*Icia stares at the blade in Aoki's hands. Her expression goes from horrified to furious to devastated.*
NO!! *With the last bit of strength, Icia grabs her sword and stands... but immediately falls to her knees. She clings to her sword, willing herself to stand.... but can't. She doesn't give up though. Not one bit.*
*bothersome...*
You weren’t his target.
The nightmare looks at Icia, then quickly follows Icia’s gaze to Aoki, who is mid-strike. She easily deflects with her own sword, sending him into the wall. His eyes widen.
“Pathetic.”
She slashes her sword across his torso. Blood begins to spill from his mouth. He looks like he’s in shock, staring at nightmare, staring at Icia, utterly confused. Why? He was trying to help! He was trying to be a good person! He was going to do the right thing, and…and now he’s never going to get the second chance he wished for so desperately. Now he’ll never see the sky again. Now he’ll never see Alpenglow again. Now he’ll never finish his list. Now he’ll never escape the chains and role he was created to fill.
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Joints and their funny decisions
Warning, I will be talking injury. Specifically dislocation and subluxation
Nothing bad, but if such things aren’t your cuppa, don’t read on.
I’m just rambling aimlessly.
My joints have always been loose.
I refer to things as swimming around. My shoulder swims around, my knees swim around. They all just kind of choose their own path.
For the most part, it doesn’t bother me. Well, ok, it bothers me, but in a non-consequential way.
I have had some major dislocations, but mostly my joints stay in their lane and don’t bother to truly fuck themselves up.
This means I don’t totally understand how joints are supposed to work. I understand logically, but viscerally I don’t. I’ll give examples in a minute.
Luckily, I’m also incredibly strong (thanks genetics!) which is a blessing because it means my muscles can hold my joints together since my ligaments are too bloody lazy.
So, back to not truly understanding joints in most people.
I have been repeatedly told that when other people carry a marginally heavy grocery bag, they don’t have to actively engage their shoulder muscles to keep their arm from slowly sliding down. Or that they’re arm doesn’t sag after too long of sitting at a desk.
Other people can’t simply tense some muscles in their shoulder and make the humeral head shift position (either to protrude slightly forward/backward or lower).
Other people’s kneecaps don’t shift around under gentle pressure quite as easily or as far. Or that their lower leg doesn’t start to dangle lower if they don’t have feet touching the floor.
The ways this means I interact with others, I assume that if I grab you by the arm and tug you along without you being prepared, your shoulder will subluxate or dislocate. I’m constantly amazed to be reminded that this is not the case.
When I see people sitting on seats or counters where their legs are dangling, I assume they’ll need to move soon or be in pain from the joint opening up. It actually bothers me to see people sitting on high stools without a foot rest because I imagine the amount of pain they’ll be in (they aren’t and won’t be).
Although I’ve been told a million times that the above things are not how most bodies work, because I live in a body that behaves this way, it’s always something I need to be reminded of.
Logically, I get it; but in the same way that someone who’s color blind understands other people literally see the world differently but can’t quite fathom that difference because they don’t have that experience.
This also means that I run into people viewing the world from their body (which does not have loose joints). And so, when I say my shoulder is out of place, they are working on the premise that it is (1) an extremely painful and (2) traumatic thing and since I’m not making pain noises, I must be exaggerating or not know what I’m talking about.
But when I speak to others with loose joints, I seem to not fit in there either.
My muscles do a fabulous job of holding things in place, and when the joint does dislocate or subluxate, my muscles pull it back. Or it doesn’t bother me and I don’t notice it until it pops back into proper place. Normally, there’s zero to minimal pain either way.
Which seems to make many loose jointed people suspicious and question if I’m exaggerating or don’t know what I’m talking about since for many it is painful or their muscles don’t just pop the joint back into place.
Which is to say, my world view, as informed by my particular body, means I assume everyone’s joints swim around but that it’s not a particularly bad or painful phenomenon. And it is new information every single time someone tells me that’s not the majority of human bodies.
Except my elbows.
When those fuckers shift around, it hurts. Thankfully the one full dislocation of my left elbow happened when I was 3-4yrs old and I don’t remember it.
Oh, and I’m not so cool with my finger joints going wonky.
But wrists, shoulders, knees, hips, ankles, bones in my feet, ribs, these are all pretty cool about when they shift.
Hell, the couple of times my shoulders dislocated (one memorable time I got to watch my humeral head leave the socket and protrude forward in real time, then I tensed my muscles to pull it back in and it was fine), they’ve had the manners to not be painful about it. I don’t try to dislocate them on purpose, but I subluxate them constantly (both passively and on purpose).
I feel like I should write down the many varied dislocations and subluxations I’ve had. I think it would entertain me.
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Is there any specific reason he keeps ending up in there?
His anomaly makes him a bit accident-prone, I fear - he tends to brush against things when using it, which would be no big issue at normal speed, but.. well, running into a corner at walking speed is quite different from running into one with the speed of a car. He is quite lucky that 006 prevents the worst of it now, though he has told me a handful of stories about his pre-promotion adventures. Hearing about said stories, I'm somewhat surprised that he is as physically healthy as he is!
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