#and HEAL

[theplotdemandsit]

When Five finally makes it back home with his siblings, finally makes it back to the right timeline, he finds he’s still holding his breath. 

“Is it really over?” He thinks out loud. 

“I guess there’s only one way to find out,” comes Luther’s response. 

So they do. And everything seems…normal?

But as much as Five wants to sleep for ten days straight, he can’t help but feel on edge. He spends his time visiting each sibling, popping in for dinners or briefly making sure they haven’t felt anything out of the ordinary. One day Allison asks him if he actually wants there to be an approaching apocalypse. His eyes fall onto Claire who’s catching him up on High School Musical the Musical the Series.

“No,” he answers. “I really don’t.” 

They make time for family dinners every Sunday. They still bicker and maybe swing some fists every now and then, but everyone is fast to apologize and laugh again. With room to breathe again without high stakes, the hurt finally begins to heal. They had been family before, but it slowly begins to feel like a real family. 

And for the first time, they really get to know each other. For all the crap they gave Luther about the moon, they listen as he shares the misery and loneliness and betrayal he felt. Allison describes her time as a Black woman in the 60s without her voice. Literally. Viktor tells them about what it was like growing up powerless only to end the world twice. How he lost his memory and found the one he loved only to lose that too. 

Klaus manifests Ben (who is still a ghost but as alive as he could get) and together they tell of their adventures growing up and the cult Klaus accidentally created. In between laughs, they also learn about Klaus’s harrowing experiences with drugs and death.

And Five? He has over 40 years of stories, and at first he doesn’t want to share any of it. His time in the Apocalypse, his time in the Commission, murdering for the sole purpose of survival in order to get back to his family—it’s not a side to him he wants his family to know about. 

But at the same time for reasons he can’t explain, he does want them to know. For the first time, he wants to talk to his family, the family he worked tirelessly to save. 

Little by little, he does just that. Every now and then he will start a sentence with, “Back in the Apocalypse…,” during dinner or his visits with them. Silly ones at first, like the time he had the nasty Twinkie. The time he sang all the Beatles songs he could remember and pretended he was having a concert. The time he found Umbrella Academy action figures and reenacted missions with them. 

When it’s just him and another sibling, he starts sharing some of the hard stuff too.

He tells Allison how he starved during his first winter alone and hallucinated that she had helped him find food. When he woke up he found himself in a storage house full of canned goods and bawled his eyes out.

He tells Diego about the first time he killed someone. How the scariest thing was that he wasn’t shaking. 

He tells Viktor how he sometimes still wonders if he deserves everything he got for messing with time in the first place. How he’s afraid that one of these days he’ll wake up and be alone again.

He tells Klaus about the time he thought about giving up and ending it all. 

He tells Luther about Dolores. About how even though he knew he was crazy for talking to a mannequin, Dolores was the better part of him that salvaged his sanity.

He tells Ben (and Klaus, by default) that his biggest regret is not being there. That he tries not to think about how things might have been different if he’d stayed.

Slowly, slowly, bit by bit, the tension eases from his shoulders. He stops worrying so much about the world ending and how to keep everyone alive. Instead, he spends his time going to the park with Claire, helping Diego and Lila with the babies, having midnight food outings with Klaus, and listening to Viktor play his music.

At their weekly family dinner, Luther tells Five he has a present for him and pulls out a box of Twinkies, saying, “I know you want to try one.”

Five gives him a practiced glare and says, “I would rather swim in a pot of boiling oil.”

Before, his family might have stared at him like he grew two heads, but now they laugh and think his retort is hilarious. Luther opens the box and pulls out a bag of marshmallows instead, and Five can’t help but crack a smile. 

One day they ask him what his plans are—what’s next for the oldest sibling.

Five warms his hands on a hot mug of coffee. “I’m tired of thinking about the future,” he tells them. “Right now, I just want to spend time with my family.”

That earns him plenty of “aww”s and “You’re such a softie, Five.” He waves them away and tries to duck out of their hugs, but they get him in the end. And even if he could teleport, he doesn’t want to.

He hadn’t been looking for happy, but he found it anyway.

Now cross-posted on Ao3 under the same handle!

[tiptapricot]

Marc Spector and Miguel O’Hara should sit down in a “guys with fucking wild guilt and isolation and anger issues portrayed by Oscar Isaac in a marvel franchise who have other guys with similar life and circumstances all connected to each other around them, alongside which they are making the worst choices and falling into a pit of spiraling self hatred and lashing out that they don’t know how to pull themselves out of” club.

[callmegaith]

Is that a gun in your pants, detective? Or are you just happy to see me? 🐰

[void-thegod]

had a whole ass "debate" with some dude bc he just doesnt like HOW solarpunk is anti establishment

bro just wants grimdark dystopian bullshit like we have always seen

"it's just trees / star trek"

tell me you dont understand what a good civilzation looks like without telling me

solarpunk is EVERYTHING other types of punk are... except it is bright.

what is wrong with that???

[ourflagmeansheartbreak]

Listen, as much as I would ship Izzy with everyone, I’m glad he’s single. I’m glad to see him grow as a person, alone, exploring himself and his queerness. Growing. Healing. Developing into a better person. I’d like to see more of that.

[tcmmykinard]

I mean, I understand grief (experience and all), but at the same time, this is a tv show, Eddie doesn't have to feel like this, they're choosing this storyline for him. And yeah, even though I know that in real life, these feelings come back again and again, I wish that the writers had given a different storyline to Eddie rather than one around his relationships/dead wife again.

okay, so you know something that is really cool about this show is that they play really realistically into the whole "how trauma works" bit. things are not linear, they come back when you least expect them to even when you think that you've moved on (btw a HUGE theme for last night's ep for multiple characters) or that you've had therapy for whatever the trauma is. they write this SO well and we see people slip up and get triggered by things and it's normal in real life and so refreshing to see on tv. that's something that i really love about this show. hell, maddie was triggered in this ep and has been over the same thing quite a few times before but i'm not seeing anyone wishing the writers would give her a different storyline.

now people complaining about shannon being brought up again into a storyline for a character whose wife died in a traumatic way, whose family was destroyed by that even further than the unresolved traumas they both had, and who is constantly running and hiding from his traumas going through relationships to "fix" what is missing when what he needs is to officially find a way to grieve and move on. which we haven't had for him. and y'all want the writers to leave it where it is without shannon being mentioned or shown anymore? when that's his biggest trauma, christopher's as well. you want the writers to just move on past his story and just leave that be? unresolved and everything?

that's so unfulfilling for his character. the only way for him to truly be happy again is for him to start to actually fully grieve her and be in a place where he can healthily start to accept that she's gone and to stop looking for shannon or "replacements" for shannon in every relationship and just. heal. but a different storyline would really round out his character right now. this isn't something that has been a long time coming for him or anything at all.

[dragonsfictavern]

It’s decided. I need Halsin on top of me like a damn weighted stuffed animal, Shadowheart on my left side petting my head and murmuring soft praises, and I need Astarion on my right side caressing my cheek and resting his face in my neck as he tries to restrain himself from biting me.

That will cure all my ailments.

[melscrate]

sigh

I still gonna draw that sbi calendar I want to. Because for me characters are characters, without ties to cc's

But I send my sympathy to all affected by the recent news :( we should never forget that people are people first of all and are capable of doing shitty things, regardless the high pedestal we're putting them on, unfortunately.

[bigassbowlingballhead]

it's crazy the lies people have to make up about tzp to feel better about hating him.

what do you MEAN no one likes working with him? literally everyone who's ever worked with him talks about how much they love him. even people who just meet him at events fall over themselves to compliment him and talk about how great he is.

like????

[gravity-falls-fanatic89]

Intimacy is cool and all, but I want to hear Stan bare all his bad thoughts, broken dreams, and sadness and show me himself in his purest, rawest form. I want us to heal each other, and bond over being broke losers that are hard to love, but mask it with dizzying charm.

I don't want to fix him, or him fix me...I just want mutual healing, touch that gives shelter and assurance, and eventually butterfly kisses, and booty rubs.

[mzminola]

Damian’s characterization bounces more than a basketball being used for proprioception stimming, but dangit, the versions of him I like are why I want him to not be a vigilante.

I get that superhero sidekicks are a staple of the genre we don’t hold to real world standards, and with the other Robins & Batgirls the job is arguably good for them (in some ways, and bad for them in others, but that’s usually less about the job and more about Bruce, especially when we compare to their peers).

But for Damian it’s not. He was raised in a violent cult and then dumped in Gotham and told he needed to live up to his dad’s violent reputation, and the characters who acknowledge that his childhood was horrifically traumatic...

Make him a vigilante so that he’ll be constantly exposed to more violence, and situations in which him using violence is the only way to keep himself and others safe???

No! No! You are compounding the trauma! You are making things worse! You are entrenching the damaging ideas he was raised with!

Let him be a kid, and keep him involved in the story by remembering all of these characters are supposed to have lives outside the mask.

[littler3d]

I’m sorry I’m really emotional right now because the doctor chose his face…and found Donna again….so he could go home 😭 subconsciously he wanted a rest so bad 😭 and he found his family again

[tiptapricot]

I am going to b 100% honest when I say to just realize you don’t understand both non white/Christian cultural n religious practices n histories, and that you don’t understand cults if you call the children of the watch a cult

[sunsbleeding]

[jesusinstilettos]

I’m about to save you thousands of dollars in therapy by teaching you what I learned paying thousands of dollars for therapy:

It may sound woo woo but it’s an important skill capitalism and hyper individualism have robbed us of as human beings.

Learn to process your emotions. It will improve your mental health and quality of life. Emotions serve a biological purpose, they aren’t just things that happen for no reason.

1. Pause and notice you’re having a big feeling or reaching for a distraction to maybe avoid a feeling. Notice what triggered the feeling or need for a distraction without judgement. Just note that it’s there. Don’t label it as good or bad.

2. Find it in your body. Where do you feel it? Your chest? Your head? Your stomach? Does it feel like a weight everywhere? Does it feel like you’re vibrating? Does it feel like you’re numb all over?

3. Name the feeling. Look up an emotion chart if you need to. Find the feeling that resonates the most with what you’re feeling. Is it disappointment? Heartbreak? Anxiety? Anger? Humiliation?

4. Validate the feeling. Sometimes feelings misfire or are disproportionately big, but they’re still valid. You don’t have to justify what you’re feeling, it’s just valid. Tell yourself “yeah it makes sense that you feel that right now.” Or something as simple as “I hear you.” For example: If I get really big feelings of humiliation when I lose at a game of chess, the feeling may not be necessary, but it is valid and makes sense if I grew up with parents who berated me every time I did something wrong. So I could say “Yeah I understand why we are feeling that way given how we were treated growing up. That’s valid.”

5. Do something with your body that’s not a mental distraction from the feeling. Something where you can still think. Go on a walk. Do something with your hands like art or crochet or baking. Journal. Clean a room. Figure out what works best for you.

6. Repeat, it takes practice but is a skill you can learn :)

[recomvery]

One of the most dangerous things in the world is not being able to say no to people because you don't want to upset them or dissapoint them. This will completely ruin your life in every way possible, at work, in your private life, your sex life and your friendships. It's a way of removing your own consent in your own decisions and go against your wishes, it is always a crime against yourself. Let yourself have a say. Upsetting people is better than traumatizing yourself.