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jalapeno-princess · 4 years

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All I Need is You

(Guys I miss Mark so fucking much *Cue Tori Vega I think we all miss Mark)

Songwriter Mark X Reader

Genre: Extremely fluffy angst (is that even a thing?)

Word Count: 5.8K

Summary: For all your life, your parents raised you to be the perfect daughter of every parent’s dreams. You did every single thing your parents forced you to do and never did you complain about anything they’d make you do, no matter how badly you wanted to. That all changed the day your path collides with Mark Tuan. After being stripped of your childhood completely in order to be respective and follow your parent’s desires, Mark shows you how beautiful life can be when you do the things you want to. Mark is the breath of fresh air from a life you feel so suffocated in. For the duration of your relationship, you did your best in hiding him from your parents in fear of them disapproving of the older boy. However, once you graduate from college, you decide you are old enough to make your own decisions and you build the courage to introduce your boyfriend to your family. The night starts off without a hitch; everyone seems to really like him up until your mom asks him what he does for a living. That’s when things take a turn for the worst and your mom gives you an ultimatum; to chose between the love of your life and your family.

A/N: Hey guys, so I’ve been wanting to write an imagine based on the song Paris by the chainsmokers for the longest time and here it is. Only when I reached the middle of writing the story did I realize this is the complete opposite of my other story “Second Chances” LOL. Anyways, I hope you enjoy this story (most of it is written in past tense so I hope you don’t get confused).

We were staying in Paris To get away from your parents And I thought, "Wow If I could take this in a shot right now I don't think that we could work this out" Out on the terrace I don't know if it's fair but I thought "How Could I let you fall by yourself While I'm wasted with someone else

"If we go down then we go down together They'll say you could do anything They'll say that I was clever If we go down then we go down together We'll get away with everything Let's show them we are better Let's show them we are better Let's show them we are better

“Hey, everything okay?”

It was currently 2:45 a.m. and normally, you’d be fast asleep right now but you couldn’t help feeling as if the bed grew more spacious and colder than it was when you first went to sleep. Mark was your own personal furnace; the two of you fell asleep pretty early after a long day of sightseeing and an even longer night of love making.

After multiple rounds of his all but gentle kisses on your neck, jaw and chest as he rammed himself in and out of your velvety walls, you both were too tired to get up and clean yourselves off. He immediately pulled you in to his chest and wrapped his arms tightly around your waist while placing his face in the crook of your neck and whispering sweet nothings until his dreams finally took a hold of him. It’s been like this for the last three weeks since you and Mark ran away to Paris in the hopes of hiding from your extremely overprotective and non-understanding parents.

You’d go sight seeing, visit a couple of museums, cute little coffee shops and sometimes you’d even go to a farmer’s market and you’d buy food to make for recipes you and Mark learned while watching whatever they had on television. Almost every single night ended up in sex; on a few occasions, there were drunken stupors where one of you or sometimes even both of you would have a little too much to drink and you’d have wild, kinky sex.

Then there were the days where you’d argue over minuscule and unnecessary things and usually Mark would be the first to give up and apologizing with his head between your thighs. Most of your love making sessions were soft, passionate and very romantic.

To strangers or people who weren’t familiar with him, Mark gave off an intimidating and sometimes standoffish kind of vibe. It was only because he was actually very shy and soft spoken and those who actually knew him were aware of how talkative and outgoing he could be around those he was comfortable with.

Unfortunately, your parents were the kind of people you’d always sought praise from and you’d do whatever you could to make them proud. Ever since you were a little girl, you went along with every command they would give you, you never complained about the clubs they’d put you in or the clothes they had you wear. It wasn’t as if you were the only child, you had three other siblings but since you were the youngest, your parents were a little more strict with you even if you never gave them a reason to question or mistrust you.

It wasn’t until Mark came in to your life that your relationship with your parents took a completely different turn. You’ve known Mark since middle school and although you hardly ever talked to him, you did admire him from afar and you could only wish to build up the courage so that maybe one day, you’d be able to at least say hello.

He was always such a social butterfly and made friends with anybody he’d interact with. All the girls in your grade had a crush on him, but you couldn’t blame them. Not only was he a sight for sore eyes, he was such a free spirit; he had decent grades and not once did the teachers have any problems with him like they did with his friends. But he was never one to genuinely care about his education, and unfortunately that was his downfall.

When you finally entered high school, it’s as if the world felt like it was time for you and Mark to come together and for your two worlds to become one. In your first semester, he was in almost every single one of your classes. You didn’t think you were the smartest person in your grade, but you did pretty well in all the subjects. All those years of long, grueling days of summer school actually paid off. Sometimes, you hated being the youngest.

Your parents expected so much out of you but they never seemed to care about anything that your two older brothers and your older sister did. They all got to join groups, clubs and sports that they genuinely liked whereas you were coerced in to learning how to play the violin and the cello. You were thankful that school was considerably easy for you seeing as how your parents made education your first priority.

While your brothers would play video games and your sister would talk on the phone with her friends, you’d be practicing math problems and read books about the civil war. You didn’t think you got to experience a legitimate childhood you’d witness all your classmates and friends had. For that reason alone, you always felt different from everybody else and it was the reason why you were so hesitant on continuing friendships with the few friends you did have from middle school.

You could never relate to anything they’d talk about; all their favorite movies they’d watch, the latest installment of Grand theft auto that they’d play, going to each other’s houses—you weren’t even allowed to cross the street by yourself let alone go out with your friends. Entering high school by yourself had to be one of the most scariest things you had to go through and because your siblings were at least five years older than you, none of them would be there at least if you needed someone to confide in or run to.

From all the stories you’d hear from each of them, their high school experiences were ones for the books. Both of your brothers joined each and every sport you could think of and your sister was the co-captain of the cheerleading team. She also had a few boyfriends in high school and you felt as if a lot of the mistakes she made were the reasons why your parents took complete control of your life.

It didn’t take long for Mark to acknowledge your existence; in fact, what you didn’t know was that back in middle school, he noticed you even if you didn’t realize it yourself. While all the girls would ogle over him and try to get his attention, he would find himself admiring you from afar.

Mark always thought you were so cute; you were always hesitant to answer the questions your teacher would ask you even if everyone was aware you knew the answer, whenever someone asked you for help you were always so quick to attend to them no matter what they were asking of you and he could never get the way you would blush when you were flustered out of his head.

He had no problem talking with other girls, but he’d become a mess at even just the thought of having to talk to you. Mark was quick to pick up on how you had most of your classes together, and he was going to use this to his advantage. Only a month in to school, both his algebra teacher and his language arts teacher pulled him to the side to tell him that he wasn’t doing too good in their classes. It wasn’t that Mark was purposefully failing his classes in order to get you to tutor him, he never was all that amazing in school to begin with.

High school wasn’t even half as easy as middle school was. Getting anything lower than a C wasn’t going to cut it and now that he had two Ds, he planned on asking you for some help. When Mark did approach you and asked you to help him catch up with a couple of missing assignments and to help teach him some algebra formulas, you had a hard time believing he was even talking to you. In the beginning of your tutoring sessions, he was always quite the gentleman.

He’d give you his full attention, always waited till you were done talking before he’d ask you a question, he’d tell you silly jokes so that it wasn’t always about studying and learning and sometimes he would drop you home after your meetings. It didn’t take long for your tutoring sessions to turn in to something more and only three months after getting to know each other, he asked you to be his girlfriend.

Dating Mark was a dream you never think would become a reality. He was extremely kind hearted and took care of you in ways you didn’t think you’d be able to experience. You were shocked when he confessed that he’s liked you for all these years, and you were quick to admit the same to him. Knowing how your parents could be, you decided to keep your relationship with Mark a secret and he was very understanding about the entire thing.

The two of you would sneak around during and after school for the entirety of your high school years and your love for one another only grew stronger as the time went by. You fell in love with him in tiny little coffee shops, in the back of the library where you’d be making out together when you were supposed to be studying. You’d lie to your parents and say you were preparing for tests and picking up on extra credit when really you’d be lying in the back of Mark’s truck, cuddling in his arms while looking up at the stars.

Mark did a great job at helping you take your mind off of how perfect you were supposed to be. He was the breath of fresh air that you’ve always craved and now that you had him, you didn’t think you would be able to let him go. Ever. He made you feel like a little kid again; you actually got to experience all sorts of things you’ve wanted to do as a child through your relationship. It didn’t take you long to fall in love with him.

Being in love was an indescribable feeling. Every time something good happened to you, he was the first person you wanted to tell and whenever something bad happened, he was the shoulder you wanted to cry on. He always knew the right thing to say; but if there ever was a time he didn’t know how to respond to something, he would just hold you comfortingly while whispering sweet, encouraging words in your ear.

People claimed that perfect people didn’t exist and if that’s the case, then Mark came pretty close. You felt as if he was sent in your life to be your safe haven; your sanity. The burst of color in your world of black and white. He had a habit of telling you he loved you every single day and even if he weren’t to do so, his actions spoke for him. You don’t know how you did it, but you actually did a great job in hiding Mark from your parents for the last few years.

There were times where you did come pretty close to getting caught; whether it was because of how loud you didn’t think you were while talking on the phone with him, or when you’d come back home with swollen lips and tousled hair. It didn’t matter to you though. A part of you was ready for whatever response you’d receive from your parents. Honestly, Mark was the kind of guy you’d bring home to your parents; so you weren’t afraid of the idea of introducing him to your family.

The only thing you were really worried about was what they would say when they were to find out you were hiding a boyfriend from them for over six years. After graduating from high school, both you and Mark went straight in to college. You went in to study criminal law and he had high hopes of becoming an engineer. Three months in to college, Mark decided it wasn’t for him and as his girlfriend, although you were upset at the idea, you supported and trusted his choices.

College wasn’t for everybody. With that being said, it was then that you found out he wanted to become a songwriter. In the few years that you’ve known him for, not once did he ever talk about wanting to write songs. You didn’t think he was passionate about music in general let alone wanting to write music for artists but when he showed you a few of the songs he had wrote, with most of them being about you, you knew he was extremely talented.

Mark always had a way with words and now that you saw them written down on paper, you knew you’d continue to support his dreams and his future endeavors and that you would do anything to help him if he needed it. Before you knew it, four years came and gone and you graduated from college with your bachelor’s degree in criminal justice. It didn’t take too long for law firms to reach out to you with internships and to see if you were interested to work for their companies. Mark was also very successful with his career.

He started off small; he wrote a few things here and there for some up and coming artists but it wasn’t anything too major. No matter how patient he was, there were times he did grow discouraged and felt like giving up but you never allowed him to. You saw how passionate he was about writing. You’d watch him stay up trying to write down any ideas that would pop through his head.

The road to success wasn’t easy, but when he got an offer from a record company to write songs for a popular artist you both listened to, he was extremely over the moon and made sure to let you know your love, your patient, your support and your determination to help him succeed was what kept him going.

The day came where you felt like you were ready to tell your parents about the man you were head over heels in love with and the reaction you got wasn’t one you were expecting. When you brought him over for dinner, both your mother and your sister raved over how good looking he was and your brothers tried their best to come off as the older, overprotective brothers boyfriends wouldn’t want to mess with. But when they heard Mark played fortnite, they were sold.

Even your father took a liking to him once Mark told him his favorite football team were the Patriots. Everything seemed to be going perfectly and you were so upset with yourself for keeping him a secret for so long. It wasn’t until your mother asked him what he did for a living that things only went downhill from there. I’m a songwriter. You could still remember the grave look on your mom’s face and with the way she motioned for you to follow her and your father in to the living room while excusing the three of you from the table, you knew it wasn’t going to be good.

You were angry that she didn’t wait for dinner to be finished or even for Mark to go home before ridiculing him on his career. It was obvious that she wasn’t too happy to hear he was a musician but it didn’t matter what she thought. Hell, you didn’t care about what anyone in your family thought about him. You loved Mark, with every beat of your heart and there was nothing your parents could say or do to change your mind about him.

“You are to break up with that boy immediately.”

Your eyes widened in shock at your mother’s command and for the first time looking her, hell, looking at your parents, you didn’t feel afraid of them. This time, you had something beautiful worth fighting for. This wasn’t something minuscule; it wasn’t something you could just stop like piano lessons or tennis practice. This was an 8 year long relationship she was telling you to end and there was no way you were going to lose against your parents without putting up a fight.

“No.”

The scoff that came from your mother’s throat wasn’t unexpected. This was the first time ever you talked back to either of your parents. This was the first time you actually said the word no in your 23 years of existence and damn, it felt really good.

“Excuse me? Did you just tell your mother no? Y/n, he’s a musician! He will never be able to give you the life you deserve! That is not a career! You’ll be the one having to take care of your entire family, I refuse to let this man ruin your life. You’re going to throw away everything you’ve worked so hard for—for someone whose position in your life isn’t promised. You know better than this, there are plenty more men in the world with better jobs and probably better living situations. Mrs.Choi’s son is a—“

“I don’t give a shit about Mrs.Choi’s son or Mrs.Park’s son or anyone’s damn son for that matter. I love Mark. I am in love with Mark. I only want Mark. Mark is all I need. I don’t care about what his job title is. It makes him happy and he’s pretty fucking amazing at what he does. But like I said, I don’t give a shit what he does for a living. He could be a garbage man and I’d still love him with every fiber of my being because that’s what love is mom. Love is not money, it’s not a big mansion in Beverly Hills with a doctor husband and six cars I will probably never drive. Love is what I feel when I’m with Mark. He takes care of me. He makes me laugh when I’m sad, he makes me smile even in the most inconvenient situations. He does my laundry, cleans our apartment, blow dries my hair when I’m tired, takes me to and pays for all my doctor’s appointments. We’ve been together for almost 8 years and these last 8 years have been the best years of my entire life because of him. The two of you stripped away the entirety of my childhood from me and Mark was the fountain of youth to help me experience actually being a human.” If looks could kill, the glare your mother was sending you would have you six feet under, but you didn’t care.

“I’m not a little girl anymore. I’m grown. I’m an adult for crying out loud you guys can’t tell me what to do anymore. I’m sorry you can’t accept it but I love Mark and I plan on doing so for the rest of my life and there’s nothing either of you can say or do to change my mind.”

“If you leave with him tonight, you are never allowed back in to this house ever again.” The burst of confidence and bravery you had confessing your love for Mark and the fact that you had every intention of staying with him went right out the window at your mother’s ultimatum. Was she really making you choose between your boyfriend and your family? There was no way you could choose between the two of them. Yes, Mark was the best thing that’s ever happened to you. But to lose all contact with your family because your parents were being unfair and irrational with their decision? She didn’t even take the time to listen to your words; did she not care about your health, happiness and well-being? Here was a man putting her youngest daughter on a pedestal, giving her the entire world and more but yet she still couldn’t accept that. You didn’t know the consequences of your next few words, but it wasn’t even a question. “Mark, we’re leaving. Let’s go.”

Your boyfriend came out from the kitchen and you had a feeling he probably heard the entire conversation between you and your parents, but your mind was so focused on leaving before things could get any worse. “Y/n, wait, sweetie think about this—think about what you’re doing—are you really willing to give up your family for a boy?”

“A man—he’s a man and yes—he’s all the family I could ever need. He’s shown me more love and support in our 8 years of being together than either of you did in the last 23 years of my existence. If you were a really family, you’d accept Mark for who he is and what he does and you’d be happy with the fact that he takes such good care of me but no. Your pride, your reputation, your wealth, your social status and your ego are more important than my feelings and what I want. You don’t care about me. You never cared about me you just cared about what others would think about me and I’m sick of it. I’m done. Have a nice rest of your life. Assholes.”

You marched out of the house and a huge weight was lifted off of your shoulders. With the rate you were walking, your boyfriend had to practically jog to catch up with you because you were filled with so many different emotions. Anger. Sadness. Grief. But no regret, nor any remorse. You knew you made the right decision in choosing Mark because not only did you choose Mark, you chose yourself. You were no longer going to allow your parents to dictate your life anymore.

“Baby—are you alright?” You gave him a sad smile before stealing a soft kiss from the corner of his mouth.

“Maybe not right now, but I will be. Take me home Mark.” Your siblings tried to get in touch with you for weeks, trying to get you to come back and to talk things out with your parents, but the damage was done. Neither of them were going to accept your relationship. It was a tough pill to swallow, but you accepted it for what it was.

Even if one day they came around and accepted Mark being a songwriter, there was no way you could ever forget the look of disgust on your mom’s face when Mark said what his job was nor could you forget how your dad just stood there and said nothing. It genuinely showed that neither of your parents really cared about you even if you were the star child out of the four of you and that’s what was hurting you the most.

Mark did his best to try and take your mind off what had happened and every time you’d look at him while he was sleeping, while he was cooking the two of you dinner or while the two of you would shower together, you’d see the glint in his eyes as he looked at you like you were one of the seven wonders of the world and you knew you made the right choice. You’d pick him again and again every single time.

He never brought up the fact that your parents didn’t accept his passion but you were sure it must have hurt him. Especially because that’s was caused you to be cut off from your entire family, but he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t extremely content with your decision. A few weeks ago, Mark got a call from the record company he was working for and gave him the opportunity to travel around Europe to work with a couple of the entertainers there and he didn’t hesitate to ask you to tag along with him.

The adventure started off in Italy, then you found yourselves in London and Greece. Each and every city was more than you could even imagine. The scenery was so beautiful, the food was delicious, the people were so sweet and the fact that you got to experience it all with your soulmate; your favorite person was a feeling you would never be able to fathom in to words.

Paris had to be your favorite place you had visited so far and you were sure it had to deal with the fact that it was the city of love and you were making the most of it with the love of your life by your side. It was currently winter in Paris right now; the temperature only grew colder as the days went by which is why you were shocked to see Mark outside on the balcony in only his underwear, but the sight did make your cheeks pink.

No matter how many times you’ve seen him naked, you always got so shy and flustered. He was freezing cold when you finally found your way behind him, you placed your chin on his shoulder blade and left a soft kiss there while lazily wrapping your arms around his hips. The giggle that fell from your lips at the feeling of your bare chest against his back couldn’t be helped, he was so cold and the frost nipped at your skin.

It took you a few moments to notice the cigarette in his hand and when you did, you grew worried. Mark hated cigarettes. He hated the smell and hated the negative effect they had on people’s bodies. However, you noticed he began smoking them after working with a well-known rapper who claimed that smoking helped him relax. It was a habit you weren’t too fond of; you knew it was probably damaging his lungs and you could taste the ash in his kisses, but you knew something had to be bothering him for him to want to even start smoking so you never tried stopping him.

For the last month, you haven’t seen a pack of cigarettes lying around the place nor did the scent linger on his clothes so you knew there was a chance he stopped. Seeing that ugly death stick in between his fingers made your blood boil; you didn’t want anything happening to his health because of a stupid decision he‘d make whenever he was upset.

“Go back to bed baby. I’ll be there soon, I just needed a little break. I’m fine.” You’ve been with Mark long enough to know when he was lying. You didn’t have to see him; the lack of confidence in his voice and the way he tensed up against your body made it clear that something was indeed on his mind, and there was no way you’d be able to go back to sleep knowing he was overthinking.

“Talk to me Mark. Something is obviously bothering you and I want to be able to help you.” He released a long sigh before putting out the cigarette and turning to face you. His eyes were red and puffy and there were dried tears on his cheeks.

The idea of him crying made your heart hurt; he was always the strong one in your relationship. No matter how rough life would get for him, he never showed that he was having a hard time. He hated burdening other people, especially you. So all his battles, he’d keep to himself. You hated that he never confided in you the way you always seemed to with him. You wanted to be able to help him carry the burden or to help fight the war in his mind that he was battling alone.

“Why did you do it?” You immediately looked at him in confusion. What was he talking about? What did you do that could be causing him so much distress and frustration?

“Mark—“

“You gave up everything to be with me. You’re completely cut off from your parents, you gave up your job at the law firm, you had to sell your car, you left all your friends without any explanation as to why you were leaving—just for me. I can’t give you everything that I want to just yet. I can’t promise to give you a big house, a nice car—we’ve been together for years and I have every intention on marrying you y/n but I can’t afford to buy you the ring of your dreams—I’m honestly nothing. I’m a college dropout trying to become a renowned songwriter y/n. Sure, I’ve been getting quite a few amazing opportunities but it isn’t enough for us to be set for the rest of our lives nor can we really be comfortable. Like your mom said, there are many men out there who’d be able to take care of you in the ways that I can’t. All I can do is love you y/n, and fuck. I love you more than you can even fathom yourself. But you deserve so much more and sometimes love isn’t enough—“

“Do you hear yourself right now? Are you really asking me why I left my life behind to be with you? My family, I love them dearly. But you know how I feel about my parents, how they sheltered me, overprotected me, forced me in to doing things I didn’t want to. They never did care about how I felt; not once did they stop and think maybe they were working me to the bone. I was never happy Mark. Until you came in to my life and I really don’t know what I would do if I were to lose you. I’m assuming you must’ve heard what my mom said and don’t you dare listen or even think what she said was true. You are not nothing Mark. You are so talented, so hardworking, so passionate and dedicated and if anyone deserves the world baby—it’s you. I meant what I said when I told her I couldn’t give less of a shit about any materialistic things. What’s a fucking Porsche going to do for me if my husband neglects me? What’s a big house if the person that I love isn’t there to share it with me?” You brought your hand up to cup his cheek and released a sigh of relief when he leaned in to your palm.

“You and I could live in a fucking box and I wouldn’t care and you wanna know why? Because you’re there. All I need is you. I don’t care where we go, who we meet, how much money we have in our bank accounts; as long as I have you right beside me, I’m not worried about anything. I can get another car Mark, I can find another job, I can make new friends—but there is never going to be another you. So stop beating yourself up about the decisions I made in the last few months. I did it for us. I did it because I love you. I will never love anyone the way I love you. Now get it out of your head that I deserve someone better than you because a man like that doesn’t exist. And yes—your love is enough Mark. It’s all that matters to me. The way you take care of me when I’m sick, or hold me close as we watch a scary movie. The way you take a bite out of my food to make sure it isn’t too hot, although I feel like you use that as an excuse just to try my food. The way you can be so tired, yet you want to sit down and listen to me go on about my day. You love me Mark. You never fail to say it, but it means more to me because you never fail to show it either.” At this point, his tears were flowing steadily from the bird of his eyelids and you found yourself wiping them away every time new tears fell.

“A person’s job title, the amount of education they’ve received, the kind of car they drive and the house they live in; none of that matters babe. I know you probably hear this all the time, but it’s what the inside that matters. Genuinely. All the wealth, the riches, it doesn’t make you better than anyone else. Your personality, your selflessness, your golden heart, your generosity, your patience, the love you never fail to show others, that’s why I fell in love with you. Oh—and your stupidly handsome looks but that’s besides the point. I’d go wherever it is that you’ll go. Whatever you need me to do, or be in order to help you grow as an artist or just a human being in general, I’ll do it. I’ll do anything for you Mark Tuan. And one day, when everything works out with your career, we can rub it in my parents faces. No more tears my love. It’s just you and I; and that’s what makes me the most happy. Oh—and I don’t need a big wedding or a huge diamond ring to get me to marry you. You could get me a ring pop for all I care. I just want to be with you. We could honestly elope in one of the hotel’s chapels if that’s what you want.”

He didn’t miss a beat before bringing his hands on either side of your face and roughly connecting your lips together. His mouth was warm and wet against yours, his kisses were rough and needy. It’s as if he was putting everything he wanted to say to you in to the kiss. How grateful he was for you. How much you meant to him. How much he loved you more than his heart could genuinely handle. Mark knew he needed to continue fighting for his dream in order to prove to you that you made the right decision in choosing him. Soon, the atmosphere was filled of sexual tension and it didn’t take too long for you to feel something hard against your thigh.

“I just—I hope—fuck. Thank you baby. I could never thank you enough for everything that you’ve done and continue to do for me. You’re the most ethereal being to walk on this earth you know that. I really, really do not deserve you but I will spend the rest of my life proving to you that I’m sure happy you chose me. Don’t tempt me, I might just go down to the gift shop and get you that ring pop. I love you—so fucking much my beautiful girl. God , only you could make me hard as a rock while I’m in the middle of crying—I know it’s 3 A.M, and I promised I would take you to the Champs-Élysées later on today, but I really want to show you just how grateful I am for you. I also kinda want to solve this problem in my pants and fuck the shit out of you so let’s go baby. You might have to rent a motor chair to get around once I’m done with you.”

#got7 imagines #got7 #got7 mark #mark tuan #mark tuan got7

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itsblissfuloblivion · 4 years

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Torch - Chapter 6: February

writing block isn't fun when you're supposed to publish on a schedule, that much i can tell you.

please enjoy - we've listened to you all and sprinkled in some good ol' fluff :)

find it on AO3 and FFnet as well

He only wants to talk to her. He wants it so badly, can’t they see how much he needs it?

Can’t they move out of his way? There are so many of them flooding the corridors, all of Hogwarts at once, keeping him away from her.

And Ginny’s calling him from the other end of the corridor, and Harry tries so very hard to remember the ‘three Ds’ of Apparition and magically transport himself to her, so hard that his scar prickles and Hermione tuts and tells him he should have paid better attention to Twycross the day before.

But Hermione turns into Ginny in the time it takes him to blink and now they are in the Common Room, lounging on the couch, blissfully alone. She is maddeningly close to him and Harry wants to kiss her like he’s never wanted anything in his life.

His lips are nearly onto hers, their arms and legs tangled together, her robes disappearing on their own -

“Harry James Potter, what are you doing to my daughter?” Mrs Weasley screams from the fireplace, her face screwed with rage.

Harry wants to say he did nothing, they were doing nothing, but Ron Apparates over them, making himself cosy on the couch between Harry and Ginny.

“How’s your three Ds, mate? Mine are bloody brilliant! You’ll never Apparate until you accept the D,” Ron is telling him smugly.

“Yes, how is your D, Harry?” Ginny’s giggling, now irritatingly overdressed, a pair of Hagrid’s fluffy earmuffs on her head and what looks like Ron’s Yule Ball ensemble of frilly robes on her.

“You’ll never see my daughter naked!” Mrs Weasley wags her finger in Harry’s face, shouting at him with a hand on Ginny’s shoulder, as Ron keeps talking about Apparition and Ginny laughs so hard she starts crying.

“Your D, Harry, your D,” Ginny dissolves into another fit of laughter, pointing a finger at his lap.

Before Harry could look down and feel even more mortified, if that’s even possible, something hard hits his head.

Suddenly and confusingly, Harry wakes up, his eyes losing focus as he rubs at the side of his rumpled head.

“Mate, you keep waking me up,” Ron grumbles, leaning over him to retrieve his pillow and plopping right back into his bed.

Harry swallows hard and privately wonders whether he’d let anyone in on what his dream was about, then turns on his side and concentrates on drifting back to sleep - sans mad dreams this time if anyone cares even remotely for his sanity.

____

To Harry, it feels like the month drags on without ever ending. Quite frankly, he feels personally attacked by all the dating invitations flying about, people confessing their love to each other, holding hands and playing footsie under the breakfast table. Ugh, gross.

It’s hard enough that no one believes him yet whenever he’s bringing up Malfoy and his evilness, not even after Harry’d told them what that sleazeball was bragging about to Crabe, for crying out loud. Not even the Prince, who seemed to have an answer to anything and was definitely Harry’s mental and emotional comfort lately, held a solution to Harry’s small not-being-taken-seriously problem.

And then there’s Ginny: walking out of the locker room shower only wrapped in a towel, stretching in her Quidditch gear, playing with her hair while she studies. It’s like she knows what she’s doing to him but pretends she doesn’t.

But how can she not know? It’s a miracle Ron hasn’t noticed yet, the little flirty jokes swapped between Harry and Ginny during practice, his eyes glued to her as she laughs loudly and shows off her prowess on the broom, his intense, burning blush when they have to change back into their robes and he tries incredibly hard not to peek over at her.

Harry actually feels like a lascivious old man most of the times or whenever he catches himself staring intently at her bum when she flies or walks or simply exists.

Is this really a life worth living?

Harry’s really tired of self-pity, but then again what else can a bloke in his place do? He’s stuck in limbo with his feelings as long as Ginny’s still with Dean. And who knows if she’ll still like him when she’ll stop being with Dean anyway?

Perhaps it’s better to keep living in limbo with the small amounts he gets from her.

Harry rolls his eyes at himself, takes one last look over his shoulder at Ginny and Demelza giggling together, and speeds up towards the castle. It’s cold and windy and he hates everything.

____

The fluff and tooth-rotting sweetness that fills the air all day gives Harry enough of a headache and a new, unhealthy dose of self-loathing to determine him to hide in a deserted classroom in a desperate attempt to escape.

Hermione, clever as always, had disappeared from the very first hours of the morning, Harry noticed earlier with a twinge of envy. He should’ve done the same, absolutely.

Because, you see, everywhere Harry looked today he could only see cuddly couples, see them crowding the Common Room and quite frankly cavorting all over the castle. It drove him mad.

And, to top it all off, his best mate had joined in the whole frisky business. Harry had spent his entire day feeling nothing but disdain for Ron and his fickle ways so he has a mind to communicate the feeling to his friend as soon as the opportunity arises. Just he waits, it’ll be McGonagall level brutal, Harry reckons.

Now Harry hides, alone, counting down the final hours of Valentine’s Day. He figures he’d be safe once the clock strikes midnight and the nasty spells fades away (because no doubt it’s a spell, some kind of enchantment; normal people don’t kiss all day, do they?) and then he can walk back into the world without the fear of stumbling upon a certain someone, her face glued to the face of an absolute prick.

Harry growls a bit at the thought.

“Ron told me you went hiding.”

Harry’s head snaps so fast he definitely hears something crack.

“I’m doing a very good job at it, I see.” He molds his voice into a dry tone, but can’t hold back the grin that spreads across his face as his heartbeat picks up. He wasn’t expecting this certain someone to come looking for him, especially since his current pastime activity involved pain-inducing scenarios of varying degrees where Ginny and Dean were - erm, couple-y and Harry pretended he’s unaffected.

So unaffected he feels he might just jump and kiss her simply because she isn’t with Dean at the moment, because she’s thinking about him, Harry - at least enough to come looking.

Still, he keeps his head and holds still, back pressed to the stone wall, knees to his chest on the cold, hard floor.

“Nah, it’s just me who’s very clever,” Ginny grins widely as she crouches next to him, pressing her back to the wall and her shoulder into his. “So what’s up with you, sad face?”

Harry scoffs playfully, flicks her shoulder.

“Aren’t you supposed to be doing couple-y stuff?”

“Would you rather I did?” Ginny immediately bites back, her eyes fixed on his, a deep frown on her freckled forehead.

Harry feels stupid, sheepish as he opens his mouth and lets out a timid no .

Much like a displeased cat, Ginny breathes out a puff of air and turns her head fast enough to lightly smack Harry over the face with her long, red ponytail.

He wants to apologise, but then decides against it. Somehow, he’s sure it’s not his apology she came after - he doesn’t know what this is about, but it’s not that.

If he’d learned anything over the years of playing Quidditch it’s that the Snitch will eventually turn up if the Seeker stands still and keeps an open eye and their mind alert.

A tense silence falls between them until slowly, gently, Ginny sighs and slides a bit further, lowers her head onto his shoulder. She doesn’t say a word, just sits still, the deep red crown of her hair close to Harry’s blushing cheek.

Harry finds he can’t do much but swallow. There’s a great many things he’d like to do right now, that much is already clear to him, but she’s Ginny, and she’s got someone, and she’s Ron’s sister, and she might slap him anyway if he tried.

He holds his breath and, with a trembling hand, musters enough courage to touch her hair. Then he waits, completely and terribly afraid she’s about to hex him.

But when Ginny doesn’t, when she simply keeps her head on his shoulder and slides her body so close to his that their thighs touch by their sides, Harry knows he’s living some kind of dream. So he goes on to stroke her hair because he might as well enjoy it before it’s over and he wakes up next to a snoring Ron.

“Harry?” Ginny calls him quietly.

Harry hopes very much she’s not about to shout at him. He keeps softly stroking her hair.

“Hmm?”

Her tone is as soft as her flowery scented hair and Harry feels a bit dizzy.

“Do you still think about Cho?”

“No. Why?”

At first, Harry surprises himself with the answer. He really never thinks about her anymore, does he?

But then again, why would he? The honest truth is they’ve drifted apart before they could ever fall together. Cho was never in his every thought, never possessed every one of his dreams the way Ginny did.

No, he didn’t think about her anymore.

“No reason,” Ginny responds and he can feel her smile. Something warm spreads throughout his chest, melting away his anxiety, calming his troubling thoughts.

From there on the conversation lulls pleasantly to a safer ground as they laugh and comment on Ginny’s childhood stories from the Burrow to Harry’s first year at Hogwarts adventures she’s heard a million times before, but still finds everything funny enough to laugh, giggle, and lightly smack Harry’s thigh.

Even though he understands nothing else can be shared between them now, Harry feels calm, happy even: her head still rested on his shoulder, their backs pressed against the stone wall, their knees tucked to their chests.

“Hey, Gin?”

“Yeah?”

“Could you,” Harry draws a breath and smirks, “Could you talk me through the process behind the ‘his eyes are as green as a fresh pickled toad’ verse?”

Ginny splutters, pouts and playfully smacks his knees - although, Harry privately notices, her hand lingers there a bit longer.

“Don’t mock my sentiment!”

“Not mocking, promise,” Harry laughs, pressing his cheek atop her head, “I’m actually a great admirer of it.”

“Oh, are you?” She says, dry, and with a great, big harrumph jumps headfirst into a tickling match, mercilessly tickling at Harry’s sides, her flowery scent filling his lungs as they’d laugh and laugh and laugh.

Soon after, another voice tangles with their joyous shrieks: Luna, strolling down the corridors, politely engaged in conversation with the castle’s ghosts.

“Luna,” Ginny lifts herself from him and calls her friend, much to Harry’s dissatisfaction as he’d been having quite the time of his life with her lounging all over his body in her attempt to win the battle by tickling everywhere.

Harry slaps invisible dust away from his clothes rather to give himself something to do and his mind something else to think about than the feeling of Ginny’s chest over his, her warm thighs, her bum touching his lap.

All feelings hard to forget, indeed.

Harry senses the irony on his own use of the word ‘hard’ and really wants to kick himself.

“Hello,” Luna says brightly.

“Yeah, hi, Luna,” says Harry, trying as much as he can not to sound too bitter.

Luna’s round blue eyes fix each of them for awhile and Harry feels like his mind is being scanned. It makes him very uncomfortable; right now, his thoughts are strictly for him to know and judge.

“You alright, Harry?”

“Oh, yeah,” Ginny answers before he can even think of opening his mouth, a devious grin on her face. “He was a bit under the weather, weren’t you, Harry? But I cheered him up.”

Ginny looks entirely too pleased with herself, her expression daring him to deny what she’d just said.

So Harry simply shakes his head and chuckles, his fingertips brushing unconsciously over her small hand; she gasps, surprised.

Harry knows he’s blushing but takes pride in the fact that her cheeks are tinged pink too.

Pleasantly their conversation spikes up and drifts towards Luna, her plans, her strange adventures. They spend an hour listening to her eerily describe the quests her father and her have to undertake to find the next fantastic creature. She talks and they listen and it’s all very nice.

From time to time, Ginny’d catch his eye and they’d grin at each other, cosy on the floor of a chilly, empty classroom.

Maybe Valentine’s Day isn’t so bad after all, Harry thinks as they wave goodbye to Luna and saunter side by side to the Gryffindor Common Room.

Harry’s about to ask her if she’d like to go over their new Quidditch strategy before they call it a night and his hand’s shooting to the back of his head in a kind of nervous gesture he’s lately come to associate with anything that has to do with Ginny.

“Hey, Ginny! Ginny!”

Harry’s mood is irredeemably shattered by Dean’s annoying voice. He’s completely forgotten about him, the stupid git.

“Ginny,” Dean tries again, waving enthusiastically from the other side of the Common Room, face to face with Seamus at a small table. “Here, hey!”

Forlorn and sighing, Ginny makes a gesture that Harry decides to interpret as being sorry that she has to go. So he sighs and watches her start towards Dean and reluctantly sit next to him.

As for him, Harry plops onto the couch, startling a couple of second year girls. They throw him disgusted glances but Harry has none of it; he shrugs and covers his face with a pillow, one leg stretched out on the stringy old couch and the other dangling loose.

He concentrates on the cracking, sizzling sounds of the fire, allows its warmth to comfort him.

He’d been having such a nice couple of hours…

“I’m off to bed, long day,” he hears her speak close to his ear and forgets himself enough to find that the pillow’s been thrown directly into the middle of the hearth.

Immediately, Harry swears loudly and nearly burns his fingers as he retrieves the singed pillow.

“Accio doesn’t work for you anymore?” Ginny laughs.

“Oh, ha ha,” Harry sticks out his tongue and she laughs even harder.

As she calms down, Ginny lightly pats his shoulder and steps away to her dorm room, her giggles sounding beautifully in her wake.

Harry shakes his head, a little dumbfounded, a little bemused and drops into a nearby armchair, once again disturbing the pair of second year girls. He shoots them a small sorry as they walk away muttering.

“Well, that was something.”

Harry’s green eyes follow the dancing flames, their burning lick, and remembers an evening spent talking to Sirius. His heart twists; the memory seems to have been retrieved from such a faraway place, from a different time, like its contains happened to someone else in another life.

The hard truth is, Harry muses and feels his eyes prickling behind closed eyelids, the truth is that he wants to talk to Sirius so, so much. So painfully much. But that’s sadly not possible now, is it, Harry?

“Quick, mate, you need to cover me,” Ron interrupts him as he runs inside, looking exasperated and completely disheveled.

Harry can do only so much not to snort as he takes notice of his best mate’s rumpled hair, the undone buttons of his shirt, half of it hanging out of his trousers, half still smartly tucked in, the lipstick marks on his neck.

“Running from your girlfriend, eh?”

“Shut up and hide me,” Ron barks, plunging under the couch as a sweet, girly shriek rings throughout the Common Room.

Lavender runs in, looks around excitedly and dashes right back out when she can’t spot Ron. Bullet dodged.

“Aha, alright, I hide you but what’s in it for me?” Harry crouches down and asks when the coast is once again clear.

Ron looks at him like he’s suddenly turned insane.

“Fuckin’ hell, Harry, I’m about to get massacred!”

Harry can’t lie, he’s enjoying it more than he should.

“Well, I just don’t see how that’s my problem,” he says, adopting something close to Percy’s pompous tone as he pushes his glasses back up his nose.

“Hello, we’re best mates, remember?”

Harry tries not to break character as Ron’s face becomes a beautiful display of all the stages of horror and desperation.

“Yeah, but you have to understand I’m risking Hermione’s wrath to help you. She might whack me with Hogwarts, A History .”

“I’ll whack you with my own fist right here if you don’t - look, there’s no time for bloody negotiations!”

“Is that right? Then how about I get one free pass where I do something and you can’t get mad or question it?”

“What are you on about?”

“Just nod and be done with it,” Harry says as he crosses his arms, fully knowing he’s on dangerous ground.

“Alright, alright, now will you give me that damn Cloak?”

“No need, she’s already gone,” Harry shrugs, smug and finally bursts into laughter at Ron’s harassed expression.

He helps Ron get up and quickly checks that Lavender is indeed still out of sight.

As much as he wants to ask Ron why in the name of all things holy he doesn’t break things off with her, Harry decides to keep it to himself this time. When he draws the line, he can’t find any good reason why he doesn’t just tell Ginny how he feels either.

“Hey, mate?” Ron quietly asks as they’re climbing the stairs to the sixth year boys’ dorm and Harry doesn’t miss the blush creeping up his neck to the tips of his ears. “Have you - erm, have you seen Hermione today?”

In his heart, Harry’s content to acknowledge once again that, at the very least, he’s not the only dumb, besotted fool.

#itsblissfuloblivion writes #itsblissfuloblivion writes torch #hinny #hbp fic #canon compliant #hinny fic #missing moments #harry x ginny #harry potter #ginny weasley #ron weasley #gryffindormischief #fightfortherightsofhouseelves #WE GOT YOU THE FLUFF #OF COURSE WE WANT MORE FLUFF #BUT ITS JUST NOT POSSIBLE RIGHT NOW FOR HARRY OKAY #LET HIM LIVE

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vespiiqueen · 4 years

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List 5 things that make you happy, then put this in the ask box of the last 10 people who reblogged something from you (if you want !! 💛💖)

Wow I rambled a lot with this but i can't add cuts bc I'm on mobile rn DHSISHSJ sorry :"))))

1. Ik Ik "haha how cringe are you" of me to say, but honestly? Homestuck. Homestuck helped me in a time of need and when i so desperately wanted something to latch onto. Finally, I caved into my friends telling me to read it-- and it's been a blast!! The epilogues / hs^2 make me feel kinda sad though, because so much of what I loved about the original was yeeted through the nine circles of hell and into the trash. I love Y/ffany's (I call her Yippi tho) design, the art is really pretty at times, Harry is a major dork, I LIVE for seeing Vrissy bc honestly?? Her design is 10/10, very early 2000s emo style and I also live for that. Tavros is cute and a nerd and I think that's swell!

But in terms of story and how any of this happens, it makes me sad to see it happen. If Vriska could return as Vrissy, why not OTHER beta trolls? Where's my Eridan fish man, writers?? Give me the boy or perish by my fury.

2. Also super "haha how cringe are you" but,,, murder cats (Warriors), esp the early 2005-2015 amvs and stuff. I remember watching Flightfootwarrior's "I Will Not Bow" Scourge amv for HOurs and having no clue what was happening, but all these edgy kitties were KITTIES! It's introduced me to a lot of music I still listen to to this very day (Imagine Dragons, Young/the entirety of Hollywood Undead, Breaking Benjamin). And yknow what?? This new arc is absolute chaos, but in the good way.

I'm an "OG Fan". I prefer the first arc, The Prophecies Begin, to almost any of the other arcs. I just could never get into the other arcs-- not to say I haven't read them, I HAVE and the Fire Scene was probably one of my favorite moments beside grumpy Jaypaw, god complex Lionblaze, and fear the gods Hollypaw. I thought the build-up for it was SUPER satisfying. Gray Wing is my baby and I fully embellish in the Gray Wing is Silverpelt theory.

This new arc is definitely something new for the universe. While I didn't read aVoS (but I may do that if i can find the files for it), and so I don't know the major events of it other than what I've seen M.A.P.'s (Multi-Animator Projects, for clarification,,, bc unfortunately that term is also something disgusting). There's fucking cat possession and all the Clans questioning their belief system, yo. Shit be on fire.

Also the Imposter is 100% Ashfur, that's canon now, yeah??? Also im sorry but fuck Root x Bristle that's the dumbest shit I have ever seen. Give me Root x Shadow or face the wrath of my dragon plushies.

RiverClan is my Clan and my gov assigned warrior name is Fireshell 🌟🌟

3. As much as I hate the author,,,,, Harry Potter. It's been a major part of my life for as long as I can remember. I can never really remember why, but I've always just loved it- the movies, the books, the extra little merch that would pop up in my local Walmart. Of course my favorite character is Draco Malfoy. I could go on and on and ON about how I think his character arc was SHIT and JKR didn't have the balls to make him a confident gay man that was always implied through the text (at least, my lesbian ass thought it was implied but i may just be projecting, idk). I could ramble about Draco for HOURS and what I think his character SHOULD have been and how his parents are horrible (more specifically, Lucius bc Narcissa [?] Actually showed a few good moments), and a child should never have to pay for their parents sins.

Oh noo, Draco's a villain because he's a victim of major abuse and peer pressure? He's a villain because a literal child can be horrible and they'll always always always stay as a horrible little fiend?? Fuck that. He's a child.

Unlike manchild grease pan Snape, who was a racist piece of shit and shouldn't have became a fucking school teacher but it's okay because he was ~~~in love~~~. No, fuck you, he was a creep. James Potter n Co may have been a little posh bitch to you, Snape, but that's no fucking excuse to continue to bluntly be a little cunt all the way into adulthood. You're an adult who flatly changed your PATRONUS to imitate Lily's. You have no excuse. And Harry went and named his child after you LIKE JESUS CHRIST, DID RON'S SISTER NOT HAVE A SAY IN THE NAMES TOO?????

I also fully adore the idea that Muggles can run into Hogwarts and their patronus can 100% be a made up, fantasy creature. Imagine you learn the patronus spell and suddenly fucking ARCEUS comes from your wand. Imagine learning the spell and CHTULU (i did not spell that right but im so tired) comes from your wand-- an entire ass fucking Lovecraftian, Eldrith horror is just the embodiment of you. What if it was a fucking Homestuck character like Vriska? How fucking METAL would that be?? Hskajssowjjsjs get on it fandom.

4. Hee hee very evident by my url but Pokemon is another major thing of mine. While vespiquen isn't my favorite (that title goes to Hydreigon), it is definitely up there!

I've ALWAYS enjoyed the idea of Pokemon. You run around, training up these fight monsters and collecting them. I remember playing my sister's Ruby version on her flip-up Gameboy. I couldn't even read but I ran around catching god only knows how many of the same pokemon wherever she was. Apparently, I had fought for hours in the same area and leveled her Blaziken up to lvl 50 something and left her lvl 30s in the dust LMAO.

I got my first game when it was Pearl/Diamond. It was Pearl, and it still holds a very fond place in my heart. I could barely read, I could barely write-- I had named my Turtwig something along the lines of "MmorpHy" and my player boy "ZbsibJ". Yes I remember the names slightly. I really didn't get far-- I barely got to the first gym but I was just so happy to play it.

I eventually lost the game, as a 5 year old would do, but I can still vividly remember what was happening when the game arrived. I had just came back from the dentist and was quite tired from fighting the dentist bc I was super scared. Mom suddenly handed me a box and said it was mine-- my overseas (at that time) dad had bought me Pearl and my sister Diamond, because I lost my shit about it when he visited one time.

Well, tdlr, I played it for about five minutes while struggling to stay awake against the loopy gas they made me take. I fell asleep listening to Twinleaf Town's soundtrack. Every time I play a rom of Pearl and I get to where the player's house fades in and I hear that first tune of the song, I get a huge smile on my face and cry-- as.. Weird as it sounds.

A few years later, I had gotten Pokemon Black bc I liked Reshiram on the cover. Now, this one I could actually READ when playing, but I don't remember a lot of things about it. I probably lost this one too, as a 8/9 year old would do. I DO remember, I chose Snivy and my sister chose Tepig (hrmm there's a theme here of grass/fire goin on......) and vibing to the music. I was so amazed by the sprites moving, I just kept getting into encounters to see the sprites move (oh boy, no one tell younger 7-9 y/o me about Zelda......oh wait....)

Playing Pokemon NOW, as a 17 year old """gifted""" chick, I stil have very fond memories. I recently beat Pokemon Black again and GOD the OTS SLAPS. I fucking adore the soundtrack-- the track that plays when you battle a trainer, the low health dings being turned into a legit song that also slaps, the battle! gym leader themes-- and oh my gOd, the legendary theme is amazing? It really tells you just how glorious these pokemon are supposed to be. It's not intimidating like Groudon/Kyroge/Rayquaza's themes. It's not action packed like Palkia/Dialga's is, it's not filled with tension like Giratina/Arceus's is-- but it radiates the GLORY that the beasts portray. And I live for that. (Also, Kyurem's version is my favorite because it glitches in the beginning and that's rly cool)

P/D/P and BW/BW2's stories, imo, are some of the greatest ones. Yeahhh, US/USUM's is cool and I haven't played XY nor SwSh-- but the ones I can find memorable are PDP and BW/BW2. I love N. I love Barry. They're my sons. Ghetsis is fucking terrifying, Cyrus needs a hug. Giratina scared the piss out of me when I was younger, which was NOT helped by Giratina and The Sky Warrior.

I think my favorite movies are the gen 4 ones. The Rise of Darkrai having a tear-jerking theme for such a mysterious pokemon (i still tear up when i hear Ocarion), Giratina being spiteful is a mood and Shaymin was cute, Arceus being angry is also a mood. Yeah, Pokemon 4Ever made me cry my eyes out over Celebi, Mewtwo Returns made me again cry because Mewtwo accepting who he is, I remember how vastly different the BW movies are-

I just. I have a lot of memories with the series, even if Gamefreak and Nintendo kinda do the series dirty a lot (your top-grossing thing and you made That monstrosity for the Switch? How dare you.). It's comforting to be stressed and pull up my roms for the games and to play them. Mystery Dungeon is incredibly fun to play, Pokemon Ranger is really fun with the concept (Shadows of Almia continues to kick my ass to this very day and FUCK the Jungle Relic, I hate the Water Challenge fucking gyarados bullshit). I remember the pokemon I got for MD (I got Time, my sis got Darkness) was Mudkip, if that is any help.

I love my little fictional pixel monsters.

5. Yup, someone told tiny 7-9 y/o me about console games. The legend of Zelda. My first Zelda game was Twilight Princess on the Wii and BOY did I play the fucking SHIT out of that game.

Honestly, looking back and looking at playthroughs now-- I still love TP. Twilight Princess is still one of my top favorite Zelda games-- yes, even after playing OoT, Majora's Mask, Wind Waker, Skyward Sword, the anniversary four swords edition for the DS where you could play by yourself (Nintendo pls bring that back, I don't have friends to play it with ;-;), Phantom Hourglass- ect.

Something about Twilight Princess grabbed me by the head and yeeted me into the world. I can remember playing it for hours with little to no breaks. I, a tiny 9 y/o, had gotten the hang of the controllers and managed to get past the tutorial quite easily. And then, I was launched into the game and I wasn't stopping for NOTHING. Mom and Dad would have to force me to save and get off to go and eat dinner. THAT sucked.

I had done everything on my own up until the first temple, the forest temple. Not where/when you saved the dumb kid, but when you were saving the spirit's light. Theeeeeeennn I got stuck on the fucking Forest Temple for deadass six months straight. I'd play for hours, running around in circles, unable to figure out where to go, and because I didn't grasp the temple's purpose of being that way- I'd get angry and get off. It wasn't until dad looked up a walkthrough and talked me through what I was supposed to do that I learned how to get through temples.

I had gotten to the last little fight with Ganondorf before the Wii broke and i could no longer play. Despite the Wii being broke and we got rid of it, I was ADAMANT on keeping the game, and I kept that game for YEARS. It was an original copy out of a sealed box, and I eventually lost it when I left it accidentally at my now ex-friend's house.

She had a Wii and I went "hey I have a Wii game!" And I brought my Zelda over. Worst fucking choice of my goddamn life. Mom called me to come home and said I couldn't sleep over like the original plan was, and that was it. My ex-friend stashed my Zelda and I never saw it again. And, even if I wanted to-- I couldn't get it back, which makes me upset. We had a BAD falling out. She likely doesn't even remember it's there, or sold it to the local game junkie kid who buys ALL games.

But I still love the game. Midna was amazing, and I loved how snarky she was and she has a very cute design! The game's OST is fucking phenomenal. Midna's Desperate Hour makes me cry bc goddamn it really sells how serious that situation is. I love Hyrule Field's theme in this game. I love the Twilight Realm's song. Zant was fucking hilariously scary. Ganondorf's design in this game scared the piss out of me when I was younger.

Midna and this game's Link and Zelda are def my favorites. Yeah yeah, Sheik is cool and all I Guess but dhsushwishs Midna holds the special place in my heart. She was totally my gay awakening BUT

For other game antagonists, I adore Ghirahim-- let's go you funky little queer-coded villain. Skull Kid was great, I love the entire dynamic of him. Prankster lost soul stumbles upon Majora's Mask and the mask makes him act out due to powers-- which, I actually took very heavy inspiration from for one of my OCs. The moon falling to Hyrule was a fucking terrifying looming threat.

But the game series holds a place, and I've yet to be able to play BoTW-- although, I'm fairly certain I'll like it. The playthroughs I've watched of it are all fairly decent! I just. Gotta save up enough money to buy it haha.

Dang guess I gotta go watch a Twilight Princess playthrough again.

Honorable Mentions:

Avatar: the Last Airbender, specifically Book 3

my OCs definitely make me happy, they're my children and I'd ramble A LOT longer if given the chance WHEEZE

My friends, but I didn't add them here bc it's more fictional stuff, I presume

Baking. I love to bake cupcakes.

Painting is fun. I'm an artist and goddammit im going to use painting as an excuse to make a mess.

Fire. I rly like fire, down to a pyromaniac level. However, i hate the fires that happened to my home town, the Great Smokey Fires of 2016-- THAT pissed me off. How dare you burn mountain landscapes to the ground. Perish.

History. I'm a history nerd.

I'm also a science nerd.

But fuck math, I cannot comprehend math to save my life.

For some reason, I rly like learning how the human body works??? like did you know, organs are actually sticky when touched by a bare hand?? Did you?? How fucking cool is that.

Bakugan. I love Bakugan, esp the DS game. I love my Darkus Leonidas. Give me back the online world, you peasants-- I want my Darkus Dragonoid. (Also fuck all my friends from when I was in kindergarten- my theory that Alice was Masquerade was somewhat correct.)

#admin ace #admin ace speaks #communistvriska #inbox tag #homestuck #warrior cats #harry potter #pokemon #legend of zelda

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boxed-toast · 3 years

Text

Pyrite and Hairbands

A wlw short story, by me!

~~~~

"Mommmm Ali hit me," Heather shrieks. "Alicia how many times do I have to tell you, don't hit your little sister," Heather glares at me. Blood drips from my arm. Heather stabbed me with a pen. I didn't even hit her back this time, but it's pointless to argue. I just try to put pressure on my arm where she stabbed me. When we get home I run to the bathroom and grab a bandage Then, I just hide in my room hoping she'll just leave me alone. I feel like my body never fully heals from the damage she does. I've always got scabs and bruises.

~~~~ School is incredibly boring. we learned everything we're doing two years ago and then again last year, but at least it's easy. At lunch Claire and Alex sit with me. Sometimes it feels like they're the only people in the world who pay attention to me. "Can I have that?" Claire points to one of the hair ties on my wrist. I pull it off and hand it to her. She stuffs into the huge black bag she always has with her. She pulls out a shiny little gold cube and hands it to me. "What's this?" "It's Pyrite. Miners used to find it and think they found gold. Sometimes it's called fool's gold." "Well it looks like gold to me," I put the Pyrite in my pocket. Alex hasn't said a word. She's just eating her sandwich in silence. "Dude, Alex, something up?" "It's all stupid." "What's stupid?" "Ughh, it's Mr. Pithers." "What did he do this time?" "Those two guys who sit next to me in his class decided to throw things at him while he wasn't looking. I think they were trying to get him in the back of the head, but he turned around and got hit in the nose with one of those little oranges." "What's wrong with that?" Claire asks. "It was my little orange. I didn't even see that they'd taken it, but of course he didn't believe me." "Ugh, that sucks. Did he say what he was going to do?" "He said after my other infractions that he'd have to think about it." "Shit, are you going to be okay?" "I dunno, the guy already hates my guts." Alex says staring at the ground. "It'll probably just be extra homework or something, that's what he did last year when I replaced all his dry erase markers with ones that didn't work," Claire never seems phased by anything. ~~~~ We walk to Claire's house after school. Her parents work late, so we have the place to ourselves. I like being here. Claire's cats are cute. Alex sits of the couch next to me. I like how she's pressed up against me. We're both doing homework. Claire sits on the floor across from us, a cat sits in her lap. Claire's reading something. After a few hours my mom calls and says she wants me home. The walk home is long and the rest of the night is filled with endless dull chores. ~~~~ "We're all going shopping for new clothes for your sister." Dad says. "I would really like to _not_ do that" "Alicia you are coming with us. Get in the car." Nothing in the world sounds less appealing than shopping with dad and Heather, but did isn't going to take no for an answer. I grab my DS and get in the car. Minutes pass, it takes forever to drive to the mall. I don't know how a town with nothing to do manages to have this much traffic. Where is everyone even going? "Dad, can I have a turn playing games now?" Oh god, here we go. "What? No, this is my DS. Did you bring yours?" "Daaaadddd" Heather kicks me in the leg and I yelp. "Dad she just kicked me." I say in a momentary lapse of judgement. "Alicia I swear to _God_ stop making problems and give your little sister a turn." Dad pounds the steering wheel with each word. "Ugh, fine whatever" She tries to scratch me as I hand her the DS. I just stare out the window for the rest of the drive. The store is fairly empty. The florescent lights make squiggly patterns on the tile floor. Heather tugs at my shirt. I turn to look at her. She lobs my DS at the ground with as much force as she can muster. It lets out an echoey crack as it hits the floor. "Oh my gosh, Heather are you okay?" Dad rushes in. Why does he fall for this every time? Is he really this stupid? "I'm sorry, I dropped it." Heather smiles up at him. I rush to my poor DS. There's a crack across the touch screen. I hold down the power button....and....nothing. It's dead. That DS was my birthday present last year. In the background dad is still reassuring Heather that everything is fine. The rest of the trip is just a blur of heather screaming and trying on clothes. She doesn't attack me again though. So, I guess that's something. ~~~~ At lunch the next day, Alex and Claire are in our usual spot. Alex is writing something on a little notepad. "Velociraptor, easy. I eat my prey while it's still alive" Claire has this look in her eyes. "Yess, I win again!" Alex responds, "Oh, oh oh Ali your next." "What am I next for?" I ask "It's a game. I have a list of questions, and I write down how I think you'll answer. And then I ask you the questions for real and we compare the results. It's shows like how much I know about you." "Learn anything interesting about Claire?" "Well I don't know, but I got 12 of 15 so I must know her pretty well." Alex says. "I need to work on being more mysterious." Claire makes a face at Alex, but I can tell she's having fun. "Okay, Ali. Let's do you. Gimme, a sec to fill these out." Alex starts scribbling on her little notepad. Claire takes a grape from my lunch and replaces it with a slice of orange. "Okay, ready!" Alex looks up from her notepad. "We'll start with the easy ones. What's your favorite ice cream flavor?" "Chocolate" "Favorite color?" "Purple. Was that what you had?" "Yeah, but these are just the easy ones." Alex says "Okay, well ask me a hard one then." "Okay, okay, According to the infinite wisdom of Ali, what is the greatest song ever written?" Alex has that spark in her eyes. I just want to stare at her, but she's too much and I look away. "Oh that is a hard one, umm When September Ends" "Aw, miss" Alex scribbles something on her paper. "She's a sucker for the sad ones." Claire says between bites of sandwich. "What was your guess, Alex?" I ask "Well I wasn't totally sure, but I had Mr Brightside" "It's a close second." Two boys walk up behind Alex. "Heyy Alex, It's goin down tomorrow, you better be..." "Fuck off, Kyle." Alex glares at one of the boys. "Hey, I'm just trying to warn you is all." He responds. "Fuck _off_, Kyle." Alex repeats. Kyle shakes his head and the two boys walk off. The bell rings. I scarf down the rest of my lunch, and we head to our afternoon classes. ~~~~ At dinner, mom keeps going on and on about how talented Heather is. She's doing gymnastics or something. After dinner I have to clean the house. Heather can't help because she's "too tired" from practice. Mom finally runs out of things to have me do, and I manage to hide in my room. ~~~~ It looks like Alex is late again today. We have social studies together, 1st period. I keep waiting for her to walk through the door, but she never does. Between classes, I decide to wait by her locker hoping to catch her before the next one. Her lock is gone. I open the locker and peer in. The empty locker shocks me a little, did they move her locker? Did something happen with Mr. Pithers? I can't stop thinking about Alex for the rest of the morning. Claire and I sit opposite each other in the cafeteria. "Have you seen Alex?" I ask. "I don't know for certain, but from what I heard a bunch of boys were found with drugs, they told everyone they got them from Alex, and so Alex got sent to juvi." Part of me heard Claire, and that part of me knows what's happening, but I just can't accept it. I can't believe it. Claire takes a bite out of her sandwich and it takes an eternity. I keep feeling Alex next to me and then seeing that she's not there. Some part of my brain is playing her laugh on repeat, and it cuts just a little bit each time. "We have to help her. We have to do something." I hear myself say. "We can do something." Claire says, her voice doesn't show it, but I can tell she's really upset. "Do you mean like, telling people it wasn't her?" "No, I mean making a trade," Claire's voice is steady, but I can tell she's forcing it, "Someone else for Alex." "You mean like, tell the cops it was someone else? Why would they believe us?" "I'm not talking about convincing the cops, or anyone else for that matter. I'm talking about a simple trade." I nod in response, but I have no idea what she means. "Who do you know that you wouldn't miss?" The bell rings. ~~~~ After 4th period, I rush over to Claire's locker. I have to push passed masses of 8th graders. I feel like everyone is staring at me. "Busted" Someone half sings at me. I don't see who it is. Claire is rummaging through something in her locker, but I can't quite make out what it is. "Claire, you said we could make a trade. What did you mean?" I ask. She looks up, "Bring someone to me after school today. We can exchange their life for Alex. So let me ask you again, is there anyone you wouldn't miss?" I'd ask more questions, but I don't have time. I have to push my way back through the 8th graders, and I probably only have about half a minute to do it. "Yes," I say to Claire, "there is" ~~~~ The moment the bell rings, I rush out towards the Elementary school. Heather is outside waiting for mom. I tell her she has to walk home with me today. She rolls her eyes, but she follows. Around the corner Claire is waiting for us. "Do you still want to do this, Ali?" Claire asks. I nod, I still don't really know what I'm agreeing to but it doesn't seem like a good idea to ask while Heather is right next to me. "Then follow me," Claire says, she turns We walk out past the football field, into a forest. I don't think I've ever actually been back here before. "This isn't the way home!" Heather shouts. "It's a shortcut," Claire responds. "Ugh why are you here." The pine trees and short, just a few feet taller than we are. They're young and dense. The path between them is windy and narrow. The ground is bright green pine needles caked in red clay. I keep expecting Heather to run off, or scream at us, but she doesn't. She just follows. Pine needles brush up against my arms. I feel like the forest is squeezing us in more and more as we go. Claire marches forward. Eventually we come to a clearing. The trees form a perfect circle around us. I can't even make out the path we came from. Heather is uncharacteristically quiet. "Hold her," Claire grabbing Heather and turning her back to me. I comply. Claire takes a knife from the pocket of her hoodie. Before I even have time to react, she flicks the blade out,and gashes Heather across the chin. Heather starts shrieking. A splatter of blood hits the ground and the earth beneath us shifts. I'm thrown off balance, but my muscles contract and I dig my fingernails into Heather's shoulders. Claire is shouting something but I can't understand the words. The trees are moving now. Swaying back and forth. My ears are ringing from Heather’s wailing. She kicks my shins, but I don't feel it. The ground beneath heather opens up to reveal a mass of writhing roots. Claire utters a single ear splitting syllable. The roots rush up and wrap themselves around Heather and wrench her from my grasp. Her skin turns white and she goes silent as the breath is expelled from her lungs. The roots crush and tear at Heather's body like a giant mouth. Bits of flesh and bone snap and rip apart until there's nothing left. The ground shakes and in a wave the earth rushes in to cover the roots. I'm knocked off my feat and I feel my back hit the ground with a thud. Everything goes quiet. The trees are still. Claire stands over me. "It's time to go," She says. The path back to the school feels much shorter than before. The spacing between the trees is comfortable. By the time we get back to the school the sun has already started to set. I half walk, half jog home. ~~~~ It's dark by the time I get home. I figure mom must have realized that Heather is missing by now. I don't think anyone saw me pick her up, but the thought still gnaws at me. I swallow hard and open the front door. To my surprise, dad is just sitting watching the TV. "Hey honey." He says. "Hey, dad" I respond nervously. "There's some food on the counter for you." He continues. What the fuck is going on. I am actually really hungry. I eat the food at the table. Cautiously, I walk down the hall to my room. I push the door open. All my stuff is gone, it's gone. Desks line the room, mom sits at one of them typing on her computer. She spins around to face me. "You were out late." she says, totally calmly. "Claire and I were doing homework together." I respond reflexively. Suddenly the pieces fall together. We didn't just kill heather. We erased her. "Did you want something?" Mom asks. "I just came to say hi. " I say. "Hi, Alicia." she says, "Hey can you put these in the dishwasher for me?" Mom hands me a plate. I walk down the hall to what used to be Heather's room. I take a deep breath and open the door. All my stuff is here. My DS sits on the bed. I press the power button and the screen comes to life. I distract myself with Pokemon until it's 1am and I pass out. ~~~~ Alex is standing beside her locker when I get to school. I run up to her and hug her. I feel a weight lift off my shoulders as her arms wrap around me. She's really back, she's real. I kiss Alex on the cheek. I know I should feel bad about what we did. I should be afraid of Claire. I should probably be afraid of myself. I just killed, no I just erased Heather, my own flesh and blood. But Alex kisses me back, and I'm happy.

#writeblr #short story #slice of life #gay #horror #wlw

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rant4hsmtmts · 4 years

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Caswell cousins

I thought of writing this ages ago but forgot to finish it- so here is a small story about Ej and Ashlyns childhood.

Sorry this is kinda a mess and jumps all over the place lol. Anyway enjoy!

@uglyballerina @beese-is-cheese-for-bees

“I’m proud to call you my sister”

“-close enough”

Both being the only child in their families, the Caswell cousins were quite close. Ej’s parents worked a lot. They were people of high profile jobs, taking any opportunity to just drop their son around the corner to Dennis and Debbie’s house. Ashlyn was happy to see her cousin, but she could see it was kinda hard on him that he never got to spend time with his parents. He spent a lot of time at her house as a child, to the point he could walk around blindfolded (which he did do once to prove a point).

She was always there for him, and he was always there for her. He would always wait for her clubs to be finished to walk home from school together and they always shared what happened that day. You’d expect such a popular guy to complete disown his cousin, but it was more the other way around... Ej was terrified that he would eventually do something so stupid that Ashlyn would disown him. Even after some of the things he had already done, it as a wonder to him that she still hung out with him.

Growing up Ej was the first person she went to for advice. He was an intense people pleaser, but once he got comfortable he had no problems being very blunt. It meant she could always rely on him for truthful advice, of which her shy jazz musician and quiet writer parents usually were too nice to give.

So when she wrote her first song- he was the first to hear it. His loud thunderous applause made Ashlyn feel like she had written the greatest song in the world. Along with his encouragement, he suggested it needed an instrumental solo, his idea was to add a harmonica solo (something that was joked about for years to come). In the end, she added a beautiful piano solo in the middle, all jokes aside Ej knew that Ashlyn really had a gift for songwriting.

Something that was really a great way for her to express herself. Ej never really found his own expression til much later.

They grew up on the edge of new technology, seeing the ipod and ipad come through but they were nothing compared to the very first gadget they both owned, the Nintendo DS. As their parents worked through the day, leaving the two to their own devices, the Caswell cousins would often play pictochat hide and seek. Though they could only draw and type to each other they would spend hours trying to find the best spot that would leave the seeker scrambling.

The overall winner was Ej (or so he claims) because he once had the ‘genius’ idea of hiding in his parents car. It was the only time that Ashlyn had to actually accept defeat as the sun had set and their dinner was ice cold on the table.

His competitive spirit was clear from childhood. Ash knew when he said he played to win he wasn’t kidding.

Ashlyn had just finished fourth grade when they officially banned Caswell game nights in the house, after a night that went down in history as the 2013 Monopoly disaster. Ej wouldn’t speak to Ashlyn for over a week due his bruised pride (and that was even after flipping the table just before landing on Parklane). After that Debbie, Dennis, Carolyn and Adam all decided that it was probably better (and safer) to just have family dinners on Thursday nights.

As they grew older Ej and Ashlyn’s hobbies started to grow apart. Ashlyn had her clubs, her songs and Ej had his team but musical theatre was something they still shared.

2014 just starting year 7, Ej started to play waterpolo, he was always quite a strong swimmer- never fast enough for the big leagues but had the perfect upper body strength from basketball. He loved it, although his competitive nature definitely got the better of him a lot.

Waterpolo has one major risk of injury, well whether you can call it injury is subjective, but one major risk of the water sport....sunburn. Ej’s play to win attitude always court him out in one way or another, Ashlyn knew this quite well.

However it had never been so evident until he rocked up for Friday night family dinner with every visible area of skin a rich red lobster colour that could made him hiss every time he had to move. After finishing dinner the two went to the living room, as their parents started an in depth discussion about whatever drama or crisis they were facing. Both Caswell kids were quite oblivious to this at the time, but EJ knew the looks that his parents would give each other meant there was something going on. Anyway, the two went on the night playing some version of ‘New Super Mario Bros’ on the Wii. They had done this for years- it was a constant they could always count on. As Ej got older and stopped openly talking about what he was going through, Ashlyn knew a couple rounds of the Mario/ Luigi power team would help him settle down and let it out.

Due to his parents lack of attention, Ashlyn knew that her cousin had always craved positive praise and interest from other people. He used his insta ‘fame’ to try and fill the void but she knew empty likes and followers would never fix something like that. After a disappointing Waterpolo game, he lost the game, his parents didn’t come and the team had a go at him, the cousins started their trek back home down Pakington Road. Ash suggested that they have a look at the Pet Shelter and she knew cuddling all the animals could get anyone out of a bad, self deprecating mood.

After spending a little while playing with all the tiny kittens Ashlyn looked up to see Ej in the corner slumped against the wall patting a small Labrador puppy. The lop sided grin Ej made as the puppy wagged his tail, Ashlyn knew that the little dog had captured his heart already. Preceding a long argument with his parents, he finally convinced them to let him adopt the puppy.

Practically prancing down to the shelter, Ej adopted Remy, and made sure that the little puppy would never feel rejected again.

Having Remy around had confirmed one thing for Ash, although she loved the dog, she was definitely a cat person.

Since Ej got Remy, and managed to look after him by himself, it was a lot easier to convince her parents that she could have a pet. If Ej could do it… she could definitely do it.

Ash knew the moment she saw her curled up in the shelter that she couldn’t leave without her. Soft spoken meows, cautious, it was such a contrast to the brash energy that Remy had. Scarlett was the smallest of the litter, she was a gorgeous little Burmese cat.

Scarlett was always there for Ash, listening to her practice lines, watching her bake cakes, looking unimpressed when Ej would tell Ashlyn all the dumb things he managed to get up to, and being the very first fan of all her songs (as she would always make a little meow at the end).

Unfortunately, Ashlyn is the only person Ej trusts to look after Remy when he’s not home. Safe to say, Scarlett is not impressed. Remy and Scarlett tried, well at least Remy did, bouncing around the small cat wanting to play a game. Scarlett was very displeased with the notion of having to entertain the dog, so she found a loving sunny spot near the windowsill and decided to have a siesta for the arvo.

They have been there for each other through thick and thin, including discovering and having a rough lesson in heartbreak.

The very first girl Ej Caswell ever really liked was Anna Madden. It was freshman year and Ashlyn had seen the way his eyes would light up every time she was mentioned or how whenever she would call he couldn’t help but smile. But the problem with Ejs love life is he would fall hard, and fast. Saying ‘I love you’ way too early or something just as scary to a freshman who doesn’t understand commitment. After Anna dumped him for Justin, the captain of the Basketball team, Ej shut down for a while. He didn’t express his emotions as openly as his former self, he felt the rejection of his childhood once again.

Ej didn’t know why he was such an a**hole after that. He always tried to do the right thing, but at the end of the day, his lack of regard for the consequences of his actions would always come back to bite him. He really did want to have a relationship, be a good boyfriend but he was terrified of reliving the rejection, so he just had causal flings. Winked at all the girls, hanging out but at a far enough distance so that he didn't get too involved.

So when Ashlyn heard that he told Nini that he loved her- Ashlyn knew that she was different. She knew her cousin had messed up, and so did he, but she tried to plead with Nini... knowing that the girl had unlocked a part of Ej that Ashlyn thought was long gone.

Their personalities were really quite different.

Although somewhat quiet at school, Ashlyn was quite a loud person a home. She was a chatterbox that would spend every dinner retelling the details of her day with great dramatic hand gestures. Like the time she was in fifth grade, and people started a riot outside the canteen because raised the price of cookies from 50 cents to a dollar. She never really had this confidence at school but Ej knew the bright dramatic personality that hid in the shy school girl.

Ej however was rather the opposite. It was almost like his outside life he was constantly trying to entertain everyone and make them happy, while painting himself as a cool, smart and all around good guy. His constant façade was rather tiring for a guy that liked to go home and spend an hour reading the works of William Shakespeare every night.

But through all their differences (and all of Ejs stupid choices) the Caswell cousins were always there for each other. Advice, a laugh, a dangerously competitive game- they would always have each other’s backs.

#hsmtmts #high school musical the musical the series #ashlyn caswell #ej caswell #nini salazar roberts

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fortunatelylori · 5 years

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Hey, GOT! Turn on the freaking lights!

I don’t know if I’ve ever talked about this on my blog but I’m from a little country in Eastern Europe called Romania. I was born and raised in Bucharest, as was all of my family dating back centuries.

One of the most important landmarks in Bucharest is this building right here:

It’s called the House of the People or, more recently, Parliament House. This is so huge that you simply can’t escape it. At times it feels as if the whole of Romania lives in the shadow of this structure.

It was built by Nicolae Ceausescu, our once communist dictator. Everything about it is meant to intimidate and impress. Entire neighborhoods and monuments dating back hundreds of years were torn to the ground in order to make room for it.

It’s impressive in all its megalomaniac glory and the inside is just as over the top. You’ve got entire rooms made of marble, with columns so high it makes you dizzy just looking up. When you enter you’re greeted by a huge staircase made of marble as well and wall high paintings of the Ceausescu spouses going about their communist life:

Looking at separate elements, there is beauty there and even artistry. Taken as a whole, it’s a fucking architectural, visual and cultural disaster.

Now, I’m not suggesting HBO and the Ds are communist tyrants but what I am saying that that a huge amount of money, time, talent and effort is being sunk into this tv show and the results are the story telling equivalent of the House of the People. There are good things sprinkled in there but the basic structure and flow of this story has sunk to such depths that it’s hard to find the experience of watching GOT pleasurable anymore. It’s become an exercise in futility and wasted potential.

This episode is even worse because GOT has so much money to burn that usually you can at least enjoy the production values and the visual spectacle that offers you. This episode is, unfortunately, called the “Long Night” so buckle up for an hour and a half of complete darkness, punctuated by brief flashes of human forms darting back and forth on your TV screen. So this is the equivalent of the House of the People at night, covered in thick fog, when the electricity has gone out.

The bad news about having the episode filmed in darkness is that it’s practically impossible for you to be invested in the action since you can’t see who is doing what or what they are going through while doing it. The good news is that the story tellers will do their utmost to make sure you also don’t give a shit.

General Impressions

This episode we are fortunate enough to get a respite from David Nutter, one of the worst directors I’ve ever had the misfortune of directing tv shows I like and we are treated instead to the talents of Miguel Sapochnik. I’ve loved most of his work on GOT, with my favorite episode of his being Hardhome. And I’m sure he did a fantastic job in this episode, coordinating what is essentially an hour and a half long battle. However, since I couldn’t really see much of what was going on in the action packed sequences, I’m basing that assessment more on faith, than solid proof.

This episode also has the distinction of completing Jon Snow’s journey into complete irrelevancy. Jon doesn’t do much of anything of consequence. Instead he simply stumbles from one failure to another: from following D*ny in destroying the wights army instead of getting to Bran (if D*ny wanted to destroy the wights, why couldn’t Jon hop on Rhaegal to go to the Godswood? why do both of them need to be there to burn the zombies?); to his almost success in taking down wight Viserion only for it to go to nothing when the dragon is still alive and proceeds to burn down Winterfell; to charging the Night King through a field of dead bodies only for the most obvious twist of the NK raising the dead to stop him in his tracks and finally completely abandoning his ethos to protect those in need by leaving Sam to die at the hands of the wights in order to get to Bran. He, of course, never makes it to the Godswood and ends the episode jumping from behind a rock to scream at wight Viserion, without even pulling out his sword to attempt to fight back. It’s enough to make one ...

My thoughts exactly, Jon.

What a complete and utter waste.

Talking of wastes, we are now 3 and a half hours through this season and the Starks have yet to be together in the same room, having a conversation. All through the seasons we have waited with baited breath for these kids to be reunited. The Ds, trolls that they are, baited us with just that at the beginning of season 7, only for it to never materialize. Now they have outdone even themselves by putting the Starks under the same roof and using every trick in their troll textbook to make sure we get absolutely no satisfaction for our Stark itch.

On top of that, we have been led to believe that these 4 people (ok, 3 since Bran is a robot now) care about each other. You’d think that they would seek each other out and at least hug before the battle that could potentially kill one or all of them. That doesn’t happen.

I think the reason why it doesn’t happen is because the Ds felt there was no point in wasting time on that when all 4 of them were going to survive. The problem is that the audience doesn’t know that and should at least fear that they won’t survive.

Most importantly, the characters themselves have no idea that they got a death immunity card for the greatest battle to visit this planet in 8000 years. So to have them completely forget about one another is just piss poor writing.

The closest we get is this scene between Arya and Sansa:

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Arya: Get down to the crypt.

Sansa: I’m not abandoning my people.

Arya: Take this and go.

Sansa: I don’t know how to use it.

Arya: Stick them with the pointy end.

This might as well be a conversation between two strangers who kind of decided they really don’t like each other very much, instead of two sisters who might never see each other again. Sansa goes as far as to refuse to leave not because she doesn’t want to leave her sister but because she doesn’t want to abandon “her people”.

It’s not wrong of Sansa to want to stay with the people of Winterfell but it does make the conversation less poignant and emotional because there’s nothing personal about this exchange. Nor do these two even spare one tearful glace for one another. That is reserved for this scene:

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That’s where the show’s priorities lay. Why did they include this scene? Was it only to fan the flames of the Sanrion ship? I would say no. I think they’re laying the groundwork for whatever plot point Sansa and Tyrion will be involved in, which will inevitably circle back to Cersei one way or another.

And while it was a poignant scene, I can’t help but begrudge that they gave us this at the expense of the Sansa/Arya scene or a potential Sansa/Jon scene.

Also, a lot of people are now complaining that Sansa didn’t fight during this episode which makes her useless (the same old tired argument so no surprise there) but they completely miss the point as to why her lack of fighting is frustrating. It isn’t because Sansa didn’t turn into Xena, the warrior princess, in this episode. It’s because the Ds set up something but then didn’t follow through. Sansa received a dagger and advice on how to use it. Normally that would lead to her having to do just that, particularly when in the scene above she pulls out the very same dagger. But wouldn’t you know it? Once she stands up and charges, she does absolutely NOTHING! It isn’t that she fails. It’s that the writers didn’t even feel the need to show her try. They set up that plot point and then left it dangling with no pay off.

There are multiple examples of this type of tepid storytelling though out the episode but I think the most glaring one is Bran. He has been building up to his confrontation with the Night King since season 1. And all of that amounted to what exactly? Bran did nothing but sit in the Godswood and wait for the NK to try to kill him. So why did he go through that entire, excruciating journey exactly? What vital information did he discover that led to the demise of the NK? What magical abilities did he posses that were crucial against his greatest foe? He didn’t even warg a dragon for Pete’s sake even though that should have been a given.

In the behind the scenes commentary, the Ds said that the key to destroying the NK was either stabbing him directly in the spot where the COF inserted the shard of dragon glass or killing him next to the Weirwood tree, depending on what you understood by their comments.

Either way, that information did not make it into the TV show. Bran never says that, despite having opportunity to do so during the council meeting in episode 2. So it doesn’t matter what the Ds say in interviews. If it isn’t on screen, it doesn’t exist.

On the whole, the most frustrating part of the episode was the actual battle. Leaving aside the poor lighting, what I got form this episode is that 130.000 men (based on my super duper math skills utilized for ep 2) had absolutely no strategy and no stamina to at least attempt to fight a hoard of mindless zombies. It took all of 10 minutes for all these hardened soldiers (with one exception which we will discuss later on) to break ranks and flee for their lives.

Also why did Jorah lead 100.000 of those men, consisting of the entire Dothraki khalasar acting as the Winterfell army’s cavalry, on a charge into the darkness of certain death? I don’t know a lot about battle strategy but I do know that when you have a key position (in this case Winterfell), you don’t charge. You wait for the enemy to come to you. And once the army broke, everyone of those people were running around like headless chickens, with no clue how to regroup or mount an effective defense of one of the most impenetrable castles in the whole of Westeros. Robb Stark must be spinning in his grave like kale in a hipster’s smoothie. Imagine what he could have been able to do with 130.000 men.

It pains me to say this but the Night King was genuinely the only one on that battlefield who had an actual plan, could adapt to what was thrown at him (the trenches, falling off the dragon etc.) and complete his mission. He was defeated in the end but his defeat consisted not only of the unexpected in the form of Arya and her FM training but also on the lack of reaction of all the wights and the white walkers that were there which, frankly, stretches disbelief.

PS: While sparing not one single moment for character or plot development, GOT did find the time to rip off How to Train your Dragon ... again ...

Give it up, guys. You don’t have half the vision and talent of the HTTYD squad. This just makes you look silly.

Favorite scenes

The “Blood of my Blood” scene:

I loved the whole sequence of D*ny and Jorah. From Jorah sweeping in like a knight in shinning armor to protect D*ny, to him getting up through multiple stab wounds because he couldn’t give up on trying to save her, to D*ny picking up a freaking sword and fighting despite not knowing how to try and defend him, to her break down over his dead body and Drogon coiling up around her to try to comfort her.

Just looking at these gifs makes me want to cry. One of the only truly meaningful and emotional moments in the whole episode and an apt ending to the most important relationship in D*ny’s life. Kudos to Emilia and Iain on giving it their all in this scene.

The “You’re home” scene:

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Speaking of acting chops, Alfie Allen, ladies and gentlemen! Truly one of the best actors in this cast. And this scene really brought Theon full circle. The man who didn’t feel like he belonged anywhere, who went through hell and back, who lost his humanity and clawed his way back to it, died defending the only place he’s ever known as home. Alongside the D*ny/Jorah scene, this really broke me down. Also this:

Bran: Theon! You’re a good man. Thank you.

cue the ugly crying right now

Just wonderful! I hope Alfie has a long career in front of him because he’s sooo good.

The “Final atonement” scene:

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The reason why I loved Mel’s death scene so much is because it brings to completion the burning of Shrieen. Despite her religious fantaticism and her ruthlessness, sacrificing that little girl did take it’s toll on Melisandre. It shook her to her core. So much so that she walked into the frozen wasteland, took off her necklace and killed herself. The fact that the entire sequence is punctuated by Davos watching her walk to her death makes it all the more meaningful.

It surprised me that they chose this way to bring an end to her character but I feel it enriched her story and my perception of her.

Episode MVPs

The Unsullied:

I was curious about what they would do with the Unsullied during the battle because their fighting style is perfectly suited to castle defense. Also, because of this story from the History and Lore series:

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The Unsullied are known for their discipline and willingness to stand their ground against the greatest adversaries. They are canonically so impressive that not only did they beat the Dothraki but all the Dothraki riders cut off their braids and placed them at their feet to honor their bravery and prowess.

Considering that not only were the Unsullied the only soldiers at Winterfell to actually stick to their guns and fight strategically and bravely but they also ensured the retreat of all the other forces, the people of Winterfell need to be cutting off their own hair and honor these brave men.

Arya “It is Princess after all” Stark:

Aaaa ... yeah, she is the princess that was promised, y’all!

Arya’s story in this episode was the most complete and compelling one. Starting off with her “I know Death. He has many faces. I look forward to seeing this one” bravado, to her rawness and vulnerability when she realized what she was up against to her putting all that Faceless Men training to good use and managing to sneak up on the Night King just enough to end him.

Arya Stark has just killed Death! A true warrior, if there ever was one! I hope this marks an end to her FM arc and a gradual return of at least part of the kindness and empathy Arya was defined by in season 1.

Daenerys “Why do you want me to feel sorry for her?” Targareyen:

Well, this is strange ... I never thought I’d make D*ny an MVP in these reviews but fair is fair. The girl was a champ this episode.

I know some people seem to think that she’s the reason why the battle plan went haywire because she decided to attack the wight army after seeing her khalasar wiped out. However ... for one, she had just seen all of her Dothraki cut down. Clearly whatever strategy they had going wasn’t working. Secondly, I seem to remember in episode 2 that Tyrion offered to wave the torch so Dany could set the trench on fire so obviously she and Jon were not suppose to just stick to the Godswood for the entire duration of the battle.

Still, I think the reason why I found D*ny so formidable this episode was because she was placed directly in contrast with Jon and unlike Mr. Can’t seem to get anything right these Days Snow, D*ny did actually put up a fight, saved Jon’s life even at the risk of injury to Drogon and attacked the Night King head on.

Yes, dragon fire was ineffectual against the NK but she gave it her all and I appreciate that. As thanks for her bravery and loyalty (despite now knowing that Jon is her rival to the IT), Jon abandoned her without hesitation, proving once again that he genuinely doesn’t give a shit about her. At this point, I honestly don’t understand why D*ny stans are shipping her with Jon. They should have higher standards for their fave.

The way they chose to portray D*ny in this episode is interesting because, despite D*ny’s actions, dark D*ny and the Dance of Dragons is still happening, in my humble opinion. That means that we are left in a bit of a conundrum: D*ny has now fulfilled her end of the bargain. She has fought the army of the dead and lost a significant percentage of her army and Jorah in the process. Which leaves us with the inevitability that Jon and the Starks will not only go against the woman that helped them protect their home but will prove themselves mercenary and dishonorable for doing so. Also because of the prolonged absence of Jon’s POV and the lack of scenes of the Starks together, D*ny, being the only one we have clear access to narratively, becomes more and more sympathetic.

In some ways this choice frustrates me because D*ny has done some truly horrific things and story-wise those have yet to be addressed or paid off. By making her more and more sympathetic and the Starks more antagonistic in relation to her, it makes it harder to deliver the comeuppance she has earned over the seasons.

On the other hand, there is something about this type of narrative choice that appeals to me. The line between hero and villain is practically nonexistent and it’s up to each and everyone of us to pick a side, based more on our subjective experiences and less on objective narrative reasons.

It brings to mind the first Dance of Dragons where you could very well make an argument in favor of both the Black and Green factions because there was no clear cut answer on who was right and who was wrong.

*none of the art work belongs to me. thank you to the content creators!

#got 8x03 #got8 spoilers #got review #my got meta #daenerys targaryen #anti-jonerys #house stark #theon greyjoy #jorah mormont #dany x jorah #jon snow #the unsullied #sansa stark #arya stark #melisandre of asshai #dark!dany #dance of dragons 2.0

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canaryatlaw · 7 years

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so, lots to unpack here. first of all, to establish setting, I’m currently sitting in LAX (if that doesn’t mean anything to you, their airport in Los Angeles) waiting for my flight back to Chicago that is gonna take off at 1:10 am and arrive at 7:33 am (two hour time difference accounted for). So I figured now is probably the most logical time to make this post. Luckily I can control exactly when I’ll get tired enough to actually sleep because I’m dependent on xanax and melatonin now, isn’t that fun!! haha. so like, most of today was cool of course, and I’m gonna get there, but I feel like I should first establish that I feel profoundly sad right now, though I can’t tell if it’s from the big event and me seeing my friends being over and having going back to real life which now consists of FINALS, or from this nostalgia I keep having for a life I’ve never had, or if it’s because I was reading Captain Canary fan fiction on the flight here (from San Jose to LA) which now just makes me really fucking sad because all I can think is WE’LL NEVER HAVE THIS. and these posts are generally good at helping me unpack my feelings so I figured I’d write this while I have the time and internet connection (good for LAX for actually offering free internet, unlike the pretending heathens in Chicago). so. here we go. I had my alarm set for 9:15 but ended up waking up around 8:45 (because shared hotel room) and started getting ready. I was cosplaying today so I did my make up and then changed into my full white canary garb (which, omg, I forgot is SO uncomfortable), doing my best to make sure where Caity signed it back in March remained untouched. A little after ten we made our way to the convention center and pretty much immediately headed to Caity’s booth because where else are we gonna go? We continued to pretend to all be VIPs (victimless crime, really) and a guy who had rather elaborate Citizen Steel (or whatever the hell we decided was Nate’s superhero codename) cosplay on who was in Brandon’s line right next to us made eye contact with me and was like “hey captain!” which was amusing haha and we took a picture together when I finished with Caity. I don’t really remember exactly what was said at each conversation because we frequented her booth, but it was good, I was just sad when I saw the picture and I looked less than stellar. I had like, super been overheating trying to keep the big coat on (I like the cosplay a lot better with the coat) and trying to make sure my hair and make up don’t run from sweat because my head overheats really easily for some reason so I didn’t look totally awesome and you can actually see my stomach hanging out just a tiny bit between the top and pants in the picture and like, I wanted to vomit when I saw it and then had a bunch of super triggering and totally inappropriate thoughts about it for the rest of the day because my fucking mind can’t be like “hey maybe you should eat less junk food” it has to immediately be like “you should just stop eating again” because fuck being neurotypical am I rite? (I am fine, if you’re concerned right now, but thank you for your concern). We did something to take up some time (I don’t remember) then ended up going back to her because I was like okay I need better photos with my white canary stuff on so I did that and they came out much better. At some point after that I leached onto my friends VIP status and used it to cut the line at Justin Hartley’s table because fuck waiting in line, and I saw him and TOTALLY flipped out, I was like “I love Smallville so much but I started it late after the show ended and I liked it so much but I thought I was never going to get to meet you because it was over BUT NOW YOU’RE HERE AND I LOVE YOUR GREEN ARROW SO MUCH YOU’RE MY FAVORITE” that’s basically what I said lol, to his credit he took it well and was kind and gentlemanly, so that was nice. From there we got some food at some point (just the overpriced shit from the convention center, there was a really amusing exchange where my friend attempted to figure out if the hot dog on the menu came with a bun or not because apparently in the Philippines they come on a stick sometimes and the ladies serving were very taken aback) then I went to Italia Ricci’s booth, and if you don’t know who that is it’s because she’s not *really* an Arrowverse actor (she was silver banshee on a few episodes of Supergirl) but is actually Robbie Amell’s wife so they generally do a joint booth thing. I wanted to see her because she’s on Designated Survivor, which I really love haha and she was super sweet, I said I was a big 24 fan from back in the day (DS stars Kiefer Sutherland) and she was like “oh yeah I’ve never seen it, he’s always teasing me about it because he’s like you’re the only person who hasn’t seen it!!”) which was amusing haha and then I met Juliana Harkavy and got a selfie with her, and she was totally awesome as well and just a fantastic person. After that those of us who weren’t doing the photo ops got in line for the legends panel, which then happened at 2:45. I live tweeted pretty much the whole thing, so if you have specific questions feel free to check that out over on twitter @RachelEiley, but nothing terribly spoilerish was said, someone asked if they could have any person in the DC universe, either existing in the Arrowverse or not yet onto the waverider to fill Stein’s spot who would it be, and Caity was basically like “well I know who it is and I’m very happy about it so I’m not gonna say anything else” lol which has prompted a fair amount of speculation as to who that means. In the room it seemed like everyone was thinking she meant Nyssa, but it’s not very much info to speculate on so I guess we’ll have to see. the other amusing exchange was when someone asked if they weren’t an actor what job they’d have an Caity was like “astronaut” and Brandon was like “do you know math?” which is obviously funnier than one would normally observe it to be when you consider they were in 400 Days together, a movie where they both played astronauts (and were each other’s romantic interests). Caity responded that it was a “dream” question, so she could say whatever she wanted. When the panel was over around 3:30 we ran back to Caity’s table, but the queue was full and the staff guy was like “sorry we had to cut it off here” and wouldn’t let anyone else in but I was like haha no fuck that shit if we all stand here and be annoying we’ll get on the line which, unsurprisingly, worked very well and we actually got on the gold/platinum VIP line and were like one of the first people to actually see her lol so that was a good plan!! But we got a few group selfies in that look really awesome and got to say goodbye to her (which is when the exchange about me saying maybe I’ll do Clexacon if I don’t flunk all my finals and her responding with my law school class rank happened). Everyone else was pretty much shutting things down at that point, so we hung out for a little bit and regrouped before heading out. We went to In-N-Out because I had mentioned I’d never had it before, and the place was absurdly busy, so we ended up eating at the tables outside despite it being like 50 degrees out, but it was nice and fun, a good ending to being with my friends for a few days and just had a good time with them. We were basically across the street from the airport at that point so I was dropped off afterwards and we said our goodbyes. I ended up chilling out at the gate for a while doing quimbee videos, which I’ll probably go back to if I have any time between finishing writing this and boarding the plane, for a while and doing that, then got on the plane and finished the first sudoku puzzle really quickly, then fucking up the next one so badly I couldn’t even correct my way out of it (which like, never happens) that I just gave up and read Captain Canary fan fiction for the rest of the flight, which of course got me feeling very invested in the ship, and then I just felt sad and couldn’t quite figure out why. But the plane landed, got off on the gate and was directed to a little bus thing to get to another terminal, in which a cute pilot gave me his seat, and then I went to the other terminal, found the gate, found a airplane pillow that wasn’t entirely made out of polyester, and planted myself at the gate until the plan boards and resolved to write this in the mean time, and here we are. Now, further analysis on the sad thing- so, obviously, I’ve been looking forward to this weekend for a while now and it being over and me having to leave my friends and of course not seeing my favorite celebrity for at least a few months would reasonably make any person feeling sad, I feel like it’s not that simple. I mean, the fact that I’m going back to finals certainly doesn’t help, and I do have some anxiety about that despite doing this exact schtick every semester with my head going “but what if this time you actually suck at tests not like all the last times????” which of course is always fun. but there’s also that whole nostalgia thing that’s got me itching for something. It came out of course because of being around actors who are living cool lives and such, and links back to that thing I was talking about but not actually mentioning a little while back that had be thinking some of those things, and mostly just imagining that kind of life for myself and feeling wholly unfulfilled with the life I’ve chosen at being a lawyer and it wasn’t supposed to happen this way, dammit!!! I can’t exactly graduate law school and decide to go road trip out to Hollywood and become a waitress while auditioning, that would be a massive waste of time, effort, and money, and there is still of course stuff I want to do as a lawyer that has me not wanting to give up. I just want both, which I don’t think is possible, and that fucking sucks. The thing, anyway, was auditioning for a new show in development (that I’ll leave unnamed for now because despite not hearing anything they haven’t filled the part yet) that was taking casting videos and self-tapes through one of the casting sites I made a profile on at some point during college and was receiving emails from about it. And, this is subjective of course, but I felt like I really nailed the audition (and even if I did there’s no reason to think that would make it likely that I would get what is undoubtedly going to be a highly competed for part and one of which I do not fit the typical character description for), and I couldn’t help but imagine how much fun it would be, even if some of the stuff about the show that’s being said now (mainly how dark it is) makes me think it probably wouldn’t be the best idea anyway (my parents, for sure, would have a freaking fit over it). But that just leaves me here- going back to law school to finish my finals and leaving my friends and favorite actors behind and I just feel profoundly SAD over it all despite having a really fun and all around amazing weekend (it doesn’t help that my friends are going to continue hanging out, but this doesn’t really feel like FOMO). idk what else there is to write about that. it just...is. and I don’t think any amount of writing about that will change it. so I guess I’ll go back to reading my sad fan fiction? I don’t quite feel like going back to studying for bus orgs being that it’s 12:30 am (here, anyway, at home where I’ll be in 5 hours it’s 2:30 am) and now I just feel tired and sad after writing all of that. blah. this is a really shitty feeling and I don’t know what to do about it. there’s no quick fixes for this, obviously. maybe if I fall asleep on the plane (I probably will at some point) I’ll wake up in a better mood, and hopefully can get some more sleep during the day before I have to go to my review session and then make up class at 4 pm. So I guess this is me signing off, though feeling not very happy about all of it. Goodnight babes. Happy Monday.

#daily journal #December 2017

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ingridgovaninsights · 7 years

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Dear Diary, It’s Alfred- A Short Story

Dear Diary,

Today is a Monday… I hate Mondays. Why I hate Mondays is because I hate Mondays. I usually have difficulty explaining myself because, well, I guess I just do.

As it usually is, today was terrible. I went to school alone, endured the day alone, and walked home alone. Why am I so lonely? Maybe it’s because I’m Alfred Governor. The students at my school seem to enjoy poking fun at me, for any reason they can spot- my “gay” mannerisms; the way in which I scream too much; and even my name.

People constantly call me gay. My voice is slightly higher pitched than other boys; I delicately sweep my hair to one side; and I look good in tight clothing. They taunt me with names and threats, which is quite disturbing when I really think about it- what if I actually were gay?

If I were gay, I would be beaten. I might even be killed. That is, if what those people said is true. If they decided to stick with what they said. See, I’m not angered at being called gay. What bothers me is people’s attitudes towards homosexuality. I wonder, who raised them to act this way? I fear for other students that are gay or bisexual.

My mother, being the overprotective woman she is, has called the principal and vice principal countless times to express her concern- why isn’t the school teaching good morals? Where is the supervision in the building? Blah blah blah.

After school, I listened to my mom for about five minutes, then got tired. My attention span is terrible; her words turned into a mush that I simply drowned out. She had been nagging about the same old things, anyways. The same complaints every single phone call.

I didn’t listen much, but I thought a lot. I had gone to my room, closed the door and lay down in my bed, stressing about the whole situation. Words the kids had used struck me in the head with their brutality, despite the truth that I very well knew. Perhaps people were just bored, and had nothing better to do than ruin other people's’ lives.

Now, I sit up in my bed, writing away. As much as I want some of this to be spoken out loud, it would ruin everything. Well, never mind that, because everything is ruined already.

Tomorrow being a Tuesday, I’ll have another chance at hopefully making a friend. Then, maybe, I’ll have something grand to tell my mom at 3:30P.M. Here’s to that… I’ll keep my fingers crossed. Someone ought to approach me by now; can’t they see me waiting?

Alfred

Dear Diary,

At school today, something really unexpected happened. You know how I was telling you about all my waiting? Wanting somebody to approach me at lunch time? As doubtful as I was yesterday, it actually did happen.

The cafeteria was boisterous, each student speaking in their outdoor voices. The funny thing is, I could speak louder. Secretly, I’m a really loud person in conversation. Often, I interrupt, leaving people angry- it’s a problem I’ve always had and likely need to work on.

One trait I do have on my side is my smile- constantly, while strutting past the tables, I’d smile widely, causing a chaos of laughter from other kids. I was confused by their laughter- was my smile crooked? Did I have a big pimple on my nose? Awkwardly, I continued to glance back at the tables behind me as I took my seat by the window.

I don’t even understand why I bother sitting in the cafeteria, because the cafeteria is clearly for people with a stable social life. Not me, Alfred, slouched all alone with my tuna and cheese sandwich and a Nintendo DS.

“Nintendo is so gay,” one guy, a broad shouldered redhead, sneered. “What are you playing, Mario?”

“No,” I said matter-of-factly, “Pokemon.”

That was when the redhead’s expression changed from mocking to pure intrigue. “Wait… which one? I used to collect all the cards when I was younger.”

He sat down beside me and I showed him the game. For the rest of the lunch period we were talking, laughing, teasing each other. Dare I say we acted like friends? I found out his name is Barry, and he is the same age as me. It’s funny how we aren’t taking any of the same classes, though.

So anyways, going by my routine, I’m in my room again and I’m feeling pretty accomplished. I held in my screams while socializing (I have a bad habit of screaming too much); I didn’t interrupt as much as I would’ve thought I would; and I made sure to smile! Sometimes I feel like a social worker for myself- giving myself advice on what to do and what not to do. But hey, if it works…

I made a new friend today. Barry. Well, maybe this friendship will last- who knows? I sure hope it does, because I don’t like being lonely.

Alfred

Dear Diary,

I should have known this would happen. A week went by without any problem at all, and suddenly Barry stops hanging out with me. We had so much fun together; I had no clue what was wrong.

It’s not like he wasn’t at school- I saw him joking around with some popular kids in the foyer. Embarrassed and a bit shy, I avoided eye contact each time, never bothering to ask him what happened. As my mother would say, “You never know unless you ask”, but I wasn’t going to… no way. I must have been mistaken- it was no friendship.

For a few days I sat at the same table, hoping he would come back and say, “Kidding!” or “I was just busy, you know?”. It never happened. Like an abandoned animal awaiting its mother’s return, I kept stubbornly sitting there at lunch.

I guess it’s like the situation with my father and I. I’ve never met him, but I’ve always wanted him to be there. Maybe if he was with me, he would back me up and fight off the bullies, or spend time with me on weekends. But I have no clue where he is, and this is just like my friendships- nonexistent, hopefully someday arriving at my feet, but not likely.

I felt depressed every day, taking the Barry situation far too personally. I must have done something wrong to offend him; I replayed all of our interactions in my head. My mom told me to stop worrying so much, because “The people that matter will, and the people that don’t won’t”. I felt pressured to be inspired by that anonymous quote.

Someday, I want a friend that will hear my screams. I get that I don’t listen much, but maybe if someone listened to me I would listen back. I just want that feeling of being wanted, like a father holding his baby son. I want to be loved so much, I want to not be bullied, or at least have somebody standing beside me through it.

Has anyone ever taken my screams as a cry for help? A strange way to express it, but I couldn’t speak up any other way. I felt words far more awkward than a scream. Screams aren’t necessarily embarrassing; words can, however, humiliate you entirely.

That’s why I write in this diary. I don’t care if it “sounds gay”- that’s what they’re called. I don’t want to be someone I’m not, which is normal. Normal is boring. So I’ll keep on screaming; Barry can go be with those popular people. That’s the circle of life.

Maybe someday, when I scream, I’ll feel relief when someone screams back.

Alfred

#short story #creative writing #young adult fiction #teen fiction #story writing #writing blog #mental health blog #diary #high school life #bullying #end the stigma

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veryangryhedgehog · 5 years

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“Nothing to See Here, Just a Never-Ending Pile of Shit, Right on my Head” an Ede Valley story by Hedgehog.

Nothing to See Here, Just a Never-Ending Pile of Shit Right on my Head

Of all the students at St. Adelaide’s, of all the tragic backstories and fucked up personalities, Doug Bailey had the worst, and was the most. And no one knew it. To most people, Doug was just that kid who was there. True, he was a bit of an oddity, with his bright white hair and his tendency to slide in and out of rooms on Heelys. People often joked that he used them to “escape his feelies”, but no one even knew what his “feelies” were. So mostly, they wrote him off as a weirdo and forgot about him. Even his friends. There was just something about him that made people not want to know.

They didn’t.

Of course, Doug’s life didn’t start out full of tragedy and woe. That wouldn’t be good storytelling. Even so, Doug had been a loser since the beginning. He was the youngest of three, and from early childhood it was clear that he was never going to measure up. His brother Gordon amazed people with his intellect and knowledge. His sister Clover charmed everyone around her with her passion and ready smile. Doug was just kinda there. He wasn’t clever, or charismatic. All Doug was really good for was the occasional snide remark.

Though no one ever said as much, people must have wondered what had gone wrong with him. By all accounts he should have been just as remarkable as his siblings. His mother Christine Bailey had a trifecta of Ph. Ds in Biology, Physics, and Psychology, and was a professor at Yale. His father Tim Bailey had received his medical degree at Stanford and had since written several books that had allegedly “Changed the American Diet”. At least, that’s what he had proudly scribed on all of their covers.

So how had Doug happened? No one had any idea. For the first twelve years of his life it seemed as if he’d simply been a fluke of creation; that somehow the brilliant genes of his progenitors had mixed in such a way to create a perfectly ordinary child. At least that’s what he assumed, until the results of his “mandatory IQ test” came in the mail.

He’d been forced to take it by his parents, who said there was no way a son of theirs wouldn’t be inducted into the Gifted and Talented program, which in his humble opinion, was a bullshit name. But who could have predicted the results? Because as his mother tearfully explained, the torn envelope crushed in the hand clutched to her chest, Doug was apparently a genius.

“Are you sure he didn’t just break the test?” Gordon asked over his physics book, as they all sat down to dinner that evening.

“Gordon!” his mother scolded. “That’s not appropriate. Apologize to your brother.”

“I’m sorry I doubted your entirely obvious genius, squirt,” he muttered, before turning back to the textbook.

Rolling her eyes, Clover smiled down at him. “I’m sure the test is right, Doug’s just been holding back, right Doug?”

He knew that she meant it as a compliment, but that phrase would grow to be his curse. Doug should do better in school, if he only “applied himself”. Even the very words sent shivers up his spine. What the fuck did that even mean? If he actually gave a shit? If he just tried a little harder? But he saw the already developing obsession with scholastic excellence in his fellow classmates, how they would check their grades every few minutes, how they would flip about tests. He simply couldn’t handle that kind of pressure.

So he did… okay. But that of course was never enough for his parents. Once every semester he would hand in his report card, and wait for the inevitable sigh and the “sit down, Doug,” from his father. Then he’d get the same speech he’d gotten the last semester, and the one before that. Like clockwork.

He wished every time that something would distract his parents from his “failing” grades. Anything. Well, anything but what he actually got.

Because for the final semester of eighth grade, he handed his report card, covered with Cs and Ds, to his father, and braced for the worst. But his father had merely glanced blearily at it, said “That’s fine, Doug,” and turned back to his writing.

Doug was frankly a little shocked, and wondered if he was dreaming. It all seemed so surreal that it couldn’t have actually happened. He couldn’t have gotten off the hook that easily. As would quickly become a theme in his life, he didn’t. Because that evening when his parents sat down to dinner with the two boys, they had some news.

“Clover is… sick,” his mother broke the silence finally.

“Well yes, of course, we know that.” Gordon frowned. She’d been bedridden for weeks. But they’d just assumed mono or something like that.

His father looked down at his plate. He hadn’t eaten anything. “It’s… it’s cancer.” His voice nearly broke on the last word. “Brain cancer.”

There was silence for a good minute. “What?” Doug asked finally, after looking over at Gordon, nearly frozen to his chair. “You’re… you’re shitting us, right?”

The fact that they didn’t even scold him for his language said volumes.

He couldn’t believe it. It didn’t seem real. Cancer… cancer was something that happened to other people. Something that distant relatives or friends of friends got and you had to pretend to feel sorry for. It didn’t happen to sisters. Not to Clover.

Late that night, as he was failing to fall asleep, he heard his father cry for the first time in his life. It came soft and muffled from his parents’ room, and it almost destroyed him. If his father was crying, then the world really was ending. He was never going to fall asleep now.

Doug stood, and padded across the dark room, taking care to avoid the piles of discarded clothes. The old wooden door creaked a little, and he cringed, but no one seemed to notice the sound. Before he knew what he was really doing, he found himself at Clover’s door. He opened it, just a sliver, just to make sure that she was still his sister.

“Hi Doug,” her voice came from the room, exhausted, but decidedly awake. He didn’t question how she knew it was him. “Couldn’t sleep either?”

“No,” he hesitated for a moment, before entering the room. She turned on a lamp, and patted the bed next to her. She didn’t look any different. Her cheeks were still their usual rose and her hair fell in dark ringlets around her face. More than anything, she just looked tired.

They sat there for a moment, before Doug finally broke the silence. “Mom and Dad told us about…”

“The cancer?” she finished for him finally.

“Are… are you gonna… die?”

She looked off to the far side of her room, her jaw tightening. “Probably,” she said finally.

“Why?” Doug asked, shaking his head. “Why does it have to be you? You’re… you’re the most amazing person I know. You’re the only one who’s never… never wanted anything from me.”

“I don’t know why things happen, Doug,” she admitted. “Maybe there’s some kind of great plan, and I got sick for a reason. Maybe it’s to motivate you to get off your ass,” she laughed bitterly. “Or maybe there is no meaning, and everything is random.”

“I don’t know which one’s better.”

She laughed again, but hard this time. “I don’t think anyone does. Wanna hear my opinion?” Clover’s blue eyes glowed in the low light.

He nodded.

“I think that you have to make your own meaning in the world. I think that you have to take what this universe hands you, and make something out of it.”

“I don’t think I understand,” he admitted.

“I’m not sure if I do either.”

He thought about those words for a long time, for the months and months that it took for Clover’s body to finally give up. They had taken her in for Chemo, of course, and Doug had watched helplessly as her hair fell out and her eyes grew cloudy and she ceased to even look human anymore. And it almost killed him. He didn’t want to remember her like that, the dead look in her eyes, the pain omnipresent in the tenseness of her shoulders, the complete smoothness of her face and head where her beautiful hair used to flow freely.

Of course, it didn’t work. Nor did any of the other treatments they tried, and gradually as the months passed, Clover just got weaker and weaker, until she could hardly lift her head to say hello anymore. By the time Doug’s freshman year of high school was nearing its end, she just slept. He didn’t think he would ever be able to forget the day when the doctor had gathered what remained of his family together, his parents and his brother and him, and told them that Clover was never going to wake up again.

They did what any sane person would do, and pulled the plug. If she was going to be a vegetable, not able to think and feel, to laugh or cry, to enchant people with her kind words and plentiful smiles, then there was no point in letting her suffer any longer. “It’s time,” his father said, hugging his mother tightly.

Doug left the room.

He didn’t want to remember her as she was, before the end. But that was the singular image that kept flashing through his mind. The deathly pale skin, hollow cheeks. Stop it stop it, go away. I want to remember my sister, not the Cancer. He found his way to the too sterile hospital bathroom, and threw up.

That night, he couldn’t sleep.

The next night, he couldn’t sleep.

The night after, he couldn’t sleep.

The night after that—

All he could see was the Cancer.

It stalked him, haunted his every waking moment. He saw It during class, in the morning, in the evening, while he was not eating, while he was not sleeping. He couldn’t get the image out of his head. Hollow eyes, hollow cheeks, lips stretched thin, not his sister, couldn’t be. It was Cancer.

Finally, after a week, he simply collapsed in the middle of his Bio final. But even in his dreams he couldn’t escape It. It was there, watching him in the dark, smiling, laughing at him. It loved the fact that It had ruined the image of his sister forever. It cackled with mad glee, the skin on Its face stretched grotesquely over Its cracked lips.

He didn’t remember much of the next few hours. The teacher poked him, and began to panic when nothing she did woke him up, apparently, and someone dragged him to the nurse’s office. When he finally did wake up, it was nearly two. There was no point in trying to go back to class now, and he wasn’t sure he could stand if he tried. How many days had it been since he’d eaten? He couldn’t exactly remember. There was no point, he couldn’t keep anything down anyway.

Maybe if he’d had the strength to get up and walk out, he wouldn’t have met Monte. Maybe his life wouldn’t have gotten so out of control.

Monte was a junior, and quite obviously off his gourd on pot most of the time. There were the stoner kids, with their overlarge hoodies and baggy pants, and then there was Monte. When Doug had first seen him on the cot next to him he was wearing a dad shirt covered in flamingos, and his large feet were enrobed in socks and sandals like some kind of Tibetan monk.

“And sleeping beauty finally awakes!” he said, grinning lethargically. “Thought I was gonna have to start mackin’ on you for a second there.”

“What... happened?” Doug rubbed his eyes.

The stoner shrugged. “Dunno,” he said. “You’ve been snoring away since I got here. Does that happen a lot?”

“No,” Doug replied, shaking his head. “But I haven’t slept in... a few days.” He didn’t know why he was telling any of this to the random guy on the cot next to him, but something about him just made Doug want to tell him things. He seemed... cool.

“A few days? What kinda damage you dealin’ with?”

Doug shook his head. “It doesn’t matter.” He liked this dude, but not enough to tell him his life story.

“Suit yourself. I’m Monte, by the by.”

“Doug.”

A few minutes later, the nurse came by, noticed that Doug was awake, at least nominally, and nodded at him, acknowledging that he was going to camp out here for the rest of the day. She then moved onto Monte, and handed him a small, metal tube that looked kind of like a pen. “Only one,” she admonished, and moved back over to behind the curtain.

Monte put the pen to his lips and took a deep puff of it. It smelled oddly like cotton candy. He noticed Doug staring a second later.

“Yeah, it is exactly what you think it is,” he laughed. “I’ve got epilepsy, ya know, seizures? The pot helps. Calms my body down, ya know?”

Doug nodded, and kept staring. A thought began to bloom at the back of his mind.

And it seemed Monte could read it, for he glanced over to the curtain, and then leaned over conspiratorially. “You wanna hit?”

He hesitated for a moment, the pen hanging in the air between them. Would this help him? Would it get rid of the Cancer that even now was flashing behind his eyelids every time he closed his eyes? Doug reached out, and took the pen.

“Go easy on it,” Monte instructed. “Though you might not actually get high the first time anyway.”

Doug took a slow, deliberate puff of it, and coughed a little, even though it wasn't actual smoke, more like steam. He paused. “I don’t feel anything.”

“Give it a minute,” Monte said, and Doug did. After a little while, he realized that he was, for the first time in weeks, actually a little calm. The Cancer wasn’t gone, not entirely, but it seemed... further away somehow, slightly less important. Like a bird with a blanket on its cage. But still, it wasn’t entirely enough.

Monte seemed to notice his hesitation. “Keep in mind,” he offered, “that this is shitty medical J. If you wanna real high you’ve gotta get the real stuff, ya know?”

Every shitty DARE documentary he’d ever been shown flashed through Doug’s mind. He was supposed to say no to shit like this, wasn’t he? But Monte wasn’t pressuring him, not like everything he’d ever been told, he was just offering. And Doug was curious. And slowly getting desperate.

“You’d... give me pot?” he asked. “Why? Couldn’t you get in trouble?”

“Why not?” Monte shrugged. “You seem like a cool dude. And no offense, but you look like you need it.”

So that day after the final bell rang, Doug followed Monte under the bleachers to get high. And it worked. For a little while, he didn’t have to think about his grades, or his thoroughly broken family, or the Cancer. For a few hours, he could just laugh with his new friend and not worry about anything at all.

The summer was spent chilling with Monte and his friends, getting high in his dad’s garage, driving around the suburban wasteland. There was Jonah, who was a drummer that all the girls went nuts for, and Jake, who did theater and was constantly teased for it. He claimed he only did it so he had an excuse to be in the auditorium after school with girls. And then there was Morgan. Morgan, was... a little weird. A little twitchy. He hung with the others but they still kept a slight distance from him. Monte told Doug later that he did some... harder stuff. He was a little fucked.

But even with Morgan among them, Doug felt awesome, for the first time in years. It was... cool, he supposed, to hang out with these older guys. He felt cool. He even got offered a beer. It tasted bitter and weird and he didn’t really like it, but he forced it down anyway.

Of course, the universe just couldn’t give one to him. Uh uh, not allowed, old Dougy never gets a break. He felt like it was a written rule somewhere that he was not allowed to have anything good in his life, and if he did, it had to be snatched away from him as quickly as possible. To be fair, what happened after that was mostly his fault.

The problem with chemistry-altering drugs, Doug soon found, was that your brain quickly got used to the imbalance and learned to work around it. He’d learned that in Psychology, he was pretty sure. If he’d taken it slow, only used when the dreams or insomnia got really bad, he probably could have kept going for years. But he got greedy. Like any sane person would, he enjoyed not being constantly plagued by the growing pit of problems in his stomach, the weight on his chest. He just wanted to forget it all, all the time. And so he did. All the time. And by the end of the summer, it became harder and harder to do so.

By the end of the summer he began to feel the Cancer pressing at him again, staring at him through the blanket of its cage, just waiting for the day when the bars got thin and the blanket got worn and it could break free once again. He didn’t want to, but he could almost see it. He started to sleep less again, and when he did, the dreams began to return. He could feel himself slipping back into that pit, regardless of how much he smoked. And school only made it worse.

One day he was at a football game with Monte and his friends, not really watching, just hitting a toke behind the bleachers and laughing at the muscle-bound football players. When the band came out they hooted and hollered as loud as they could to try and distract Jonah, and all had a good laugh. But it didn’t feel the same, it was harder, Doug was more nervous. He felt It sitting in the back of his mind. At one point, Morgan snuck away to go snort some cocaine in the trees behind the field, and a few minutes later, Doug followed him.

“Hey dude,” Morgan nodded at him, wiping the white stain from under his nose. He leaned back against the tree he was sitting in front of and let out the most content sigh Doug had ever heard. He desperately wanted to be that calm. More than anything. He didn’t want to think any more.

So when Morgan asked if he wanted a hit, Doug nodded. Morgan grabbed the mirror he’d used just a minute before, and used a razor to form a line with the powder. It almost looked like powdered sugar, and Doug wondered vaguely if that’s what it would taste like. He took the straw that Morgan handed to him, and snorted.

Coughing viciously as Morgan laughed, Doug nearly fell backwards. And then, he grinned. It was gone, completely gone. He didn’t even remember what It was. He nearly laughed out loud. He’d found it, he’d found the cure to his fucked-up head at last. “Feels nice, right?” Morgan asked, and Doug nodded. For the first time in months, he felt full of energy. He didn’t feel tired or down in the slightest. This was the best thing ever.

The two of them went back to the game and joined the others, who were now cat-calling Jonah and making stupid faces. Doug joined in with a drive he hadn’t known he’d possessed. For once in his goddamn life, he was having fun.

At least, until an hour later when he abruptly came down.

It happened suddenly, on the drive back to his parent’s house. He’d finally gotten his license a few weeks ago, early birthday whoo hoo... and all of the sudden, out of nowhere, he looked into the rearview mirror and for just a second, he thought he saw It grinning at him.

Doug jerked the wheel so suddenly that he nearly ran into a parked car. “Fuck. Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck.” But he blinked, and it was gone just as quickly as it had appeared. He shook himself, and eventually made it home without further incident.

But for the next few days he brooded over the appearance. The Cancer had never appeared in the real world before, only in his head. He’d known what was reality and what wasn’t. If the two were starting to bleed into each other. Was he getting worse? Or had it been the cocaine? To any rational person, they probably would have come to the conclusion that it was the cocaine and never take it ever again. But Doug was a teenage boy, one who was still coming down from a high. His limbs felt heavy, and he suddenly felt like crying, or shouting, or both, it didn’t matter which.

One thing was clear. He needed that high.

In the future, he would have difficulties remembering the next four months of his life. It all seemed to pass by in a haze of confusion and fog. He did remember some basic facts. More and more he had stopped hanging with Monte and the guys and clung to Morgan like some sort of parasite, which was what he quickly became.

“Dude,” Monte had pulled him aside sometime that fall. “Are you high... like, not on pot right now?”

Doug responded with something largely incoherent. He felt free as a bird. This shit didn’t matter.

“Is this Morgan’s doing? I’m gonna fucking kill that little prick.” Monte ran his fingers through his somewhat greasy hair. “What’s he thinking, getting a kid high?”

“I’m only like, a year younger than you dude, shut the fuck you’re up.” And suddenly, that slip of the tongue was absolutely hilarious to him.

Everything was pretty hilarious to him, when he was high. Finally, he had a little peace, and little quiet. The coke not only put a blanket on the Cancer’s cage, but dumped it into the fucking ocean. He could smile, he could laugh. He didn’t have to worry about the Cancer watching him. He didn’t have to mourn anymore.

Until he came down, of course. But then he’d just do it all over again.

He started going to parties with Morgan, even though he had never really liked them before. Usually it was because it would seem like a good idea at the time. And then he would wake up the next morning in a stranger’s house, smelling like booze and cigarettes. Sometimes if he was lucky, he wouldn’t have a vomit stain down the front of his shirt.

He’d lost his virginity at some point, though he didn’t remember anything about it. He thought her name might have been Lindsay but he wasn’t really sure. Even if he thought hard about it, for the life of him he couldn’t find her face. There were a lot of girls after that, but they all blurred together into a mass of perfume and curves. In fact, there had been a girl on his lap the night of the accident.

Luckily he hadn’t been driving. If he had, he wouldn’t be at St. Adelaide’s right now, he’d be in juvie. It had been after a party one night, and Morgan had piled something along the lines of eight people in his five-seat Dodge. Again, it had seemed like a good idea, at the time. Morgan had been high as a kite. Doug should have never let him drive. But he was flying at the exact same height. He didn’t give a shit. He was in the middle back seat with a pretty girl on his lap, her fingers in his hair, the taste of her lips, peppered with alcohol and cigarettes.

And a second later she was through the windshield. He watched in horror as with a horrible crash her body was dragged through the glass and bounced like some sort of morbid doll off the front of the car. The police told him later when they were questioning him that Morgan had tried to run a red light, but had stopped at the last second when a semi had crossed in front of him. Unfortunately, the truck that had been attempting to show off its driver’s massive balls behind him didn’t, and the little Dodge’s back end had quickly been reduced to so much scrap metal.

If it hadn’t been for the girl on his lap, it would have been Doug who was through the windshield. That thought kept circling through his mind. For a while, her mangled, Cocaine ridden body joined the Cancer in his nightmares. And the worst part was, he couldn’t even remember her name. He found it later, of course, in her obituary, Elizabeth. Her name had been Elizabeth. He promised himself he wouldn’t forget it.

The rest of the night was a little foggy. He knew that the police had taken the six survivors of the crash to the hospital, and out of all of them, Doug was probably the least beat up. His parents had been called of course, but he was a little surprised when it wasn’t either of them who showed up, but Gordon.

“What. The fuck. Is wrong with you?” was the first sentence out of his brother’s mouth.

“Nothing,” Doug insisted, “I was just at a party and—”

Gordon just shook his head. “Don’t even try to lie, the doctor told me everything. How you’re still high as a goddamn mountain right now.”

“Where’s dad?” Doug asked, still a little behind. “Mom? Thought they’d be worried sick.”

“Wow. You really are pathetic.” Gordon looked to the sky, as if it could help him. Looking to Clover. “You really haven’t noticed, have you? That coke dulled your fucking head so much you haven’t even realized that Mom’s been gone for the last four months and Dad’s been near catatonic since then?”

Blinking, Doug didn’t think he followed. “Are you shittin’ me?”

“No. I’m not.” At this point Gordon had grabbed his shoulders to try to get him to look at him. But now he let go in frustration. “God, I can’t believe I turned down MIT for this shit.”

“Wait, what?”

“Well, who the fuck else was gonna take care of you and dad, huh?” Several of the patients in the waiting room looked over at them. “Maybe it is just time for this family to fucking die.”

It was in that moment that Doug realized he couldn’t do this anymore. The drugs, the parties. Not only was he killing himself, but he didn’t even know what was going on anymore. He’d missed his own mother leaving their house and hadn’t even noticed. What the fuck was wrong with him?

The next week or so of withdrawal was absolute hell, but somehow, even with the dreams, even with the Cancer and the Cocaine flashing behind his eyelids, he gritted his teeth and got through it. Though YouTube helped quite a bit, if he was really honest. Without those Vine Compilations he would probably be dead.

Finally, after about a week, Doug came downstairs. Gordon was sitting at the counter, eating breakfast, and the acceptance letter for St. Adelaide’s was on Doug’s spot. It was the strangest thing, because he didn’t even remember applying for a “School for Gifted Youth”. He’d done a lot of strange things while high, but he never would have done that.

"What's this?" he asked Gordon, flipping the envelope over to see the large wax seal.

“I don’t know. I assumed you’d applied.”

“Why the fuck would I do that?”

Gordon finally looked up at him from his book. “I don’t know what you do period. I hardly know you anymore.”

That hurt. Doug fiddled with the envelope and finally got it open. “St. Adelaide’s?” he furrowed his brow. “Isn’t that that school where all the fucked-up rich kids go?”

“And what do you think you are?”

Doug didn’t respond.

After an awkward pause, Gordon sighed. “Sorry. That was harsh.”

“’S’okay. I kinda deserve that one.”

Again, there was silence for a long minute as Doug read the contents of the envelope. It seemed as if someone had applied for him, but unless it had been one of his parents he had no idea who could have done it.

“I think you should go.” Gordon said simply. “It’d be a good opportunity.” Doug just stared at him for a long minute. That wasn’t the real reason, and they both knew it. This family was as good as toast. All Doug was doing was keeping Gordon chained here. He was brilliant. He’d do brilliant things. He shouldn’t be sitting around here waiting for Doug to graduate and then... probably do nothing.

Doug sighed. “Alright.”

The day before he left, Doug did something he had never imagined he’d do: he went in Clover’s room. No one had touched the place since she had died, and it was just how he remembered it: light pink walls, posters for the various plays she’d been in hanging on the walls. He didn’t want to dig through her stuff—that felt like a violation, even if she wasn’t around to care anymore—but he couldn’t help noticing a small box under her bed, wrapped in wrapping paper.

He reached under the bed frame, trying not to cringe at the dead ladybugs and dust, and pulled the box out. On the top, in Clover’s handwriting, were the words: “To Doug, from your Sister xoxo”

Hesitating for a second, Doug wasn’t sure if he wanted to open it. The Thing-He-Definitely-Wasn’t-Thinking-About-Right-Now danced at the back of his mind. But it was addressed to him, wasn’t it? Clearly Clover had meant it for him. He took a deep breath, and ripped off the wrapping paper.

Inside were a pair of shoes. Not just any shoes, but a pair of Converse Heelys. He laughed, remembering just then that at one point, so long ago now it seemed, he’d joked about wanting a pair. He didn’t even know they actually made Converse Heelys.

“Hey fartface,” said the note on the cover. “You talked about wanting these, and I had to cut off an arm and a leg to get them, but here you are. Sorry, I think they might be a little big, it was the only size I could get, but I think you’ll grow into them? Maybe? Unless you’re already done growing, squirt ;P. Love, Clover.”

Doug smiled, blinked a few times, and left the room, taking the Heely’s with him.

And then, just in time for the new semester, Doug was dropped in some suburb he’d never heard of somewhere in the Midwest. In the middle of bumfuck nowhere, at least that’s how it appeared to his east coast brain. Gordon had helped him pack as much as he could, but he was also finally getting his life started. He was able to drop Doug off before heading back east to MIT, but for the most part, Doug was on his own.

He had heard that being away from home for the first time was hard, even for those who were more than ready, but he didn’t really feel it. Maybe he was too focused on ignoring the itch to approach the druggies on the quad to see if he could snatch a hit. But he persevered, and stayed as far away from them as possible. Even when the itch became nearly unbearable, even when his dreams were filled with Cancer and Cocaine.

But it wasn’t so bad. His roommate was bearable, the classes were boring but not unconquerable, and now all he had to do was wait out the next two and a half years until he could go to college or do whatever the fuck else he wanted. Maybe the shit was over, maybe the nightmares were bad enough now that the universe had decided to leave him alone for a change.

Well, you’re still reading this, aren’t you? The story hasn’t ended yet. So what do you think?

Doug had heard about the Director’s “sessions” in whispers, but found that most people didn’t want to talk about it. So he had no idea what they were exactly until one day he’d been called out of lunch and marched down to the basement. At that point, he wasn’t even surprised. After everything else, this might as well happen. He had no idea how bad it would get.

“Well, well, Douglas Bailey. I’ve been waiting for this moment for quite a while,” said the figure from under the mask.

By this point he was strapped down to a table, a piece of rubber in between his teeth. The numbness was fading now, replaced by a slowly building sense of terror that he hadn’t realized he was still capable of. Because this was weird. Even for him.

“You’ve been having nightmares, huh? My psychiatrists have informed me that it’s been interrupting your sleep. And we simply can’t have your demons getting in the way of your schoolwork now, can we?”

It was the flimsiest excuse he’d ever heard. This woman clearly could not care less about his current state of mind. He would have said something to that effect, if he could have spoken at that point in time.

“These new ‘humanitarians’ keep saying that this method of treatment is ‘cruel’ and ‘inhuman’, but I still find it to be highly effective. I guess we’ll see just how well it ends up working for you, hmm?”

And then he spent the rest of the afternoon with the sound of laughter in his ear and electric shocks jolting through his head.

At some point that he later couldn’t remember, he found himself back upstairs long after the lights had gone out. He could barely remember what happened. All he knew was that he couldn’t think straight and his entire body ached. It would have probably been best for him to just collapse right then and there, but he didn’t. He started walking, back towards the dorm, trudging through the newly fallen snow, not even feeling the cold through the thin canvas and rubber of his Heelys.

Doug felt... numb. He couldn’t feel... anything. Just nothing, just utter shock. So much shock. What had happened was so shocking that he couldn’t even... no, no more puns. That was a stupid coping mechanism anyway. He supposed this whole thing was a coping mechanism. One foot in front of the other, just keep moving, don’t think about what just happened, just keep moving, walk it off.

Keep. Fucking. Walking.

Don’t look back. Don’t look back.

He stumbled into the room, and in the first stroke of good luck he’d had in years, his roommate seemed to already be asleep. He did not want to have to explain what he was doing back here so late with his eyes blank and his hair so full of static he could power the school for a week.

In his bedroom, he packed some shit in a backpack, his laptop, some clothes, other random garbage he didn’t think about too hard, and just left. Walked right back out. If this was going to happen, then he was gone. He didn’t know where he would go, or what he would do once he’d gotten there, but one thing was clear: he sure as hell couldn’t stay here.

And then he’d ran right into one of the psychiatrists on the way out and was brought right back to the Director.

“Trying to run away, Doug?” she’d cackled. “Pathetic. Truly. Think you can leave your problems behind if you just keep moving? Well, you are unfortunately, very important, so I can’t have you running away on me.”

The psychiatrist had put the band on his wrist.

“Now, just so you can’t say I didn’t warn you. If you break a rule, if you’re gone from the school grounds for more than two hours, this is what will happen to you.”

She pressed a button on a remote control, and Doug’s whole body went into debilitating spasms.

To this day, the two weeks after that were completely gone from his memory. He doubted at this point that he’d ever get them back.

It’s funny, really, how people are so able to adapt to their realities so quickly. People wonder how starving children in Africa or victims of human trafficking are able to keep on living, keep on breathing, and the simple answer is because they get used to it. As horrifying as it is, it becomes routine, normal. And that is exactly what happened to Doug. One would think that continuously receiving electric shocks about once every month for multiple years would do a number on your mental state, and at first, it did, but Doug was so used to nightmares that this new element to them did next to nothing.

Though she didn’t show it much, he knew that the Director got frustrated when he stopped reacting to the shocks so much, so once every few months, she would turn up the voltage, which was just frankly annoying. It made it harder to get back to the dorm without anyone stopping to ask him if he was “okay”. Of course he wasn’t okay, but if he said or didn’t look as such then he’d just have to explain to people that he’d been receiving electric shocks in a basement and very few people would probably believe him that that was just a pain.

So he just survived for the next few months, trying not to think about his next session as much as he could.

Until the one day when the Director was in an especially prickly mood. Doug was strapped down as always—hot, a particularly immature part of his brain would insist every time—and he could feel the air of tension surrounding the masked figure stalking around him.

“So, are we gonna get started or are you too chicken?” Doug asked, mostly hating the waiting.

“Oh, we’re going to get started, all right,” the Director muttered. “I’m just figuring out how best to go about this. You see, Doug, I’ve had a particularly trying day, today, and I’m wondering how best to relieve the tension.”

“I don’t like the sound of that.”

She just laughed, that cackle that sent involuntary shivers down his spine. “You shouldn’t.”

After sticking the piece of rubber in his mouth, she moved away from him, over to the big, hulking machine that was responsible for the shocks. “You’re a little shit, Doug Bailey, you know that? And as much as I like that in a person, every once in a while it’d be nice if they’d just shut the hell up. And this, my dear friend, is one of those days. That being said, today I have a special treat for you. Today,” she paused to chuckle again. “Today, we’re going maximum power.”

Oh no. She’d only gone halfway up the scale in terms of voltage. This... was going to be painful.

“So, uh, if you don’t survive this, it was nice knowing you.”

The Director, as much as she loved her flair and drama, was deadly efficient when it got down to it. And so it was without any fanfare that she pulled the switch on the machine.

Doug immediately began convulsing as way too many volts of electricity shot through his body. He screamed, unable to form a singular coherent thought. All he could feel was pain. Sheer, unbearable pain. Usually, the Director would let up the electricity after a minute to let him breathe, but either time had slowed to the most unbearable crawl imaginable or she was letting the machine go.

After too long of oxygen deprivation and nerve snapping pain, something happened. Out of the corner of his eye, Doug saw her. Not the Cocaine, not the Cancer, but her. Clover. She was still ridden with her disease, her eyes dull, her cheeks hollow. But for some reason, Doug knew it was her. Maybe it was the look in her eye, the one she had always given him when she was worried about him. This definitely counted as a time to worry.

“You’re going to die, Doug,” she told him.

He couldn’t speak, the rubber clenched too tightly between his teeth, could hardly even think, but she still seemed to understand what he would be thinking: Yeah, no shit.

“Is that really okay?” she asked. “Is it okay to end it like this?”

It’s as good as any.

“Do you really believe that?”

He didn’t respond.

“This is what the universe has handed you, Doug.” She sighed, staring into his eyes. “What are you going to make of it?”

What could he make of this? This horrible piece of shit that he called his life. Nothing, nothing at all. The best thing for everyone would be if he just died. No one would care that much anyway.

“Maybe not right now,” she said. “But will that always be the case?”

He didn’t know what to think of that. Before now, his life had almost consistently been shit. It would probably continue to be shit. But there was always that chance, that small, insignificant chance, that things could end up differently. Life was long, depressingly long, after all.

“Are you alright with this?”

No. No, he was not. At the very least, giving in to what the Director wanted was simply not his style. At the most, at Clover’s behest, at that tiny little speck of optimism that she was, and had always been.

He screamed again, but this was more of a battle-cry, a bellow against the darkness, against the void. But above that, above it all, he could hear laughter. Her laughter.

A second later, the machine whirred into silence, and Doug blacked out.

He didn’t know exactly how long he had been out for, but when he came to, he was leaning against a wall in an out of the way corner of the Bloch building. He picked himself up, nearly fell over, and meandered over to the nearby restroom. Water, he needed water. The inside of his mouth was sand. He didn’t know why he didn’t just go to the water fountain instead, but at the time he wasn’t thinking quite clearly. Though to be fair, he almost never was.

Leaning on the sink, he managed to get some water in his mouth, though most of it just dribbled back out. In an attempt to get his mind unscrambled, Doug splashed some water into his face. But when he looked up into the mirror, he almost fell over. For a second, he thought that someone else had entered the bathroom, and was standing right behind him, but then he quickly realized that he was still alone. There was no one here. The face with the static-y, cloud-like halo of white hair staring back at him was his own.

At this moment, there were a variety of reactions he could have had. He could have cried, he could have panicked and tried to cut it all off. He could have passed out again, if he so desired. But all of those things were far too overdramatic for Doug. So instead, he just laughed. And laughed and laughed and laughed. It was a harsh, bitter thing, and he probably sounded insane to anyone passing by. But that’s what he did.

Eventually he stumbled his way back to his dorm room and collapsed. Finally, about two days later, when he was finally able to venture out and function somewhat normally, he emerged to find the school in a frenzy of activity and gossip.

Because that was the day that Jilli Nakajima came to St. Adelaide’s.

#Ede Valley #writing #story #Doug Bailey #Abigail Hodge #Jilli Nakajima

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shinyoliver · 6 years

Text

Verse 9: Confluence

Verse 9

Confluence

Mr. Ward spent a lot of time doing research. Bruce remembered that. It’d be time to prep the next job, like now with this job, and Mr. Ward would keep kind of quiet about something that it turned out later he had breadth and depth of knowledge about. Bruce used to think Mr. Ward kept his knowledge to himself to be a prick; if Mr. Ward kept it to himself he could make a scene and look cool later. It’d really cheesed Bruce off. For months, Bruce pretty much wrote Mr. Ward off as a self-important fop.

Then there had been a day when Bruce found himself disillusioned—a feeling he relished. The job had to do with skin walkers and new world land magic. Poppy did her initial rundown of the job, and Mr. Ward kept his gawp shut, as usual, which, as usual, left Bruce with a low opinion of Mr. Ward’s worth.

After that Bruce did something that he did more often than people thought: he went to the library. People who expressed shock about it always seemed to forget about comic books and recorded books. He found Mr. Ward there, more than half buried in books about medicine men of the Arapahoe Indians.

They didn’t speak to each other. But Mr. Ward saw Bruce and nodded to him, and Bruce nodded back. He left the library that day with a collection of Harlan Ellison short stories read by the author and a new attitude about Mr. Ward.

Bruce saw Reg making notes about ogres. If he wanted know about ogres, he wouldn’t figure it out writing to himself. Bruce sent a text message to his cousin, Nigel, who did a podcast about ogre history. Nigel probably had a book or two he could suggest that Bruce could get for Reg. Nigel wouldn’t respond till morning. Bruce settled into his deep corner of the natty couch to listen to Bonzer. Bonzer had no more words to say, but he had plenty of odd noises to make: murmuring at his tablet—hawing at his phone—making ineffectual grunts toward his Nintendo DS. He said a lot without saying a word.

A little while later, Poppy followed her growl and her now slightly but not unpleasantly sweaty scent into the basement. She fell backwards onto the other end of the couch from Bruce. She looked like she meant to relax. Before she did, she batted her forehead with her open palm again—a gesture more for stretching and thinking than anything else. Then she started settling down again.

“Bruce, I need you to show Reg the world,” she said.

Bruce nodded. Poppy nodded back.

Something about Reg didn’t come over like a self-important prick, hiding from life behind his own intellect. He quoted Shakespeare and he thought too much, which Bruce counted against people. The air of your over-thinking, dry-literature quoting intellectual prick effected Bruce’s opinion more than the actual act of quoting and thinking. And Reg had an air that he lived in the world. He didn’t understand it, but he knew that about himself. He lived in a world that he didn’t understand, and he accepted that, absorbed it, and acted like the child it made him. Bruce could get behind that.

Bruce met their conversation the next morning with that approach. You always needed an approach. Bruce believed that more than anything.

He drove the big Buick across town, listening to the sloshy tires and fuel injectors and fan belts and calculating how many more days they’d last. He lazed his eyes half closed against the light going from the scratchy grey of a winter dawn when light needed to fight through the air, to the refracted yellow when the sliver of sunshine glanced off a thousand ice-shining surfaces.

He stopped for coffee, considering the vibrations of Reg for a few seconds before ordering a quadruple shot Americano for him. He got the same for himself today, because if Bruce believed in anything else he believed that life had too few days in it for “usuals.”

He got a water cup of half-and-half and shoved a handful of raw sugar packets into the pocket of his leather coat. Another ten minutes of driving and he hadn’t sipped the coffee, only held it up to his nose, unsullied by cream, and smelled the heat and earth.

The Buick sluiced through some slush up to a curb. Reg collapsed like a marionette into the passenger seat, thin and floppy and like his still-attached strings trailed in a tangle from his joints.

When Bruce handed him the coffee, Reg said, “Oh, thank the dark gods,” in a voice that sounded more like two fifths of a heart attack. He held the cup in his fingerless gloves for several long breaths before he said anything more. Then, unlike most people, he did not comment on Bruce’s uncanny ability to deliver precisely on unspoken beverage cravings. Reg did look sideways at Bruce, his eyes narrowed and intelligent. He put cream in his coffee, offered it to Bruce, who declined.

For a few minutes, Reg observed a silence. It felt to Bruce like a ritual, with the first few mouthfuls of coffee treated with reverence. Bruce respected the ritual. He had known many stranger ones, and this one felt comfortably similar to the attitude that Mr. Ward had always taken to what he called, “a proper cup of tea,” except Reg’s felt more serious.

The next words Bruce spoke were, “You don’t need to talk, if you don’t want to talk.” He said it because he found that he liked Reg’s presence. He felt like something stable, like a tree or a rock. Bruce could trust trees and rocks, to a point, and he liked that about trees and rocks. Reg felt that way deep down—like Poppy did, deep down, under the storm. On the surface, Reg felt like the coffee, and while Bruce had been aware that Reg had started talking pretty much without interrupting himself, he had been aware of it like the squeaky bearings in the front wheels of the Buick: at that volume, he could ignore it till it started getting dangerous.

After a time, Bruce realized that Reg felt nervous. After a little more time, Bruce figured out that Reg felt nervous because of him.

So Bruce told him that he didn’t need to talk.

“Seriously?” Reg said, after a second, in a tone like he had been given a gift. Bruce answered with a broad gesture of his big hand that said Reg could, or he could not, he could decide for himself. Reg replied with a nod and thoughtful expression, and then he did not.

For a while they watched the city slide past the Buick. It brightened every second like an ache. It woke every minute like a revelation. Commuters on foot huddled into coats and scarves, unsteady on sidewalks cleared of snow so patches of ice waited, dark like grease stains. Driving commuters took their time, as if worried their cars would start moving on their own at any moment. The air itself had that clarity as if the city’s usual dust and smog had frozen and fallen out of the sky, which could be easily believed from the slight brown shade of the snow in piles on the sidewalks and streets and as large as vehicles in corners of parking lots.

Bruce liked how a feature of this town meant it got warm most afternoons and cold as a bite during most nights, which meant that after a few nights of heavy snow, like the last few nights, long icicles hung like bad teeth off the edges of everything. It felt like the world had stopped in the middle of closing its jaws on everything.

Which, in fact, was the case. Winter had a mouth as big as the world and it chewed everything up every year.

Bruce turned left past the oldest building in the city. Four gargoyles on its corners recognized Bruce and one threw up two fingers in a peace sign. A few blocks along, a Wind Sprite crossed the street. It looked like a flurry of wind that caught up a handful of snow, but for those with eyes a translucent person walked in the middle of the flurry, its arms and legs and head of waving hair visible from the grains of dust whirling in it. Bruce slowed down for it. He glanced down an alley and saw four homeless men around a barrel fire. One was human, two had the too-broad, too-short bodies of dwarves, and the fourth had the shaky, negative-space quality of a ghoul.

Bruce knew that most of the things he saw would look “normal” to the normals. Normals had an amazing elasticity to their belief. Their belief could stretch a long way before it started to unravel. It took a special kind of pull.

Reg asked where Bruce was driving to.

“The world,” Bruce said. And Bruce respected Reg for not asking what that meant.

This all worked so far because Reg had been half broken to begin with. Poppy had a good eye for stuff like that.

Bruce parked the old Buick in the parking lot of a camping supply store in an old train depot. He knew the parking attendant there—a wrinkled kobold who waved at Bruce. Down the street, Bruce stopped at a food truck and got four breakfast pasties—a half-moon of hot, flaky dough, baked golden, around meat and vegetables. They reminded him of the short, cold time when he operated out of Mackinac Island in Michigan, but in a vague way like a memory ought to be.

With the pasties warming his deep pockets, Bruce walked up the sidewalk to Confluence Park, a place named for the two rivers that fell together there into a larger river. A half dozen subtler reasons, not reckoned in by the people who named it, made Confluence a more apt name than they had intended.

Bruce crunched through the snow across a field. The field ended abruptly with a rail. Past the rail a twelve foot drop stood against a bike path that flowed on this side of the forked river. He set his coffee on the flat top of the rail and watched the different things flowing together.

Foot traffic took the path below left—south—into downtown, walking from the train stop and the young neighborhood in the north to their jobs and to school. A few people trudged the other way, but most of the traffic went south at a steady rate of one or two every one or two minutes. Another bike path across the river had similar traffic.

Most of the people were normals.

Some were not.

“Come here much?” Bruce asked Reg.

“I’ve spent some time here,” Reg said.

“You ever looked at it?”

Reg looked ready to answer that of course he did. He showed some wisdom, caught the words on the backs of his teeth, blocked them with an unsure look in his eyes, then kept them down by closing his mouth.

“What are we doing here?” he asked instead.

“Watching,” Bruce said. He handed Reg a pasty. They ate and they watched. Reg had a stiff back of urgent confusion at first. It relaxed to unsure nigh boredom after a while.

Down near the river, at this bend, commuters had one of their most imposing views of the glinting buildings downtown. Sure, you could see them from a hundred miles in every direction, really, but few other spots in town had a view from just below the toes of the glass towers, talking in their still and silent dance about the concentration of money and purpose. The manmade gulley, with its sheer concrete sides, swerved with the river and the buildings flashed into sight all at once.

It worked on most imaginations the same. Especially because of the joining of two rivers, working on the backgrounds of minds, people tended to switch here. They woke up here, more than they had been. They tended to switch from feeling at home to feeling outside here.

Millions of feet carrying millions of minds over millions of minutes carrying a similar thought caused a steeping in the magic. Magic grew over-brewed here, greasing the world like a spicy flavor for those with the tongue to taste it.

“You know those hidden picture things?” Reg said. “You know, the ones where it’s, like a repeating pattern of color splashes, and if you cross your eyes just right at them you see the wolf’s head jump out of them.” Bruce smiled. “Yeah…” Reg said. He had an airy tone in his voice, and he no longer looked bored. He looked calm.

“You get to see the real world now,” Bruce said.

Near some brambles, a rabbit paced with its two forepaws behind its back. A worried expression put a twitch in its whiskers and two piercings in its right ear flickered in the morning.

Bruce said, “You don’t need to look hard.”

The wind gusted up suddenly with a sneezing sound and an apology—another wind sprite on its way downtown to start its shift somewhere.

Bruce said, “You need to look easy.”

A dude did a backstroke up the middle of the river. He had on jeans and a leather jacket and carried his backpack on his front, like an otter carrying a rock to break clams. He had something off about his face—something greenish and slickish and too sharp. The cold didn’t bother him. He waved to Bruce.

Bruce said, “Nothing’s hiding.”

A little brown bird alighted on the rail next to Bruce’s big hand. A normal bird. Its head twitched to look at Bruce. Bruce fed it some pasty crust.

“You’ve always hidden it yourself,” said Bruce.

Squid’s phone rang. She answered it without looking who it was.

“Sing for me,” she said.

And they didn’t. Whoever it was made a small sound like words tripping over a tongue swollen with too many intentions.

“Reg?” she said. “Try swearing. That always helps me.”

He laughed. She hadn’t expected him to laugh. It weirded her out. The laugh sounded like it deflated a head that had seen one too many things today.

“Is this going to be one of those awkward conversations where I need to pretend like I care about your feelings?” Squid asked.

“I don’t need anyone to care about what I have to say right now,” Reg said.

“That is both a relief and a surprise. If that’s the case, why would you choose to disturb my peace of mind with a phone call?”

“You had peace of mind?”

“It’s a saying. Don’t make anything of it.”

“Just saying, if you had peace of mind…I’d like to get in on whatever you’ve been smoking.”

“Hey, dude, remember the part of this ‘family’ arrangement where the only real perk is how I’ve got a library of blackmail material against you at my fingertips at any given moment?”

“How did you do air quotes over the phone?”

“How did you hear them?”

“Touché.”

They stopped talking for a few heartbeats. Squid could only hear a little breathing at the other end.

“You’re being quiet,” she observed in a tone similar to one someone might use to accuse somebody of being something dreadful, like an organizer of surprise parties and other crimes against humanity. “Whatever you’re about to say, keep it to yourself. You’re never sane when you’re quiet.”

“I’m quiet a lot.”

“When?”

“When I’m alone.”

“Hey, man, whatever shenanigans you get up to in the privacy of your own home are your business, and you can keep them to yourself as far as I’m concerned. And…you’ve gone quiet again.”

A short silence.

“I can hear you nodding.”

A short silence.

“And shrugging,” Squid said.

Another short silence.

“You can wipe that smile of smugness off your face too. It’s disgusting to hear you feeling cheerful.”

Another silence.

“And don’t salute,” Squid said. “It makes you look like a John Cusack impersonator I saw in Santa Fe once.”

“Was he a good John Cusack impersonator?”

“He made the Asian Edward Norton impersonator from Spokane look like a Pilipino version of the midget Dennis Leary impersonator from Minneapolis.”

“That bad?”

“Why are you talking to me, man?”

“Because…”

She let the silence breathe for just long enough to roll her eyes.

“If you’re waiting for me to interrupt you, you’ll be waiting for a long time,” Squid said.

“Because some strange thing has changed in the world—some…weird thing,” Reg went quiet for another breath. Squid respected it this time. “I want to be reminded of something real.”

“I’m not good at real,” Squid said.

Reg laughed, but in the half-sound way that sometimes people did when they weren’t so much amused as encouraged.

“You’re the most real thing in my life, Squid.”

A half dozen quips tickled Squids lips and tried to get out. She caught them in her frown, swallowed them.

“You’re okay, Reg?” she said. “Right?”

“I’m…” Then a pause vaguely in the shape of a thought bubble. “I think so. I might be. Can I get back to you about that?”

“Can you get back to me?”

Reg nodded. Squid could tell from the shape of the silence. She nodded back.

“Will you be okay?” she asked.

“I’ll never be the same.”

“But you’ll be okay?”

“I don’t know.”

“Will you try to be okay?”

“Yes,” he said. The syllable dropped like the period on the conversation. Squid believed that part, at least.

“Are you getting along with your new friends?” Squid asked.

“We’re learning to interface,” Reg said.

Squid rolled her eyes. “I will never understand your inability to be normal.”

“They’re not really the kinds of people you just get along with.”

“Yes they are. They’re people.”

“They’re weird people.”

“There’s no such thing. There’s only nervous people. People like you. Who don’t know how to relax.”

“They’re not the kinds of people who make it easy to relax.”

“It’s your job to get to know people. No one else is supposed to change for you.”

“You introduced me to them—sort of.”

“I take no responsibility for how you spend your life,” Squid said.

She said it flippantly. She even thought the meant it flippantly. The conversation proceeded from there for a little while longer in the sense that they kept talking, but Squid didn’t move past the moment. In her mind, it got stuck, and she couldn’t evade a sense that something had just happened that would remove Reg from her life forever and leave her with an entirely different person.

And she didn’t know how to deal with that.

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