get a thrill and feel something other than pain. I know I went about it the wrong way but...” he gives my hand an encouraging squeeze, “And you’re wrong, I didn’t do it all on my own.” I release his hand so I can cup his cheek. His hand comes up to cover mine as I swipe my thumb on his cheekbone, “I met you a month after I left the hospital. The rest you know. I moved to a less druggie populated part of town and I repaired my relationship with my aunt. All that time, I was balancing between the need to relapse and the will to stay alive. After I met you, that balancing act was no longer a balancing act at all. I didn’t even think about my past anymore. I was more focused on what I could be. On what I have to be to deserve to have you by my side.”

“You will always have me on your side, Y/N. Even when you don’t want or need me there.“ With both his hands holding mine he leans forward, connecting our lips. It’s a short kiss laced with nothing but love and adoration.

As we lay on the couch, him asking about each individual tattoo I didn’t get to tell him about, everything just seems a lot easier. Like a big area that was previously dark has suddenly turned into the brightest point of our relationship.

“I need to get that key tattooed. It’s only appropriate.“ He says, his finger tracing the heart on my wrist.

“Or an ownership deal for it. That heart’s yours, you know.“ I laugh, lifting my arm to inspect the oldest painting on my body, “It’s your favorite one?”

“No.” he shakes his head, “This is my favorite one.” he leans down and kisses the heartbeat on my collar bone. “I’m so glad it started beating again.”

“I am too.“

@susceptible-but-siriusexual @simonsbluee @save-the-sky @hacker-ghost @itsminniekat @bi-andready-tocry @imtiredaffff @jazzkaurtheglorious @hereforbeebo @fandomgirl17 @chrysanthykios @maehemscorpyus

#corpse husband #corpse #husband #corpsehusband #corpse simp #corpse husband fanfic #corpse x reader #corpse x y/n #corpse fanfiction #corpse husband fanfiction #corpse fanfic #requests #request #requests open #x reader #reader insert #love #angst

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intheticklecloset · 3 years

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Team Bonding (Haikyuu!!)

Primary Universe

Summary: It's game night in the Karasuno gym, and Noya is determined to have some fun with the first-years during Truth or Dare - especially the usually quiet Yamaguchi!

Word Count: 1,216

~~~

Noya sat cross-legged in the circle of boys, chin in his hand, unintentionally glaring at Yamaguchi. The libero was at a total loss for how to mess with this particular first-year.

The team was gathered on the floor of the gym, having scheduled tonight as a “chill out night” rather than practice as a way to relax before heading off to their next round of games. They were currently playing truth or dare, and up until now, Noya had found it easy to challenge the first-years in different ways that would amuse him and push their limits a little.

For Hinata, it was daring him to stay quiet until his next turn. The redhead had struggled but managed to do it, which the libero had to admit he was impressed with. He didn’t think even he could do that. With Kageyama he’d dared the setter to do ten push-ups in ten seconds. He’d just barely made it. Tsukishima and Yamaguchi – up until now – had always copped out by asking for “truth” rather than a dare. But finally the latter had decided to be a little braver and accept a challenge from Noya, which elated the second-year…until he couldn’t think of anything to do.

I don’t want to traumatize the poor guy, he thought. He’s way less intense than the other first-years, and this is his first dare, so I don’t want to scare him into never doing another one. How am I going to do this?

All of a sudden he remembered that fateful night at training camp a couple of months before – the one during which he and Hinata had been woken up by Yamaguchi’s silent crying in the middle of the night and joined forces to reassure him and make him feel better. Noya grinned. He had something to work with now.

“I dare you,” he said with a smirk, “to let me tickle you for two minutes without trying to stop me.”

Yamaguchi’s eyes widened. He made a little noise in the back of his throat, cheeks turning pink, eyes darting to the others around him nervously. “I d-don’t know if I can…”

“You can do it,” Noya replied, half-encouraging, half-teasing. “How hard can it be?”

Beside him, Asahi snorted on a chuckle.

The libero punched his shoulder. “Well, Tadashi? You going to do it or not?”

Yamaguchi swallowed, squeezed his eyes shut, and nodded once. “Y-Yeah. Okay.”

“Great!” Noya crawled across the circle to his underclassman, observing the smiles around them as he gently grabbed onto his sides and squeezed, easing him in gently. Yamaguchi squeaked and brought his arms in instinctively, but Noya tsked at him. “Ah-ah! Can’t stop me, remember?”

“I’m nohohohot stohohopping you,” the pinch server replied through his already unstoppable giggles. “I’m juhuhust protehehehecting myself.”

Noya hummed. “I guess I didn’t say anything about that, did I? Well, if you make it too hard for me to tickle you, that will count as a forfeit. Oh – has anyone got a timer up?”

Too distracted by the cute scene in front of them, not one person had thought to do so. Daichi announced he’d do it and quickly pulled out his phone, setting a timer for ten seconds less than two minutes for Tadashi’s sake, as Noya had already been going for about that long.

“Aw, coochie coo, Tadashi~” The libero teased with an easiness that surprised Asahi, knowing how susceptible his smaller friend was to teasing when he was on the receiving end. Yamaguchi giggled himself to the floor, doing everything he could to not push Noya away. “You’re pretty ticklish, huh, Tadashi? I can really see your freckles when you blush like that.”

“Stohohohohohohop!” Yamaguchi pleaded, arms shaking from the effort to hold still when the libero traveled up toward his underarms. “Plehehehehease! No fahahahahahair!”

“Never said I couldn’t tease you~”

For another few moments Noya tickled without hindrance, but once he got to the pinch server’s underarms Yamaguchi couldn’t help but clamp down, trying desperately to keep him out somehow. To both of their surprise, that was the moment that Tsukishima shifted from where he’d been seated on his friend’s left, reaching down to grab Yamaguchi’s wrists and pull them above his head.

“There,” the blonde said evenly, seeming completely uninterested in what was happening right now. “So it’ll be easier for you to win the dare.”

“B-But – buhuhuhuhut it tihihihihihickles even wohohohohohorse now!” Tadashi squealed, his giggles turning into laughter when Noya finally descended on his now exposed underarms. “Ahahahahaha plehehehehehease, nohohoho! Noyahahahahaha!”

Noya chuckled, scribbling gently but crazily along his underclassman’s ticklish spots, keeping him in constant mirth. He tried to exchange a mischievous glance with Tsukki, but again, the blonde didn’t seem the least bit interested. He merely held his friend to the floor without another word.

“Hohohohohohow lohohohohohong?!” Yamaguchi cried after another several seconds of tickling. His cheeks were growing pinker by the moment.

Daichi replied, “Just another minute. You’ve got this, Tadashi.”

The others in the circle voiced their agreement – especially Hinata, who was just as excited about this dare as Noya seemed to be. Tadashi, for his part, merely squealed and squeaked and laughed helplessly, twitching when the libero moved back down to his ribs and belly, eventually reaching behind him to squeeze his knees.

“NOHOhohohoho! Not thehehehere – Noya, not THEHEHEHEHEHERE!!” Yamaguchi shrieked, actively struggling against Tsukki now, who only held him tighter. “NAHAHAHAHAHAT THE KNEHEHEHEHEHEES!!”

“No? Not here? Not riiiight here?” Noya teased, reaching under his knees to knead at the sensitive undersides. “This is a good spot, isn’t it?”

“PLEHEHEHEHEHEASE!! I GIHIHIHIHIHIVE, I GIHIHIHIVE!!”

Daichi called over the noise, “It’s only fifteen more seconds, Yamaguchi! You’ve got this!”

“NAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!” Tadashi tossed his head back and screeched with laughter. Noya dug into his knee pits harder, determined to push the first-year a little more but not so much as to overdo it. “PLEHEHEHEHEHEHEASE!! I CAHAHAHAHAHAHAN’T!!”

“Five!” Daichi called, and the rest of the team joined him in counting down to zero, at which point the libero let up on his tickling attack and got off of him, ruffling his hair playfully.

“See? You did it, man. That wasn’t so hard, right?” he giggled.

Tadashi let out a few leftover snickers of his own as Tsukki released him and he sat up, trying to pretend like he wasn’t blushing like crazy and totally unbothered by all the teasing smiles he saw facing him as he looked around the circle. “Y-Yeah…not so bad.”

They all laughed as Noya went back to his spot, and Yamaguchi may have noticed the slight pinch Asahi gave his side if he weren’t being nudged by Tsukki, his attention drawn to the blonde, who gave him a look that would have appeared blank to anyone but him. Tadashi smiled gratefully at him, nudging him back. He knew what that look meant, and he couldn’t be happier for it.

Physical affection isn’t really my thing, Tsukki told him without words. But I’ll still help out whenever I can because I know you like tickling. I’ve got your back.

Yamaguchi beamed. As the game went on, he grew more and more confident that he could take on other dares, and eventually Tsukishima joined him in that endeavor.

The night ended up turning into one of his happiest memories.

#fanfiction #tickle fic #haikyuu #haikyuu!!#hq #noya #nishinoya #tadashi #yamaguchi #karasuno #truth or dare #playful #teasing #fun #game night #tickling #ticklish #tickle

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moodykylo · 3 years

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Sleep Deprived

CW: Sleep deprivation, canon typical self loathing

Spoilers for tpp season 2&3

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Juno Steel was exhausted. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept a full night on the Carte Blanche, and it was starting to catch up to him.

Juno’s sleep was becoming increasingly restless as the nights came and went; each night leaving old memories rearing their ugly heads. When he was able to sleep, it was anything but peaceful. Whenever Juno found himself drifting off, nightmares would begin behind his eyes, jolting him awake. He had to stop sleeping in the same room as Nureyev in fear of waking him. Now, he was alone, nightmares becoming worse and worse. He had really thought he was done with these childish nightmares of Sarah and Benzaiten, but now they were increasing in both frequency and fervency.

Now, Juno was sitting in his own room, on his bed, eyes burning with fatigue and brain on fire with memories. He sat in his bed, eyelids drooping as he fought with sleep.

After about half an hour, sleep finally won and Juno’s dreams were anything but sweet. Sweat beaded on his forehead and he thrashed in his sleep, mumbling quietly, behind his eyes a scene of the past replaying like a favorite movie, until finally, he woke with a gasp, chest heaving.

Juno groaned, standing from his bed. He wandered out into the hallway - if he was going to be awake, he might as well make himself useful. He stopped in the middle of the hall to lean on the wall as dizziness hit him with no warning. Frustrated with the spell, he pushed through it, rubbing at his eyes.

Juno entered the kitchen, taking out his comms and squinting at it. The rest of the Carte Blanche crew would be up soon. At least he’d gotten some sleep that night, he thought to himself with a bitter laugh. He got himself a glass of water before walking over to the stove and starting to cook a simple meal as breakfast for the crew.

Contrary to popular belief, Juno did know how to cook. Sure, his ability wasn’t anything spectacular, but he did know how to cook something decent. Today, “something decent” was pancakes. He made almost every pancake perfectly round, saving the oblong one for himself (although he could only manage to eat half of it).

Juno was just finishing up making the pancakes for almost everyone on the ship - although Buddy would be having her usual morning cocktail instead - when Jet walked into the kitchen, bright and early as usual.

“Juno. You’re awake before usual,” Jet said before gazing at the pancakes. “And you’ve cooked. This is out of character, you sleep the latest of everyone,” Jet observed.

“Hey big guy. I was just awake early, couldn’t sleep.” Juno shrugged. He wasn’t exactly lying per se, but he wasn’t telling the truth, either. Juno rubbed his eyes as another dizzy spell threatened to make him lose his balance.

Jet looked Juno once over without saying a word, and then he grabbed a plate of pancakes. Rita walked into the kitchen next, eyes wide upon seeing Juno standing there.

“Mistah steel! You’re never awake this early! You made pancakes too!? What, is it my birthday or somethin’? No, no my birthday ain’t for another few months-” Rita rambled before Juno cut her off to explain.

“Just couldn’t sleep. Wanted to do something nice for once, I guess,” he mumbled, leaning against the counter to keep himself steady - why was he so dizzy? Well, it could be the lack of sleep, but it had to be more than that, he thought to himself before Rita’s voice pulled him out of thought.

“Awww Mistah Steel, that was awful sweet of ya. Thanks, boss!” Rita said before grabbing her pancakes.

“Not your bo- You’re welcome, Rita.” Juno sighed, a tired smile playing on his lips.

There was a short wait before the rest of the crew was in the kitchen all with varying reactions.

“Woah Steel, didn’t know you were capable of being awake before noon, or that you could cook!” Vespa joked before taking a look at Juno, he looked absolutely exhausted. She walked closer to him, talking so only he could hear. “You alright? You look tired.”

Juno sighed before pushing the heel of his palm into his eyes. “Just fine Vespa, just couldn’t sleep last night.” He blinked hard, trying to get rid of the thick weight of exhaustion from his eyes.

Vespa almost said something else before Buddy walked into the kitchen.

“What’s this about Juno cooking?” Buddy said looking over at the pancakes and her cocktail sitting on the counter, not missing how utterly wrecked Juno himself looked. She had known Juno had not been sleeping and saw it was now catching up with the ex P.I. “I’m impressed, wonderful job.” she praised.

“Thanks…” Juno replied timidly. He was always struck with an odd pride when Buddy complimented his work.

Before any other words could be said, Nureyev entered the kitchen. “Juno, you’re up early…” His eyes were filled with an unspoken worry. Juno just shook his head, already knowing Peter wanted to ask what was wrong.

“I’m fine, Ransom.” Juno replied before sitting down abruptly; standing was becoming too much work, his knees felt weak and his vision was fading in and out, he was cold, was anyone else cold? It didn’t seem that way…

“Look everyone I’m fine, I just couldn’t sleep so I figured why don’t I make myself useful for once in the morning.” Juno said again, a tad too crankily. The tone made both Nureyev and Buddy raise an eyebrow, but the conversation was already moving forward when Rita started talking about a stream. Nureyev grabbed his pancakes and Buddy grabbed her meal replacement, a pinot noir, and sat down.

When everyone was distracted from the discussion, Juno snuck out of the kitchen and into his bedroom to hide under his blankets - he was freezing. He knew that this probably meant a fever. The chills doubled with the room spinning when he moved too quickly and the splitting headache he had, he knew he was completely fucked for the day.

He closed his eyes for a second before someone was knocking on his door, next thing he knew he was on his feet grabbing clothes from his closet. “Come in,” he said quietly.

“Juno darling.” Nureyev’s gently called out before walking into the room. “Are you alright? You left rather quickly.” Peter looked over to Juno picking out clothes from the closet.

“Yeah, just changing into some actual clothes…” Juno responded, putting his selected clothes on the bed. He discreetly grabbed onto the bedpost as the worst dizzy spell that day hit him.

“Juno?” Peter asked as he watched Juno grip the bedpost and sway dangerously. “What’s going on?”

“‘M fine, just need a minute.” Juno straightened himself out trying to pretend nothing had even happened. “What’s up? What did you need?” Juno looked at Peter, shaking his head to clear the blurriness that was obstructing his view of his beautiful boyfriend, his makeup already done for the day, and suddenly he was embarrassed to be seen in his current state.

“Are you okay? What happened just then?” Nureyev walked closer to Juno, taking note of how tired he looked, of the slight flush he could see on Juno’s face. “Are you sick? You look exhausted.”

Juno mentally cursed himself, he was busted - he knew he couldn’t lie to Peter Nureyev, whenever he tried the thief saw through his lies immediately.

“No, I’m not sick. Just haven’t been sleeping very well lately. It’s kind of starting to take a physical toll.” He sat down on his bed, too weak to stand, a chill running up his spine, accentuating his weakness.

“Nightmares again?” Peter asked Juno, to which the other nodded. Peter took note of Juno’s state and frowned, concern evident on his face.

“Are you sure you’re not ill? You seem to have a fever.” Nureyev cupped Juno’s face, frown deepening at the heat he found.

“Careful Nureyev, you don’t want to get frown lines.” Juno joked before leaning into the coolness of Peter’s hands.

“Now isn’t the time for jokes, darling, I am rather worried about you.” Peter said to Juno, cupping his too-hot cheek.

“‘M okay.” Juno said, still leaning into Peter.

“You don’t seem okay, dear… I’ll be right back, alright?” Nureyev asked, sitting Juno down on his bed. He was going to get Vespa, she was the ship’s doctor, after all, she would know what to do.

“...Okay,” Juno responded after a beat.

Peter took a final look at Juno, smiling at him worriedly before walking out of the room and beginning the search for Vespa.

With Nureyev’s absence, Juno laid down on his bed, wrapping himself in blankets, trying to keep his eyes open. It was a grueling task, but he didn’t really feel like reliving every traumatic event he’d ever had upon falling asleep.

Sleep almost won, but just barely, Nureyev was back in Juno’s room with Vespa before the former P.I. could succumb to slumber.

“Steel, I knew something was up with you this morning,” Vespa said as she entered the room, looking Juno over.

Nureyev stood out of Vespa’s way, nervously watching, he’d seen Juno deal with quite a lot, and perhaps that’s what made him more nervous.

“So, you wanna tell me what’s wrong, or am I going to have to examine you?” Vespa asked Juno, who only nodded listlessly.

“Yes to which one Steel?” Vespa asked sharply, her worry coming off as impatience, she was used to Juno’s sharp tongue, and seeing him acting so unlike himself was worrying.

“First one. Haven’t been sleeping well.” Juno slurred exhaustedly.

Vespa looked at him sympathetically, she understood sleepless nights due to nightmares, she, however, had never had a time where the sleeplessness caught up to her quite as bad as it did Juno.

“There’s nothing I can really do besides treat the fever Ransom told me about.” Vespa explained, pulling out fever reducers and handing them to Juno, who swallowed them dry and laid down.

Vespa and Peter exchanged a worried look before Vespa left the room.

Juno watched Vespa leave through half-closed eyes, fighting against sleep. He ultimately lost the battle, however, when he was asleep within minutes of Vespa’s departure.

Peter watched Juno fall asleep, sighing in relief watching the ex-detective’s features grow soft and unguarded in sleep. Unfortunately for Juno, this peaceful sleep didn’t last long.

After about an hour of Juno sleeping “peacefully”, Nureyev watched Juno’s expression twist into discomfort, sweat rolling down his boyfriend’s face, cheeks slightly flushed from fever. Juno started mumbling incoherently, terrified of a threat invisible to Nureyev’s eyes.

Nureyev considered waking Juno as he watched him grow more and more terrified, but ultimately didn’t need to, Juno woke on his own, a strangled cry ripping from his throat.

Juno couldn’t remember what his dream was about when he woke, hearing his own screams and feeling tears slipping down his cheeks, but he was still shaken anyway. He remembered hearing screams and feeling cool tears in his dream but maybe that was just his own.

Nureyev was staring at him, looking at Juno with such worry that it made the P.I. feel sick to his stomach. He didn’t like being the cause of such a look.

“Sorry, I’m okay.” Juno said timidly, watching Peter relax a little.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Peter asked, but regretted it when he saw Juno visibly tense at the question.

“I don’t exactly remember what happened.” Juno explained, weariness seeping out with every word.

Nureyev only nodded, letting Juno drift off again.

____________________________________________________________________________

Many hours passed of the same cycle of Juno sleeping and waking with a strangled noise, whether it be a gasp or a scream, and Juno could tell it was only stressing Peter out, so when dinner finally came, Juno practically begged Nureyev to take a break from watching him.

“I’ll be fine, It’ll only be an hour at most.” He’d said, Nureyev, nodding and leaving with a look of apprehension.

Juno sighed, he knew why Nureyev was hesitant to leave, why he was always hesitant to leave; because Juno himself had left him alone.

After the guilt wore off, Juno found his eyes growing heavy once more and he fell back to sleep.

It was quiet for a while before Juno awoke again, sweat pouring down his face, and a faint knock at the door.

“Come in,” Juno said quietly, expecting Vespa to be checking in on him, however, that was not who it was.

“Ah Juno, I hope I didn’t wake you.” It was Buddy, her heels clicking on the floor as she walked into Juno’s room.

“You didn’t wake me, I was already awake,” Juno said, embarrassed; he respected Buddy, and here he was looking like a mess.

Buddy frowned. “Ah well, I’d like to have a chat with you,” Buddy said, her nerves ever slightly showing.

Juno’s chest tightened with fear. “Um, yeah, sure…” Juno replied, feeling like a child caught with their hand caught in the cookie jar.

“You’re not in any sort of trouble. I just want to ask, are you alright? I’ve just noticed you haven’t been sleeping recently, and well, I’ve been woken up a few times from hearing you scream.” Buddy explained looking at Juno with pity.

Juno felt small and weak. “I’m sorry.” He responded meekly, guilt ever so evident in his tone.

“Nonsense,” Buddy replied sitting on Juno’s bed, keeping her distance but still sitting close enough to be a comfort. “It’s no bother to me, it only concerns me that you’re bottling things up again.” She gave Juno a knowing look.

“Sorry.” Juno replied, looking at the floor. He felt the guilt crawl up from his chest and into his throat and before he knew it, he was crying in front of the person he respected the most.

Buddy felt a pang of sadness but did not let it show, she kept her composure and began to speak again.

“I know things haven’t been easy for you. I don’t want you bottling all these emotions up, how about you talk about these nightmares of yours with me? No pressure but, it might help.” Buddy said, placing a comforting hand on Juno’s back.

And with that, Juno began to sob, spilling his guts to Buddy, telling her everything that happened in his dreams. He wailed and retold the memories to Buddy, stopping with hiccuping breaths.

Buddy had known of the former P.I’s struggles but hadn’t known the extent of them all. Perhaps she could blame the fever but she hadn’t expected all the walls Juno had built up to crumble at that moment, but she knew one thing - Juno trusted her.

Juno couldn’t believe how easily he’d just said everything to Buddy, his captain, and the person who could kick him out of the crew at the slightest wrong move. He didn’t care, he finally felt light, lighter than he’d felt in months, and after a few moments, he spoke.

“So much for you not being my therapist,” Juno said with a tired smile.

Buddy laughed, the sound hearty and melodic, making Juno laugh along with her.

“I may not be your therapist, but I do care about you, Juno, and that counts for something,” Buddy replied once her laughter died down.

Juno smiled. “Yeah. Thanks, Buddy.” He laid down, suddenly too exhausted to continue sitting upright.

“Any time dear, now I do believe it’s time you get some rest, hmm?” Buddy suggested, standing from the bed.

Juno nodded, closing his eyes and drifting off, and as Buddy left he fell asleep, staying asleep, peacefully for the first time in a good long while.

#the penumbra podcast #sickfic #Junoverse #juno steel #peter nureyev #rita tpp #buddy aurinko #vespa ilkay #jet siquliak #tpp season 2 spoilers #tpp season 3 #tpp #fanfiction #tpp fanfic

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neverendingparable · 3 years

Text

"Boss, if you would just listen-"

"I thought I made myself very clear. The experiments are on hold."

"But we've already gotten a new shipment and they're not going to last forever-"

EJ turns and his cold blue eyes sweep over the group of Mariellas pleading with him. They shrink back at his expression.

"I said. The experiments. Are. Halted." He repeats in a dangerous tone. He waits for a protest, just one more, to unleash his infamous rage on his unhappy servants.

None of them do, despite their obvious opposition.

He doesnt care about their opinions, however. They are meant to follow his orders - instantly - without question. This is one of the reasons why he has managed to run his operation for so long.

Jon contemplates returning to his personal room, but knows that he is too distracted to read over his notes and sleep is far from his grasp. He dreads the nightmares that will come when he eventually does pass out.

Perhaps he should focus his efforts on keeping his dreams at bay for now. Crafting around will give him something to do while he figures out how to get himself out of his current...predicament.

There is not a moment that goes by where he doesnt think about what happened a week ago. The feeling of Maelle's blade entering his body, as if he was made out of nothing but soft pliable sand, is still fresh as ever. The stab didn’t hurt his abdomen, but he would take the feeling of being ripped apart over this any day.

He thought he knew what torture was. After all, one could argue his experiments were based on it, picking apart his subjects minds and bodies, seeing what reactions were satisfactory and how far he could push until they succumbed to one thing or another.

But this— this is worse than anything he ever experienced in his life. Worse even than being pitied.

His soul feels like it is being cooked alive, stewing in emotions that both anger and scare him.

He has never felt guilt before. It sits inside his rib cage like glowing hot coal, uncomfortable at best and painful when there is a lull in his distractions. No matter how he turns or twists, it refuses to dislodge itself.

It’s just as much violating as it is suffocating and so far, he hasn’t found a way to escape the discomfort.

As he enters his laboratory to clear the desk of his previous projects and start finding a hopefully permanent cure for dreams, he is distracted from his thoughts by a muffled gasp of surprise.

And when he glances over his shoulder, it is the last person Jon expects to see.

The ex-fusion Stanley, who had spent months escaping his facility, only to return nearly two years later with a new shadowy friend to steal some medical supplies for unknown reasons. Back then Jon had welcomed their presence (annoying shadows aside) as it had helped him capture a new object of interest, the being that called itself God.

The Masochist had spent every moment he was in Jon's presence letting him know just how much he hated it. But now he's back, once again standing before the exhausted Vichtel.

Jon wonders if his masochism has gone too far. Perhaps it is exciting for him, returning to the place of his most traumatic memories.

The Masochist looks around as if contemplating how to escape now that he's been caught, but Jon isnt interested today. He ignores him and returns to his desk, shoving the notes and books aside.

"If you are going to go, just go." He says after a moment of pause.

"So it is true," Maso replies. "You were stabbed by that guilt-y sword."

"I am not in the mood for a conversation."

Maso glances at the vent he came out of, but Jon can tell he is too curious to leave yet. Just his luck.

He doesnt call the Mariellas though, not wanting to deal with their silent judgement of their Boss's sudden change in character.

"Soooo, do you regret kidnapping Stanleys?" The Masochist steps to his desk and despite his wariness, he’s wearing a conceited smile. "Do you feel guilty for making me? I hope so. Not like it would change anything, but I want to imagine you sitting there suf-fer-ing~"

Jon eyes him up and down. "I do regret making you, but not because I sympathize with how much it must've hurt to be violated in every aspect of your nature." He says. Guilt or not, the Masochist is still annoying enough that Jon takes quiet satisfaction in watching that smile become strained with poorly hidden anger.

"I wanted to make a perfect fusion of two men in one, yet I just made a monstrosity of some sort. Useless, loud, obnoxious. I should've exterminated you instead of keeping you around like a screwed up trophy."

"Too bad, but I don’t care about your pity party." Maso puffs out his chest. "I became pretty cool, actually. I have many arms, an interesting body I can use for cheap party tricks to impress cuties aand I have the best of both world from Bradley's and Stellan's personalities."

"Your fake bravado doesnt impress me," Jon snaps. "And you aren't truly a fusion anymore. You are more Spencer than you are Sommers, you know this. You just want to make yourself more interesting than you are."

"Go back to feeling like shit, Jon."

Maso turns on his heels. Jon opens his notebook to a blank page, but then stops as a thought occurs to him.

"What if I can unfuse you?" He says suddenly.

He hears Maso pause.

"I still have the machine. I could return you back to normal." If he could reverse his mistakes, starting with one of his biggest, perhaps that's enough to make the nagging guilt stop. Enough for him to stop thinking about it.

He spares a glance at Maso, who is studying him with an unreadable expression.

After a long moment of silence, he finally speaks up. "I'd refuse, Jon. I don’t want to return back to normal and forget this ever happened, because it has happened and no amount of body modification can change it. That's why I never let anyone ‘fix’ me."

He hesitates, then sighs.

"Not like I give a shit about your guilt. You can rot in here crying about how idiotic you were for all I care. But you don’t fix your mistakes by covering them up and pretending they never happened. You have to own up to them, otherwise you're just a coward. And then you can try and figure out how to proceed. My advice is stop pretending like you're something special and just go talk to some people who aren’t Mariellas."

Jon finds himself staring despite himself. He wants to ask what Maso means and exactly how he can talk to anyone if they either treat him like a god or the devil himself, but the words are stuck in his throat and suddenly the idea of embarrassing himself is worse than the guilt.

He lets himself form a familiar scowl instead.

"Get out of my Office before I pump the vents full of pesticide, you abhorrent thing." He snarls at the Masochist.

Maso just sticks his tongue out in the most childish way possible and swings himself back into the vents.

He considers going through with his threat but decides he doesnt want to find out what happens if he angers the shadows as well.

So he grabs the notebook again and starts scribbling down outlines of his new experiment until his eyes hurt too much to keep open. In his dedication to stay distracted, one thing slips his mind completely.

What was the Masochist doing in his lab in the first place?

#drabble #evil!jon #the masochist #yes he was stealing something again

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isitreallyok · 3 years

Text

Therapy, Medication, And Mental Help

I’m gonna level with y’all here. This post will likely not be quite as articulate as some of the other ones. It’s been a really rough morning, but I wanted to address this issue while it is still fresh in my mind. I have yet to ask for advice or feedback on a single one of my posts, but if anyone has any I’m definitely not opposed to receiving it on this one.

Uh oh. That doesn’t sound great. What’s going on?

I’m going to attempt to keep this as brief as possible, and it likely will still be quite lengthy, but I’m going to have to give a bit of context here as well. My current life situation has been radically altered in the last year. 2020 has thrown so many wrenches in my plans and Covid isn’t even the biggest of them. However, lets take this from the top.

When I was 9 years old my parents divorced. Not a huge deal. It happens to a lot of kids as sad as that is to say. I grew up with my mother, brother, and sister in a single parent household with a skewed picture of who my father was and didn’t want too much to do with him. Fast forward a few years, my dad moves to Idaho and remarries and has a wonderful relationship with my stepmother. I wasn’t able to visit too often, but it wasn’t horrible when I was able to make it out there. As much as I minimize the normalcy of being a child of divorce though it still had a horribly impact on my emotional well being and my mental health as a child. Many other kids throughout school came were content with their home life. They were able to enjoy being children and did not have to worry about the pressures of caring for their siblings started at a young age. I, on the other hand, was not content with where I was at in life and wanted desperately to change it.

My mother was incredibly supportive of us kids as best as she was able. She made sure that we had routine trips to the doctors, that we had what we needed in terms of food and shelter, and even got us therapy and psychiatric help. I was blessed to have that available to me as a child. Many children going through similar situations do not have access to that level of external help for a myriad of different reasons. However even though I had these things I still ran into trouble. As I was growing up my father discredited mental healthcare as a practice so I always had that rattling around in the back of my head. By the time I was 15, I decided to stop taking my bipolar and depression medications because I didn’t feel like they were helping me. This is honestly the biggest mistake I’ve made in my entire life. I continued to see my therapist, until I not longer had insurance at age 18, but I didn’t feel as if I was making any real strides there either because I had also adopted the mindset that nothing was working and therapy and caring for my mental health was a joke.

Wait. Isn’t this a place where you talk explicitly about your mental health and how to manage and cope with various aspects of it?

Why yes. Yes it is. I’ve been handling my manic depressive bipolar disorder unmedicated for the last 13 years. It has been absolute hell most days. A few years ago I hit rock bottom and realized that I needed help. The girl that I had been dating for a few years, was living with, and planned on proposing to cheated on me and I ended up moving back in with my parents because of the situation, I slept on a futon mattress on the floor for months before we ended up moving, and due to this my mental state deteriorated to the point of suicidal ideation with intent.

This is when I realized that I was wrong in my views on medication and therapy. I had been putting myself in a position where I was running people out of my life due to the fact that I was using my friends as free therapy and they drew a line and I had to respect it. There was only one problem with finally accepting that I needed to get help. That problem is that help is expensive. I had been uninsured for mental health since I was 18. I accepted the fact that I needed to get help, but the fact that I could afford it drove me even deeper into despair about my circumstances.

So what did you do? Did you get the help you needed? Clearly you didn’t give into your suicidal tendencies.

Well. Yes and no. I didn’t get the help I needed, but I managed to find a way to distract myself from the troubles of the real world. I poured myself into my job and decided that that was the time to go to college. I do understand the irony or going to college after complaining that therapy was too expensive. Believe me that is not lost on me. The difference is you can’t get student loans for learning how to take care of yourself.

Rather than allowing myself to begin working through the existing trauma in my life, I decided to put myself in a position to where I could start to try to live a “normal” life again. Whatever the hell that means. I had a routine, albeit a poor one, I was socializing, albeit minimally in my classes and typically only for group projects, and I was too distracted by other pressures to reminisce on how much I hated my life. I started taking steps that I felt like a therapist would tell me to and began working towards chasing a dream again. This felt different, but I don’t think I’d venture as far as to say it felt good. It was just a different kind of stress that I was piling on myself. I still felt like I needed help handling the day to day. Learning to cope with my bipolar unmedicated took years and the singular trauma of living with my family again meant that all the coping mechanisms I had worked to develop became even more difficult to manage and I had to once again learn different strategies to handle all the new challenges.

Instead of schooling and attempting normalcy on your own wouldn’t it have been easier to get help?

Easier? No. More beneficial? Absolutely. The hoops that one has to jump through even to get seen by a therapist nowadays is challenging enough and that doesn’t even include financial ramifications for those without health insurance that covers mental health, which most workplace insurance plans don’t. With that in mind, the benefits of getting the help that you need often are not able to outweigh the cost.

Realistically, even if I had been able to afford to get myself the care that I need I likely wouldn’t have. I have always been the type of person to do everything on my own until I have exhausted all of my options. This is not something I recommend. One of the biggest things that I want to learn to do is ask for help when I need it instead of asking after I am already at the end of my rope. Even as I’m typing this I am beyond frustrated and want nothing to do with with the stress I’m under from today and it took me hitting that point to finally open up about talking about it even though it was among the first topics I decided to address when I first started this blog. Asking for help at appropriate times is a topic all on it’s own so we’ll save that conversation for another day.

So I’m starting to see a bit of where you’re coming from, but what happened today?

So this part of the background info I plan to address more in depth in the future and will keep the context of this very brief. Remember how I said that my dad and I had a strained relationship even after he moved? Well that changed once I was about 20. We reconnected and for years spoke nearly every day and he became a close confidant and more of what most people with a healthy relationship with their father have. We disagreed on a lot of things, but we were able to understand each other. A few years ago my stepmother passed away. Even before she passed my dad was diagnosed with early stage dementia. He had been having memory issues and it felt like he was a completely different person. At the start of this year he moved back in with my family and that has been a challenge having my divorced parents living under the same room without the ability to properly communicate with each other.

Fast forward to this morning. I woke up to both my mother and father bickering with each other about something related to Dad’s socks. Rather than handling it like adults they were both fighting like toddlers from what I could hear in my bedroom. This has become an increasingly common occurrence. One gets frustrated with the other, situation escalates, I feel pressured to step in and deescalate the situation, I typically end up frustrated and my mood is shot. Dad feels more comfortable talking and listening to me, Mom backs off because I get what needs to be done done, I wind up once again in the middle of a weird situation between my parents. I tolerate this because of the fact that I am able to assist in my father’s care in a way that is beneficial to his understand of what he needs and it eases the burden on other people that are trying to convey the same message with zero results. However over time this would wear anyone down and that point is where I finally reached this morning.

Rather than being able to calmly handle the situation with a level head I ended up snapping at all partied involved. I snapped at Dad for not wanting to do anything to mitigate the problems he complained of, I snapped at Mom for escalating the situation, I snapped at my sister who was just checking it see if I was okay, I ran the gambit of getting frustrated with people. Instead of handling the situation the way I normally would with patience and dignity, I mismanaged the situation and likely made it worse.

This is where we get back to the topic at hand. I have finally managed to actually get myself on some half decent health insurance that has wonderful mental health coverage. This kicks in at the start of the year and I will be able to finally get some help with handling the fact that this entire situation has been traumatic and has left some serious scars. I’m excited but this also got me wondering about the part that I need help on.

My bipolar and resistance to most psychotropic medication had to come from somewhere, as it’s a disorder that is tied to genetics, and my mother is not bipolar. This tells me that my father, who exhibits clear symptoms of having bipolar depression, is where I got my proclivity for the development of this condition. That being said, with my father’s resistance towards getting psychiatric care, and being medicated to balance any chemical imbalances, puts me in a weird state for doing what is best for him and his care. Do I force this help on him? Do I accept that he’s not ready for it and sit idly by and continue to watch him deteriorate? With his dementia he’s less likely to be able to receive the care he desperately needs due to his inability to create a coherent thought in regards to what his needs are for the large scale rather than just being fine in that exact moment. So I truly am at a loss. This is the part where I ask for advice. If anyone who has read this far has any experience with dementia and psychiatric care I could really use some advice on how to best have these conversations with my dad. This has been one of the biggest hardships I have faced and I am getting to be at a proper loss for words in how to help the situation which as you can tell by the verbosity of this post is difficult to do.

You’re totally fine in not knowing how to handle this situation. This is a difficult situation to be in regardless of who you are. You’re doing well.

Thank you. All of that stuff is an absolute nightmare to handle and life has been absolute hell, but I hope that that helps you to understand where I’m coming from when I encourage you all to once again remember the three reminders! I know most days, including today, I need to remember them to so lets run through them together before we end things for today. You are so much stronger than you think, you are beautiful inside and out, and jinkies you are worth love, kindness, respect, admiration, and all those things you think you’re not worthy of. Lets turn today around together and kick some butt and take some names.

#suicidal tendencies #suicide #dementia #mental health #bipolar #bipolar disorder #depression #help #i need advice #three reminders #self help #Psychiatry #Therapy #Medication #cognitive dysfunction

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bigskydreaming · 4 years

Note

Hey feel free to ignore this ask if it's too personal, but could you explain more about how ADHD can help you check out from/survive abuse? Because as someone recently diagnosed who also had an abusive childhood, that sounds very familiar, I am definitely curious about that. Again, ignore this ask if it makes you uncomfortable, and thanks for posting so much about ADHD, it's literally because of recognizing myself in your post that I brought it up to my therapist who diagnosed me lol

No problem! As far as I’m aware, we’re mostly in the realm of more theory than hard confirmation because its not really something you can get much data on other than anecdotal, and when we’re talking the really young end of the showing-signs-of-ADHD spectrum and also in terms of regular or at least persisting experiences with abuse, all that anecdotal data isn’t gonna be current and empirical, its more than likely going to be years old.

So, all that said, my understanding as its been explained to me, is C-PTSD, or complex PTSD, which is technically what I have as it stems all the way from early childhood, like....it literally affects the hardwiring of our brain. When the abuse or trauma occurs early enough in life that the brain is actively in its developmental stages still, the resulting brain patterns and neural pathways of say, an abused kid pretty constantly living in a heightened state of fear or wariness, like....they’re going to be different than those of a kid who thankfully has lived a fairly sheltered life.

This is where things like hyper-vigilance come from.....I’ve had it as long as I can remember, because like, its essentially our fight or flight instinct dialed up to a constant eleven.....and since that’s pretty much where it was for me back when my brain was still developing, that ended up solidifying as my ‘default’ setting, pretty much. That level of vigilance WAS my normal, so my brain by the time it finished developing, was hardwired to TREAT that as normal.

And thus, anything that would trigger a fight or flight response in most people, for me is just.....amped up more than it is for most people. Like, its literally just having more of a hair trigger, being quicker to leap to that physiological and mental response and state of mind....and at a heightened intensity.

My point in going into all of that is to illustrate just one of the many ways childhood abusive experiences can actively affect and shape our developing brains. Someone like me, our trauma quite LITERALLY leaves a lasting impression, because the pathways in my brain that developed as what my brain considers normal, or regular, or just another Tuesday....are geared around the fact that while my brain was developing, Tuesdays pretty much sucked giant donkey balls.

Like, the trauma isn’t just bad memories, the trauma is why someone else hears a car door and their brain goes “oh Mom’s home,” whereas I hear a car door and my brain goes “quick, hide in a closet.” My childhood experiences and C-PTSD literally trained and hard-wired into my brain that this IS normal. that this IS the appropriate, safe, sane response to that stimulus.

Now, where the ADHD comes in, is when I was trying to focus on a single task and get it done? Yeah, it could and still can be a pain and get in the way of that happening. But by the exact same token.....if the only thing in front of me at the time or situation I was immersed in wasn’t something I needed to accomplish, but rather just...an actively unpleasant experience....here’s where my brain’s tendency to take unscheduled vacations no matter WHAT’S going on in front of me or around me, like....was likely an active asset to me.

Because by making it unlikely or even impossible to keep my attention focused entirely on how much a situation might have sucked for me, no matter how bad it was or how long it lasted....the hard-wiring that otherwise would have happened according to the blueprint that situation was mapping out for my brain and attention was interrupted. So it just didn’t happen.

Obviously, this didn’t happen every time, or otherwise I wouldn’t have C-PTSD, but if that’s what was happening at all, to any degree, it means what my brain ended up set at as considering ‘normal’ ended up not being AS dominated by simply traumatic experiences as it otherwise might have.

The sheer fact that I’m as likely to get distracted even from intense pain as I am from a task I’m trying to accomplish means that instead of JUST the abuse and trauma taking the clear lead and being the only defining influence in the matter of shaping my developing brain and neural pathways....my brain ended up being the end result more of a random sampleage, as befits the way my usually scattered focus is just as likely to land on anything else and fixate, as it is on just an extremely crappy situation or experience.

So, in essence, even though I’ve got plenty of even physiological lingering after-effects of childhood abuse, let alone bad memories....its entirely possible that if not for my ADHD, I would have ended up with more. And I mean, frankly, I have enough to deal with in terms of the after-effects I do actually have, lol, so I’m pretty happy to not have even more on top of or besides that.

Hopefully that made enough sense to follow, and helps you in some way or maybe put certain things from your own past in a different context or perspective.

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id-on-parade · 4 years

Text

A New Day

This will probably be a pretty long post. I’m gonna put the positives at the front, then i’m gonna exorcise some demons from my mind. This exorcism is to remove them from my head, not to put them into someone else’s, so i’ll go ahead and put an end to positives notice, and i guess read on at your own risk.

I am currently waiting on a list of approved Mental Health care providers in my area from my insurance company, I’ve just gotten off the phone with them and they said they would send it to me and I should pick one. After picking one and confirming they are accepting patients I should call the insurance folks back to get approval for a number of appointments. They close at five, so hopefully I’ll get the list soon so i can get this rolling - hopefully i’ll get this sorted today. Its funny that I feel this sense of almost giving up on doing it myself, this outdated cultural stigma at the same time that I feel a strong sense of hope that this will be a turning point in my mental health. I look back and wonder with a decent sense of awe how different my life might have been had I received mental health care as a teen when this all started.

I had a pretty heavy depressive episode yesterday, and am happy to report that today feels more like my standard levels of depression, i’m me again today - the me that most know, not the me that’s falling and can’t seem to catch hold. this information that today is a new day, i’ve survived, and the pit appears to have closed is the end of the positives for this post. here on in will be an unloading of a very stressful and difficult week, read on if you wish, but i gotta get these demons out somewhere, so here they go.

I guess i should start at the start. I returned this last week from a week of sick leave wherein I had some Covid symptoms, my wife had some Covid symptoms and at the start of that sick week, that was majorly stressful. I got tested, nasal swab, x-ray, and found to be negative for covid, or pneumonia. my wife’s insurance, however, had her do an online appointment, she answered some questions, the internet told her it was likely viral sinusitis, and wrote her a note to take the week off as well, no seeing a doctor, no actual tests. now, luckily, we both seem to have gotten better over that week - but boy was that frustrating.

When I returned to work, my boss and I had a bit of a disagreement about what a sick note through Saturday meant, he thought i should have come in Saturday, I thought i shouldn't. I even called Saturday and someone over the phone told me i was not scheduled Saturday. at the end of the conversation he had basically made it seem like i was dumb for thinking about it the way i did, that it didn’t matter about the call on Saturday, and that i might get in trouble. then he said “so, for next time, you know - come in on the day that’s listed.” So far, no trouble has come down the pipeline about that, but he’s been much less jovial with me of late.

That’s probably a decent bit of paranoia, we’ve all been less jovial of late, at my work. Providing mental health care to inpatient teens is hard. there’s a lot of secondhand trauma. (more on that later) there’s a lot of firsthand trauma. (more on that later). These kids are quite ill, and they are trying so hard, often put up against a life that’s honestly too difficult for even most adults, my whole heart goes to them. Right now, With the pandemic, and the rioting, they have more stress than ever, and less access to their loved ones, and anyone who knows anything about mental illness, knows what that means for their mental health. And with all of our patients having suddenly much worse mental health it means not only that my coworkers and I are dealing with more unsafe situations, and absorbing more trauma, but on the back-end we’re watching these kids backslide through months of progress, and sometimes that’s so heartbreaking. It’s normal, to backslide, and it doesn’t mean anything negative about the kids, but it doesn’t make it less heartbreaking. so yeah, coworkers are all in their stressed out, panic, survival modes, and its pretty visible right now - which means sometimes we are not as awesome to each other as we could be.

One of my coworkers was especially not awesome, to himself, this week. I really looked up to this guy. takes heart to be openly flamboyantly queer with these kids, and he was, and he was always honest with them as far as accountability, a real no-sugar-coating type guy. when things got rough, it wasn’t unusual to hear him say “look at your life, look at your choices” to these kids, where other staff might handhold, and walk them through an analysis of what they’d been doing. Well, this week he must have finally snapped from the stress, as about 5 cop cars and a firetruck arrived at the neighboring cottage to retrieve him from the bathroom, where he had sequestered himself to huff aerosol mid shift. He won’t be returning, and he was damn good at this. he’ll be missed, and I hope away from the job he can recover.

Stream of consciousness, this brings us to kids and trauma. To avoid trauma, as the kids also care about that coworker, I ushered the kids I was outside with into the building. well, all but one. This is a fairly new patient, AFAB NB, spent a long time homeless before coming to us, family ain’t about the identity. As the cops rolled up, they were hurling insults, flipping them off, and generally saying things that I had to remind them to watch their language for. not that i reminded them very loud, because honestly, mood. But then they got silent as the cops sent to work, and they got real still. they stopped responding to me, and that was when i decided to walk around in front of them and force eye contact. they were on the verge of tears. I said “They aren’t here for you, you’re safe here, let’s go inside - it isn’t helping you to watch this.” they said It’s just --- the last time I saw the Cops they were hauling away my boyfriend”. - “that is extremely traumatic, if you come inside with me we can work on some coping, and help you to get the thoughts out, will you come inside with me?” -- “I wan’t to, But I just Can’t, I Can’t Make Myself.” - “Can you take my arm and we’ll walk together?” --”NO! I Can’t Have Anyone Touch Me Right Now, PLEASE” - “Absolutely, you’re safe here, how about if we take it slow, and I walk beside you instead?” -- “o-okay” it took us roughly 5 minutes to walk the 20 steps to the door. Once inside, they wept in a ball for some time, before beginning to work on coping skills with me. In processing, they let me know they were having such trouble because the boyfriend they were remembering had been very abusive, and the cops were hauling him off because of the beatings he had heaped upon them. that they hated the cops because they thought they loved him at the time, even though they now know he was not good for them, but knowing that hadn’t made them hate the cops less. And that seeing the cops had put their mind firmly into memories of being abused, and that they were having trouble breaking free of that thought trap. eventually we were able to get them involved in group activities and somewhat distracted, at least.

There’s a kid who reminds me of me as a teen, he’s depressed, and angry. unlike me as a teen he’s also very slow to process, and to avoid falling behind when he fails to process things he either makes cruel jokes, or explodes with anger. His dog is dying. His family barely sees him normally, but with the virus they don’t do much at all. His only contact is family therapy, and when he remembers to call them. he often doesn’t remember to call them until after phone time is over. then he wants to scream and shout and tear everything apart when he doesn’t get to make the call. This story though, is about a day he did remember to call. And his family let him know about the riots, all across the country. He’s trying hard to understand, but he doesn’t. He thinks, his being here, after drug and assault charges, has something to do with whats going on out there. that maybe his case is also unjust. but he also knows he needs this care. but he also sees himself backsliding and feels hopeless about progress, due to the depression. This is when he decides to try to recruit his peers to escape with him. All of his peers, to their credit, stayed the fuck out of it. but it did mean convincing him of the value of treatment, and the potential risk of breaking down a door - while he was trying to break down a door. he’s one of the few that I honestly don’t know, if i’m alone with him and he swings on me, if i could defend myself well enough until support arrived. he didn’t that day. but boy was that A Lot Of Stress.

The kid who has assaulted the most staff and peers, physically, verbally, sexually. started a plan that had him out of Low Stim and with peers in Close Attention this week, because we were receiving a new kid this week, at six foot, straight from juvie, a known fighter, and an off-meds psychopath. and, even though Low Stim has 2 rooms, we’re trying to get sexually assaultive kid out of there so there isn't risk in the dual occupancy. i’ll talk about new kid later, for now lets talk about the more long term patient. this patient has trouble with building relationships, an echo of the abuse he experienced in younger life, frequently he gets sexually explicit, physically assaultive and perhaps fecally oriented while doing so, especially when he is worried about relationships, or feels “too silly”. the trouble being of course, our counseling works best when we build strong relationships with patients, and even regular jokes can push him into the “too silly” category. He did well for the first bit. after about three days the back to back escalations began. a peer told a joke, he laughed too much, the staff pulled all the other kids inside and away from him to protect them. he whipped out his dick, pissed all over the place, tried showing it to staff, then began throwing sidewalk chalk everywhere, windows, doors, the roof, towards other buildings, whatnot. when the support staff arrived and 12 of us asked him to proceed to a quiet room, he did so of his own volition, rather than us taking him, and due to that, my coworker did not lock him there. no sooner had the extra staff gone than he came out banging around.we went hands on and locked him there. at the end of an hour and a half, my coworker deemed he had calmed enough to rejoin his peers. no sooner had he made his way back into the milieu than he began trying to hug and grope various staff.we again hauled him into a quiet room and locked him there. as the shift neared its end, we called security and had them help us get him back to his room in the LSA, not wanting to leave night shift with a kid in a QR. once back there, he tried to show staff his dick, again, and eventually settled into refusing to go to his room, when it was clear staff wouldn’t interact with him anymore for the night and expected him to go to bed, he went in his room, drug his mattress to being half down in the doorway, looked at me and said “is this in my room enough?” before laying down to try to sleep. he was scared, after everything he didnt want to be alone, and would rather not follow directions and potentially be in trouble, than be by himself in his room. I let him stay there. More of the same throughout the following day, and the day after that is when his story intersects with new kids in just about the most traumatic way.

New kid is over six feet, muscular, dead eyed, and arrived wearing a juvie orange jumper which he refuses to change from. developmentally, it is hard to distinguish this mustachioed individual from a fully grown man. in all of his dealings with staff, he was robotically polite. out of staffs sight he could be heard screaming angrilly, wailing in dispair, cursing out people who aren’t there, and then pleading “ oh no, no no no, NO NO NO NO” like you would expect to hear from a prone person while someone with a bloody knife walked towards them. I know because for a lot of the week i sat and listened to this. i listened to him strike himself after the pleading as well. and while I personally was not threatened in any way by his actions, it was still extremely stressful and distressing. Throughout the week, whenever the longer term patient overheard these things, he would should “would you stop, damn” to the new kid, and less polite versions. I tried to remind the long term patient that everyone struggled with different things, and that it would be better to ignore his peer, or at least make politer requests. no such luck. it seemed, throughout the week as though new kid simply did not hear long term patient.he proved that wrong on saturday afternoon, when he marched out of his room and began wailing on long term patient. after long term patient fell, new patient grabbed him by the hair and pulled him into a room, where the beating could be heard to continue. By the time we had enough staff to safely go in, new kid was standing one foot on long term kids throat, looking him in the eyes and repeating “i’m going to kill you” but, dispassionately.

I think thats it for work stress, I covered viral stress earlier. I am stressed by the riots. it makes me profoundly sad that it must come to this, but i also find myself firmly believe it HAD to come to this. that this rioting is righteous, and the only road to social change. I’ve been a punk since I was a teen, and I feel like i should do more for this movement, but honestly all of my energy is being spent keeping me going and treating these kids.

My depression has picked my relationship with bestie to fixate on in these trying times, and I fear I may have damaged that relationship because of it this weekend. bestie has just started a new schedule which is excellent for her. I’m so happy that she is now on a schedule that works for her needs, and will allow a healthy amount of sleep, and time at home, and for her to sleep close to the hours she’d prefer to be sleeping. I had been very lucky in that her last schedule was very close to my own schedule, and so our time at home nearly entirely overlapped. she chose to spend a number of mornings, and late evenings after the rest of the house just hanging out, her and I, and I absolutely love that time. I don’t want to sound entitled to it, at all. it is a gift she gives to me, that I am so happy to receive and which i am so glad she wants to give to me. With the new schedule she will have to leave early enough that the morning hangouts will not be an option, and because of this likely ought to go to bed early enough that the hangouts while the house slumbers aren’t a healthy choice. My depression tried hard to have me believing that this meant those times were just gone. After work saturday, bestie and wifey were listening to an excellent, but extremely despairing/sad audio drama.It was very enjoyable. It was probably not a mentally healthy choice for me to partake in that, and had I requested a different hangouts activity, they might have been a little sad, but probably would have swapped. instead, rather than be an even minor inconvenience I joined because i wanted the hangouts, and had a great time listening to a great story and felt like while the despair was growing in me, in resonance with the story, i’d sleep on it and it’d be alright sunday. I woke up sunday honestly too depressed to get out of bed. just laying in spiral. I asked bestie to join us in bed, when i heard her going to get her phone charger, hoping extra cuddles would help me get through, i don’t know why i couldn’t ask for what I wanted, I had the opportunity and I’m sure it would have been fine, now, in hindsight. I felt like at the time I was so certain something would go wrong. eventually everyone came to the bed and there was a semi-cudllepuddle. people didn't want to fall back asleep, it makes sense not to full cuddle puddle for that. as people set in on their various phone activities I started to get that feeling like i wasn’t part of what was happening (despite being there. I know, I don’t know why, but when the depression gets going it gets harder to fight.) and rather than grab my phone and to the separate activities together thing I just withdrew. i recall someone commenting on it, and I thought i said something confirmatory about it. The blondes (wifey and besties husband) went to the store, and I could tell bestie might fall asleep, so i tried to get her to stay awake, she needed to for the new schedule. in interacting i’d asked to hold her hand, and she observed i was sad to relinquish it when she wanted it back. admitting that made me sad, led to just an outpouring of all of this stuff sans work stuff. and the worry about time to spend. I shouldn’t have dumped all of that on her, she didn’t consent to listening to that, and she certainly had a stressful enough time. I hate that when I’m in the throws of this damn disease I can’t seem to stop this. I don’t want to hurt the people I love. I don’t want to push them away. She reminded me I ought to go to therapy. I worry I may have offended her by talking about worrying about time we’d get to spend together. That voice in my brain is trying to convince me that her response means that those times mean so much more to me than to her. thats a damn lie. its a damn lie and it needs to get out. I’m exorcising it with the lot.

I’ve just received the list. I’m ending this here, and moving forward with that productive enterprise

#depression #Work Stress #bestie #wifey #therapy #Begone Demons

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xoxo-buttons-xoxo · 4 years

Text

Warned.

There are horrifying, spine-tingling people and things all over this world. Murders, rapists, abusers, drug dealers, who will stop at nothing to get every penny they earned, live all around us and we come into contact with them more often then we hope to. From birth we are raised to stay away from anything or anyone who could harm us, but what about what our parents forgot to warn us about? What if the thing that traumatized you the most had stunning brown eyes and the dark, chestnut crew-cut hair that tries to distract you from the dangerous lifestyle he lives. We should not be warned about dangerous drugs and malicious murders in the streets. We should be warned by the demon in disguise. We should be warned about him.

Chapter Three- On The Run

The regret of getting into the car with him filled my whole body instantly with the most uneasy feeling. I was still in absolute shock over how Caroline so easily ratted me out to Monty. I know the overwhelming feeling of pure terror, I was living in it. Never once would I have put my family or friends in harms way trying to protect myself though. I let my thoughts drown me entirely as I stared blankly out the window. I watched so many faces in different vehicles pass us on the interstate, but I knew if I made the wrong move of trying to obtain anyone's attention, Monty would hurt my family. As if it was perfect clockwork, Monty broke the unbearable silence.

"If you even make so much as a hand gesture to someone, we will have your parents killed. I will have them start with your precious mother while your father watches." Monty grinned as the malicious words fell from his lips.

I nodded and stayed silent. I did not want to talk to Monty in fear of saying the wrong thing, so I just avoided any kind of conversation at all. Monty kept occasionally looking over at me, but he never attempted to make any kind of conversation after that. He stayed utterly silent gazing into the lights of other cars passing him. I noticed just how carefully he was driving. He would make sure to stay within the speed limit and always use turning signals while switching lanes. He was careful to not make any careless mistakes, and it was that moment the feelings of terror deepened. I realized just how many faces I had seen tonight and how not one of them even recognized me and probably never would. At least not until it was too late. I tried to shake the negative feelings away, I tried to stay hopeful in maybe he was only trying to scare me into being quiet. He tried scaring you into being quiet, you didn't listen remember? The little voice in my mind reminded me of the obvious.

My breath hitched in the back of my throat when I noticed Monty turning off an exit. The exit looked run down as if it had been abandoned for years. My guess, it probably was. He pulled into a old hotel room parking lot and I did not know what I was really more scared of Monty or what was going to be in these rooms. Monty touched my hand as if to get my attention but out of pure instinct, I jerked my hand back holding it. Monty let out a deep sigh and got out of the car. He walked over to my door and motioned for me to roll down the window. I did as I was told and listened to what Monty had to say.

"We are going to be staying the night here. It has been a long night and I am tired. When we enter this building, we are a couple looking for a place to crash," I cringed at the thought of being in a relationship with this asshole, "I do not want to hurt you. I will however if you do not listen to exactly what I say. I will not jeopardize my life over a bitch who can not keep her mouth shut." Monty finished his speech and tilted his head sideways, I assume he wants me to confirm I understand him. I nod once again avoiding conversation and get out of the car. Monty grabs my hand and holds it as if we were sincerely a couple.

When we walked into the hotel, a thousand thoughts filled my mind. Could I escape tonight? If I made a move to escape or get help, does Monty actually have people watching or is it a scare tactic? I knew my best way of surviving all of this was just to play into Monty's game. Monty was dangerous and I stood no chance fighting him in battles he won one too many times. When we reached the hotel welcome center to book a room, the woman's eyes widened. I looked around at myself wondering what I had done and then it struck me, she was trying to picture us together. I took a moment to really observe Monty. Pale white skin, tattoos painted up and down his arms, dark eyes, and dark hair. Everything about Monty screamed, I am trouble stay away and if I had to say so I think the receptionist agreed after comparing the two of us.

"Hello love, I need a room for the night." I heard a familiar voice say. I whipped my head up and noticed it was Monty. Did he just say love? He was so slick and convincing for a moment, I began wondering if he was actually a decent guy. All those thoughts were completely blindsided by the reoccurring memories of him threatening my family. I heard the receptionist ask Monty a question, but did not catch what it was as I was too lost in my own thoughts. "One is fine, thank you." Monty stated before tugging at my wrist to follow him. I gave a quick half smile to the receptionist and followed Monty to the elevator at the end of the hallway.

When we stepped inside the elevator, I remained silent. This time however Monty did not oblige to keeping conversation at a minimum. "You did good, Ella Mae. You keep that act up and maybe I won't torture you too much." I swallowed the lump in my throat and tried to control my breathing, but I felt completely helpless and to be completely honest, I was. Nobody was going to help me or find me. Monty was too good at hiding to ever get caught. I was going to be tortured and then maybe get to go home, but the chances seemed to grow more thin with every second that passed. I felt a single tear fall down my cheek but I quickly brushed it away and tried to maintain my composure. I did not want Monty knowing he broke me or even scared me if that was possible.

We stepped out of the elevator and walked directly across the hideous carpeted floors to our room, twenty seven. I paused in front of the door waiting for Monty to open it. He finally did and when I walked inside to view the room, I suddenly felt an instant wave of uncertainty. I now understood where the one is fine thank you comment came from. There was only one bed in the room. I froze like a deer in headlights and could not regain my composure. I was wearing more and more thin. Did he bring me here just to have sex? Is this part of the torture he had planned? Monty came out from behind me without a shirt and motioned to the bed. "You aren't just gonna stand there all night, are you?" I slowly walked over to the bed and sat on top of the covers holding my knees to my chest. "Monty, you didn't bring me up here to torture me did you? You aren't going to well you know?" I managed to spit these two half sentences out before turning around to look Monty in the eyes. His face dropped and then he let a grin sink in and I felt like I needed to dart towards the door.

"Honey, I have killed many men in my time, but I am no rapist. Rest assured, I just want sleep and did not feel like paying extra for you to have your own bed. Feel free to sleep in the floor, just know I will catch you if you try to escape." Monty stated firmly never dropping eye contact.

I just decided to stay in the bed as I felt like Monty could not be worse than a hotel room floor. I stayed as far to my side as I could trying not to think of how close Monty was to me or the things he had planned to do to me. I closed my eyes attempting to drift to sleep but shot up when I felt an arm around my waist. Monty was dead asleep but he had placed his arm around my waist as if to snuggle with me. What is wrong with this guy? Don't answer that, I don't want to know. I walked over to the bathroom and sat on the toilet until I felt like I had been in there for years and opened the door to go back into the room. When I opened the door, I had to resist the scream in my throat. Monty was standing there just looking lifelessly at the door. I shoved past him and laid back down in my current spot on the bed placing pillows in the middle to keep us separated.

It was a childish move I know, but I did not even want to think of Monty touching me. I heard the toilet flush followed by the pitter-patter of feet. I heard a deep chuckle from behind me as Monty entered the bed. "You seriously built a wall out of pillows to keep me away from you? Are you twelve or something?" Monty said as he tried to hold back his laughter. "I do not want you touching me. I will do as you say, but I am not going there with you. You can just kill me now." I stated finally showing him I can stand my ground. When I felt the bed sink right next to me, I knew I should have kept my mouth closed. I just let the anger get the best of me and had to let some of it slide before I completely blew up in a rage. "You do not have to worry about me killing you. That is too easy. I prefer the slowness of torture. It breeds the best revenge." Monty responded in the way I expected him to.

I just stayed rolled over and remained silent. I did not need to piss Monty off anymore than i already had. All I was doing at this point was asking for trouble. I wanted to see my parents and Caroline again one day. I needed to gather every last bit of strength I had and put on the best performance Monty had ever seen. Maybe he thought he was good at the whole pretending-to-be-someone-you-aren't thing, but I was going to show him, he had met his match. I needed to keep him on my good side even if he was a psychopathic killer who was an asshole more times than not, I was going to out do him. I was stronger than him. He relied strictly on fear of his victims, but without any fear, he was nothing more than a face in the crowd. I was not going to let him know so quickly that I knew how to out play him. I needed to feed into his ego a little more first, but I was going to get out of this hell. I did not care what I had to do to do it, I was getting out.

I thought of how my parents must be feeling right now and let the tears stream silently down my face. I tucked my head into the comforter and closed my eyes. I tried picturing happier moments. All the good times my family and Caroline had together and slowly drifted back to sleep. That was the last time I would sleep that good. That was the last night, I would go to sleep without seeing things that completely changed me forever. Nobody could have prepared me for the lifestyle Monty lived. The things he had done was terrifying and how he so casually completed his "tasks" and felt no remorse for them was downright insane. I knew if I did not want to end up in Monty's body count, not sexually, I would have to put on the best show he'd ever seen. I was finally ready to play Monty's twisted game, but this time I was confident I was going to win.

#warned #badboy #bad #goodgirl #good #drugs #monty #ella #gang #gangster #story #wattpad

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getallemeralds · 5 years

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So, I have a character who is a system, and I wanted to know before I develop them further, how does DID work, from a personal account? I really really really don't want to accidentally create yet another TOXIC misinterpretation of a real condition (because I know how horrible that can feel), and I hope I'm not saying anything wrong even now. (P.S. I love your blog, but I'm too shy to come off anon.)

hey anon!! it means a LOT to me that you sent this message :D theres a lot of really messy-bad potrayals of DID in the media so seeing people actually going to the effort of asking systems abt their experiences is really heartwarming for us. (plus the fact that ppl keep asking us in specific abt system stuff omg,,)

im gonna preface this by saying that, in the end, i can only really talk about my own experiences with full confidence. systems can work pretty differently from each other, but this is how we function and also some details ive noticed from system friends + general discussion over the years

so, to start off: Dissociative Identity Disorder is, at its core, your brain trying to respond to trauma in a pretty severe way. that being said there ARE systems that didnt experience severe trauma and still developed, and im not really sure about the mechanics behind that but i find it really cool and it totally exists. im gonna focus on trauma-based systems bc that’s our ~tragic backstory~ and also tends to be what most people opt for when creating system characters anyway, but the only real difference from what i can tell is, uh, a lack of trauma.

I HOPE YOU’RE READY FOR ME TO SAY THE WORD “TRAUMA” A WHOLE LOT JFC

(system friends are welcome to reblog with corrections or added info!!)

anyway. the way your brain responds to things is really weird. if something happens where you’re just, like, completely unable to handle it, like you dissociate yourself so hard because there’s no way you can manage this, your brain has a chance of going “uh… well, fuck, uh” and generating somebody who can manage it. or it might decide to be a dick and take all of the fucky internalized garbage and turn it into a person whose sole existence is to be an asshole. (they have the potential to get better, i think… ours didnt.) honestly theres a bunch of reasons and a bunch of “roles” that could lead to an alter/headmate* forming.

* we use the terms interchangeably depending on mood and whos fronting. i think its supposed to be “alter” is DID, “headmate” is implication that theyre non-traumatic? we like using “headmate” because it brings this fun mental image of us being a bunch of roommates constantly starting shit with each other and goofing off which is pretty accurate about 75% of the time

i keep getting distracted bc my cat is here. this is gonna be fun to go back and edit.

whatever the original situation is, you’re suddenly not alone in your own brain. and it’s REALLY WEIRD. communication was VERY hard. Icarus, our system original, used to do a very “cliche” thing of sharing a journal with their early headmates, where theyd write a sentence and then theyd write a reply (although back then they didnt realize that was a system-related thing and just thought they were having a fun conversation with their ocs. which… they were, just. Actually Talking.) they didnt have any inward perception of themself or their headmates either, so that kinda built up over time (with some help) along with the appearance of our headspace so that there was… actually a location for people to interact in. once they had a better awareness of things, mental communication got a bit easier– its sort of like background chatter really, when everybody’s awake. sometimes i get weird out of context things from Mae yelling at somebody, or sometimes ill be talking to a friend and someone’ll butt in.

when talking out loud, this usually leads to us suddenly stopping and then laughing or going “no!!!”. when on discord and around people who know who we are… well.

speaking of Mae, she’s pretty much my sister. not like… biologically? because i don’t think thats possible for me, but shes kinda literally my “other half” which ill get into later. headmates can have strong attachments to other alters! friends, best friends, family, dating, whatever. they can also do that with people outside the system, and itll be different for each headmate. there’s like 4 people dating Jorb but i just see him as one of my best friends. we’re people and we have complex social interactions that can get to be kind of a nightmare when you’re around a bunch of people who don’t know that you’re Not Leo and that youre suddenly not super up to existing around people in general.

plus even if like… so Jorb’s dating 4 of us like i said, but his relationship w/ each of them is different? Ica is very clingy and likes rambling to him, Summer’s pretty much just always happy to hang out, Mae makes fun of him a lot but in a loving way, and Leo is… kinda “all of the above” because that’s his gimmick. plus even tho a few other alters have a sibling-ish relationship with Mae like i do, usually its just me and Mae that do the “chaos siblings” bit.

the basic system.. thing… is that there’s “front”, which is being in control of the body– so, like, i’m currently fronting/in front, because im the one currently active and using our computer and staring at our cat.– and then theres the headspace, where everybody hangs out when theyre not in front. the headspace itself can differ in style & functionality for each system, and i think theres some systems that dont really have a location at all? but for us its like a full on location where we have individual rooms, places to visit if we get bored while away from front, etc.

theres also like, being at/near/away from front? so currently im in front, but Leo is pretty much always lurking nearby if he’s awake (we have individual sleep schedules that dont always sync up to the “irl” one, Trust is almost always sleeping), Ica’s somewhat in the back talking to Rookie so i cant really make out what theyre saying (its probably about either a youtube thing they both like or about a comic they want to do), and everyone else is either asleep (in which case they could be nearby but i cant currently “ping” them, so id have to actually take a sec to ground myself in headspace more) or in a different room. communication is easier if im in front and somebody is nearby, or it can be like with Ica rn where im like “well, theyre talking, but i have no idea what theyre saying and am making a guess based off their usual interactions”, or i could pass off front to go talk to Ica and come back (in which case my memory would be kind of vague and weird because information doesnt always properly translate), oooor i could actually go bug them while still in front. which.. im not gonna do rn bc then id get super distracted.

switching front differs between systems a lot! and even varies from day to day. like there are days where we wake up and we have absolutely no idea who we are bc we went to bed as one person and woke up as another. or we could be talking to somebody and then realize “wait, i stopped being Leo a bit ago, who am i”. or we could pass off front to somebody, like if Summer really wanted to front sie’d run up to me and let me know and we’d swap. or if something critical happens (usually a breakdown), Leo or one of the other headmates that’re more built to handle stressful situations will literally drag somebody out of front to make sure they dont hurt themself. or sometimes we throw front at people unexpectedly, like either mid-breakdown where we go “okay i dont wanna be here anymore, tag youre it” or sometimes because we think its funny because its the metaphysical equivalent of getting clonked in the head with a dodgeball, except the dodgeball is “being in control of our shared physical form”. usually mae’s the one that does that lmao

there’s a couple major categories of how alters come about. there’s “walk-ins”, where they kinda just… appear externally? like they just show up. sometimes we get a feeling of “huh. i think somebody might be here? or somebody might be showing up soon.” and have to rummage around for a while until they approach us or we find them. our walk-ins aren’t like, inherently aware of system stuff at first, so they usually get a crash course before they first front (if they choose to front at all) and it can be kinda entertaining. Rookie’s a walk-in! also Hiro, from a couple years ago. most of our walk-ins are fictives (fictional characters, usually appearing in response to us getting extremely attached to something or somebody) but a couple of our trauma splits are also fictives so that’s not like, a Rule or anything. i think these are mostly associated with non-traumatic systems but we get em fairly often so man idk

theres also… uh, i dunno what theyre actually called? we used to call them “constructs” but that sounds kind of mean. these alters exist to fill a specific role! and we usually dont talk about them on here with the exception of one major one, they just kinda hang out. Dhe exists to keep the system stable and manages the “backend” so to speak. Imp is kind of a mix of our intrusive & impulsive thoughts that came about from us trying to separate ourself from them so that we had an imaginary entity to go “nope!” at, which… stopped being imaginary, and is now a gremlin that lives in my brain. they can show up in response to trauma but arent split off of somebody, they kinda just pop into existence to help manage things.

the more… well-known, i guess? alter origin is “trauma splits”. rather than “just showing up one day with no real connection to the system origins”, trauma splits are formed when somebody in-system, uh, splits. it could be in response to a single situation or something built up over a long time, but somebody just kinda breaks and somebody new that has a bit of the original alter’s identity (if kinda influenced by the situation) shows up.

this can vary. All is a trauma split off of Leo himself, who got saddled with all of our brain hell about our ex and their insystem appearance is influenced more by eir than by leo which is… something they struggle with. Mae has a trauma split from a similar situation that is “Mae but from 2 years ago”, so basically her old identity before she reworked herself after getting put through total hell. and then uh… then there’s me and Mae! Icarus quite literally exploded into several people, with Pat (me) and Mae being the most distinct ones. we’re STILL finding out alters used to originally be a part of them that later evolved into their own people, like Summer and Toby. my identity is shaped pretty heavily not just by who Ica was at time of splitting, but also what they wanted to be jumbled together with trying to rationalize what was happening to them (they’re a pretty big fan of megaman star force, which has a media-typical system in it, so they leaned into hard “its like pat and rey from mmsf! i like pat, i wouldnt mind being like pat, its scary but im like one of my current favourite characters” and so i ended up being like, half-weird shapeshifter, half-green-haired prettyboy. and yeah thats where my name comes from!)

(Ica got put back together w/o anybody needing to integrate, which we were all very scared about, and it’s still kind of surreal to me because… me and Mae used to be able to stick ourself back together and thats how we found out about what happened to Ica in the first place? and we havent tried that since bc we have no idea what would happen. Ica 2: Ica Harder?)

despite their origins, trauma splits can be way more than… being a split. :V;; Toby’s not just a tiny splinter of Ica, he’s a quiet guy that gets stressed out and isn’t totally sure how to interact with people. i’ve existed for like 7 years at minimum and im a totally different person than i was when i thought i was still Ica, ‘cause ive had time to grow and change (and a problem Ica keeps running into now that theyre back is… they kinda Didn’t change because they were MIA for 6 years.) like everything else though this is variable– there can be “temporary” splits that dont develop properly and might get integrated back in, which has only happened to us when we were at the lowest point in our life where we were stuck constantly splitting to try and cope with whatever the hell was going on.

so Ica was gone for 6 years, which meant our system was without an original or main– there wasn’t anybody to be head of the system, basically. for a while i was operating under the assumption that i was Ica, so i filled in that role for a few years before i made the realization. eventually i kinda… stopped being able to, though, bc of stability issues, and then we were back to not really having a proper main anymore. to make up for it, we started going by Leo collectively and kinda… trying to pretend to be a single person? and so that ended up creating a construct to fill the role of “system main and the person we pretend to be when passing as singlet/not a system”: Leo himself! he’s kinda the most prominent traits we all have in common rolled into a single guy, which means that not only is he a pretty good system representative but we can also pretend to be him pretty easily (unless it’s someone like Toby who acts totally different). i dont know how common this situation is, i think normally it’s just “if system original is gone, another alter steps up” like originally happened to us before i had a severe case of problems disorder.

uhhh this is very rambley bc there’s a Lot to cover and now im trying to figure out how much of it i HAVE covered. systems are complicated and weird! OH WAIT okay i have one last bit.

so like, for us, first realizing we were a system was total hell. we fought a lot. as more alters showed up through various means, there were times where Ica felt like they were completely out of control of their own life bc of having to manage everything. there were a lot of panic attacks of people fronting and not being sure they were even REAL, despite… being in front. but we still felt like we were deluding ourself. this was in, like, late 2011, so systems weren’t a THING. they were a very fringe community that everyone hated. we got constantly harassed, which only fed into Ica’s panic hell and our identity issues. interpersonal relationships became a nightmare, especially because we have BPD as well which varies in severity for each of us but… for me it’s pretty bad! there were times early on where every day was another fun new breakdown from us arguing with each other or our friends or not being understood or… etc.

so… how are we holding up ~7 and a half years later? pretty well, actually! we talk to each other. we do things for each other, like buy food or games we know specific headmates like. Ica is back and way happier than they were in 2011, and is thrilled to get to hang out with everybody that’s showed up since. we help each other through problems, because at the end of the day our system ended up being a support network. Ica couldnt function on their own, so we’re like… 10+ people working together to try and be a single functional person. and we feel pretty okay with that! we still fight, and we still start shit, but we’re not in constant crisis anymore. we’re still working through all of our trauma, especially the more “recent” stuff that kinda broke our system for a while until we were able to start rebuilding, but we’re doing it together. :D

so… yeah, it can start out as a stereotypical “nightmare system”, with constant infighting and toxicity and self-sabotage and etc. but we worked through it! it took a while, but we’re overall more stable than we were before. we got out of the bad environment that was fucking us up, we got mental help for our other brain hell (we havent been able to bring up the system to our therapists bc its literally a non-issue now and we focus more on other things like our depression, anxiety, PTSD, etc), we found people that support us for being us, and we were able to like… figure things out. and it was a mess! i still have issues about my own identity because of literally thinking i was someone else for two years. Ica’s still trying to figure out how to adjust to things, especially bc they missed our entire “cringe culture” phase so they came back to find that i’d dismantled a lot of their middle-school settings. and, uh, some of their friendships as well.

systems are fuckin weird

#leo chirps #leos reply #system shit #i dont think i covered EVERYTHING #and im not sure how coherent this is #but i tried! :D #Anonymous #ask #pat.txt

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lucywithlupus · 5 years

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“When my loved ones tell me the sparkle in my eyes are back, even if it’s for a day; and on that day, I feel. I feel the things that have been missing, things I didn’t even realize weren’t there anymore.”— Courtenay Ambrose Living with a rheumatoid condition means that you are pretty familiar with the rise and fall of your health. We would wish to always stay up, but sometimes, we fall, and we fall hard. Hospitalizations or a recovery period at home can be daunting, traumatic experiences. They make you realize how in one second, your health could be at risk. Whether it is for excess inflammation, a serious damage of your joints, bones or muscles, organ failure or an infection that your body cannot get rid by itself, there are plenty of possible scenarios where you are placed back in that hospital bed for a few days, only to be sent back home and told to take a few (or many) days off. And I will admit, those days are some of the saddest I have experienced in my life. Coming back home was like an explosion of emotions: anger, happiness, sadness, confusion, fear, etc. Knowing that I would have to take things slow was devastating to me since all I wanted was to finally wipe off all memories of me being in that hospital bed. But not all hope was lost, and, for the first time in so long, I can finally say that I am getting better, and I will continue to get better every day. In this post, we will talk about what can you do during those recovery days and how can you heal yourself in the best way possible. I carefully thought about the things I did during these last three weeks of recovery, and how each of them was either a step forward or backward. You are not alone, and we can put you on the right track to sweet, healthy freedom! Without further ado, here we go: How to get better after a long recovery break? Tip 1: Eat The first three tips that I have to involve the Big Three: Food, Water and Sleep. We all need them, we cannot survive without them, and, in most cases, they are the only three tools your body will need to make you feel better. When I came back to the hospital, I was still trying to listen to my body and what it asked me to do. It was super hard to eat again after almost two weeks of nausea and irregular appetite, so even choosing what to eat was an important daily task. I would constantly ask myself: "am I ok? what do I need?" Note that when you're sick, sometimes what you need and what you won't get mixed up. You may want to eat a tub of ice cream, but maybe that won't help in your healing process. Both what you crave and what you actually end up eating are important. Inform your doctor on both of these: your appetite patterns will always be a key hint of how your organs and metabolism are doing. Now, about nausea: no one likes it. But you have to get through it.Foods with a bland taste and some texture to them like crackers, popcorn and toast made for great post-hospital-food snacks, while also not making me want to throw up. Chewing your food rather than drinking it in soups or smoothies also makes your body fuller for longer. Don't be surprised if you eat more or less than you normally do: just follow what your body is telling you to do! The trick is to be aware of what you are eating, chose healthy things most of the time and treat yourself every so often. This is no time for a strict diet: change your eating patterns according to your mood and hunger levels! Tip 2: Drink water Water, water, water! Drink water, all day, every day, nonstop. Being properly hydrated is the only way your body is going to heal itself. So if that wasn't on your 2019 resolutions list, write it down now. You still have 11 months to achieve master levels of water intake. Another tip: make sure you have good hygiene. Sometimes, it is hard to understand for others, but I can't step into the shower without fearing death by slip. It was worse when my hand still had an intravenous treatment happening, and I needed to protect my hand from water at all times. Being clean and tidy at all times does not only make you feel fresh and clean, but it also makes you feel more motivated to make your day right. So wash your face, clean your teeth, change out of those PJs: make sure every morning, you are ready to step out that door, even though you know that you may not go anywhere. It's small tweaks like this that make a huge difference! Tip 3: Sleep and Rest This should not come as a surprise to anyone, but sleep is probably what your body does more when its spending energy trying to heal you. Identify how does your body tells you it is tired and wants to sleep, and do not continue binge-watching Netflix just because you want to know what happens in the next episode. Sleep now. You'll thank me later. But obviously, you can't sleep all day. Resting other ways is just as important, but do rest mindfully. This is what I mean: you probably won't feel rested after that 45-minute Forntnite gameplay video, but probably you would by spending 10 minutes doing something else: listening to some music, coloring, playing an instrument, taking a walk. Surprisingly, I have found so many things that I can do to relax that I would not do before because I was too lazy to try them out! And for my fellow workaholics out there, understand that your body is not going to keep up with the same workload as before at first. That is perfectly normal and ok, and you should not feel guilty for that. If you really want to squeeze in some work, just zigzag your way between breaks and work and eventually, things will get done. Tip 4: Know your limits This ties in nicely with what I was saying before. Coincidence, I don't think so! I understand that finally being free of nurses and doctors telling you do lay down and rest makes you want to do the exact opposite when no one is watching. But the truth of the matter is: if you don't stop yourself, your body will, using its own painful, unpleasant ways. Take your time to heal, that's why you are here in the first place! Accept the fact that you cannot go to work/school/ university or college right now because you put yourself and others at risk. Try to do some tasks, but make sure you prioritize health and rest for now. Plus, let me spill on you some truth: It is not your fault you are in this situation. It never was and never will be. String-theory-wise, there are so many possible realities where you are in the hospital for so many different reasons beyond your illness, like a car crash or an armed robbery. In these realities, no one would dare tell you it was your fault you got hurt, so why now? Why now blame yourself and actually sabotage your healing with bad thoughts? So every time you feel guilty, alone or weak, just think of your day and what you accomplished today. Today you got up, brushed your teeth, put on some clothes, took your meds, etc. Slowly but surely, these little victories will matter and push you forward. Tip 5: Rebuild your space Imagine that you are a plane crash survivor, drifting in the ocean in a tiny lifesaving boat. Your house is like this boat: it protects you, but you also spend a heck of a long time in it. So the logical thing to do would be to make sure this tiny boat has all the things you need to survive: a rain collector, a weapon for fishing, some good wifi, etc. In other words, make sure your house is equipped and cozy enough for you to survive the long wait. Bring important things near your bed for what I call "drop everything" moments: basically, moments when you feel so bad, you just throw everything everywhere and toss yourself in bed, helpless and sad. Have essentials in your nightstand at all times: pills, water, thermometer, tissues, snacks, etc. These will save you during those "I can't get up" tragedies. Also, bring out things to keep you entertained throughout your stay. My room has never had so many books lying around. There are coloring pencils I haven't touched in so long which are now every day "grab and doodle" tool. I still cannot stay be separated from my headphones and fine tunes for long. You get the point. If you need something, do not be ashamed or afraid to ask for it. Call a friend, your parents, your family and let them know how they can help you! Tip 6: Try new things Imagine you are now at work or school, sitting in your desk, your mind wandering. These are the exact moments when you think: I could totally become a great dancer/ artist/ DJ/ chef if I had the time. I could totally start my own projects, read this book I want to read, learn more about this thing I love, etc. I could totally do all of those things, only if I had the time…. Well, knock knock, look who has arrived! Time has! This is the perfect time for you to try out all of the things you could not when you were too busy stuck in your routine. Do them now! Try some coloring, painting, yoga, that recipe you saw online but were too intimidated to do, that choreography that looked cool but challenging, that 1000-piece puzzle someone gave you but you just stashed away for another day. The world is your oyster, so go ahead! Tip 7: Have fun What better way to spend your time than catching up with the people you love and maybe haven't seen in a while!Meet up with your friends, text them often if they are far away, call them a few times. Do not think that you are wasting their time: if they are your friend when they want to hear how you are doing, how your health is doing, etc. Make sure you are being honest: as cliché as it sounds, sometimes its ok not be ok, and those moments of sadness and worry is exactly what talking to others is for. It is super important to understand that not everything has to be about feeling sorry for yourself for being sick. Not every single activity of your daily need to revolve around your current illness. You have to find ways to distract yourself from the situation you are experiencing right now, otherwise, you will, as we Spanish speakers say, drown yourself in a glass of water. Sometimes, your problems seem bigger than what they truly are, and it is in those times where fun and games should arrive to cheer you up. So enjoy your home: watch some Netflix, play video games, watch funny youtube videos, play some music and dance, etc. Tip 8: Take care of yourself Sadly, not everything is fun and games, and you must find the balance between responsibility and perfectly normal laziness. Take your medications, call the doctor if they are not working properly or have weird symptoms. If possible, keep a record of how you feel each day, what your symptoms are, go to your checkups, etc. Know when your body cannot go further, but also challenge yourself every so often. When you listen to your mind and soul carefully, you being to be more honest with yourself, about what you can and can't achieve at certain times. You will be surprised at how, in the most unexpected moments, you will be able to get out of bed with no back pain, you will be able to go down those stairs with no fear of falling, you will be able to not feel sick for a whole day, then days, then weeks, and so on. Always question yourself: do I avoid this because I might get hurt or do I push myself to try to overcome it? Am I ready yet, mentally and physically, to take that step forward? Tip 9: Have faith Whichever religion you practice, or whichever believes you have on the universe and our existence, faith is a universal entity that will be the one to keep you going even in the hardest of times. Take a moment to meditate, pray or just reflect on what you did and what you can do for yourself today. Those moments are just as important as any doctor's appointment or medicine. They bring you a sense of peace and love that no other thing can give you. Always be thankful for what you are and what you have. Be thankful for both the good times and the not so good ones. Not many people keep up with what you do, so be thankful that you have the strength and wits to make it happen. Tip 10: Prepare yourself for life after your recovery Staying healthy ain't easy after a recovery, especially when reality slaps you in the face when you get back to your routine. Before you even step out, make sure your environment is prepared to welcome you back. Call your teachers, boss, or college professors to let them know where you have been and why you could not come back sooner. They will surely understand and help you to readjust to your old working habits. Take the time to reflect on your goals and what you truly wish to achieve in life. Talking to others about said goals makes it more likely for them to become a reality! Have clear and genuine care for your well being. Being back to your old life doesn't mean that you will put your health to the side after all that work to get better! Do not be ashamed or afraid to speak about what you went through, how you are doing and how can others help you to get back out there. Take it easy! Not everything will be perfect at first, and that doesn't surprise me! There may be a few slips here and there, but going slow and steady will always make you win the race in the end. Believe in yourself: you have overcome so much! Keep going! I believe in you! Aaand that's all for today, folks! Next week, we will move on again to Wednesday's "What is…?" post, and another lifestyle post for Saturday/ Sunday. Sorry for being late this week! I had so many things going on with university, checkups, seeing my friends, etc. I hope you still enjoyed the post and hopefully, some of it will help you survive your next recovery break- if it were to happen, always be ready! Take care of yourself! Love you! Bye!

#lupus #lupuswarrior #systemic lupus erythematosus #recovery #hospital #inflammatory arthritis #types of arthritis #fibromyalgia #spoons #rheumatism #rheumatic #chronically ill #chronic pain #gouty arthritis

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minoukatze · 6 years

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Homecoming

Chapter Twenty-One

The room somehow seemed to grow darker, chillier, all remnants of celebration for a successful sting driven out. Johann went rigid, the question draining all color and victory from his craggy face.

Johann pleaded. “Victor, this isn’t a good time.”

“Of course it’s not,” Victor countered heatedly. “But there never will be one. I need to know, and I cannot leave the question any longer.”

“I…uh…” Johann ran his fingers through his fluffy white hair. “Victor, I don’t think you really want to know the answer.”

“I have resigned myself to the notion that it must be traumatic,” Victor replied. “Sigmar’s sake, Johann, I am fifty-six years old and I have seen more horror than you can imagine. Do you honestly believe that I cannot handle it?”

“It’s not that, Victor,” Johann replied wearily. “It’s just…whatever positive memories you have of your mother…I don’t want this to color them.”

“I am not a sentimental man, Johann,” Victor stated firmly. “You should know this by now. I need to know the truth.”

Johann sighed. “Very well, but you have been warned. It is not a pleasant tale.”

“Duly noted,” Victor replied. “Tell me.”

“Right.” Johann set to pacing. “So. When you were nearing your Trials, your mother…well…you remember she was always zealous, but when we got word you were to begin them she…she sort of took it to new heights…or depths…whichever way you want to look at it. Sieglinde began raving in the street, preaching to passersby…began to badger the chapterhouse, kept demanding to know your location. When we received word of your success, she lost all sense.” Johann swallowed heavily. “She shaved her head, used one of your father’s brands to burn the comet into her forehead, and then hammered a few nails into her skull for good measure. She pounded on my door, howling, demanding to know where you were so that she could follow you on mission.”

Victor felt the room began to spin. He grasped the chair and slid into it.

“Victor, I can stop. You don’t need to know more than…”

“Continue.”

Johann nodded sadly. “She began to camp out at the door of the chapterhouse, braying verse at the top of her lungs and trying to wear me down. We would have to keep alerting your father to bring her home, and the first few times it worked. After she found the flail, though, there was no use.” Johann paused to rub his temples. “As you can imagine, she didn’t take the greatest care of her injuries, and it’s very possible the nails were rusty. Walburga went to Sieglinde every day, begging to clean her wounds, and Sieglinde would chase her away every time. ‘Slattern! Slattern!’ she’d yell.” Johann shook his head ruefully. “I can still hear it in the back of my head. It was almost like the town clock tolling on the hour. ‘Slattern! Slattern!’” Johann reflexively waved his arms in imitation, then stopped himself, clearing his throat in chagrin. “We could see Sieglinde failing every day, but could do nothing to help. No one could get near her. Finally, Sieglinde fell asleep on our doorstep, and Walburga decided to try to treat her, thinking the woman weakened. As soon as Walburga’s salve touched your mother’s brand, Sieglinde awoke screaming and attacked. She smashed her flail into Walburga’s shoulder. Sieglinde was ready to cave the poor girl’s head in, when her son, just a wee lad at that point, ran up and tried to defend his mother. Had we not been there to apprehend Sieglinde, she would have destroyed the both of them. And if it weren’t for Old Lady Somner, poor Walburga probably would have lost her arm. It took five of us to subdue your mother, and then we strapped her down to a table and had Doctor Knudsen clean her wounds, but it was too late.” Johann knelt down opposite Victor, his blue eyes pleading. “Victor, I’m so sorry. That is probably what we should have done at the start, but I don’t know if she would have just gone and hammered more nails into her head. Your father did not want her thrown into a sanatorium, but…” Johann stood again. “There it is. Your mother was not well mentally. She loved you in her own sick, demented way, but…”

Victor stared blankly at the wall. He felt as if he’d been hollowed out, a shell in leather and chainmail arranged upon a chair.

“Victor?”

“And what about my father?” Victor asked quietly, his voice empty.

“That one was tragic, but mundane,” Johann replied. “Same as in the letter. He was trying to shoe a horse, got distracted, the horse was spooked by something and kicked out. It was sudden and painless. Victor, I am so…”

“Thank you,” Victor interrupted. “I will need a moment, and then I will report to the chapterhouse. Please tell my friends to supplement the guards at the appointed spot in the forest.”

“Victor, are you sure? I…”

“I will be there.” Victor’s breath was steady, his voice even. “Just give me a moment.”

“If you need to talk…” Johann hesitated, seeing Victor’s stone-faced expression. “You can always…”

“Yes, Captain.”

Johann nodded and turned for the door. “Right. I will expect you shortly.”

After Johann departed, Victor was still for a very long time, aware of the avalanche of rage and pain threatening to consume him, but distant as of yet. For the moment, he was numb, stunned, the news not unlike a strike from a Chaos Warrior. He had assumed agony and illness, but the madness…

The worst of it was that it was a madness Victor understood well. He had edged close to that line several times and had drawn back just at the brink of oblivion. Every time the Order shunned him, every scrap of evidence disbelieved, every nightmare of a ravaged town uncovered…They are fools, they are nothing, there is only the lustration of Sigmar, and my will to serve…they will see, the world will see, and they will be forced into submission…I am the hammer of Sigmar and they will REPENT! REPENT!

That sudden terror, the very same that flared the moment the rye bread touched his tongue the first day he had arrived, arose and swallowed Victor whole. He sat petrified in his chair, pulse speeding, gripping the arms of his chair…he forced himself to steady his breath and unclench his jaw, remembering what had dragged him out of this hysteria before. Duty. Purpose.

Vengeance.

Victor stood.

Gilbert Falkenrath awaited his pleasure.

Victor had not had time to assess the Senden chapterhouse interrogation chambers as of yet. From what Johann had told him, theirs was among the most technologically advanced in the Empire, all thanks to the man currently restrained in it. One could slice the irony with a knife.

When Victor entered the chamber, he could appreciate the various cutting edge instruments of destruction therein. There were shiny things that whirred, hydraulic things that pummeled (Dwarven in origin, Victor supposed), racks which required no cranking. They were all well and good, but Victor was more of a traditionalist. He preferred to be a bit more hands-on, and while he did enjoy experimenting with other tools, Victor never needed anything more than a single blade to carve out whatever secrets lurking inside of the heretic before him.

You will find that witch hunters have a certain mastery over time, Victor liked to say. With this scalpel, I can stretch a minute into an eternity.

Victor had been practically salivating over the thought of this very moment ever since he had arrived in town. Seeing Gilbert strapped to the table, though, Victor felt oddly…empty. Gilbert was particularly pathetic-looking on the slab; his fish-belly white stomach bulbous and vulnerable; his arms and legs skinny and stringy; his jowly face wan and haggard; shadowed with scrubby, threadbare stubble. Victor expected to be met with shock, terror, pleading; but received none. Gilbert looked upon the hunter resigned; relieved, even.

“So, Victor,” Gilbert rasped. “Our merry dance ends.”

“You seem unsurprised by your reversal of fortune, Gilbert,” Victor remarked, inwardly disappointed.

“Not so much unsurprised,” Gilbert breathed. “As you know, I have sinned, and sinned greatly. I suppose that for the past two days I have been subconsciously hoping for retribution.” He peered at Victor with weary, bloodshot eyes. “I deserve every scream you are going to rip from me. I only ask that you wait as I give you my confession, as I wish to give it with a mind unclouded by pain.”

Damn. He was taking all of the fun out of this. “Very well, Gilbert. Give me the record of your misdeeds.”

“My son…” Gilbert’s steady voice faltered, broke. “My Axel…they took him, and I let them. I could have gone in his stead, but I was a worthless coward. I would do it now, Victor! I have my courage now!” He broke into blubbering sobs. “Oh gods! Switch our places! Turn back the clock and take me instead!”

It was not the first time a suspect broke down in tears upon his table, but Victor had never allowed it to deter him before. Now, though…Victor felt no glee or satisfaction, rather the opposite. He was curiously depressed at the sight of his childhood enemy, helpless and utterly defeated before him. Victor was not pleased by this turn of events.

“Were your children involved in your criminal activities?” Victor asked tonelessly.

“Gilly never did anything too horrible, and Gretchen…Gretchen liked you, Victor, remember?” Gilbert gasped. “Please…please spare her. She has done nothing terrible, never harmed a soul.”

“By hiding a beastman camp, or worse?” Victor replied coolly. “We know of her work. We know that she is a rogue grey mage, and the Grey Order is currently dismantling everything she has wrought in this town, and they do not take kindly to pretenders…”

“Wait, what?” For the first time, Gilbert strained against his bindings. “Victor, you must stop them!”

“You expect leniency after-“

“VICTOR!” Gilbert yelled. “The town is in great peril! Gretchen’s spell is the only barrier keeping the creatures from invading Senden!”

“What?” Victor demanded. “What are you saying?”

“There is a tunnel into our cellar,” Gilbert replied urgently. “My god, Victor, stop the wizards or get every hunter to the manor, otherwise Senden is doomed.”

“Sir?” An apprentice burst into the interrogation chamber. “Um…there’s a lot…we need your help!”

“It begins…” Gilbert howled. “Oh, Sigmar preserve us, it begins!”

#Vermintide #victor saltzpyre #witch hunter #warhammer fantasy #fanfiction #fanfic #homecoming

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lirlovesfic · 6 years

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The Choice

A Doctor Who fanfic Summary: After GitF, the TARDIS brings the Doctor, Rose, and Mickey back to the estate to solve a problem involving the TARDIS herself. But when they see a familiar face, the face of someone who should not exist, they realize the problem is deeper than they thought and could endanger the Doctor’s very existence. Primary characters: Ninth Doctor, Tenth Doctor, Rose Tyler, Mickey Smith, Jackie Tyler. Genres: Romance, mystery, adventure, drama, character study, HN AU, fobbed!Nine, sick TARDIS. Pairings: Nine/Rose, Ten/Rose Rating: Adult

Warning: None for this chapter

a/n: I am currently working on editing this chapter-by-chapter, with the hopes of completing a chapter a day until I catch up with myself. As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m doing it to try to get back into the swing of writing and to build some momentum in order to finish this. Also, there have been some tiny things nagging at me for a while (grammar, punctuation, etc.) so I’ll be correcting as many of them as I can find as I go. The story will not change. In fact, most of the changes are going to be so minor that I doubt anyone (besides myself) will notice. But to keep me on target, I’ll be posting it all here as I go, with links to the other websites it’s on. I hope you enjoy it.

This chapter: on AO3, on TSP, on ffnet

Chapter Four—London, 7 July 2007 and 8 July 2007

On their way back to the TARDIS, Mickey decided not to go with them.

"We've been gone three months," he said. "I've got to check to see if my flat is still mine and find out where my stuff is."

"Do you want me to go with?" Rose asked.

"Nah," he said. "I figure I'd go back to the pub for a bit afterwards. Unless you wanna come with?"

She rolled her eyes. "Oh, yeah, I'd love to sit around and watch you watch more telly," she said sarcastically.

Once back at the TARDIS, the Doctor immediately began to work on the console, trying to get more information from the TARDIS's memory banks. For a while Rose sat on the jump seat, hands under her thighs, feet swinging back and forth, as she watched him work. Normally when he worked on the TARDIS he'd keep up a running commentary, explaining to her what he was doing and why, and even if she didn't understand a word he was saying she'd feel like she was a part of everything. But this time he was completely silent. She knew it was just an indication of how serious he felt the situation was, but she still felt oddly excluded in a way she hadn't ever felt with him before they had met Reinette.

After a few more minutes of staring at him staring at the monitor, she got restless and got up to get something to read. Months earlier, before he had changed even, the Doctor had given her her own storage space in the console room. It was a small compartment under one of the floor gratings where she could keep some of her own stuff so she wouldn't have to run back to her own room every time she wanted something. At the time it had felt almost as momentous as when he had given her a key to the TARDIS. The Doctor had blushed, actually properly blushed, when Jack had compared it to him emptying out a drawer in his bedroom for her.

Rose got out a paperback novel and returned to the jump seat, but she wasn't able to concentrate on it. Instead her mind kept returning to the tiny glimpse she had had of her first Doctor. She reread the same page three times, not remembering a single word of it, as his face swam in front of her eyes.

She threw the book down on the seat next to her.

"Stop it," she muttered to herself.

The Doctor looked up. "What did you say, Rose?"

"Nothing," she said. "Sorry."

He nodded and returned to what he was doing.

Well, there wasn't anything she could do here, she thought. Anything she did would just distract him, and she clearly needed a distraction as well. She considered going out to try and find Mickey, but she knew from experience that sitting around the pub would be as boring as sitting around the console room.

Lord, what had she done on Saturday nights on the Estate before she had run off with the Doctor?

Clubbing, she reminded herself. Mickey had been right. She had spent a lot of time clubbing with Keisha, Shareen, Susie and Rita. She briefly considered ringing one of them, maybe even getting together, but she quickly rejected the idea. She knew Susie and Rita had blokes and would want to be with them on a Saturday night. She wasn't sure whether Keisha and Shareen had boyfriends, but if they didn't, and if they were anything like they used to be, they'd probably want to go pub crawling or something. She didn't want to go with them to try and pick someone up at a club, that wasn't her anymore.

But even if they didn't want to go out, what would she talk to them about anyway?

What have you been up to the last couple of years, Rose?

Oh, I ran away with an alien from outer space. He has a time machine, and we've not only traveled millions of years in the future, but into the past as well. I've met a bodiless head in a jar, cat nun nurses, a woman who had had so much plastic surgery she had turned herself into a bitchy trampoline, and a werewolf from outer space. I've even met the Prime Minister and Queen Victoria.

No. The last time she had tried to talk to Keisha about what she had been up to she'd had to lie through her teeth about the Doctor, something Keisha hadn't noticed at the time because she was distracted by her own problems. She couldn't count on that this time.

She wandered the corridors for a bit, taking peeks into rooms she had never been in before—and why did the TARDIS have an entire room devoted to shoelaces, anyway? Finally, she watched a movie in the media room and went to bed.

Once there, though, she tossed and turned as her mind raced. Ever since Christmas in Cardiff in 1869, she had known that with a time machine the Doctor could take her into the past, where people long dead were alive again. But even after meeting Charles Dickens, Reinette, even her own father and herself as a baby, it had never occurred to her that she could ever see a past version of the Doctor himself.

As she fell asleep, her mind returned to the tiny glimpse she had had of him in the garage.

And longed for another one.

~oOo~

The Doctor huffed in irritation as he yet again watched the images on the small screen built into the TARDIS console. Nothing he did was clearing up the static in the display.

"Rose, this looks less like interference in the CCTV and more like actual damage to the TARDIS memory core. I can't figure it out. Any ideas?"

When Rose didn't answer, he looked up from the monitor. She wasn't there. He scanned his Time Sense only to realize to his surprise that it had been more than four hours since they had gotten back to the TARDIS. She must have gone to bed, he told himself.

Disappointed by her absence, he frowned and turned back to the screen.

~oOo~

"Exterminate! Exterminate!"

Beams of deadly light lit up the night. He could hear the sounds of explosions, of feet running, of desperate parents calling for their lost children.

"Exterminate! Exterminate!"

Giant pepper pots swooped out of the sky and floated above the ground, shooting everything in sight.

"Exterminate! Exterminate!"

Children screamed in fright and pain.

Fire. Fire everywhere. Burning everything in its path.

"No more," he muttered, his voice low and cold.

"Exterminate! Exterminate!"

"No more," he growled angrily.

"Exterminate! Exterminate!"

"NO MORE!" His voice rang out over the din. "NO MORE! NO MORE!"

Heart pounding and chest heaving, John shot up, instantly fully awake. This nightmare had been the worst yet. He reached over for his sketchbook, and stopped. His hands were shaking. Besides, there was nothing about this nightmare he wanted to remember.

In an effort to calm himself he closed his eyes and took in several deep lungsful of air, blowing them out slowly. Gradually his heart rate slowed.

The images made no sense to him. They had, could have, no basis in reality. But dream images often were symbolic of something else, he reminded himself. The dreamscape seemed clearly to be symbolic of a battle of some type.

For the first time, it suddenly occurred to him that he might have been a soldier.

He could have kicked himself. How could he have been so stupid? Why hadn't he thought of that before? The vast majority of the dreams he had were of war, albeit in a futuristic setting. Perhaps he was suffering from amnesia brought on by some form of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Knowing he wouldn't get any more sleep, he got out of bed and sat down in front of his computer. His fingers flew across the keyboard. In his effort to try to find out who he was, over the last several months he'd hacked into a half-dozen computer databases and created false accounts so he could easily enter any time he wanted. The first time he had broken into one of the websites, he had wondered where, how and why he had learned how to do it, but now he just accepted the fact that he could and was grateful for the skill set.

This time he broke into the websites of the armed forces rather than that of Scotland Yard or the NHS. It took no more effort for him than hacking into the others had. But several hours later he knew no more than when he had begun. Since the nightmare had featured a ground battle, he searched the army database for soldiers, regardless of name, matching his general description who were either retired or missing-in-action and presumed dead. When he had found nothing he had expanded his search to the navy and the RAF. Still nothing. A dead end.

John sat back and frowned at the computer. Now what?

What about the girl?

He had concentrated on searching for himself on the internet, but he hadn't searched for her, in part because there hadn't been a way of looking for someone based only on hair color. He hadn't known anything else about her, not her name, not what she looked like, not even if she was real. But now he knew she not only existed, but she was here, on the Powell Estate.

He retrieved his drawing and scanned it into his computer, but the photo recognition software couldn't get a match on the internet off of his drawing.

Another dead end.

He glanced at the clock and groaned. Not quite 8 am. And it was Sunday. He hated Sundays. They were so boring. The garage was closed on Sundays. And he had no odd jobs scheduled for the day. Maybe he'd go into work anyway, he decided.

Just as he was about to get up, the black cat jumped in his lap.

"You still here?" he asked with a quirk of one eyebrow. "You're not movin' in, you know." The cat butted her head against his hand and he sighed. "Alright, let's get you something to eat. But then I'm puttin' you out, because you're not movin' in."

The cat purred.

~oOo~

The next morning Rose slowly awoke in her room in the TARDIS. Although she couldn't rightly remember, she knew she had dreamed of her first Doctor. Right after the Doctor had regenerated, she had dreamed of his previous self every night, but it had been months since the last time.

She closed her eyes and buried her head back in her pillow, trying to recapture her dream. But there was no use. She was too awake.

Yawning widely, she sat up and stretched, wondering what time it was. She didn't have a clock in her room in the TARDIS. There was no real point. No job, no set schedule, and, as the Doctor frequently reminded her, no time in the conventional sense aboard the TARDIS either. With time travel, she could wake up only to find herself on a planet that was entering its nighttime hours or vice versa. When she had first begun traveling with him she had developed a killer case of jet lag trying to keep track of where and when they were, until the Doctor told her not to worry about it and work within her own circadian rhythms.

But they were on the Estate. There was actual linear time here. If they ended up stuck here for a while she might actually need a clock. She shuddered in disgust. She hadn't needed a clock since she had worked at Henrik's.

After showering and getting dressed, Rose stopped by Mickey's room. He wasn't there. Nor was he in the kitchen. Neither was the Doctor. After having a much needed cup of tea from the perfectly hot, never empty pot on the counter, she looked around for Mickey a bit more before wandering into the TARDIS console room.

The cavernous room appeared to be empty as well. Only the telltale whirr of the Doctor's sonic screwdriver told her he was there somewhere.

She found him sitting on the floor, wedged under the console. Disconnected wires, bits of electronics, and other things that looked more grown than made emerged from the bottom of the console and hung loose around his head and shoulders.

He was sonicking something that looked a bit like a glowing aubergine. Nearby was a box containing a half-dozen more of the egg-shaped things, and another lay on the grating next to him. Unlike the others, that one had a smoky appearance to it, resembling nothing more than a giant, burned-out light bulb.

She stood there for more than a minute before he realized she was there.

"Oh, Rose," he said when he finally noticed her. "You're up."

Well spotted, she thought, biting back the sarcastic reply. She was still irritated by his ignoring her the previous night. But that wasn't fair to him, she reminded herself. He was busy with a crisis, and it wasn't his job to pay attention to her. "What are you doing?" she asked instead.

"Replacing some ganglionic circuits from the TARDIS's neural net," he told her. He pointed the sonic at a couple of the hanging wires. They moved towards one another, twisting themselves together and reattaching themselves. When they were finished, it was impossible to see where one had ended and the other had begun. "And I'm almost finished. Unfortunately the static in the CCTV playback was more than static. It was actual damage to the TARDIS's memory core itself." He pointed his sonic screwdriver at the aubergine thing again. As the sonic whirred, its glow brightened.

"Do you know where Mickey is?" she asked.

"Did you check his room?"

She rolled her eyes. "Yes."

"Kitchen?"

"Yes."

"Game room?"

"Yes."

"Swimming pool?"

"He's really not much of a swimmer," she told him.

"Library? No, he wouldn't be there," the Doctor said, answering his own question.

Before Rose could defend him, Mickey burst into the TARDIS, breathing hard as if he had just run a long distance flat out. He bent over, putting his hands on his knees, and gasped for air.

"I am so out of shape," he complained.

"Where were you?" she asked.

"My flat," he told her. "I found out someone paid my rent for six months in advance. But that's not important." He turned to the Doctor. "I know where he is."

~oOo~

"I was just walkin' down the street, on my way back to the TARDIS, when I saw him," Mickey said for the fifth time as they stood across the street from the auto repair shop. Unlike the day before, since it was Sunday morning the street was almost deserted. "He was comin' out of the bakery eatin' a doughnut and carryin' a cup of coffee so I followed him."

"And he went into the garage," the Doctor said. It was clear he wanted less to clarify what Mickey had said than to just stop him repeating himself again.

"Yeah," Mickey answered.

"Hmm." The Doctor cocked his head and stared at the garage thoughtfully. "Well, assuming he's still in there, this is probably my best chance to get a good look at him. What's the best way to get in there unnoticed?"

"Through the office?" Rose suggested.

"It'll be locked," Mickey warned, "and before you suggest unlocking it with your sonic, there's an alarm. Same as the back way."

"I could silence the alarm," the Doctor said, "but he'd still hear the door open and close."

"Y'know, if all you want is to take a look at him, there's a couple of windows in the back. They've got bars across them, but we always keep them open at least a little for ventilation."

The Doctor's mouth twisted into a small grin. "That might work," he said. "You two stay here."

Darting between two parked cars, he took off across the street. Rose started to follow, and Mickey grabbed her arm.

"He said to stay here," he said.

"And since when did either of us ever listen to him?" she asked. She shook off his hand and followed the Doctor, and after a moment's hesitation Mickey followed her.

In the alley behind the garage, the Doctor was standing on a dustbin which had been rolled against the wall and was looking into one of the narrow windows along the eaves. Rose quickly climbed up next to him. She could hear the quiet strains of classical music filtering through the open window.

The Doctor didn't show any surprise at seeing her there.

"Did you see him?" she whispered. He placed a finger over his lips and then gestured at the window. She peeked in.

At first she couldn't see anyone, but then she spotted someone's legs sticking out from under the bright red Vectra in the repair bay directly in front of them. Although it was impossible to see who it was, she knew it was him, if for no other reason than she recognized his heavy black work boots.

"You think that's the man you saw yesterday?" the Doctor whispered.

Rose moved her mouth close to the Doctor's ear. "Yeah, that's him."

"Are you certain?"

"Yes," she said firmly. "Do you feel that echo you were talking about?"

The Doctor shook his head. He pulled his sonic out of a pocket and aimed it through the window. The tip lit up in blue, but she couldn't hear its familiar whirr. In the distance, a dog began to bark.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"The sonic is capable of producing sounds that Time Lords can hear but are far above the range of human hearing," he told her.

Rose looked back in the window. John Smith hadn't moved from his position under the car.

"One more scan," the Doctor said in a low voice. This time the sonic made a quiet whirr, barely audible to Rose even though she was right next to it. The Doctor's brow furrowed as he examined the readings. "He's not a Time Lord. He's completely, one hundred percent human."

"So that's not you after all," Rose said. "He just looks like the old you." She was surprised to feel a wave of disappointment.

"It's a little more complicated than that," the Doctor began, but he was interrupted by a loud crash. They turned as one towards the source of the sound. Mickey had rounded the corner and tripped over a wheelie bin. It had upturned and spilled its contents all over the alley.

Rose heard a sound coming from the inside of the garage and turned back to the window. John Smith had rolled out from under the car he had been working on and was headed towards the back entrance. She nudged the Doctor.

"Time to go!" he said. He hopped off the dustbin and caught Rose as she jumped off. The three ran, rounding the corner just before the back door opened. As they ran, Rose heard a familiar voice coming from the alley behind her.

"What a mess," John said loudly. "Stupid apes."

~oOo~

Back at the TARDIS, the Doctor immediately returned to his position underneath the console. "It's even more important now that I find out exactly what happened," he told them. He quickly replaced the remaining burned out globules.

"Because he wasn't you?" Rose asked.

"No," he replied. "Because he was."

"What?" Rose gaped at him. "But… but… you said he was human. One hundred percent human. If he's human, how is he you?"

"I don't think I can recover all of the missing CCTV footage," the Doctor said, ignoring her question. He pulled his glasses out of his pocket and pushed them on as he stood. With one slender finger he flipped a switch on one of the control panels and the whole room went black except for the console. The faint glow cast odd shadows around the room and gave his skin a bluish cast. "Most of the sections that are missing are too badly damaged to recover, but I don't think I really need them. The most important bit is at the end. I have managed to enhance the footage we've already seen, though. If I can just get an additional second or two to play back in addition to that, it might be all we need."

"Doctor, if he's you, why is he human?" Rose asked.

He looked up and met her eyes. "That's what I'm trying to figure out."

"Right." Stupid question, she thought, silently chastising herself.

The Doctor threw a lever forward. A hologram of the very room they were in superimposed itself on the real console room, making the room look like a 3-D movie being watched without the special glasses they always gave you. Rose was surprised to see minute changes had been made over time, changes she had never noticed. A switch and a dial were currently reversed from their original placement on the console. The door leading deeper into the TARDIS was a different shape than it had been. And the jump seat was not only a foot away from its original location but it was larger as well.

The holographic TARDIS door opened and the translucent shape of Rose's first Doctor walked into the room and crossed to the console. He wandered around it, flipping switches carelessly. He stopped in his tracks and winced before continuing to program in the next set of coordinates.

"Stop," said the current Doctor, and the image froze. He walked to the console and examined the controls. "Looks like I just programmed the coordinates for the Powell Estate."

"So… if the coordinates are set for the Estate, is this when you were coming back for me?" Rose asked.

"Yeah, must be," he told her. He looked up at the ceiling. "Forward, normal speed."

The holographic Doctor began to move again. Grimacing, he rolled his left shoulder and tilted his head left and right as if he was trying to relieve a cramp in his neck.

Smoke began to rise from somewhere within the console, and for a second Rose thought it was real. She only realized it was part of the holographic display when the younger Doctor reacted to the sight.

"No, no, no, no, no!" he shouted. He rushed around the console, appearing to run through the current Doctor. He pulled his sonic screwdriver out of the pocket of his leather jacket. As he began to sonic one of the control panels, his TARDIS lurched. He leaned forward and grabbed onto a protrusion near the central column while he continued to use his screwdriver on the panel.

"Freeze," the current Doctor said. He leaned through the hologram of his previous self and examined the controls. "Hmm. I seemed to have bumped the chrono-temporal relay switch. Reset the arrival time for… Huh. New Year's Eve, 2006." He frowned.

"That was six months ago!" Mickey exclaimed.

"But… but we were on the Estate then," Rose said to the Doctor. "We didn't leave until a few days after that." She gestured at the holographic Doctor currently sprawled all over the console. "Do you mean that you and… you were both there at the same time?"

He looked over his glasses at her. "Me? I don't mean anything." He looked puzzled for a moment. "No, that's The Restaurant at the End of the Universe," he said. He glanced at the ceiling. "Forward."

The entire image shimmered and was replaced by static. The Doctor pulled his sonic screwdriver out of his pinstriped pocket and aimed it at one of the controls. The holographic console room reappeared. The leather-clad Doctor was hunched over in pain. He staggered a few steps forward and fell to his knees before collapsing on the floor. In the background they could hear the Cloister Bell ringing, but weakly, as if from a far way off. The helmet that the Doctor had shown her before dropped from the ceiling and fitted itself to the holographic Doctor's head.

"Freeze," the pinstriped Doctor said again. He walked over to his previous self and knelt beside him. He pointed at the helmet. "That's a Chameleon Arch. Has the capability of rewriting a Time Lord's entire biology, changing every cell and turning him into a completely different species. This piece," he pointed out a circular part in front, "stores the Time Lord's true identity while he's in another form. It appears that the TARDIS used the Chameleon Arch to turn me human for some reason." He grimaced. "Could have been worse, I suppose. She could have turned me into anything. Could have ended up a Denebian slime devil or a Canidine Rosikan or something. Could have even ended up as a Slitheen."

Rose slowly walked over to the hologram of her first Doctor and crouched next to him. Now that she could get a closer look at it, she realized the Chameleon Arch didn't really look much like a helmet at all. The metal structure had a main arch that stretched across the top of his head from side to side, held in place with horizontal bars that clamped onto the sides of his head and large disks that pressed against his temples. Another secondary arch stretched from the central arch to his forehead, holding the circular thing the Doctor had pointed out tightly against his younger self's forehead. It appeared to be a silver fob watch, not unlike the one her great-grandfather had had, but this one had the Doctor's circular language engraved into the lid.

Despite being unconscious, the holographic Doctor's face was twisted in pain. Biting her lower lip, she reached out a hand as if to touch him before pulling it back. She drew in a shaky breath.

"Wouldn't that hurt, changing species like that?" Mickey asked

"Yes," the Doctor said shortly. He began to wander the room, ducking his head to look under the jump seat and behind the coral struts. "The only reason she would do something like this is if there was no other choice. The real question is what that was."

At his matter-of-fact tone, Rose stared at him in disbelief. He sounded as if he didn't care what the other Doctor had gone through. Same man, she reminded herself finally. He might not remember it, but he's the one who went through it.

"What are you lookin' for?" Mickey asked.

"The TARDIS locked me out, therefore she's been injured. I'm trying to figure out what could have caused it. I'm also looking for anything out of place," the Doctor answered. "Like this." He pointed under the console. A holographic sonic screwdriver lay on the grating under it. "I must have dropped it when I collapsed."

Mickey and Rose joined in the search, but they couldn't find anything.

"Forward, one quarter speed," the Doctor said.

The Cloister Bell resumed its weak tolling. As they watched, the holographic Chameleon Arch detached itself from the younger Doctor's head and withdrew into the ceiling of the console room, leaving the fob watch on the floor in front of the Doctor's face. The light illuminating the holographic console room flickered, briefly turning mauve before returning to its normal color. The grating under the Doctor rose up on one end, causing him to roll towards the door. It opened by itself.

As the holographic Doctor rolled from one section of grating to another, new sections of the floor would rise up, slowly forcing him towards the door and out of the TARDIS. Then the door shut behind him. The light began to flicker in mauve again.

"Stop!" the pinstriped Doctor yelled, and the image froze. He rushed to the door and knelt down, staring at something on the floor. When he looked up again, his face was visibly pale, made worse by the mauve light shining on his face.

"What is it?" Rose asked.

"The fob watch. It got stuck on the floor between the ramp and the threshold of the door. It's still in the other TARDIS, and as long as it's there, he can't change back."

#The Choice #revised #ficandchips #minor revisions here #but nothing major #I'd do more today #but the day is going to be busy #and I may not get back to editing #until tomorrow morning #we'll see #I really want to get this done #and now that I'm doing it this way #I am anxious to continue

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bookwormguri · 6 years

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Escape the Brothel- Recap 2

aka Fuck me in my stupid face. I can’t write short recaps to save my fucking life because EVERYTHING IS IMPORTANT.

I’ve imagined myself writing this or continuing to write this so often that sometimes I forgot I haven’t written down a single sentence in months. It’s easy to imagine I’m in an empty room with only four people, speaking into the microphone about a story that did happen, and some that didn’t. I did some long posts about the Background and First Session of my DnD game’s first arc, but here I am, over a year later trying to catch up. My memories are a little fuzzy because this happened OVER A YEAR AGO, but I’m sure my Players will correct me if I get anything wrong.

God save me.

Warnings: Violence, PvP, attempted rape, mentions of child abuse, prostitution, poor grammar.

The Players:

Terrance “Fitz” Fitzgeralt-Half-elf Barbarian tiny gay @fitzgeralt @yarking

Vekti White-Bear- Half-orc Sorcerer happy gay @autumninthenorth

Aritian- Aasimar Bard ??? gay @nyako-chan

Arc 1: Escape the Brothel

In my last recap, I left it off with the group’s first day of work finishing up. Now we are on to day two and beyond. Nyako was not there this time, thus the lack of a pretty Bard.

The first arc took place in the Deep Fantasia, located in the walled city Derwezeam. It’s the foremost brothel for those who want something specific or expensive or both. Working there is akin to slavery. Only the guards are allowed to leave the large, manor-like brothel and only at certain times. All workers are branded with a rune that will cast the Disintegrate spell if the person carrying it leaves the brothel and stays out of it for longer than 30 seconds. It first activates by becoming unusually warm when someone leaves it’s allowed range. One can buy their freedom, but it is difficult. However, some prefer their gilded cage to the uncertainty that permeates Derwezeam, a violent, corrupt and insatiable city to its core. My players are not such people. They are determined to escape and bring as many people as they can with them.

Locations: [Link].

First Floor- Includes the main floor, the kitchen, a meeting room in back, the vapors room and the dinning hall.

Servant’s Quarters- Nothing of particular interest here unless you go searching each person’s personal belongings. It isn’t until MUCH later the group discovers a Cloak of Protection as a hidden gem.

Second Floor- This is where (most) of the fucking happens, but also the guard barracks. They never get much sleep.

Third Floor- The whore’s rooms.

Fourth Floor- The Madame, Quofire (Head of the Servants) and Belward’s (Head Guard) chambers + other

Roof- A pretty, pretty garden

Krisatra and Vekti

Krisatra was the cranky, old den monther of the servants, but held only slightly more love for the servants than she did the guards or whores. She had a secret love for flowers that the players did not discover. She essentially unloaded her duties onto Vekti to set up the meeting room for some Very Important Visitors. Vekti was so sweet and obedient. Krisatra didn’t deserve her. This wasn’t in my original plans. I wanted to give my Players carte blanc to do and do whatever they wished in order to escape the brothel. I was terrified of railroading them. I still am to an extent, but I think this was my first lesson in that this group of Players was one that thrived with more direction, not less. Thus, I gave Vekti the instructions to be in a place where Plot was happening. That’s more fun for everyone, right?

Fitz pls Part 2 (w/ Hiraeth)

Vekti went to speak privately in the vapors room with Arara about the meeting. If I hadn’t rolled such poor stealth they would have never heard the disjointed clunk step clunk step clunk that was Hiraeth, the newest whore. She was acquired from the Rangers of Derwezeam after she suffered an accident that left her with only one leg. She had a metal leg as a placeholder (this leg is still with us in the current game, over a year later. How strange to think about).

After overhearing that a meeting would be taking place (aka those in power would be distracted), Hiraeth decided right then it was time to escape (I had originally planned for this to be several days later, but I decided to push it up so Plot could continue). To make sure Vekti and co didn’t realize she was eavesdropping she quickly hid under a table in the dining hall… where Fitz was.

Fitz said something akin to, “Well if you’re down there, you might as well give a blowjob.” Fitz, you sounded kinda rape-y. (EDIT: Trust me, knowing Fitz’ personality, it was not intended in that way, but that was how Hiraeth interpreted it. Fitz tried his best to do the right thing, but he had a Charisma of 9, so.....) Also questioning her about why she was hiding. Hiraeth wasn’t allowed to let anyone stop her from escaping so she knew if she had to snap this guy’s dick off with her teeth to not say anything, she absolutely would. This led to a wrestling match where Fitz ended up grappling her to the floor, much to Hiraeth’s displeasure. Cue Vekti popping in, seeing this, and breaking it up immediately via lifting Fitz up (it’s extra impressive when you remember Vekti is the squishy Sorcerer and Fitz is the stronk Barbarian).

Fitz and Vekti have ‘fun’ (note: backstabbing = fun)

Hiraeth runs without so much as a ‘thank you.’ She has things to plan thank you VERY MUCH. Vekti makes her displeasure about the situation known and eventually puts Fitz down.

Now, for context, Fitz’ past is… traumatic to say the least. It includes a lot of creative and terrible abuses towards him as a child, when he was unable to fight back. It was completely understandable to me as the DM knowing all his secrets why he would react poorly to being restrained against his will and carried around.

Vekti, poor dear, was none-the-wiser. She had just seen a grumpy half-elf that hasn’t been the nicest to her, pinning a girl down who obviously did not want to be pinned down. If it were me, can’t say I would have done any differently. If it were me, and Fitz decided to be stubborn about it, I 100% would have kicked him in the nose. Sorry Yark.

This friction led to delicious and amazing character conflict. I was floored by the roleplay of these two. But it led to Fitz snapping and attempting to backstab Vekti (with a fucking Greatsword mind you) when she went to walk away in a huff. Notice this, Fitz is not good at first, and often second, impressions. It’s a theme.

The Madame~

Since this time, my players have theorized I brought The Madame in at this time specifically to break the PvP fight up. I can confirm this as 100% true. I was legit terrified that this PvP would end with one character dead, especially at such low levels. I didn’t want the Players to feel like they had to fear for their character’s lives (yet), so I put a stop to that.

The Madame is the Deep Fantasia’s owner and the Big Bad for the first arc. Their character design is still one of my favorites; a white painted face, gold lips, lace as a half-face mask, a wide-brimmed hat, covered neck to feet in black, including gloves. I really wanted to emulate that this character WAS NOT to be trifled with, like they were something beyond the brothel and tiny scope of the Material Plane. Considering how terrified my Player were of them, I think I nailed it.

Long story short, The Madame broke up the fight by casting Blindness on both Vekti and Fitz. They had to be led back to their quarters and wait for it to wear off. Now that I have had time to truly develop The Madame’s character, motivations and goals I feel if we didn’t that scene again it would have gone much differently. Fitz would have for sure lost at least one finger or the use of his limbs for the week. That could have been fun. Would have gotten across the message “PvP is not allowed” too imo. We ended the session there, with Vekti and Fitz both blind and vulnerable.

#nats dms #dnd recap #arc 1 #escape the brothel

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