#but damn it's so bad now because content consumption has just become so easy and people don't really interact with art like they used to

[hedgehogofspades]

Haha, no dude, it's uuuuuuuh, totally normal to treat people's personal creations like a corporate franchise, nah nah, it's not even a little weird that the only way you interact with fandom is by mindlessly consuming content and reposting other people's work, I'm sure it's totally fine to just disregard the creator's wishes as long as you get to have your 2 minutes of fun with "your" new blorbos before your criminally short attention span moves onto the next thing for you to mindlessly consume, yeah, haha, I'm sure framing the creator's struggle to keep control of their work as a threat to your future ability to continue to consume content isn't totally self-centered or tone-deaf. No yeah man, haha, totally normal

[yslkook]

#corporate synergy (9)

#corporate masterlist summary: you’re making many strides- this month brings new work milestones and new personal milestones. after a night with new friends, you find yourself in jungkook’s arms. word count: ~5.6k warnings: cursing, alcohol/drinking, suggestive content in the form of making out, grinding, this is an 18+ story dont forget a/n: ENJOYYYY and thank you to @cutechim​ for your endless support <33

Work isn’t so bad in the coming weeks, you quickly decide. When you have colleagues around you who have become your genuine friends, it becomes a little more bearable to tolerate your ungrateful boss.

Even his snide comments haven’t been able to bring you down as of late. 

Your midday pick me up often comes in the form of lunch with either or including Jin, Namjoon, Sana and Jungkook and whoever they bring along.

Jungkook. Since you had stopped by his apartment when he had been sick, something definitely shifted between you both. If he had been running through your mind before, he was a near constant presence in your mind now. This crush of yours has morphed into something unrecognizable and unfamiliar to you. It scares you, the intensity and the suddenness of it.

But your fear is outweighed by your affections for him, and it’s something you find yourself wanting to embrace. The instinct to run, to bury it and ignore it had reared its head more than once after you had made the bold move to visit Jungkook in his own apartment.

Well. It was bold by your standards. Spontaneity doesn’t come easily to you, but it seems like Jungkook has you breaking your own unwritten rules. And he doesn’t even know. He doesn’t even know how your lips break into an easy smile when his name lights up your phone or how sending a good night text to him is your favorite part of your night routine.

When you had told Jin that you had visited Jungkook when he was sick in his apartment, even Jin couldn’t mask his surprise-

“You brought the guy soup?! Are you kidding me?! What if he was a murderer? Then what? I can’t believe I’d have to explain your murder to Grandma. Why would you put that burden on me? I’m too hot for that-”

“Seokjin!” You shriek through laughter, “You’re being so dramatic for no reason! Besides Jungkook is too soft to be a murderer-”

“Oh, well, I don’t know if I trust your credibility anymore. You’re the one who’s in so deep that you went to visit the man when he was sick,” Jin says, “Though, that’s very cute and domestic of you to do so. Did you bring him Grandma’s galbitang?”

“Obviously.”

“Damn. Now I’m not the only one who gets the galbitang treatment, huh?” Jin says knowingly, “You’re a sucker.”

Despite your protests, you know he’s mostly right.

Jungkook stopping by your cubicle during quiet, uneventful afternoons is more often than not. Or, you find yourself in his cubicle with two cups of steaming hot tea. One for you and one for him. Sometimes you both gossip in whispers about the members of your respective teams or do some impromptu work on the submissions project. Or you both just talk- about anything that comes to mind.

It’s so easy to laugh with him, to tease him like you would a friend, and to look at him like you would a lover-

“I heard there’s gonna be a big re-org by the end of this quarter,” Jungkook whispers, as if it’s a secret. And honestly, it probably is.

“Oh? Which little birdie told you that? Namjoon? Or Yunho-”

“Namjoon did, but you can’t tell anyone,” Jungkook insists.

“You’re lucky I don’t have a big mouth,” You roll your eyes.

“You’re lucky I trust you,” Jungkook shoots back immediately, a mischievous sparkle in his eyes. Your heart is suddenly in your throat but you maintain an unaffected facade.

“You think people will lose their jobs?” You whisper incredulously, “Re-orgs are so hard to stomach sometimes…”

“I hope not,” Jungkook sighs, “We’re all just cogs in the wheel that is capitalism, huh?”

“Well. I’m glad we’re cogs in this shitty wheel together, Kook.”

And there had even been several times when you had both found yourselves at the gym together, a happy coincidence as it was. Jungkook had felt much more comfortable with correcting your form, and seeing him sweaty with strands of dark hair plastered to his forehead only sent a string of lewd thoughts into your empty head.

If you nearly dropped a dumbbell from your sweaty grip onto your chest as he spotted for you because you caught a glimpse of Jungkook’s flushed cheeks and his easy smile directed only at you, then that was your own business.

And to your surprise, you’ve been getting meeting invites on your calendar from Hae-ri, the head of business development, herself. You’ve always hated networking, but Hae-ri had seemed so genuine when you met her in Tokyo that part of you wanted to maintain that relationship with her.

For some reason, it seemed that she had taken an interest in you. You’ve had many quick chats in her office or virtually if she’s traveling. You’ve come to think of her as a mentor, even if it’s only been a few months of getting to know her. The initial awkwardness you felt, the need to fill in the gaps of conversation had slowly washed away the more you talked to her. Your conversations mostly consisted of work topics- things that you found curious, or things you felt could be improved. You always leave her with a small idea or a thought to chew on until next time. But surprisingly (at least to you), she starts asking you for your perspective and your advice on challenges that she’s having.

It gives you something to ponder about, something that you haven’t allowed yourself to ponder about since you left school and took this job.

It makes you wonder if you’re meant for more. For so long, it felt like you were only surviving. Only trying to keep your head above water. But if you’ve learned anything over the last few months, it’s that it’s okay and encouraged to want and seek more.

High risk, high reward. But with high risk, comes the potential for things to fail. With high risk, comes the potential to be hurt and let down. Is it worth it? Is the journey worth it?

You think it might be, for how good you’ve been feeling lately (for the most part).

Yuna had quickly brought you into her own friend group, as if you’ve known her and Yuri, Seohyun and Sooyoung for as long as they’ve known each other. You’ve never had a group of close friends like them, let alone a group of girlfriends.

Now, you knew what people meant when they said that every woman needs a group of women around them. It hadn’t made sense to you before, but now… Now it does. And you’re not especially close with them, but they make you feel good. They make you laugh and they make you want to be close with them.

It’s an unfamiliar feeling, but it’s a feeling that gives you those familiar first date jitters.

So when Yuna had asked you to join them for a Friday night out, your first instinct was to hesitate and decline. But the more you started thinking about it, the more you found yourself wanting to go and enjoy a night out with new friends. And you had asked Jungkook for his opinion-

“Should I go? I mean, I don’t want to like… Be the pity invite. They’re all already so close…” You trail off a little nervously, itching at your chin.

“Being a pity invite fuckin’ sucks,” Jungkook agrees, “But it sounds like Yuna invites you because she genuinely wants you there. I don’t think she would’ve asked you to come if she didn’t want you there.”

“But what if it’s only because of Jin-”

“Even if it is only because of Jin,” Jungkook says, “Does it matter? Besides, you talk about things outside of Jin, right?”

“Yeah-”

“Just go. You’ll have fun, sweetheart. I know you will.”

You contemplate sending a picture of your outfit to Jungkook as you get ready- and why did you want to send a picture to him- for what? You don’t know. But you do know. You look good, you know you do- with the silky navy blue of your blouse a pretty contrast to your skin and your makeup done meticulously well.

In the end, you get distracted by Yuna’s texts that she’s arrived at your home. You told Grandma you’d likely be staying the night with Yuna. Grandma had only looked at you fondly, with unsaid pride in the lines of her eyes and her smile. You had made her promise to call you if anything happened, to which she promptly shooed you out of the door and into Yuna’s car.

Yuna grins at you and helps you put your bag in the backseat- which you really don’t need help with. But you appreciate the gesture anyway.

And so the night begins.

It’s three tequila shots, half a glass of soju and some water later before you realize that you’re well on your way into the warmth that comes with being drunk. 

Your lips are permanently etched into a smile, laughter tumbling out of your throat easily and genuinely as you stand with Yuna and her friends in her apartment. Her apartment itself is so very her- very colorful and vibrant, with baby blue throw pillows over a pink couch and a mint green rug. Her apartment is relaxing and inviting, much like her. It’s only fitting.

You had learned about Yuri, Seohyun and Sooyoung- how they had known each other since college but Seohyun and Yuri hadn’t really connected with the group until after graduation. When they had all moved to Seoul for work. There is clearly a deep, understanding bond between the four of them and you’re benignly envious of it. But you don’t let it get you down- not the way it might have before.

You’re also happy that you and Yuna can get along outside of Seokjin. If you’re being honest, that was one of your main worries. That you would need Jin to act as a buffer for you and Yuna. But Yuna brings you into their tight knit circle with her innate warmth, and you want to feel it, too.

“Pick your poison, babes,” Sooyoung grins wickedly at you, standing behind Yuna’s kitchen island. Behind all of her bottles, laid out neatly for your consumption.

“I think you can venture a guess,” You say, handing her your cup.

“Tequila,” Yuna and Sooyoung say together.

“Wow. You know me so well.”

Sooyoung clearly has a heavy hand- you wince when you sip your mixed drink but you’re no quitter.

“Cheers,” Yuri says, “Cheers to us, and cheers to the fountain of youth, in the form of tequila and soju.”

The rest of the night goes in a blur of dancing, loose limbs and close touches. You can very clearly remember sending selfies and videos to Jungkook, who instantly replied with heart eyes and words that made your face heat up in the crowded bar.

“Who you texting,” Yuna says, wrapping her arms around your shoulders so you’re facing her. She holds you close and you have to steady yourself by holding her waist. 

“Jungkook,” You say quickly, “Just wanted to say hi.”

Yuna looks at you knowingly but says nothing, only dancing with you. Yuri joins you from behind, holding your own hips tightly. You sway with them, throwing your head back happily and singing along to the song blasting on the speakers.

Your head feels hazy, but you feel happy. 

“G’nna call Jin,” Yuna slurs to you, “T’ pick us up-”

“Wanna see Kook,” You say stubbornly, already pulling your phone out. You have to close one eye to see the words on your phone screen, and even then, it’s kind of blurry. 

You call Jungkook, or at least you think you do. But he answers, a sweet sound of your name ringing in your ears.

“JK,” You breathe into your phone, as if he can hear you over all of the noise. 

“Hi, sweetheart,” Jungkook says smoothly, “Having fun-”

“Jin’s comin’ t’pick us up,” You cut across him, leaning against the wall for some stability. You can’t tell if you feel this weightless because of your drunkenness or because of him. “But… I don’t wanna g’home with them. Wanna go home with you.”

“You want me to come pick you up?” Jungkook asks. Anticipation and then happiness blooms in his chest, that you want to see him. 

“Yeah,” You reply instantly, “Wanna see you. Miss you.”

“You saw me a few hours ago, at work,” Jungkook teases and laughs when he hears your noise of protest.

“But I wanna see you,” You’re on the verge of whining, and you’re not above it.

“You’re obsessed with me,” Jungkook says, unable to keep the smile off of his face, “I’ll be there in twenty.”

Jungkook has a small smile on his face the entire drive to the bar.

Jin and Jungkook both arrive at around the same time, parking a few blocks away from the noisy bar and hopping out quickly.

Jin looks at Jungkook as if he is transparent, and it unnerves him. Jin says your name first and then, “You’re here for her, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, she called me,” Jungkook says, not backing down from the obvious heat in Jin’s eyes.

Jin looks at him, long and hard. Despite the bustle of people around them on the busy street, Jungkook knows what this is. It’s one friend, a brother really, looking after another.

Jin claps his hand over Jungkook’s shoulder, and the tension immediately evaporates as if it had never existed. 

“Let’s go get our women, huh? Jin says with a grin.

Jungkook lets out a sigh of relief.

Jungkook sees you before you see him- your head tipped back in laughter, alcohol slick in your eyes and you nearly stumble but maintain your balance by holding Sooyoung’s shoulder for stability.

You look so pretty, as you always do. But tonight, you look relaxed and carefree and it looks nice on you.

And you sharply turn your head to him when Yuna whispers in your ear with a smug grin of her own and your eyes connect with his. You take him in unabashedly, leaving the conversation you were in to be next to Jungkook.

He meets you halfway, threading through the few people standing in between you both. 

Your smile is blinding, full of flowers and tequila- of course, you nearly lose your balance trying to get to him as fast as possible. Luckily, he’s close enough to you that he can grab your waist before you fall on your ass.

It seems that almost happens all too often in his presence.

“It appears,” You murmur, “That I’ve almost fallen for you.”

“Yeah, how many times do I have to catch you before you bust your ass?” Jungkook says, eyes dancing and it’s the prettiest thing you’ve ever seen.

“A million and one,” You reply. You’ve had plenty of water from when you had called Jungkook to now, and while the tipsy haze has begun to lift, you still feel the edge of alcohol clouding your mind.

“Cheesy,” Jungkook rolls his eyes. He doesn’t mind the way your hands slide up his arm, as if reassuring yourself that he’s right there. That his hands are really circling your waist and that he had really come to pick you up.

You wrap your arms around him for a wordless hug and sway for a moment in his arms. He smells nice and he feels safe. He tightens his arms around you, wrapping himself around you almost completely.

Your heart flutters at how nice he feels, his chest slotted against yours.

“I’m glad you called me,” Jungkook murmurs, only for you to hear. 

“Glad you picked up,” You reply sincerely, meeting his eyes, “And glad you’re here.”

You shine in his arms, bright, bold and beaming. You surprise him again and press your thumbs to his cheeks, before pecking his cheek quickly.

“Let me get you a water and then we’ll go,” Jungkook murmurs, his hand drifting to the small of your back. The satin-y material of your shirt is thin in his fingers- where is your jacket? Had you even brought one?

“Okay, Bambi,” You reply dreamily. You lean against him at the bar, head on his shoulder as you both wait. You tighten your grip on his bicep and he moves his hand to circle your waist and pull you into his side. He likes the way you slot next to him, your quiet heat something he doesn’t know if he’ll ever get used to.

The sparkles in his doe eyes never seem to fade away when he’s with you. Your head is filled with nothing but his reddened pout, the way his hair falls into his eyes, and the way his palm feels on you. His lips move as he speaks to the bartender but all you can feel are the absent circles his thumb makes on your hip.

Your throat goes dry, and the urge to cling to him and hold him close, for you and your eyes only is too great. The man contains a universe in those eyes, and you always want to gravitate towards the magnetic pull of his axis. The overwhelming urge to kiss him washes over you in gentle waves, the desire igniting your veins. 

But you wait. In your tequila-addled mind, you decide to wait. Not here, not now. 

“Here, princess,” Jungkook says easily, the pet name slipping out without him meaning to. You gasp in surprise with wide eyes and your cheeks light up. Something in your belly is satiated by that and Jungkook knows it.

Interesting. You never fail to surprise him.

“Thank you,” You mumble, “Honey?”

Jungkook’s heart skips a beat and he squeezes your waist in approval. You smile at him, a little bashfully and god, does he want to kiss you. He wants to kiss the gloss right off of your lips, he wants to taste the tequila on your tongue. He just wants you.

But not here. Not now.

You’re trying your best to not be handsy in the car. What is it about a man with one hand on the wheel? Specifically, what is it about Jungkook, with one hand on the wheel and the other dwarfed over yours in your lap?

His hands were big. That much you knew. But having his hand in yours like this, encased over yours- they just seemed that much bigger. The feeling of his hand in yours sends sparks through your skin. You melt with his touch, with the soothing sound of his voice.

You have to ask him to repeat himself more than once, because you’re too busy enjoying the feeling of his hand in yours.

He chuckles to himself, already aware of your apparent distraction. The tips of his ears are warm and his belly is fluttering. But he’s not ready- when Jungkook parks his car and helps you out of the passenger seat, you don’t let his hand go. Instead, you bring his knuckles to your lips and kiss it softly.

“Thank you,” You mumble, meeting his eyes, “For taking care of me, Kook.”

Jungkook doesn’t let go of your hand after that, not in the lobby, not in the elevator, not even as he unlocks his door. Not even as he gives you water and a snack to chew on. You watch him with hearts in your eyes, looking at him as if he’s hung the moon and stars for you.

“D’you have clothes? I left mine at Yuna’s,” You ask once your face is freshly washed. Despite your difference in skincare routines, you had not so secretly stolen some of his cleanser and moisturizer. 

You suppose you’ll have to skip on toner tonight.

“No, I don’t, even though you’re standing in my bedroom,” Jungkook rolls his eyes and you swat his shoulder.

“You can just say yes-”

“It’s more fun to stress you out,” Jungkook says and rummages around for a shirt and some shorts for you to wear. He pulls out a freshly washed pair of shorts and an oversized grey t-shirt for you, but you’re smirking at him deviously.

“What,” Jungkook says flatly, “Why are you looking at me like that-”

“I don’t want those clothes,” You murmur, mischief swirling in your eyes, “I want the shirt you’re wearing.”

“You’re just full of surprises, aren’t you,” Jungkook says, hoping you don’t catch the stammer in his voice. He moves closer to you, curling a hesitant hand around your cheek. You lean into his touch, tilting your head just a fraction and hum at the warmth of his palm against your heated skin.

He pulls away just for a second to peel his shirt off of his torso and despite your bravado from earlier, you’re not prepared to be met by his bare chest or the full breadth of his tattoos.

In fact, you squeeze your eyes shut to cope with the sudden sight of his beautiful, golden skin and the lines of corded muscle. 

“If I didn’t know you, I’d be offended,” Jungkook’s voice comes from right in front of you. He puts the fresh shirt on and his hand resumes it's comforting place on your cheek.

“Shut up,” You muster out, “Turn around, Jeon.”

And he does, hearing your pants drop to the floor, along with the rest. You neatly fold your clothes and place them on his chair before changing into his clothes. And Jungkook hears you inhale deeply- his clothes smell so much like him, the scent of his cologne heavy in the minuscule fibers.

“You can turn around now,” You mumble softly, “Honey.”

If Jungkook thought he was ready to see you looking at him with tired eyes and a tired smile wearing his clothes, he was kidding himself. He won’t deny that he’s daydreamed about it before- seeing you in his clothes, in his bed, in his arms, in his arms, in his arms…

And now you are. Even if you’re a little tipsy. He can’t wait to kiss you, feel the mold of your lips against his, feel how they slot against him- but not now, not tonight.

“Jungkook,” You say, tugging your hand in his. He doesn’t miss the way your eyes are still mischievous. “Should I sleep on the couch? Is it untidy of us to sleep in the same bed?”

“Haven’t even taken me out on a date yet and you’re already trying to bed me, huh?” 

“It didn’t take much, Kook,” You laugh.

“No,” Jungkook says, “I suppose it didn’t.” 

You’ve never been this close, this open to anyone. It unnerves you a little, even in your foggy mind. But maybe not as much as it would normally. 

You feel like you can just be with Jungkook. Without questioning it, wondering if it’s right or wrong. And you think he might feel the same way, too.

You’re “sleeping” on your side, facing away from him. Jungkook notices how rigid you are, as if you don’t know what to do. He also knows you’re still awake, even if you pretend not to be.

He touches your shoulder tentatively, reassuringly. “Hey,” Jungkook murmurs.

You hum in acknowledgement, feeling like a live wire about to explode. What do you want? What are you doing?

Nothing. It’s so easy with him. What are you so nervous for?

Jungkook can read your thoughts easily, your body language a practiced poem to him. “You alright? Is this too much?” Jungkook murmurs, pulling his hand away.

You miss his warmth already. No, you realize. It’s not too much… You want more. You want more, you want everything he’ll give you.

But he misunderstands, taking your silence for hesitation. You feel him begin to slide off of the bed, likely to take the floor or the couch. But you turn abruptly, shooting up and grasping his forearm tightly.

“No,” You say softly, “Don’t go, Jungkook. Stay with me.”

“You sure?” Jungkook hesitates, “Whatever you’re comfortable with, I’m comfortable with.”

“Yeah,” You breathe, “I’m sure.”

And so he settles in his bed once more, and you still sense apprehension radiating off of him in waves. 

“Are you sure?” You murmur, turning to face him. You’re close enough to him that you can see the count of his long eyelashes fanning his cheeks. Maybe you’ve rushed into this, whatever this is. Before you can spiral down that train of thought, Jungkook cups your cheek and your breath hitches.

“I’m sure,” Jungkook says, his cheeks tinted a dusky red, “I… I like seeing you like this. In my clothes, in my bed.”

“I like seeing you like this, too,” You whisper, feeling a little shy. But you return his gentle caress with a warm hand over his chest. Your touch sends happy little shockwaves pulsing through him, and he wants to chase that feeling with you.

“Thank you,” You whisper, somehow even softer, “For taking care of me. I probably interrupted your night...” You shift closer to him, plucking the courage to allow the press of your chest to his and to gently run your fingers through his soft hair.

More shockwaves.

Jungkook resists the urge to say what he really wants to say. Instead, he gives you a blinding smile, one that has you smiling back. “No, there’s no interruption. There’s only you.”

The sheer conviction of his words leaves your entire body buzzing and your face aflame. You’re not sure of many things, but you’re sure of this-

“I’m gonna kiss you,” You mumble sleepily, “Tomorrow, I’m gonna kiss you.”

And somehow, with that declaration, you fall asleep with your head tucked on his chest and he’s left with a small smile on his face.

Jungkook is awake before you. It’s a cloudy morning, shades of grey hidden behind his blinds. It makes him want to curl into you, just how he was moments before. He had woken up to his arm loose around your waist, his chest around your back. You were so warm, so pretty in his clothes. So unassumingly his, if you’d have him.

He peels away from you hastily. His face immediately heats up, he’s certain the tips of his ears are red from his proximity to you. 

Specifically, your ass is pressed into his half hard cock, and he can’t bring himself to pull away. Not when the sweet image of your ass swallowing his cock is a previous fantasy that is so close to becoming a reality.

You squirm in your sleep, or at least, he thinks you’re asleep. You sigh lightly before getting comfortable and Jungkook knows he’s in trouble. With you, he’s always in trouble.

Your hand comes forward to your face and you rub your eyes tiredly. Jungkook’s throat goes dry- what should he do? Feign sleep? Roll away from you? Or-

You make the decision for him though, and lift your hand behind you to feel around for him. A satisfied sigh escapes your lips when you find his chest, and then a soft murmur. A complaint.

“What?” Jungkook chokes, “I can’t hear you.”

“Come closer,” You mumble, your voice hoarse. It sounds like thick, golden honey and Jungkook wants a little taste. He envelopes you, encasing you with his legs and his arms around your waist. Your hand drops on top of his much larger one and you sigh dreamily.

“Jungkook,” You say, not really sure where you were going with that train of thought, because the warmth of his body against yours feels too good to do anything but sink into.

Jungkook nearly purrs into your neck.

“Good morning, princess,” Jungkook says. God, he wants to get used to this.

“Morning,” You reply, threading your fingers through his and squeezing. You push back against him, grinning to yourself when you feel him freeze up behind you. He holds your hip tightly, to stop you from moving.

Jungkook is only a man, only a man with a giant crush that he knows you reciprocate.

“What are you doing,” Jungkook asks breathily.

“I’m just lying here,” You say innocently and grind into him. Jungkook takes the bait, of course he does, and melds his hips to yours. A sharp exhale tickles your ears when he rocks into you lightly. It only lasts a few moments, a funny, sweet feeling swirling in your belly. It spreads to your toes- it’s all because of him, because of his touch. His touch sends a warm buzz all over.

You never want to let it go.

“You remember what you said last night?” Jungkook asks breathily, his lips nearly pressed to your neck. Remnants of your perfume along with the scent of his sheets lingers on your skin.

“I said a lotta things last night,” You tease, reaching behind to thread your fingers through his hair lazily. He groans, bucking his hips just a little faster. A breathy moan escapes from your throat and you’d be a little more embarrassed if you weren’t enjoying how he felt around you so much.

“You did,” Jungkook hums, “You were really talkative-”

“I remember,” You say and finally turn in his arms to get a good look at him. His cheeks and the tips of his ears are tinted a pretty pink. But your gaze immediately lands on his eyes, his beautiful, big, brown eyes. The same eyes that look at you with something similar to magic in them.

“Said I was gonna kiss you,” You continue, “So ‘m gonna kiss you. Can I? Can I kiss you?”

He nods eagerly, eyes wide and lips parted in anticipation. He wonders if you know how long he’s thought about kissing you, about feeling those surely soft lips against his.

And now his dreams with his dream girl are coming true. You press your lips to his, almost bashfully, and gasp into his mouth when he grabs your waist as if he can’t get enough of you. And he can’t- he can’t believe this is real, you in his arms, you kissing him like this.

It’s soft, it’s magnetic, it’s you.  Your skin is soft under his fingertips as his hand shifts to cradle your cheek. Your hand is fisted in his shirt before you wrap your arms around his head and push your fingers into his hair hurriedly.

Your hands are everywhere, trying to hold as much of him as you can. You can’t get enough either- the warm heat of his mouth is too enticing for you to let go of. You’re on a cloud, in a daydream all on your own. Filled with nothing but pastel stars and dark skies and him.

Jungkook devours you, slowly, surely and all at once. He slips his tongue into your mouth and you sigh, swallowing his own moan. Jungkook holds you close but presses your back on the bed and hovers over you when he pulls away slightly to catch a breath.

But you pull him back towards you impatiently by the collar of his shirt and press your lips to his. Jungkook re-centers you, slowing your impatience and kisses you languidly as if you have all of the time in the world to learn the soft lines of his equally soft lips. His name comes out of your mouth in a breathy whisper- he’s on his knees to hear you say his name like that as many times as he can.

Jungkook pulls away for a longer breath, peering down at you with wide eyes and bitten lips. 

“J-Jungkook,” You say with a splitting grin. It just feels right, it feels natural with him. “That was fun. I wanna do that again... baby.”

He laughs, eyes crinkling and honest and it makes your heart flutter. Jungkook presses his lips to your forehead, your cheeks, your chin, your nose- and in between you laugh airily, wrapping your arms around him to keep him as close to you as you can. Wrapping your legs around his tiny waist, you keep him molded to your chest.

He loses himself in you, in the gentle but firm caress against his heated skin. 

“Your hands,” You murmur with a smirk, “Your hands are so big…”

Jungkook snorts and rolls his eyes, nipping at your neck playfully. “Shut up,” He says, voice muffled.

“You’re really hot,” You say a little more seriously, “Like…  really, really hot.”

“Thank you,” Jungkook says almost shyly.

“So you agree? You think you’re really pretty?”

You screech with laughter when he playfully pinches your waist. “You’re really pretty,” He repeats to you, “Like… really, really pretty.”

“Oh, I know,” You grin and cup his cheeks for a quick kiss. You won’t deny the way your heart pounds at his quick, genuine declaration. You wrap an arm around his broad shoulders, rubbing the expanse of his back and enjoying the feel of his thick muscles under your fingertips.

“Kiss me again,” You demand softly, “You’re good at that. We’re good at that.”

And so he does, he kisses you softly, deeply and pulls peals of laughter and soft moans of his name from your throat and into the minuscule crevices between both of you.

Jungkook wonders if his past self would’ve ever dreamed of this moment- of his dream girl in his bed, wearing his clothes, kissing him as if he was the sweetest nectar to grace your lips.

tags: @koo-zy​

[127-mile]

Une seconde avant noël.

Pairing: Lee Ten x reader.

Genre: Christmas, exes, fake dating, feelings realization / Fluff, angst.

Warnings: Vulgar language, alcohol consumption.

Word count: +5.2k.

Prompt chosen: It’s Christmas Eve. It’s the one night of the year when we all act a little nicer, we smile a little easier, we cheer a little more. For a couple of hours out of the whole year, we are the people that we always hoped we would be.

Plot: What an idea to break up before Christmas, Ten thinks, as he announces to his mother that yes, you will indeed be present at the annual party organized for Christmas Eve.

A/N: This is part of the Walking in a winter wonderland collab hosted by @suh-insane​ and @neocitybynight​.

"Do you always have to be in my way? Fuck Ten, be careful where you are going!" you growl, looking at the content of the box strewn on the floor. You have a ton of work to finish if you want to have a meal break, and Ten really is not making it easy for you. "You piss me off." you mumble as you kneel to retrieve the glitter bloxes, and sigh in exasperation when you notice of them opened. You'll find glitter everywhere for a month at this point. Who is stupid enough to think of glitter as a passable Christmas present for a child, you think, rolling your eyes.

"Can't you be polite? We have customers, damn it!" you turn your face to Ten who looks at you as if you caused the accident yourself when this idiot was hunched over his phone at the time of the impact. "And you, can't you at least pretend to work instead of checking how many sluts you'll be able to bring in your dingy apartment this weekend?" you stuff the glitters into the box while huffing, you can't take any more. If you didn't need the money so much, you would quit your job this instant.

Ten's chuckle is enough to make you angry once again. You can not stand hearing him and his stupid laugh anymore, and if you looked up at him, you would see his annoying little smile. "Are you jealous?" he asks, and you bite your lip so as not to laugh. They are causing enough commotion in the middle of the store, you do not need your boss to come and see what's going on. "Jealous? But why would I be jealous, Ten. You really need to take the time to think and calm your fucking ego, it's not good for you."

"I'm not saying you are jealous, I'm just saying that worrying about who I can bring back to my apartment is suspicious." you look at him, shaking your head. God damn his face would be beautiful with your fist pressed against. "You're so full of yourself Ten. I don't care what garbage you take home, all I want is for you to get down to work, before if you haven't noticed yet, it is almost Christmas and the store is full of customers."

"Garbage?" he asks, tilting his head, and you turn on your heels. "As far as I know, I took you back to my apartment at one point." it is too much for you. You leave the arts and crafts section, and you put the box at the feet of one of your colleagues who looks at you, incredulous. "I'm going to be sick, can you take care of it." you are not sick, but if you stay with Ten for a minute longer, you will eventually be.

You ignore a client who ask you about an interactive teddy bear they sac on TV, and you know it's wrong, but you have no choice, or you'll end up spitting your venom on a poor innocent person who wants nothing more than to please someone for Christmas. You push the door to the break room, and you walk to the bathroom. As you thought, it's empty. The boss doesn't allow anyone to go while they are working.

You push the door open, and you sit on the closed toilet. It is not the cleanest place, but it is the only place where you'll have time to think, and where you can calm your sudden urges for murder. It's sad to see where the relationship between you and Ten is. It was not always like that. There was a time when you weren't insulting each other at any opportunity, when you could smile at each other without wanting to throw up. There was a time when you were in love, and convinced that you would spend the rest of your life together.

You tense when you hear the door open, and you remain silent, pressing your hand against your mouth, as if it would help you go unnoticed when your feet are visible under the door gap. "Y/n?" of course, there is only Ten to follow you to the toilet. He approaches the door and you see by his movements that he sits on the floor. You grimace, because you do not know how long the cleaning person has stopped washing the once white tiles.

"Ten, it's disgusting on the floor." you mumble, and hear him sigh. "What do you want? What's important enough for you to follow me into the bathroom?" you ask in a voice barely above a whisper. "I am sorry." he says, and you shake your head. This is not the first time you've found yourselves apologizing to each other after a little quarrel in the middle of the store, and you know it won't be the last time either.

"We only have one week left before Christmas, after that we won't have to see each other as much anymore. Can't we make an effort to ignore each other?" your voice is so weak, Ten feels his heart skip a beat. He never wanted the situation between the two of you to become so chaotic. He wanted nothing more than to be happy. Be happy with you.

"But- but I don't want to ignore you." Ten answers, and you get up to open the door. The boy almost rocks forward, since his forehead was pressed against the door. "Ten, you need to learn about the existence of germs on the bathrooms." he smiles weakly, and he stands up too, dusting his uniform pants. "What do you propose?" you ask, cocking your head.

"We're burying the hatchet." Ten crosses his arms against his chest, and you sigh. "Ten, we've already tried dozens of times since we broke up, and it always comes back to the same scenario. It's useless."

For the first time since they broke up, you do not pull back when he puts his hand on your arm. "But we can try. For real this time. We were friends before we were a couple, maybe we can be again?" there is so much hope in his voice, and in his eyes, that you can't afford to deny him anything. "We can try." you finally say, and Ten's smile is so bright that you could almost be blinded.

"Perfect! So will you come with me to the party my parents are hosting for Christmas Eve?" he asks, and this time, you pull back at his touch, and you clench your fist to punch him in the shoulder. He whines loudly and you refrain from not doing it again. "You asshole! Why are you doing this to me?" Every year, the Lee family host a Christmas Eve party. It's always lavish, with beautiful decorations, and exquisite food. You loved spending Christmas Eve with Ten's family. So reminding you that you will not be attending this year hurts.

"But I'm serious!" he explains by rubbing his shoulder. He takes a step back to make sure he doesn't get another hit, he knows you all too well. "You are invited." you frown as you dig your hands into the pockets of your pants. "We are not together anymore, why would you parents invite me?" for a moment Ten looks embarrassed, and he is unable to meet your gaze. "Ten, what are you hiding from me?" he hops from one foot to the other, and you are ready to ask him if he feels like pissing when he opens his mouth to explain. "It may well be that I didn't tell my parents we broke up."

"But why Ten? You told me you did! It's been months now." the fact that he is embarrassed is at least a good thing, he is still human. "I was going to do it, I promise, but my mom started talking about the party, and hse said she missed you and really can't wait to see you. You know how much my mom adores you, I didn't want to break her heart!"

It's really mean to include his mother and her love for you in the story, because he knows you considered Ten's mother like your own when you first met her. "I'll tell them everything after the holidays, I promise! If you come, I'll never ask you anything again, and I'll disappear if that's what you want."

"I hate you, Ten." even though it's a phrase he doesn't like to hear, he knows you do not mean it. At least that's what he hopes, because he doesn't know what he would do if you really hated him. "So?" he asks in a whisper, and you roll your eyes. "I'll come, but this will be the last time I do anything for you. Anything, do you hear me?"

He nods, and he smiles once more. "Good, very good! We'll take my car, and I won't carge you for your share of the gasoline, don't worry." he is so excited that you start to feel the excitement too, but you do not show him, no. You walk to the bathroom door, it's time for you to get back to work, but before you leave, you turn to Ten. "I need my day tomorrow, so I'll let you tell the boss you're going to use your day off to replace me."

The following week is the calmest week you've had since breaking up with Ten. You meet in the store, but you ignore each other. Well, you ignore him every time he tries to talk to you, it's much better than insulting him until he resigns himself to being silent. And when Christmas Eve comes, you wonder if you really made the right decision by agreeing to follow Ten. And pretend to be his partner again.

You wait outside your apartment for Ten to arrive, your hands in the pockets of your coat, and your face niched in your scarf. The cold wind is whipping your face, and the snow have started to fall on the city which is festive with the fairy lights, the decorated trees in the streets, and the laughter of the locas who are eager to come home and celebrate Christmas Eve.

Thanks to Ten, you were able to get out of work early, and also, you won't be spending Christmas on your own. That's the only positive things you can find in this strange situation. Even your friends have told you to text Ten and cancel, they all think it's bad, and they think it will do them more harm than good. And you understand them, you too wonder what will happen after the party is over, once you have to go back to your routine without each other.

But that's life, and sometimes you have to make sacrifices to avoid hurting the people you love, you think with a sigh.

When you feel ready to freeze in place, Ten's car pulls up in front of you, and you huff. Finally. He gets out of the car, and he opens the door. Seeing him do that make you roll your eyes. "I can open a door." you mumble, and when he lifts his big shining eyes, you sigh. "You'll catch a cold, Tennie." he shakes his head, and you get in the car.

You feel a weight being lifted from your shoulder as your warm up, and Ten watches you, smiling when you take off your gloves. "You want a photo, it'll last longer." you say, and he shrugs. "I'm just glad to see you." yeah, you don't believe that lie, he must already be playing his part not to be caught off guard in front of his parents.

Ten starts the engine, and begins to drive out of town. "I had my mom on the phone earlier, she is excited to see you, and so is my dad." you hum. "Me too, I really missed them." Ten's lower lip juts out, and you avoid looking at him, he knows you are weak when he acts like that. But not tonight, no. "Ten, don't forget your promise. We can't do this at every family reunion, you know that, it'll only hurt more every time.

"Yes I know, and I will, I promised, didn't I?" you nod, and you turn your head towards the window. You watch the landscape gently getting cover by a thin layer of white snow as you approach the countryside. You love the city, yes, but you would love to be able to land in the countryside, and have a simple life, far from the hustle and bustle of the city.

The rest of the road is silent, and you slowly fall asleep, you head against the window, rocked by the vibrations. It's Ten's hand on your shoulder that wakes you up. He is out in the car, and you notice that it is now dark outside. You stand up, yawning. "We're here." he says. The Lee family house is impressive, and decorated with lights. It is really beautiful, and you expected no less from Mrs. Lee whose favorite holiday is Christmas.

You get your bag and get out of the car. Your legs are numb, so you take Ten's arm to avoid tripping in the snow. Yeah, that would be fun, but you do not really want to soil your clothes now. Maybe later. You stop in front of the door, and Ten turns to you. "Ready?" and when you nod, he knocks on the door.

It only takes a minute for the door to open on Ten's mother. She looks at the both of you, and she smiles with a sweetness all her own. "My loves, how happy I am to see you! Come in or you'll get sick." Ten lets you pass, and when you enter, you are immediately engulfed in a hug. You melt, you can't help it. You feel like coming home, and god damn your heart hurt at the realization.

Ten clears his throat, and you refrain from laughing. When Mrs. Lee lets you take a step back, you both turn to the boy who frowns. "Impatient." his mother says before taking him in her arms in turn, for a shorter moment. You are pretty proud of it. "Come into the living room, the guests have already arrived."

You follow her into the living room, and you greet the guests. You and Ten have been together for a few years, so you know all of the family and friends who are used to being invited every year. "Ah, the lovers have arrived!" his father says, and you nod. You put the gifts you brought in your bag at the foot of the three, and you smile. You had a great time looking for the perfect gifts.

Immediately, you are taken aside by Ten's sister who is surprised to see you here. She is the only one in this room, besides Ten himself, who knows about your situation. Because yes, maybe you were drunk one night and called her, crying to complain about the ordeal your life had been like since breaking up with Ten. Tern is younger, but she is quite scary, so you hardly swallow your saliva when she comes face to face with you.

"What is this mess?" she asks in a whisper. "Did you get back together?" you worry your lower lip, giving Ten a furtive glance, he seems to be in the middle of a heated discussion with his father, and you shake your head. "Ten didn't say anything to your parents, so he asked me to come over, so as not to break the holiday spirit." you mumble, and if the Lee family was not there, you know Tern would go and slap her brother right away.

"You both are idiots." Tern says, and you shoulders slup. "Are you masochistic or what? Do you like hurting yourself?" you do not know what to say, you are just here to help Ten. "I know it's not the right thing to do, but it's Christmas Eve, so I'm going to pretend it's okay, smile, laugh, and be happy beofre I go back everyday life without Ten."

Tern sighs, tilting her head. "Is that what you want?" she asks before resuming. "Go back to a life without Ten? Because a person who has no more feelings would never agree to help their ex." That's the question, you don't know how you feel, your head is empty and your heart is a mess, it's been like this since Ten left. So you shrug. "I don't know Tern."

As you are about to speak, you are called out by Ten's mother who beckons you to approach. "Come help me in the kitchen for a minute, please." you nod, apologizing to Tern before joining her. There's nothing more to do, so you frown. "It's the only way to have some time with you without Ten jumping on you." she explains, and you can't help but laugh. "He learned to behave in public, don't worry."

"Is everything okay?" Ten's mother asks, and you nod. She looks worried, and for a second, you feel ready to tell her everything, but you can't, you promised Ten, and as he said himself, he doesn't want to hurt her, and neither do you. Not tonight anyway. "I'm asking because it's been a while since we've last seen you."

You nod. It's true that before, you used to visit the Lee family a couple of times each month, even though Ten was busy at work, and even more during the month of December, used to help Mrs. Lee prepare Christmas Eve. But being convinced that Ten had warned his parents, you did not do it anymore, you found it inappropriate.

"I was overwhelmed with work, I'm so sorry. But it's true that I should at least give given you a call." you explain in a weak voice, and the older woman shakes her head, placing a hand on your shoulder. "You have a job, you have a life, you have you own family, so you don't have to apologize for not having time. I get it, I was your age once."

You blame yourself more and more for the pain you are going to cause her, but you bite the inside of your cheek. Sometimes things don't go as planned, and you have to adapt. "And with Ten, is everything going well?" the question you would have liked to avoid. But you smile. "Everything is not perfect every day, but we both make an effort, because our relationship deserves it." Ten's mother smiles, she is proud to hear that her son has matured enough to do whatever it takes to keep his relationship healthy, and going.

"Don't hesitate to tell me if he crosses the line, then I'll give him a piece of my mind, believe me!" you laugh softly. You know that Mrs. Lee is, and will always be, there to help you. At least for now. But you need to stop thinking about the future, and focus on the present. You need to enjoy this last night you have with your surrogate family. "Thank you Ms. Lee, I appreciate that."

When she offers to return to the living room so as not to worry the guests, you follow her. Ten is still talking with his father, but the conversation seems to have calmed down, and you are happy. You know that the two men are used to arguing, and you have witnessed some rather disturbing scenes already, and you do not want that to happen again. You do not want to have to pick up Ten again.

"Everything okay?" you jump when Ten comes up behind you, and you turn to him. His cheeks are flushed, and you pursue your lips to stifle a laugh. "Don't tell me, your grandmother's friend?" he shakes his head with a poud, he doesn't like it when old little ladies pull his cheeks, it hurts. "My poor child. Maybe she'll stop someday."

"When she is in a coffin, yeah." Ten mumbles, and you put your hand over your mouth. "Don't say such things, Tennie!" you giggle and he smiles. He likes to be the reason for your laughter. "But to answer your question, yes, everything is fine. Your sister was a little surprised to see me here, but outside of that, like clockwork!"

Ten nods, and takes a sip from his glass of wine. He looks around him. The three, the decorations, his family, their friends, and you, and for a minute, he completely forgets that things are not the same as last year. Nothing is as before, everything is only an act. And when he turns his head towards you, and sees the lights of the tree reflected in your eyes, he thinks to himself that maybe, it was not a good idea.

See, you and Ten had a long relationship. You are his first love, and he always hoped that you would be his last. And to be honest, he still hopes so. But he knows that despite everything that has happened, all the insults you have exchanged, it would take very little time for him to fall in love again. No, he wouldn't need time at all, he is still in love, he always will be, he knows it deep down inside of him. And seeing you here, acting as your girlfriend, knowing that you'll probably never will be again, hurts like a bitch.

You think the same, and it hurts you too, but you both have too much pride to say it.

You then meet around the table, enjoying a fabulous feast prepared by Mrs. Lee. That's what you'll missed the most, the food. Ten is next to you, and every now and then, he leans in to whisper a joke in your ear. It's a tradition that you have, you try to make the other laugh, and get all eyes on yourself, knowing that it will be too inappropriate for you to say the joke out loud. At least some things are not changing.

You honestly can't remember the last time you had such a good time with Ten without it ending in an argument. What you do not notice is Tern's gaze. She watches you both, frowning. She can read between the lines. She knows that you still love each other, but are also too stupid to admit it.

The meal stretches over two hours, and when you finish, a full stomach, and ready to explode, it's time to open the presents. You get up from your chair and collect the packages. You give one to Ten's parents, one to Tern, and the last one, you hand it to Ten who titls his head. "You didn't have to, you know." he says in a whisper, and you shrug. "I know, but I got it before.. well before you know what."

Ten also gives you a present, and you arch an eyebrow at him. "I didn't want to see you pout thinking I forgot about you." he mumbles, and you smile. You open the present, and sigh. Inside is your favorite book, but not just any, the very first edition. It's old, rare, and probably extremely expensive. "Ten.." you whisper, and the boy smiles. "I know you've always dreamed of it."

What makes your heart beat a little faster is not that he gave you the book, but that he remembered it, because you only mentioned it once almost two years ago. Perhaps accusing him of never paying attention was wrong, now that you think about it. "Thank you so much Ten, you have no idea how happy this makes me." you lean over, and place a tender kiss on his cheek. And when you take a step back, you notice the rosy tint on Ten's cheeks. Cute.

"Come on, open yours!" Ten nods a minute later, the poor man needs to recover from the sudden physical contact first, then, he unwraps his present. If there is ont think Ten loves more than himself, and you, it's his watch. His father gave him his own watch for his 18th birthday, and it quickly became his most precious item, and unfortunately, he broke it a few months ago.

He thought it was irreparable, but nothing is ever irreparable, so you grabbed it one morning, and sent it over to have it fixed. It's not much for you, but when you see the tears in Ten's eyes, you knows that it was a perfect idea. "I thought I lost it." he says under his breath, and you shake your head. "I took it from you, wanted to surprise you, but I didn't expect it to take that long. I'm really sorry if I worried you."

Ten shakes his head, and he wipes his tears with his free hand, before a smile spreads over his beautiful face. "This deserves a kiss!" Ten's mother exclaims, and you hear Tern sigh loudly. "Mom, don't embarrass them." you are grateful for Ten, but you have to do it. So once more you take a step forward, and you cup Ten's face, and your face meet in the middle for a long, and soft kiss. Yeah, maybe you wanted to kiss him too. And for a while now.

"How beautiful young love is!" one person comments, and you smile weakly. Ten does the same, and you help him put the watch around his wrist. "Thank you, thank you. I don't think I will ever have enough words to thank you. It's the most perfect present." he says in a long sigh, and you smile. "I knew how much you cared about this watch." you run your fingers through Ten's hair to pull it out of his face, and realize how easy it is for you to fall back on your old habits.

The rest of the evening goes well.

You sit on the couch with Ten, and you listen to the stories the family members are telling, laughing every now and then, but you can't really focus with the heat radiating from Ten's body. Proximity in your hands. It would be so easy to take his hand, or rest your head on his shoulder.

Why the hell not, you think, it's Christmas, and you are supposed to be acting, so might as well make the most of it. You rest your head on Ten's shoulder, and if he is suprised, he doesn't show it, he lands a kiss on the top of your head. You feel his shoulders relax and you smile. You always have the same calming effect on each other. True love, but you refuse to think about it.

It's getting late, and you can't seem to suppress a long yawn, Ten notices. He stands up and you pout at the sudden lack of contact, and you sit up. "We're going to go mom, we still have a way to go, and it's snowing again." she nods, albeit a little sad, but she knows it would be too dangerous for Ten to drive if he is tired, of if there is too much snow.

"Thank you for coming, my loves, it made me very happy." once again, you find yourself engulfed in a long her that you give back with pleasure. And you thank her and Ten's father again and again for the invitation. And in a few minutes, you find yourself in front of the car. Tern follows closely behind you, and before Ten gets into the car, she puts her hand on his shoulder to take him aside. "Take care of yourself, and your heart, okay?"

Ten nods. "Don't worry, I know what to do to keep my heart safe." he looks at you to see if you heard him, but no, you are half asleep on the seat, and you would not even hear if a bomb were to explode near your ear. "Really, don't worry." he places a kiss on his sister's cheek, and he gets into the car after making sur the passenger door is closed. You collapsed into the seat, your new book clutched to your chest.

"It was a very good evening. You family is amazing." you say, and Ten can only agree. "You are right. Thank you for coming." you smile and lean your head against the window. You do not want to fall asleep, you want to enjoy your last moments with Ten, but unfortunately, fatigue quickly gets the better of you, and when you open your eyes, the car is already parked in front of your apartment complex.

"Thanks for taking me home, and thanks again for the book." you lean in to kiss the corner of his lips, but before Ten can say anything, you get out of the car. He opens the window, and you turns to him. "Have a good night, Ten." his fingers tighten around the steering wheel, and you see that he wants to say something, but he holds back. "Good night Y/n, and merry Christmas."

You walk towards the door that leads to the lobby, but the sound of the door opening and closing catches your attention. You turn around and find Ten in front of the car. You embrace your body with your arms to fight against the cold. "What are you doing, Ten?" you ask, and the boy finally approaches. He's so close you can feel his breath against your lips. "Would you like to go have coffee tomorrow? And maybe we can go check out the Christmas lights."

You smile, and you nod. "I would love this, Ten." his smile is as bright as the moon, and you chuckle softly when he places a small kiss on your lips before heading back to his car, not without a victory move that almost makes him trip in the snow.

It’s Christmas Eve. It’s the one night of the year when we all act a little nicer, we smile a little easier, we cheer a little more. For a couple of hours out of the whole year, we are the people that we always hoped we would be.

And maybe sometimes, you can decide to stay that kind of people.

[bubonickitten]

Summary: Jon goes back to before the world ended and tries to forge a different path.

Previous chapter: AO3 // tumblr

Chapter 17 full text & content warnings below the cut.

CWs for Chapter 17: panic/anxiety symptoms; brief mention of past self-harm (from last chapter); mention of past (canonical) blood/injury; brief allusion to past passive suicidal ideation; brief claustrophobia/Buried themes (in the context of a nightmare); some blink-and-you'll-miss-it internalized ableism re: ADHD (not explicitly stated as such); Jon-typical self-loathing, internalized victim blaming/dehumanization, etc.; discussion of low self-worth, fear of abandonment/rejection, and other Lonely themes; extensive discussion of Jon's statement consumption (so, general warning for restrictive behaviors re: 'eating' and self-hate re: addiction/compulsions); swears. SPOILERS through Season 5.

Chapter 17: Intervention

Even asleep, Jon is a flurry of movement. The muscles in his jaw tense repeatedly as he grinds his teeth; his limbs twitch and jerk and tremble; his fingers curl into his palms, fists clenching and relaxing at random intervals. The quick, erratic motions beneath his closed eyelids are accompanied by gasps and the occasional whimper. Impossibly, he looks even frailer than usual – folded in on himself and shivering despite the thick, oversized jumper engulfing his slight frame.

Martin sits on the floor with his side pressed up against the cot, his arm resting on top of it and his eyes riveted on the few inches of space between Jon and himself. Part of him wants to reach out, to soothe away the varying shades of distress flitting their way across Jon’s face; another part of him, quieter but nonetheless insistent on making its existence known, tugs him in the opposite direction, urging him to widen that handspan of distance between them into a chasm. Something about Jon’s ragged breathing keeps Martin rooted in place, his heart skipping a beat any time the pauses between breaths stretch just a little too long for comfort.

At least he’s breathing at all, Martin thinks with a pang. His hand twitches in an unconscious desire to check for a pulse – some secondary sign to reassure him that Jon really is just sleeping.

At the gentle knock-knock on the doorframe, Martin jumps. The door to Document Storage, already cracked an inch or so, creaks as it swings wider.

“Jon?” Georgie calls softly, peeking through the gap. “You in here? I was just – oh,” she says when she sees Martin. An instant later she notices Jon, tossing and turning on the cot behind him. “What happened? Is he okay?”

“He… well, he’s fine now. I think. Just… sleeping.”

“Wait,” she says, fully entering the room and approaching to watch Jon with genuine astonishment, “you actually got him to sleep?”

“Not really? He was having trouble staying vertical, so I told him he should lie down until the vertigo passed, and…” Martin shrugs. He’s still taken aback by the fact that Jon complied without argument. “I don’t think he was planning on falling asleep, but he was out as soon as his head hit the pillow.” Jon’s fingers spasm, brow wrinkling as he cringes and curls into a tighter ball. Martin sighs. “Doesn’t look very restful, though.”

“Oh, he’s always been a fitful sleeper. Even back in uni. He didn’t used to be that bad, though. Or – he was, but in short bursts. Not… drawn out like this. He’d usually wake himself up after a minute or so of…” She frowns as Jon goes taut in a full-body spasm. “That.”

“I guess the Eye doesn’t want the dream to end,” Martin says quietly. Jon twists his fingers against the sheets, gathering the fabric in a death grip. Martin’s hand twitches again, inching just a bit closer to Jon’s. He resists the urge to uncurl Jon’s fingers, to give him a hand to hold instead.

“Last I checked, the nightmares weren’t as nightmarish anymore,” Georgie says. “I mean, by his own admission, he treated mine and Naomi’s dreams like social calls.”

Martin tears his eyes away from Jon to glance at Georgie, a puzzled expression on his face. “Naomi?”

“Naomi Herne. He said hers was the first statement he took in person.”

“Yeah, back when he was still putting on the skeptic act. And she filed a complaint against him for being…” Martin smiles and shakes his head. “Well, Jon.”

“I’m not surprised,” Georgie says with an amused snort. “They seem pretty friendly now, though.”

“What, seriously?”

“Yeah. They do have a similar sense of humor. She doesn’t seem to scare easy, which probably helps. And she has a cat, so…”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Jon… has trouble initiating when it comes to having a social life,” Georgie says slowly. “Just wanting to talk doesn’t strike him as a good enough reason to start a conversation. He worries he’ll just be an annoyance. It’s like he needs to come up with some concrete justification for reaching out. But Naomi is always excited to talk about the Duchess – that’s her cat – which means Jon is less likely to feel like he’s bothering her. Which also makes him less likely to talk himself out of sending a text. Plus, it’s a safe, normal thing to talk about, and he loves cats, so…” She shrugs. “It’s good for him.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah. Gives her an excuse to stay in touch, too, I think.” Georgie gives Martin a significant look. “Lonely, you know?”

“I…” Martin rubs the back of his neck, not meeting her eye. “Yeah.”

“Anyway, I thought… well, he said the nightmares weren’t as bad as they used to be.” Georgie frowns as she watches Jon’s lips twist, his teeth bared as he sucks in a sharp breath. “I don’t know. At least he’s actually sleeping. I don’t think he’s slept for more than forty minutes at a time since he got out of the hospital.”

“That was nearly a month ago.” Martin gapes at her, horrified. “How has he even been able to function with that level of sleep deprivation?”

“The same way he survived for six months without a heartbeat. And why he has to consciously remind himself to breathe sometimes, and has a tendency to forget to blink, and doesn’t have much of an appetite for normal food anymore. He’s not fully human –”

Georgie must sense Martin preparing to go on the offensive, because she holds up both hands palms-out, placating.

“I’m not saying that he’s inhuman, either. He might be convinced that he’s more monster than human, but he’s still a person. He’s just… different now, and he’s resigned to that, but he hasn’t yet gotten it through his head that there are people who will accept him regardless.” She sighs. “My original point was that he doesn’t have the same physiological needs that most people do. But he still does need to sleep from time to time. Sleep deprivation clearly takes a toll on him.”

“Figures,” Martin huffs, blowing hair out of his eyes. “He’s always treated sleep as optional.”

“Yeah,” Georgie says with a laugh. “He’s operated on a bare minimum of sleep for as long as I’ve known him. Part casual self-neglect, part allergy to the general concept of resting, and part legitimate insomnia. I told him more than once he should get evaluated for a sleep disorder, but… well, you know Jon. And now that he really does need less sleep than the average person, of course he’s pushing the limits even further.”

Martin looks down at Jon and thinks, as he has countless times before: He really does make it so damn difficult to take care of him.

It’s simultaneously heartbreaking and frustrating, even irritating at times – but somehow, whenever Jon doubles down, it only makes Martin do the same. It’s become such a familiar dance, a challenge even, and more often than not, Martin wins those contests of will: badger Jon persistently enough, strike just the right balance between expressing worry and wagging a finger, and eventually he’ll agree to take care of himself. In the beginning, he would grump and roll his eyes and drag his feet; as time went on, though, he became more receptive to it. Some days, he even seemed to enjoy – albeit in a guarded, almost shy way – being cajoled into sharing lunch or tea or conversation.

Unthinkingly, Martin brushes a lock of hair away from Jon’s forehead, damp with cold sweat. Wishes he could smooth the tension away as easily.

“Did you two talk about things?” Georgie asks.

“Some of it.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“I…” Martin bites his lip. “I feel like I shouldn’t want to, but I – I sort of do?”

“Well. I have some time to listen.” Georgie takes a seat towards the foot of the cot. “How’d it go? Bearing in mind this isn’t the tunnels.”

“It’s… a lot.”

“Mm. I can imagine.”

“I mean, he…” Martin runs a hand through his hair with a disbelieving, nervous chuckle. “He told me he wants to grow old with me?”

“He said that?” Georgie laughs outright. “God, he’s gotten even more saccharine than I thought.”

“It’s just – not something I would have ever imagined him saying? To anyone, let alone me.” Martin can feel his palms sweating now; he rubs them on his trousers, hoping to dispel some of the clamminess. “He just seems so… changed.”

“He is, but… maybe not as drastically as it might seem. Rather, this is him, just – without all the walls.” Georgie chuckles, shaking her head. “And less of a filter, apparently. Sorry.”

“Sorry?” Martin repeats, perplexed.

“He’s dumping a lot on you all at once. I can talk to him, if you want. Tell him to slow down, give you some space to process it all.”

“I… I don’t…” Martin pauses, coming up against an invisible wall between a daunting realization and the explicit acknowledgment thereof. He makes several abortive attempts at speech before he manages to voice the confession: “I don’t think I want him to?”

Left to himself for too long, Martin can feel himself start to come unmoored. The truth the Lonely is so loathe to have him accept, let alone speak aloud, is this: he doesn’t want that to happen. Not anymore. Being in the presence of others, actively taking part in a conversation, seeking comfort in touch – all of these things still feel grating, unnatural even, but a return to solitude frightens him in a way it hasn’t for months. It’s an old terror, one that he had become numb to since accepting the Lonely’s embrace. Now, it seems to have returned with a vengeance. The lingering, ambient discomfort that comes with human connection is quickly becoming preferable to that looming fear of absence.

Still, though…

“It feels like – going against my nature, every minute I spend talking to him, to you, to… anyone, really. I think I just… forgot how not to be alone?”

On some level, Martin wonders whether he ever knew in the first place. He’s had friends, certainly, but every relationship, no matter how ostensibly reciprocal, has been laced with an undercurrent of insecurity: a loud, nagging voice in the back of his mind, reminding him of the consequences should he allow himself to be too much or not enough. Always primed for rejection, he strove to make himself pleasant, to make himself useful, to make himself accommodating and unobtrusive and easy. Sometimes, he felt like an impostor, fooling people into believing that he was worth keeping around. He was always counting down the moments until someone would see through the façade to the inadequacy within, realize he wasn’t worth the trouble, and leave him behind.

“The Lonely… I don’t think I want it anymore,” he says, “but it feels – wrong, to leave it behind. Not me, somehow.”

“Hmm.” Georgie drums her fingers against her chin. “I can understand that. Isolation can become so habitual that it starts to feel like home, and anything trying to break through feels like an invasion. You start to feel safer alone, and you deny those moments when you catch yourself wishing things were different, because loneliness has become such a part of you that you don’t know who you would be without it.”

“I… yeah,” Martin says, taken aback by having it laid out so succinctly.

“In my experience, it helps to remind yourself that your brain is lying to you when it tells you you’d be better off alone. In your case, I guess it’s your brain and a supernatural fear god or whatever, but… unless you’re keen to fight a god, it might be best to start with your brain. That’s something you actually can exert some control over, with enough practice. And I think it might make it harder for the fear to get to you if you’re not trapped in the kind of mindset it thrives on.”

“I guess,” Martin says, looking off to the side. Once again, he rests his arm on the cot, his hand mere inches away from Jon’s, sheet still clenched tightly in his fist.

“But you don’t have to take it on all at once,” Georgie says. “If you have to set boundaries, Jon will understand. And even if he didn’t, you still have a right to enforce them. Not to sound cliché, but you shouldn’t set yourself on fire to keep others warm.”

The problem is, of course, that the concept of putting himself first is as alien to Martin as the idea of being… well, not lonely.

“I can hear the cogs turning,” Georgie says with a gentle smile. “Look, it’s easier to accept a concept intellectually than it is to actually apply it to yourself. There’s a learning curve. But it’s a lesson worth learning. Took me way too long to learn it myself. If it helps, start with – to use another cliché – ‘put your own oxygen mask on before helping others with theirs.’ Then you can move onto practicing self-care without feeling guilty.”

“What are you, a therapist?”

“Nope. I’ve just had several years of experience being on the receiving end.”

“O-oh. Uh, sorry –”

“Don’t be. It’s not something to be ashamed of. Anyway, at this point, I could probably fill out CBT worksheets in my sleep. With enough practice, it does start to become intuitive.” She shrugs. “Anyway, you can’t fix Jon, and I don’t think he expects you to. You can support him, you can care about him, but you can’t make him better. That’s true in any relationship, but… well, obviously it’s – a bit more complicated in this case.”

“I just… I want him to be okay, and I don’t know how to help –” Martin startles when Jon kicks one leg out violently, entangling himself in the sheets as he pulls it back and curls into himself again. Martin lowers his voice. “He – he was so starving he passed out, Georgie, he wasn’t breathing and it was like the hospital all over again and – and I don’t think I have any other stories I can tell that would count as statements –”

“Wait, you gave him a statement?”

“Y-yeah.”

“I thought he didn’t want –”

“I don’t know if he would have agreed if he was conscious, but he… he wasn’t waking up, and I didn’t know what else to do,” Martin says pleadingly, watching Georgie carefully to gauge her reaction. “He needed a fresh statement. Old statements aren’t enough, and he said new ones cause nightmares regardless of whether he takes them in person or not, so we can’t just give him new written statements that come in, and I – I don’t know what we’re going to do if he gets that bad again.”

Martin remembers the look in Jon’s eyes: glossy, glazed and almost luminous with an alien sort of hunger, but shot through with a terror more devastating than Martin had ever seen from him. The unflinching intent with which he hurt himself; the erratic rhythm of his breathing; the way his dilated pupils swallowed the irises just before he fell unconscious. He was lost to the world in those moments, alert but unresponsive, seemingly unable to hear a word Martin was saying.

And the abject horror on his face when he commanded Martin to stay away…

“He was… he was so scared. Of himself. He doesn’t want to hurt anyone, but he – he can’t think straight when he’s like that.”

“Shit,” Georgie says, pinching the bridge of her nose.

“I think working in the archives gives some immunity? I’ve given a few statements, before we knew how all this works, and he never showed up in my nightmares. Tim’s or Sasha’s, either, as far as I know. And I actually… well, I don’t actually mind giving him statements, to be honest? It’s – hard, to relive it, but it’s… cathartic, too. To get it all out, to be able to actually – describe it in words. Maybe I’d feel differently if I came in off the street – or was approached – and I didn’t know him, and wasn’t protected from the side effects, but – as it is, I would be fine giving him statements when he needs them, and that’s not – that’s not a huge sacrifice on my part, is what I’m saying. But I don’t… I don’t think I have any more stories to give.”

“Okay,” Georgie mutters to herself, rubbing her temples. “Okay. We… we’ll figure something out. Obviously, Jon needs to be part of that conversation. Maybe Daisy, too – Jon seems to trust her.”

“Why would he trust her?” Martin asks, incredulous, almost incensed. “She kidnapped him. She – she slit his throat, she was going to –”

“I know. I don’t really understand it either. But supposedly she’s changed a lot, and she’s an Avatar like he is. I get the feeling he might want her there.”

“Fine,” Martin says in a clipped voice, even though fine seems like a wildly inaccurate descriptor to him. “What about Basira? And Melanie?”

“Melanie… with Jon’s permission, I’ll invite her, just so she’s not out of the loop, but I doubt she’ll take us up on it.” Georgie frowns, rubbing her jaw absently. “As for Basira… I don’t know. Something Jon said…”

“What?”

“I’m…” Georgie pauses, tilting her head from side to side as she deliberates. “Concerned. About how Basira might approach the situation.”

It takes a few seconds for Martin to work out the implication. When he does, he pales, mouth going slack.

“You – you don’t think she’d hurt him?”

“I don’t think so,” Georgie says haltingly, “but there’s a chance she might put the option back on the table if she thinks he’s too dangerous. She wouldn’t like it, but… well, she seems utilitarian. I think she’ll do whatever she thinks she needs to do. And even if she doesn’t threaten him directly, I still…” She sighs. “Jon’s not in a good place right now, mentally. Frankly, I worry about exposing him to anything that might encourage a better-off-dead mindset, even if it’s just… perceived condemnation.”

“God, this…” Martin laughs, high and stressed. “This entire situation is…”

“I know. But we’ll figure something out. And in the meantime, make sure to take care of yourself too, alright?”

“Yeah,” Martin says, only half-listening.

“I mean it. Jon cares about you. He wouldn’t want you to run yourself into the ground on his behalf.”

Before Martin can respond, Jon jumps in his sleep again with a strangled gasp. Flinging one arm out, his hand brushes against Martin and seizes a fistful of his sleeve. Tightening his grip, he tugs on Martin’s arm to bring it closer, practically hugging it in a vice grip. Almost instantly Jon calms, tense muscles relaxing, pained expression going slack, a relieved sigh shuddering out of him as he nuzzles into the crook of Martin’s elbow.

Martin can feel his cheeks burning. He shoots a preemptive glower in Georgie’s direction, daring her to laugh – but she only smiles.

“Well, I’ll leave you to it,” she says, rising to her feet. “Text me when he’s awake, will you?”

“Y-y-yeah,” Martin stammers. “I’ll – I’ll see you later.”

He barely notices her departure, instead staring down at Jon with a vague sense of wonder. Jon holds fast to him like he’s a lifeline, and Martin can feel him breathing warm and steady through the fabric of his sleeve. The cold sweat on his brow seems to be evaporating now. Martin shifts his position to more fully face the cot. As he reaches up with his free hand to brush away the hair clinging to Jon’s forehead, a slow, shy smile begins to spread across Martin’s face.

It won’t be long before Jon succumbs to another fit of tossing and turning, but in the meantime, Martin simply watches him with faint awe and renewed affection. He’s never seen Jon look so at peace, and he takes the opportunity to memorize the sight.

When another shard of the Lonely shatters and crumbles away, Martin is too preoccupied to note its passing.

With a startled yelp, Jon sits bolt upright. Gulping down air in deep, ragged breaths, he looks wildly around the room, not taking anything in: it’s all visual noise, smudges of loud colors and sinister shadows, all of it closing in and bearing down on him.

Something next to him – close too close too close – moves abruptly, rising up and looming over and settling down beside him. Jon cringes away, only to find that his legs are pinned together by something, restricting his movement, and there’s dirt in his mouth, and dirt in his throat, and dirt in his lungs, and he cannot breathe, cannot breathe, cannot breathe, cannot breathe –

“Jon,” comes a voice – somehow both close and far away. “Listen, you’re – you’re okay, you’re safe.”

Trapped in that liminal twilight haze between sleep and waking, Jon gropes blindly for a handhold, an anchor, something real and solid and –

His hand collides with something soft, warm – wool, his mind supplies, and then:

…wool is able to absorb nearly one-third of its weight in water…

He shakes his head to chase away the stray scrap of trivia, digging his fingers into the fabric to ground himself.

“It was just a dream,” says the voice again – a kind voice, a safe voice – and Jon takes a shuddering breath, like a drowning man clawing for air.

Then a hand closes over his, and that light pressure is enough plunge Jon right back below the surface. He thrashes violently, desperate to break away from the throbbing litany of too close cannot move trapped held pinned in place screeching metal crushing in and down and down and down and Karolina beholds her encroaching fate with tranquil acceptance and the Archivist feels her skull crack and her chest cave in and her lungs collapse and still she smiles and she watches as the Archivist flails uselessly for an escape that does not will not cannot exist and the door bulges and splinters and explodes inward and the deluge rushes in and the Archivist is drowning, drowning, drowning –

The hand draws back, the pressure lifts, the train car finally collapses, and the last remnants of hazy sleep begin to disintegrate.

“S-sorry, I didn’t mean to – it’s – it’s just me, Jon.”

“Martin?” Jon chokes out, tightening his grasp on Martin’s jumper – wool, warm, soft, safe – still bunched in one hand. He reaches out his other arm to find a second handhold.

“Yeah. I – I won’t hurt you.”

Safe.

“I know,” Jon says groggily. The tension drains away and he sags against Martin’s side, breathing in slow, deliberate swallows. “’M sorry. Dream.”

The first time he’s slept, truly slept since leaving the hospital, and of course it had to be while Karolina Górka was dreaming. Of course.

“Do you… want to talk about it?”

“Buried,” Jon mumbles, face partially burrowed in Martin’s shoulder. Self-explanatory, he figures.

“Oh,” Martin says in a broken whisper. Jon opens one eye to see an expression of helpless pity on Martin’s face. “That’s…”

“’S okay,” Jon assures. “I’m okay.”

Reluctantly, he releases his hold on Martin and leans away. When he stretches – partly out of habit, partly to reassure himself that he can – there’s still something pinioning his legs. A spark of panic tears through him before he realizes that it’s just the sheets, tangled hopelessly around his lower half. With some difficulty, he manages to extricate himself and kick the blankets away.

“How long was I out?”

“Couple hours.”

“Have you just been sitting here the whole time?” Jon frowns apologetically. “You could’ve woken me.”

“Wake you when you were actually sleeping for once? Uh, no. How are you feeling?”

“Better,” Jon says simply. “I’d like to know how you’re doing.”

“I’m – fine,” Martin says. Jon raises an eyebrow. “Really, I – I am. I’m more worried about –”

“Me, I know. And I’m worried about you. I… don’t think you’re just ‘fine.’” Martin gives a noncommittal grunt. “I really would like to know where you are in all this. How you’re faring. How I can help.”

Martin remains silent, lips pressed tightly together as if to seal them.

“I know I was – distracted, earlier, but I… I really do want to help,” Jon tries again. “Please let me help?”

Something finally gives and Martin slouches with a sigh.

“I’m… still trying to figure it all out,” he says slowly. “I don’t know what I’m feeling most of the time, besides… worried, and…”

“Lonely.”

“Yeah,” Martin says with a wistful smile.

“You don’t have to be,” Jon says quietly.

“I know.”

“I’m not – I’m not trying to –” Jon sighs. “I just… I need you to know.”

“I know,” Martin says again.

Jon bites back the nagging impulse to ask all the questions itching on his tongue: Have you decided what to do about Peter? How Lonely are you now? Do you need closeness or distance? What should I be doing, or not doing? What can I do to take care of you? Where do we stand?

What do you see, when you look at me?

Jon looks away and shuts his eyes.

“I’m sorry you had to see me like that, by the way. It wasn’t my intention to frighten you. Or to…” He swallows, fighting back the nausea rising in him. “To compel you.”

“It’s alright –”

“It’s not,” Jon says brusquely. He makes a conscious effort to soften his tone before he continues. “I don’t want to be the thing that frightens you.”

“You’re not,” Martin says with a bemused frown. “I know you didn’t mean to use your powers on me.”

“You were afraid. I could…” Jon closes his eyes again and forces himself to say the words. “I could taste it.”

And the Archivist in him savored it.

“I wasn’t afraid of you, Jon. I was afraid for you. You looked terrified, and in pain, and you were hurting yourself, and I didn’t know how to help, and then I didn’t know if you were going to wake up, and… that’s what scared me.” Jon’s skepticism must show on his face, because there’s an intensity to the words when Martin reiterates: “Not you. Never you.”

“Never say never,” Jon says with a brittle, self-deprecating smile.

“I’m serious, Jon.”

So am I.

“I… I think we need to talk about where to go from here,” Martin says after a moment, averting his eyes.

“I agree.”

“You do?” Martin looks back to him, blinking in surprise.

“Yes,” Jon says, adjusting his position to sit cross-legged and pivoting to face Martin fully. “The others need to know what happened. I can’t be trusted not to hurt anyone –”

“No, that’s not what I –” Martin sighs. “I’m worried about what could happen if things get that bad again.”

“That’s what I’m saying. I came dangerously close to – to relapsing. We need some plan in place, some way to keep me contained so that I don’t –”

“Stop, stop, stop,” Martin says, holding up a hand. Jon tilts his head, bewildered. “I’m not – I’m not talking about keeping you contained, Jon. I’m worried about you. This goes beyond a compulsion you can beat with enough willpower. You were starving. You… you could have died.”

“We don’t know that.”

“Exactly! We don’t know, and I don’t want to find out.”

“Well, yes, but –”

“No ‘but.’ There has to be some way to keep you fed without hurting anyone. We just need to –”

“Martin, terror and suffering is the entire point. That’s what sustains it. Mine, my victim’s, doesn’t matter as long as it hurts.” Jon laughs, hollow and bitter. “It’s not like there’s an ethical way to – to harvest trauma –”

“We don’t know that for sure,” Martin says fiercely, “and I’m not ready to just give up. I would hope you aren’t, either.”

“I…” Jon busies himself with tucking a flyaway lock of hair behind his ear, using it as an excuse to break eye contact.

“Please, Jon.”

Martin takes his hand, prompting Jon to look up again. A familiar guilt rises up in him, shame at always being the one to put that expression of desperate worry on Martin’s face.

It’s enough to make him agree, albeit in a whisper, “Okay.”

“Right,” Martin says, giving Jon’s hand a brief squeeze. “Georgie and I were talking while you were asleep. She wants to be part of the discussion, so long as you’re alright with it.”

“Of course. We should probably tell Daisy and Basira as well.”

Martin appears to hesitate.

“I was thinking the three of us can meet first,” he says carefully, “and then we can open up the discussion after.”

“Why?” Jon observes the slight concavity that forms as Martin chews the inside of his cheek. “Martin?”

“Georgie’s worried about Basira’s reaction,” Martin says abruptly, “and honestly, so am I.”

“She needs to know.”

“I – I know, it’s just…”

“We have so few allies; we can’t afford secrecy and mistrust. And…”

And of all of them, Basira is the one Jon can trust to do what must be done if things go wrong. If he goes wrong.

“Basira is a strategist,” he says. “She’s good at viewing a problem from multiple angles, considering all the variables, predicting potential solutions and outcomes and then weighing them with a… pragmatic eye.”

“The pragmatism is what worries me.”

“I want her there,” Jon says simply.

“Okay,” Martin says, but Jon can tell he’s not thrilled about it. “What about Daisy?”

“Yes,” Jon says, not missing a beat. At that, Martin somehow manages to look even less thrilled.

“And Melanie?”

“I… I’m alright with her being there, but I don’t want her to feel pressured. She’s dealing with enough as it is.”

“Okay. I can let everyone know, but I think you should get some more rest before –”

“No.”

“Jon –”

“I need to confront this now. While I’m still… in my right mind,” Jon says, plucking absently at his sleeve with his free hand. “Sober.”

For a brief second, Martin looks ready to argue, but then he capitulates with a sigh.

“Okay,” he says, releasing Jon’s hand and standing up. “I’ll… round everyone up, I suppose.”

“Thank you,” Jon murmurs.

Martin glances back several times as he leaves the room. Jon waits until he’s out of sight before he puts his face in his hands, sighs, and tries to brace himself for a conversation he dreads almost as much as the Coffin.

A short time later, the group – minus Melanie – convenes in the tunnels, five chairs arranged in a loose circle with a sixth left empty off to the side. Sitting almost directly across from Jon, Basira watches him with eyes narrowed, arms folded, and mouth pressed into a firm line.

“What do you mean you ‘almost’ relapsed?”

“Martin suggested reading a new statement that came in earlier this evening,” Jon tells her in a straightforward near-monotone. Pushing through the discomfort it brings, he forces himself to meet her eyes when he speaks. “I agreed, without informing him that reading a fresh written statement has the same repercussions that taking a live statement in person does. I was going to feed, knowing that it would hurt an innocent person.”

“But you didn’t,” Martin says emphatically. “You stopped yourself.”

“Only because Helen pointed out the cognitive dissonance. Took a monster to remind me not to be a monster.” Jon scoffs. “Even then, I almost did it anyway.”

“But you didn’t,” Martin repeats.

“What about next time?” Basira asks, unimpressed. “When you get hungry again, what then?”

“That’s what we’re here to discuss,” Georgie says, assuming the role of mediator the moment she notices Martin’s scowl deepen. “We need to find some way to keep things from getting that bad in the first place.”

Thoroughly unnerved, Jon squirms in his seat. Basira has had him pinned under her stare for several minutes now, and she seems unlikely to cut him free any time soon. But what right does he have to object to scrutiny, given what he is?

“What did you do with the statement?” Basira demands. “The one you were going to read?”

“I… asked Martin to burn it.”

Her eyes flick to Martin. “And did you?”

“N-not yet –”

“Burn it. As soon as we’re done here.” She shifts her attention back to Jon. “Is there an alternative to new statements?”

Jon doesn’t miss a beat when he answers, matter-of-fact: “No.”

“Jon,” Martin and Georgie say simultaneously, with the tenor of a reprimand.

“I’m not – I’m not trying to be difficult,” he replies, finally breaking eye contact with Basira to look down at his hands. “It’s just… reality. I’m an Archive dedicated the curation of statements – of fear.”

“You never actually explained what that means,” Basira says. “You being the Archive.”

“It’s… hard to put into words.”

“Try.”

Jon sighs, taking a moment to collect his thoughts.

“The Archive is more than – paper and files and tapes. The reason it needs to be housed in a living mind rather than a mere building is because the statements themselves have a living quality to them.” He crosses his arms, brow furrowing as he struggles with his phrasing. “They need to be immersed in a steady supply of fear. A shelving unit, a filing cabinet, a hard drive, a cassette tape – those can’t provide the ideal habitat that they need to thrive. The Archivist is –”

“– simply a battery, a ready source of constant terror –”

He cuts the Archive off with a frustrated snarl, digging his fingernails into his arms.

“Hey,” Georgie says gently, “you’re alright. Take your time.”

Jon has to spend a few minutes counting breaths before he feels ready to try again.

“What I was –” He cuts himself off preemptively, half-expecting the Archive to intrude again. Once he realizes the words are his own, he clears his throat to recover from the false start. “What I was trying to say is – without a living consciousness to contextualize them, the statements are just… stories. When I consume a statement – read it, hear it, doesn’t matter – I See the events play out through the victim’s eyes. My lived experience of it is essential to the recording and preservation of the story. I need to be able to recall how it feels, not just summarize the major points of interest.” He sighs again. “And… that’s also the point of reliving the events in the nightmares. All of it is to keep the memory fresh. To keep the story – the fear – alive.”

When he looks up to see all four of them staring at him, he begins to rub his arms absently, increasingly self-conscious. He can feel the semicircle grooves leftover from where his fingernails cut into the skin.

“So… yeah,” he finishes awkwardly. “The Archive is defined by the statements and the fear that embodies them. The Beholding always hungers for more, and the Archive is a… a receptacle for all of its knowledge. The continual curation of new statements is what sustains it. Without that, it withers.”

“And dies?” Basira asks.

The question isn’t unkind, per se, simply businesslike: an eagerness to discover an answer heedless of whatever messy emotions it might elicit. Jon understands that impulse all too well. Not for the first time, he wonders whether Jonah had a secondary, hidden motive for recruiting Basira: a backup Archivist, in the event that his first choice be unable to endure the process.

“I still don’t know if it would physically kill me,” he replies, “but the hungrier I get, the more I forget myself. I’m liable to do things that I wouldn’t normally do, monstrous things.” He huffs. “And at the same time, giving in to that hunger will also make me more monstrous over time. It seems like… either way, I – I can’t avoid losing sight of… well, me. The human part of me. Whatever’s left of it.”

And wouldn’t losing himself be a death of sorts?

In a way, Daisy died the moment the Hunt recaptured her. What she became was her, undoubtedly, but only a small piece of her. The creature that Basira eventually killed… it was an echo of all the hated, feared parts of herself that Daisy had tried so hard to starve out. The rest of her – all the things that altogether made her Daisy – had long since been burned away.

If Jon didn’t manage to find a way out of that doomed future, he suspects that his ultimate fate may have been similar: all the fragile scraps of himself that still belonged to him, every sliver of personal identity, every shred of humanity crushed and buried beneath an ever-swelling ocean of dispassionate knowledge. The Archive would have carried on expanding and curating until, one day, it would have either collapsed under its own weight or simply run out of things to catalogue, then to waste away – but by then, it would have borne no resemblance to the original owner of its ravaged vessel.

Some endings play out in merciless increments. Jon has witnessed – has caused – more than his fair share of pointless, drawn out suffering. It would have been only fitting for his end to follow a similar path.

“Well, shit,” Basira mutters.

“What about statements given consensually?” Martin asks tentatively. “The one I gave you seemed to satisfy the Archive, or – or however you want to call it. And in the past when I’ve given you statements, they never gave me nightmares, so…”

“Anyone aligned with the Eye has a measure of protection from the Archivist,” Jon answers. “I was never privy to Tim’s or Sasha’s nightmares, either. Once Melanie and Basira started working here, their dreams were cut off from me as well. And… last time, Daisy ended up signing an employment contract after returning from the Buried. Same result.”

“Is it just the archival staff, or any Institute employee?” Basira asks.

“I… don’t know,” Jon says thoughtfully. “If I had to hazard a guess, I would say that it’s restricted to those most strongly connected with the Eye. Archival assistants, primarily. Possibly the research department, or at least those individuals who are the most… compatible with the Beholding, so to speak, though I’m not positive.”

Now that the question has been posed, Jon craves an answer.

“But – but experimenting isn’t worth the risk,” he says, mostly in an attempt to dissuade himself from pursuing the matter any further. He’s pleasantly surprised to hear the confidence in his own voice.

As if satisfied with that answer, Basira gives a tiny nod. Jon doubts it’s meant as a vote of confidence or as approval, but her posture does relax somewhat. He doubts that she trusts him by any stretch of the imagination, but for the moment she seems to have decided that he isn’t an imminent threat, at least.

It feels remarkably, disconcertingly like passing a test he didn’t realize was in progress.

Georgie’s eyes are fixed on the floor, her chin propped in her hand and a contemplative pout on her face. Martin has his lips pressed together, as if biting back an objection. Daisy is the only one looking directly at Jon. She hasn’t said a word since Jon gave his confession, but now her head cocked slightly to the side, as if she's weighing her words.

“I have a lot of stories from my Sectioned days,” she muses. “I could –”

“What would you say if I told you that you should go hunt a few monsters?” Jon says immediately.

“I…” Daisy stalls for a moment, and then gives a resigned sigh, understanding. “I would be worried that I wouldn’t be able to stop at a few,” she says grudgingly. Her shoulders slump as she adds, “Or at monsters.”

“Exactly.”

“But wouldn’t it be different?” she asks, perking up again. “The prey doesn’t consent to the hunt. The fear is taken, not freely given. But a statement – that can be consensual.”

“The Hunt cares about the terror of the prey in the moment. The Eye cares about the terror of the victim in the retelling. The consent aspect is only relevant in terms of whether and how it influences the fear. The fear is all they care about, and I doubt anything benign can come of consuming the fear our patrons want, consensual or no.”

“Do you remember what I said about harm reduction?” Georgie has been sitting quietly with her thoughts for so long, Jon startles at the sound of her voice when she rejoins the conversation. “We need to keep you from getting so hungry that it changes who you are, and new statements are the only way to satisfy that hunger. Correct?”

“Well, yes, but –”

“No ‘but.’ According to you, right now your options are statements or starvation.”

Struck with a fleeting impulse for petulance, Jon has to swallow a biting retort. It’s an old habit, hackles rising at having his own words turned against him – something for which Georgie has always had an aptitude. Between an impressive memory, an analytical nature, and a tolerance for confrontation, she’s never been shy to speculate on what’s really going on in Jon’s head at any given moment. That ability to dissect his motivations and insecurities and cognitive distortions – it used to feel like being flayed alive, all the vulnerable bits of him exposed and shoved under a spotlight.

It’s probably fair to say that his inability to weather that level of scrutiny was a big factor contributing to their eventual breakup: his guarded nature was incompatible with her more straightforward approach to relationships.

“I realize it’s not ideal,” she’s saying now, “but taking statements given with informed consent seems like the most ethical choice.”

“It isn’t just unideal, it’s – it’s –” Jon puts one hand over his eyes, rubbing his forehead and fighting back the urge to shout. “This isn’t a solution.”

It’s still feeding the Eye. It’s still capitalizing on other people’s trauma. And the stories Daisy has to offer… Jon has to wonder how many of them feature Daisy as a victim or a bystander, and whether those outnumber the ones where she herself is the object of fear. He’s taken statements from Avatars before. Some of them were indeed stories of experiencing fear firsthand. Others, though… the fear threaded through the statement came not from the teller, but from their victims.

Jon isn’t keen on siphoning off the secondhand terror of Daisy’s prey. Maybe he can’t afford to be picky, but if there’s one thing he’s learned, it’s that lines have to be drawn somewhere.

“We can keep looking for a better alternative,” Georgie says, “but for now… think of it as a stopgap measure.” Sensing Jon’s continued aversion to the idea, she continues: “If your own wellbeing isn’t enough to convince you, consider how you starving would affect other people.”

“It might make me more dangerous,” Jon says quietly.

“I mean – maybe, I guess? But that’s not what I meant.” At Jon’s blank expression, Georgie sighs. “When you suffer, it hurts more than just you. You have people who care about you. They’re sitting with you right now.”

“Still, I – I can’t ask that of –”

“Oh, come off it, Sims,” Daisy says, rolling her eyes. “You crawled into hell to drag me out when all I’d done was treat you like prey. And even after seeing what it was like, you went back in and brought me back a second time.”

“Yes, but –”

“If I sign a contract to work in the archives, it’ll stop you showing up in my dreams, right?”

“Yes. I’m – I’m sorry, again, about –”

“And it’ll keep new nightmares from cropping up if I give you more statements?”

“Well, yes –”

“Then what’s the problem?”

Jon opens and closes his mouth soundlessly several times.

“I – I – I don’t want you to sign yourself over to the Beholding just so I can – treat your memories like a – like a snack” – Jon flings one arm out in a sweeping gesture, supplementing the disgust with which he says the word – “without facing any consequences!”

He looks around at the others, arm still outstretched in the air, waiting for someone to back him up on this. When no one does, he huffs a bewildered chuckle and withdraws his arm to comb his fingers through his hair instead. Why is he the only one making a fuss about this? He thought he could count on Basira at least to raise an objection, but she’s just staring off to the side, apparently lost in thought.

“I was already considering signing a contract anyway,” Daisy says. “Basira said you had a theory that the Slaughter’s effects on Melanie were slowed by her connection to the Eye, yeah?”

“Yes,” he admits cautiously.

“We were thinking – maybe it’ll do the same for me with the Hunt.”

“Did it help last time?” Basira cuts in, as if she’d never tapped out of the discussion.

“I’m not positive,” Jon hedges. “It was a theory we’d considered, yes, but it’s not like we had much of a sample size to test that hypothesis.”

He wishes he’d thought to ask these kinds of questions after the world ended, when he actually had a chance of getting the answers. In his defense, he had a lot on his mind – and it’s not like he considered the possibility of coming back in time to actually make use of that information.

“And it didn’t entirely silence the call of the Hunt,” he adds, looking back to Daisy. “You still deteriorated the longer you refused to answer it.”

“Hm.” Basira’s contemplative expression returns as she withdraws to commune with her own thoughts again.

“Well, it’s not like I’m going anywhere anyway,” Daisy says with a shrug. “Basira’s trapped here. So are you. And I don’t think I can be trusted to leave here without giving in to the Hunt again. I have nothing to lose by signing a contract, and…”

Her eyes gravitate towards Jon’s throat. Mechanically, he reaches up to adjust the scarf around his neck, to ensure the scar there is covered. At the guilty expression on Daisy’s face, Jon has to look away.

“If it can help,” Daisy continues, “then I think telling some stories is the absolute least I can do after… everything.”

“How many do you have, do you think?” Georgie asks, once again settling into problem-solving mode.

“Don’t know. Several. A couple dozen? Maybe more, depending on how far we can stretch the definition of a statement.”

“I have a handful as well,” Basira says, her tone wholly unreadable. “Not many, but… a few of the things that happened while you were dead should count as statements, I think.”

“I – I couldn’t ask you to –”

“I’m not offering; I’m just inventorying all the options on the table,” Basira says with an air of finality.

Curiously, Martin seems to tense at Basira’s words, shifting restively in his seat and looking askance at her.

“How much time does that buy us, do you think?” he asks, throwing brief, surreptitious glances in Basira’s direction. “How long would a few dozen statements last you?”

“I… I don’t know,” Jon says, still altogether uncomfortable with the idea. “If I ration myself, then – a while, hopefully? Hypothetically? But…”

He’s loathe to elaborate, but when did keeping secrets and denying reality ever help?

“Last time, it kept getting progressively worse. I needed to feed more and more frequently in order to stave off the hunger. The side effects of abstaining grew more severe. I want to hope that it will be different this time. Maybe giving in to the hunger in the first place only encouraged the Archivist’s… evolution. Whet my appetite. It’s possible that refraining from hunting will… I don’t know, slow the process? Maybe? B-but at the same time…”

He trails off, lips parted, unable to say the words.

“Jon?” Martin prompts gently.

“It’s… I’m sorry, but I – I have trouble being optimistic about it. Coming back didn’t… it didn’t reset the Archivist’s progress. I’m the product of what I’ve done up to this point, even if I’m the only one who remembers any of it. I still have all the marks. And… the Archive fledged and thrived in the apocalypse.”

“Meaning?” Basira leans forward, watching him intently.

“The Archive is accustomed to a feast, not a famine. Millions of statements filtering through every moment without pause. Even when humanity started dying off – when there was less and less fear to go around, when even the monsters started to decay in that place – the Archive was still sated, because I could See everything. No matter how few and far between those pockets of terror became, as long as fear was being suffered somewhere, the Archive had a steady source of sustenance.”

It wouldn’t have lasted forever, of course. Everything has an ending. But that had still been a ways off when Jon left that place.

“I probably would have been one of the last things standing, by the end,” he says softly.

“And you think the hunger will be worse this time because you aren’t used to being hungry,” Basira says.

“More or less,” Jon mumbles, shamefaced. “Coming back to the past, to now… there was no transition between plenty and want. I – the Archive – was just… dropped into a – a habitat it was never adapted to survive in. It’s like a… like a non-native species, as far as this reality is concerned. Like taking a fish out of water and expecting it to evolve lungs on the spot.”

“Hm.” Basira cups her chin in one hand, running a thumb slowly over her lips as she thinks.

“I plan to ration myself as strictly as possible, of course. I just want to establish the possibility that things might – escalate, at some point.”

“If it comes to that, we can deal with it then,” Georgie says. “In the meantime, we should just…”

“Take things one crisis at a time?” Jon tries to temper his bitterness with a weak smile, without much success.

“I mean, yeah, basically,” Georgie says. “But in order for this to work, you need to be honest with us.”

“I – I am, I –”

“I’m not accusing you of lying, Jon. I just mean… well, you have a long history of ignoring your own limitations, and –”

“You’re not good at taking care of yourself,” Martin interjects. His cheeks go pink and he tosses an apologetic glance in Georgie’s direction. “S-sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“No worries,” Georgie says. Martin looks uncertain until she grins and, still making eye contact with him, jerks her chin in Jon’s direction. “By all means, go on.”

Emboldened, Martin turns his attention back to Jon, who meets his eyes with no small amount of apprehension. If Martin is intent on compiling a laundry list of examples of Jon’s poor self-care – and judging from that worryingly familiar look on his face, he is – then he has ample material to choose from. Jon barely has time to brace himself before Martin launches into his lecture.

“You used to forget to eat. You never took lunch unless I hassled you. I had to nag you to go home at night.” He’s counting off on his fingers now, Jon notes with dismay. “You went through most days fueled by a maximum of four hours of sleep and frankly alarming amounts of caffeine. You insisted on coming back to work, against medical advice, immediately after almost being eaten alive by worms.”

Jon opens his mouth to speak – and promptly shuts it again when Martin gives him what Jon can (with equal amounts of affection and dread) only refer to as that look.

“You could barely walk. I had to threaten to forcibly remove you from the building before you agreed to go home. You spent the next several weeks sneaking – hell, limping around down here” – Martin makes a sweeping gesture with his arm – “where we found your predecessor’s murdered body, and –”

“Yes, yes, okay,” Jon interrupts, hands flapping anxiously. “I get your point.”

“I also had to threaten to withhold the Admiral from you in order to get you to go to the clinic to have your third-degree burn treated,” Georgie chimes back in. Jon glares at her; she looks far too entertained by the proceedings.

“I was – I was on the lam,” he protests. “I couldn’t exactly go waltzing about in public.”

“But you were perfectly willing to go chasing down Avatars, apparently.”

“I…”

“Oh,” she adds, “and today was the first time you actually slept since you woke up from a coma.”

“I was asleep for six months,” Jon mutters, arms crossed, bouncing one heel against the floor. “I think that more than makes up for –”

“You tried to pass off a stab wound that required five – five!” – Martin holds up five fingers for added (and unnecessary, in Jon’s opinion) emphasis – “stitches as an accident with a – with a bread knife.”

Somehow, Martin manages to sound as indignant now as he did on the day it happened.

“That was several lifetimes ago,” Jon says primly. “At some point you have to let me live it down.”

“It hasn’t even been two years!”

“Seriously, Jon?” Daisy, who has been hiding a smirk behind her hand throughout the entire exchange, finally fails to contain her stifled laughter. “A bread knife?”

“I – I panicked,” Jon says weakly, cheeks burning. “Martin cornered me in the breakroom and it was the first thing I saw, and I just –”

Martin starts in again. “You were actively exsanguinating –”

“Th-that – that’s an exaggeration,” Jon sputters, watching Georgie out of the corner of his eye to gauge her reaction. She’s shaking her head with a faint smile, and Jon… well, Jon supposes that playful scorn is preferable to actual scorn.

“– and you refused to let me take you to the clinic until I threatened to call an ambulance,” Martin finishes.

“I was –” Jon twists a lock of hair around his fingers as he scrambles for some way to save face. “I would have been –”

“I think it’s safe to say you have no sense of self-preservation,” Basira says, and even she has a hint of amusement in her tone now.

“They have a point, Sims.”

“Et tu, Daisy?” Jon says, hoping to garner a laugh – or, failing that, at least halt the relentless bombardment of admonishments. Daisy simply raises her eyebrows and folds her arms, unmoved.

“Do I need to revisit some of the things we discussed in the Coffin?”

“No,” he says sullenly. When no one else speaks, he continues, somewhat irately: “Are we quite finished with the roast session?”

“For now,” Georgie says. “The point is, don’t run yourself into the ground just to test the limits of what you can endure.”

“And don’t let rationing statements turn into just another way to punish yourself,” Martin says sternly. Then he bites his lip, speaking gently now: “You… you deserve better than that.”

I really, really don’t, Jon thinks. Having no desire to unleash another lecture, though, he keeps the contrary comment to himself.

“Besides, letting yourself get that bad probably makes things worse in the long run,” Georgie says. “Like walking on a sprained ankle. Maybe you can endure the pain, but the longer you ignore it, the more likely you are to cause even more damage, and recovery takes longer than it would have if you’d just attended to it in the first place.”

“Speaking from personal experience, are we?” Jon allows a hint of retaliatory smugness slip into his voice.

“Yes,” Georgie says, rolling her eyes. “That ankle is still weak. Which is why you should listen to me. Just… try to care about yourself even a fraction of how much others care about you, alright?

Jon sighs. “Point taken.”

“You can trust us,” Martin says.

“I – I know that. I do trust you. I’m just…” Afraid. “I don’t want you to –”

“– mark me out as something other –”

“– getting used to people making polite excuses not to look at me –”

“– it wears you down to be someone whom nobody wants to see – I called out again and again but nobody came –”

Frantic, he covers his mouth with his hand to halt the recitation; the words continue to pour forth undeterred, albeit muffled and likely – hopefully – too indistinct for the others to understand.

“– I remember shouting, recriminations, and I was abandoned –”

“– no one to blame but my own stupid self – blundering in where I had no right to go –”

A flash flood of restless energy breaks through the dam and then it’s racing through his veins, filling his mouth and his mind with white noise. He kicks one foot out and brings it stomping back down to the ground in a burst of sheer infuriation and near-panic. A crawling sensation travels up and down the length of his spine, a parade of feather-light pinpricks reminiscent of thousands of scuttling spider legs.

The slight whimper that works its way up his throat is thankfully stifled by the hand still pressed to his lips.

“Breathe through it,” Basira tells him.

Irritation flares to life at the reminder, but Jon forcibly snuffs it out before the spark can catch. Basira is only trying to help – and in a way she knows has helped before.

He breathes.

A frustrated noise – something between a snarl and a whine – spills out on his exhale, and he presses another hand atop the first as if it can render him entirely soundless. Before another wave of self-directed fury can take him, Jon coaxes himself to take another breath in through his nose. And another. And another, counting up until the pressure behind his eyes lets up and the static clears from his thoughts – at which point, he’s forced to confront the four pairs of eyes playing patient audience to his outburst.

Like a toddler’s tantrum, he thinks acidly, burning with humiliation.

“Sorry.” Although the scathing edge to the word is reserved solely for himself, he takes another breath before speaking again, lest the others assume the ire is directed at them. “Sorry. I’ll try to control it better.”

“It’s fine, Jon,” Martin says. “We know you aren’t doing it on purpose.”

“Anyway,” Basira says, her peremptory tone indicating a return to the subject at hand, “can we all agree that this is the best strategy for now?”

Jon looks down, tracing the weave of his scarf, focusing wholly on the texture of fabric against fingertips in a vain attempt to distract from the pins and needles still skittering across his skin. It takes a moment before he registers the silence. When he looks up, the others are staring at him. Basira raises an eyebrow, clearly waiting for his response.

“Even if I do agree to this,” Jon says warily, “I still – I know it’s a lot to ask, but I still need to be monitored for any signs of…” Although the question is meant for all of them, Jon shifts his gaze to make direct eye contact with Basira as he asks it. “Can you let me know, truthfully, if I – if it looks like I might… if you think I’m a danger?”

“Jon,” Martin sighs, “you’re not –”

“Yes,” Basira says decisively.

Martin glares at her, his mouth falling open with a combination of shock and protective outrage. Jon recognizes that expression, and he jumps in before Martin can get a word out.

“Thank you, Basira.”

Now Jon is the target of Martin’s glower. He looks offended, betrayed almost, as if Jon took Basira’s side in a dispute between the two of them. Again, though, Martin doesn’t get the chance to scold.

“Alright then,” Daisy says, stretching. “It’s settled. You” – her eyes swivel to Jon, their piercing intensity prompting him to sit up at attention – “come to me when you’re hungry.”

“Before you cross the boundary into ‘starving,’” Martin says, carving out an opportunity to chastise despite the interruption.

“Consider me a vending machine of horror stories,” Daisy quips.

Jon grimaces and rubs the back of his neck. “Do you have to describe it that way?”

“Oh, quit grousing.” With a flash of teeth, a wolfish grin spreads across her face. “What, would you prefer I write up a menu?”

Her expression turns solemn when Jon winces and looks away.

“Sore nerve?” she asks, suddenly and uncharacteristically delicate.

“Are you sure you’re okay with this?” The question is nearly inaudible, Jon’s eyes fixed on the floor.

“I wouldn’t have offered if I wasn’t.”

Fearing his voice might crack if he tries to speak, Jon bites down on his lip and tucks his chin to his chest, letting his hair fall to hide the others from view. He shuts his eyes for good measure and swallows hard, determined to head off the tears threatening to gather.

“Hey.” Daisy stretches out a leg and kicks his foot gently. It’s enough to make him raise his head cautiously. “I was just teasing. Really.”

“I –” It comes out as a croak. Jon clears his throat and blinks several times to dispel the stinging pressure in the corners of his eyes. “I know.”

“It is… so weird to see you two like this,” Basira says with an air of baffled wonder.

Jon notices Martin fidgeting restively out of the corner of his eye. When he looks directly at him, he sees Martin glaring at Daisy with a mixture of worry, suspicion, and resentment.

It isn’t surprising; he never really did forgive Daisy for what she did to Jon. Neither did Jon, for that matter, but… Daisy was so changed after the Buried, it was difficult to see her as the same person who dragged him into the woods. She was, undoubtedly – she was the first to admit that – but she was remorseful and wholly dedicated to changing her behavior, even knowing it might well kill her. She never asked for forgiveness, never denied the harm she’d caused, never tried to justify or shirk responsibility for her actions.

What she later became… there was nothing left of the Daisy who he’d come to see as a friend. For that Daisy, being reclaimed by the Hunt was a fate worse than death. Worse than the Coffin, even. She would have preferred to die as herself, and on her own terms – and the Hunt stole even that ounce of humanity from her. It made her forget that she didn't want to be a Hunter.

Jon dreads watching her waste away again, but not nearly as much as he fears the Hunt devouring her whole.

“People change,” he says, looking from Martin to Basira, hoping those two words can convey all the things he cannot say. They both look unconvinced, albeit in slightly different ways.

The silence drags on uncomfortably long until Georgie claps her hands on her knees.

“You never answered the question, Jon. Are you alright taking statements from Daisy? At least until we can find a better solution?”

“I…”

He glances around the circle, looking at each face in turn, trying to discern their opinions on the matter. Daisy gives him a reassuring nod. Martin has an almost pleading expression on his face, worrying his bottom lip between his teeth and wringing his hands in his lap.

Basira is… entirely inscrutable, much to Jon’s dismay. He didn’t expect otherwise, but he still wishes he could get a read on her, determine exactly how she categorizes him now. Probably not as a trustworthy ally. At best, perhaps she sees him as human enough to be suffered to live, but on thin ice and under probation. At worst, she sees him as an irredeemable monster and is simply keeping her opinion to herself for the time being.

Or – no, the worst might be what he was to her last time. She saw him as a monster, yes, and was fully prepared to put him down – like a rabid animal, he thought when confronted with that wording – if he became too much of a danger. It was comforting to know that Basira wouldn’t let sentiment get in the way if he had to be stopped. Less comforting was how she saw him as an asset: a dangerous tool to be used and then locked away once he’d fulfilled his purpose.

Granted, he gave Basira permission to use him – asked her to, in fact. It would be unfair to resent her for taking him up on an offer that he himself put on the table. If his powers could be used to help for once, he was fully willing to sacrifice his humanity to do so. After all, he was already too far gone, he figured – and everyone else seemed to agree.

Georgie certainly seemed to think so. Melanie told him outright that he came back wrong. He had likewise interpreted Martin’s avoidance as a comment on his having changed for the worst, at least initially. And he knew from the moment he woke up that Basira saw him as something other, as something more akin to the monsters they were fighting rather than an ally. He understood why they all felt that way, agreed with their assessments even, but it was soul-crushing nonetheless.

But even if he couldn’t have – didn’t deserve – trust or companionship, he still needed a reason, something to justify choosing not to die. If being wanted wasn’t an option, the least he could do is avoid being a burden. An annoyance. If approval wasn’t on the table, at least he could convince people that he was worth keeping around. And hadn’t that approach always been second nature to him? In a way, he didn’t tend to seek affection so much as try to avoid rejection.

Ultimately, though, pursuing that strategy started to feel sickeningly familiar. It wasn’t until much later that he realized why: between Jonah and the Beholding – and in all likelihood the Web as well – he’d grown accustomed to being seen as a means to an end, and that made it all the more difficult to see himself as a who rather than as a what. It’s a distinction he still struggles with – particularly during those times when the Archive makes its presence known.

He might not have much right to ask for trust or approval, but that doesn’t change the fact that he craves it – perhaps from Basira most of all. If even her opinion of him can change… well, it would go a long way in helping him to believe that he really does have a chance.

“Jon,” Basira says, snapping him back to attention.

Shit. How long has he been staring?

“We need an answer,” she continues.

Jon can’t help but wonder if this is another test. If he agrees, will she see it as further proof of his inhumanity, as evidence that he isn’t trying to resist? If he refuses, will it make her suspicious, lead her to believe he plans on going hunting instead? He’s never been skilled at reading between the lines, at interpreting social cues, at deconstructing the unspoken. The best he can do is ask questions and guess blindly as to the right way to respond – and agonize over the repercussions should he get it wrong. Basira has a way of making that already difficult process even more intimidating.

“Jon,” Basira repeats herself, growing impatient now.

“O-okay,” he says quietly. “It’s… worth a try, I suppose.”

She gives a curt nod. As always, it gives him no insight into her thoughts. He has no time resume brooding, though, as Martin draws his attention with an audible sigh of relief. When Jon glances at him, Martin graces him with a smile – small, almost shy, but genuine. Jon tries and fails to mirror it.

Apparently finished with Jon for the moment, Basira turns her attention to Daisy.

“Come on,” she says, rising to her feet and tapping Daisy on the shoulder. “It’s time for your exercises.”

Obediently, Daisy starts to stand, only for her knees to buckle beneath her. Basira is there to catch her.

“Been sitting too long,” Daisy grunts, embarrassment coloring her cheeks.

“Can you manage the ladder?” Daisy shakes her head, flushing darker. “That’s fine,” Basira says, though Jon thinks he can detect a hint of fear – maybe even melancholy – in her tone now. “Let’s just… walk for now. Wake your legs up.”

The two of them start off down the tunnel, Basira supporting half of Daisy’s weight as she staggers forward.

“Jon?” Georgie says softly.

“Hm.”

“Try to cut yourself some slack, yeah?”

Jon really can’t afford to do that, but saying so will only start them talking in circles again. Martin leans closer and places a hand on Jon’s knee.

“Hey,” he says, looking Jon in the eye with overwhelming sincerity. “We’ve got this, alright?”

“Alright,” Jon responds, and wills himself to believe it.

The three of them exit the tunnel in silence. It isn’t until Jon hoists himself through the trapdoor – Martin assisting in pulling him to his feet – that one of them speaks.

“Oh,” Georgie says, looking at Jon, “by the way…”

“Yes?” Jon says, apprehensive.

“Melanie asked me to tell you that she’s ready to talk, whenever you are.”

“O-oh.”

“I know it's not a great time –”

“No, I – I think I…” Jon nods. “I think I’m ready, too.”

“It doesn’t have to be tonight,” Georgie says hurriedly.

“I really am okay to –”

Martin looks ready to object, but Georgie gets there first.

“Okay, correction: it won’t be tonight,” she interrupts, fixing him with a stern look now. “You’ve had hardly any rest since coming out of the Coffin. I think you should get some actual sleep tonight. If – if – you’re feeling up to it tomorrow, we can arrange something then.”

“Fine,” Jon sighs. He knows better than to argue with the combined tenacity of Georgie and Martin.

And he has to admit, he is rather tired.

A little over a half-hour later, Martin and Jon are back in Document Storage.

When he suggests Jon go to bed, Martin is prepared for a protracted argument. Jon acquiesces surprisingly quickly, though, his only condition being that Martin get some sleep as well. It takes slightly longer to convince Jon to take the cot. Martin pulls up a chair and sits at the bedside, refusing to budge as Jon makes his counterarguments. Eventually, though, Jon starts nodding off mid-protest. It’s only a matter of time before he begrudgingly gives in – but not before demanding that Martin take the better blanket. With an amused shake of his head, Martin agrees to the compromise.

Jon slips between the sheets, Martin leans back in his chair, and for a long moment the two of them watch each other in silence. Jon’s hand rests near the pillow, fingers crooked loosely, palm turned up like an invitation. Martin has the sudden urge to reach out and take it.

Another minute passes before Martin realizes that… well, that’s a thing he can do now, isn’t it? What’s stopping him?

Slowly, tentatively, he extends his hand, lets it hover uncertainly above Jon’s, fingertips barely brushing. He applies the slightest pressure, giving Jon every opportunity to pull back. He doesn’t. Jon interlocks their fingers, curling them over in a firm grasp, and peers up at Martin through his lashes with mingled uncertainty and hope.

“Is this okay?” Martin asks quietly.

As answer, Jon lets out a contented sigh, eyelids fluttering closed as a sleepy smile spreads across his face.

“'Course,” he mumbles, already drifting off. “Always will.”

Martin will follow not long after, slumping precariously to the side, head lolling onto his shoulder, and hand still held fast in a warm, sure grip. It’s a posture that will undoubtedly leave him sore by the time he wakes up, but that discomfort will be overshadowed by the way he feels in these shared, quiet moments: seen, accepted, wanted, embraced.

Anchored, he thinks – and for the first time in months, no thoughts of Loneliness shadow him as he falls to sleep.

End Notes:

Jon: *feels safe for the first time in a literally unmeasurable amount of time and promptly passes right back tf out* Martin: oh no he’s cute

Jon's gotten a SNACK and a NAP now. I hope you're all happy. :P  (Just kidding. Every time someone tells me to let Jon have a nap, I am also @ing myself - and Jonny Sims - with the exact same demand.)

(On that note, I find it funny that as I was writing this chapter and finally giving Jon the nap he deserves, he was ALSO finally getting the nap he deserves in canon.)

Citations for Jon’s Archive-speak are as follows: MAG 135; 130/067/066; 032/037.

Next chapter: Melanie gets some actual screentime again!!

[katehuntington]

Title: Ride With Me (part six) Fandom: Supernatural AU Characters series: Reader, Dean Winchester, Bobby Singer, Ellen Singer-Harvelle, Jo Singer (Harvelle), Benny Lafitte, Ash Miles, Garth Fitzgerald IV, Castiel Novek, and many more. Timeline: 2008 Pairing: Dean x Reader (eventually) Word count: ±1900 words Summary series: Y/N is a talented horse rider who is on her way to become a professional. In order to convince her father that she deserves the loan needed to start her own farm, she goes to Arizona for six months, to intern at a ranch owned by Bobby and Ellen Singer. Her future is set out, but then she meets a handsome horseman, who goes by the name of Dean Winchester. A heartwarming series about a cowboy who falls for the girl, letting go of the past and the importance of family.  Summary part six: Y/N is getting lost in the feelings that she’s developing for Dean, and it doesn’t take long before Jo takes notice. Warnings series: NSFW, 18+ only! Fluff, angst, eventually smut. Swearing, smoking, alcohol intoxication, alcohol abuse. Mutual pining, heartbreak. Crying, nightmares, childhood trauma. Description of animal abuse, domestic violence, mentions of addiction. Financial problems, stress, mental breakdown. Description of blood and injury, hospital scenes, character death, grief. Music: Check out ‘Kate Huntington’s Ride With Me playlist’ on Spotify! Author’s note: Thank you @kittenofdoomage and @girl-with-a-fandom-fettish for helping me. You girls are awesome betas.

Ride With Me Masterlist

     Okay, maybe the tequila last night wasn’t such a good idea. Neither was that margarita the previous night, or the drinking game the night before that one. Or was it the other way around? Y/N cannot seem to recall, but today is Friday, so at least tomorrow she can sleep her way through the headache. Never ever did she drink as much as she did this week. Normally that would bother her, especially considering she’s not here on Spring break. But when the drinks are offered in a time when she needs a little something to stop thinking about that damned Dean Winchester, she couldn't care less about the increase of alcohol consumption.

     She found the balance quite quickly, too. Intoxicated enough to let go of the complexity that comes with growing fondness of the head wrangler, but sober enough to stop herself from doing anything stupid. The consequence is, however, that on this morning ride, her brain feels like it’s trying to expand beyond the size of her head. Thank God her stomach isn't acting up, because Joplin is trotting under her nervously. Seems like Y/N is having trouble finding the ‘walk’ button this early. The hot-blooded mare fails to respond when her rider asks her to slow down by saying ‘ho’ with a calm voice, but when Y/N breathes out, relaxes her legs, and shifts deeper in the saddle only by a fraction of an inch, the black horse transitions to walk.

     “Good girl,” Y/N compliments her.

     Three days without riding were more than she could handle. Meadow needed some time to recover from the long journey and to get used to her new home, but Y/N needed to restrain herself from climbing on the mare’s back anyway. She imagined this was a glimpse of what it would be like to kick an addiction cold turkey, going into withdrawal from the lack of her drug. As if not being able to train her own horse wasn't enough, it took another extra day before Y/N got onto any horse at all. It wasn't until yesterday morning that the supervisor decided that she deserved a shot at proving herself as a wrangler. She had to earn that by mucking, shit scooping, cleaning tack, and turning horses in and out. Which she gets, of course. Dean and Bobby wanted to see what she is made of before they let her ride one of their animals. But boy, was she frustrated. She even got to the point that Garth almost caught her muttering a promise to herself that if she had to clean up some horse’s massive dump one more time without a reward, she would be out of here.

     Yesterday she finally got to accompany a few guests on a trail. It was amazing to feel the horse move under the saddle again, the experience of the communication that she established within a second, and how the perfect fit on his back felt like home. Apparently, she did well, because on this morning ride, she is allowed to come along too.

     Content, she looks ahead at the large group of inexperienced riders, who find their way down the hill with some difficulty. The respect Y/N holds for the trail horses has grown, because their patience and ability to keep their clumsy passengers in the saddle hasn't ceased to amaze her. Bruce, a draft horse mix, has halted several times already, waiting motionless until his overweight German load has pulled himself back into the saddle after slowly tipping to one side. It's quite entertaining to watch.

     As she smiles at what’s playing out in front of her, the sound of hoofsteps close by on the rocky surface reaches her hearing. When she glances over her shoulder, a beautiful buckskin is just about to transition to an easy walk after catching up. Her eyes glide up until they meet his rider.

     “So, how are you this morning?” Dean wonders, a playful smile on his face.      It takes a short moment for her to answer, taken aback by her body’s response to the sight of the wrangler. A whirlwind starts to twist in her stomach, yet the headache suddenly doesn't seem as tormenting as it was a minute ago.      “I'm okay,” she claims.      He grins. “Sure about that? You had quite a few drinks last night.”      “I can handle myself,” she returns defensively, narrowing her eyes at him a little.      “Oh, I’m sure you can.”

     He chuckles, the warm and low sound rumbling deep in his throat triggering Y/N to peek at him from the corner of her eye. Was that a nervousness she detected? Did she just make him uneasy? He looks down, his lips drawn in a small smile. The sun from the east outlines the sharp lines of his jaw, edged by a scruff; apparently he didn't take the time to shave this morning. Boy, is she glad he didn’t.

     “Okay, I'll admit,” she says, trying to take away his insecurities. “My stomach might be a little… unsettled.”      Y/N isn’t lying, although alcohol has nothing to do with the butterflies that came to life inside of her. He doesn't know that, thankfully, yet he keeps a hold of his intern’s gaze for a little while longer, reading her. As if Dean’s horse wants to help love a little, the Quarter sways closer to her horse Joplin, the two of them now riding stirrup to stirrup. His knee slightly brushes against hers every other step and despite that it's barely a touch, she’s highly aware of the physical contact.

     “Don't throw up on your horse if you want to leave a good impression with me. Believe me, it ain't pretty,” Dean half jokes, half flirts.      She throws her head back in a laugh. “Don't worry, I won't. But please don't tell me you have seen that happen.”      “More than once, I'm afraid,” he remembers, turning in his saddle to face his younger cousin. “Ey, Jo?”      The blonde cowgirl, who is about thirty yards behind them, throws him a confused look, since she hasn't picked up a word of their conversation. Puzzled, she watches, inducing the riders further up to laughter.      “No way!” Y/N cries out.      “I ain’t kiddin’,” Dean sniggers. “I'll save that story for another time. Y’know, when your stomach isn't ‘unsettled’ by the same tequila that started Jo’s tale.”

     He spurs his horse, who canters forward to meet the group of guests up ahead. She observes Dean as the morning sun portrays the cowboy and his horse in a romantic light. Out here, away from the city, the Arizona landscape would have anyone believe that they traveled back to the time, when the Wild West was still the real deal. Cacti surround them, peculiar mountain peaks shaped by ten thousand years of wind erosion obstruct the far edge of the world. And in this perfect portrait rides a handsome cowboy, one with his horse, clouds of dust in their wake. An amused smile allows a glimpse of Y/N’s true feelings to shine through. There it is again, that tingly sensation in her belly. Sure, Dean. Blame it on the tequila, she thinks to yourself.

     “What the hell was that?”      Now that Dean left his spot next to her, Jo has caught up, gently pulling the reins as she sits back to bring her horse’s pace down.      Feeling caught, Y/N looks at her, brought off balance by the spite in the cowgirl’s voice. “What do you mean?”      “Oh, c’mon, Yankee. I wasn’t born yesterday, and neither were you. You just completed your master in business, don't act like you're stupid,” Jo counters. “You and Dean, what’s going on?”      The cowgirl eyes her in shock, her jaw dropping unpleasantly surprised. Was it really that obvious? How is she going to talk herself out of this one?      “I - I don't--” she stutters, blood rushing to her face. “There - there's nothing--”      She’s not sure if it’s her shameful expression or the fact that she lost her tongue, but Jo knows enough. She closes her eyes and sighs deeply.      “Y/N…” her friend starts, a mixture of disappointment and pity present in her voice. “Please don't go down that road. He will hurt you so bad you're gonna wish you never gone on that flight that got you here.”      Now the intern sighs too. Denying will not do her any good. Jo is smart enough to see right through it.      “Listen, I really like having you around. You're good company, you're a hard worker, you're great with the horses, and I don’t wanna lose my sis,” the ranch owner’s daughter says genuinely. “I would hate to see you leave because of my heartbreaker of a cousin. I've seen this play out so many times already, don't walk into that trap.”      “I think that ship has sailed,” her friend admits out loud.

     The words startle the woman who speaks them just as much as they stun Jo; she didn't intend to share that with her new friend already. But now that the comment is hovering between them without a way to take it back, a part of her is glad it’s out there. Dean has been about the only thing on her mind since she first saw him. Not being able to talk about that with anyone was driving her mad. She needs to vent to someone, someone she can trust.

     Shocked by the bombshell that Y/N just dropped, Jo turns her head to orient her big eyes towards the man in question. That son of a bitch..      “Well, that didn't take long…” The cowgirl shakes her head, then looks her in the eye after her confession. It's clear she feels sorry for her friend. “I'll talk to him.”      “No! Jo, please don't. Look, I didn't forget about your warning and I’m surely not going to act on these... feelings,” she guarantees, barely able to get out the word. “But I can't shut this off. It caught me by surprise as well.”      “He tends to have that effect on women,” Jo mutters.      “I won't do anything stupid,” Y/N assures her.      Jo glances at the intern from under her hat. “Promise?”

     She looks backs at her new friend. Honestly, she isn’t sure if she’s strong enough to resist Dean, but this agreement might help her stick to the plan. The plan to complete her internship successfully and return home to start her own ranch. It's all she ever wanted, it has been her life goal for as long as she can remember. Is she really going to let some cowboy stop her from fulfilling that dream? A very handsome, sweet, and utterly irresistible cowboy, but nonetheless. She will reach for the stars and she will have her wish, nothing will stand in her way, not even him. And so a reassuring smile forms on her lips.

     “I promise.”

Well, the cat’s out of the bag. Thank you for reading. I appreciate every single one of you, but if you do want to give me some extra love, you are free to like or reblog my work, shoot me a message or buy me coffee (Link to Kofi in bio at the top of the page).

Read part seven here

[blackwoolncrown]

curious to hear your thoughts bc i think they're sharp, as a person still figuring out fandom. what do you think of the moral okayness of thorki (the ship)? they're brothers, but gods.... godly incest? at what point does "ship what you want" stop applying?

It’s not so much about where it stops applying. Understand that I actually never have said what people should or shouldn’t read- only that what a person chooses to focus on in general (and therefore including what you write, watch, or read) is indicative of something and in many cases of certain taboo* or violent material my heavy suggestion is that that something is ultimately meaningful.

It’s not ‘just’ fiction.

So like, me personally? I often don’t actually care what someone is into (with some logical exceptions), I care whether or not they’re aware of why, because often people would rather not inspect the why so they can keep enjoying problematic media (and also my actual Big Thing is I don’t approve of situations where someone engages in activity they are not fully aware of, because to me if you aren’t aware of the consequences or origins of your actions, you haven’t fully consented to what you’re doing and that makes me sad. Example: Do you smoke cigarettes? Fine! It’s your body; as long as you aren’t exposing non-smokers to second hand smoke, no one should have shit to say. But if you start smoking bc you believe that cigarettes aren’t actually bad for you and there’s no downsides, you haven’t fully consented and now I wish you either a) inspected your motives and actions or b) stopped).

Overall I suspect that many of the most vociferous defenders of ‘fiction is just fiction!’ are people whose interests often veer into what we often call taboo (I think that word is so ineffective) who don’t want to ask themselves why. My other general rule is that people are most doggedly defensive about what they get off to. There’s also the issue of people having already brought to question their fictive interests and instead of wanting to find out the answer, deciding There’s Nothing To See Here, Fiction Is Just Fiction! Or, on the cusp of identifying a maladaptive interest and feeling as if that’s an action of self-judgment, they identify with their fictive interest because to them judging it means judging themselves.

Ideally neither is necessary. You can just understand that you got into something at a previous time but you’ve grown past it, learned from it, and can walk away from it without shame. After all, it’s ideally just your business. All I’m saying is that you know what the fuck your business is, pardon my french, because people who don’t know themselves are….well, it’s an issue.So to answer your question, here’s another question: If Thor and Loki were not brothers, would you care as much? Imagine a situation in which Thor and Loki are not related, but still share a lusty rivalry. Is something missing? What is it? What about them being gods absolves, in your mind, the impact of their siblinghood?Often, something like sibling incest (which to me is, honestly, not my bag but obviously way less awful than parent/child due to a whole slew of issues with imbalance there) is exciting to people simply because either a) the incest is the barrier to love and in general barriers to love make ‘good’ stories because two people overcoming the bounds of a romantic limitation is a more moving story than two people who can love freely (bc we love suffering and strife! it seasons things, I guess lol) and the incest is just an easy yet huge barrier b) because we have a hard time working through something without sexualizing it and who could write or would want to read about two brothers’ having a heartfelt love/hate brotherhood? Very few people, apparently, because that’s not a valued interaction. Thus, add some fucking into the story and Thor and Loki can work out their antagonistic feelings without getting to the bottom of them because we imagine sex is an equalizer and a balm (it’s not, but I understand the idea has a huge place in erotic fiction and absolutely use it myself when I write for fun).That speaks, to me, of an issue (and I’m going to be specific here) with not really having the language or familiarity with the social concept of brotherly love to make a story about it and its struggles interesting. We don’t have the language and thus cannot conceive of brother/brother reconciliation without sex. And this again speaks of a larger issue our society has with sex and the huge void of emotionality between strangers and lovers (friendships, loyalty. non-sexual bonding? What’s that?). We cannot conceive of a way to intensify, for the sake of adult (in age, not nature) entertainment, something like siblinghood without using sex.

It’s just cheap writing.

On the other hand, the very real ramifications of this easy-route conflict writing is that it sexualizes and normalizes sibling incest (or other things in the case of other stories) and I think it’s incredibly callous to want to ignore the voices of SA victims in this regard. People like to retort that ‘well YOU might not be able to tell fiction from reality, but I can’ but here’s the thing: Your subconscious mind can’t. If your brain wholly knew that the fiction you were reading was Not-Reality the information would be irrelevant and would fail to produce an emotional response. The reason we are excited, aroused, sad, scared, angry, tense, etc during movies and books is because while we are focused on them our mind is interpreting the happenings as actual happenings. To the extent (!) that media ‘pulls you in’, your  subconscious believes it, validates it, and signals responses accordingly. That’s why it’s entertaining.

I say this because something many fans of certain content don’t want to face is that the consumption and support of, and proximity to certain types of violent or taboo content starts to lessen your reaction to them. I’m not speaking as an outsider, here, and so I caution you and anyone else to second-guess the awareness of anyone who says ‘there’s no way that’s true!’. What you repeatedly experience becomes normal for you. This doesn’t apply as heavily with Thorki or similar ships bc of the conceptual complexity (it’s pretty far-removed) but there are certainly fetishes/ships  where repeated exposure lessens your reaction to that concept in general. As if that doesn’t seem to be problem enough, since this is an issue of entertainment, this also means that a person seeks more of the content. After all, what fic fan reads just one story about their scandalous OTP? You need more, or more extreme versions. And I’m not talking out of my ass here- people for some reason love incest- it’s one of the top-searched terms on any adult media site for general consumption. On sites that it’s not, that’s only because the term itself is blacklisted and users use some other coded term. In the absence of pearl-clutching, we must recognize that smutty fiction and tube sites’ activities are largely the same. b/b m/s and f/d incest continue to draw attention and I honestly don’t know why. 

And this is why I pay no mind to people who say that fiction has no effect on reality. Even if it didn’t, it arises from our reality. The real minds of real writers in the real world. And I’ve seen the results. I work with sex and fetishes- it’s my job. I know what people as a whole are into and I’m begging y’all: UNPACK THIS BAGGAGE. Soooo many fetishes are just maladaptive coping mechanisms, so talk of ‘fiction being just fiction’ are literally bullshit. Fetish, and the relative psychology of it, is my job, to the point that it’s also what I have to navigate to try and ensure my safety (by avoiding volatile fetishists) and income (my first job, for instance, was a porn artist, and by now I’m an adult content producer and prodomme). And again, many fetishes are the back end of intense or subconsciously formative moments in our lives. The attraction is not ‘the thing’, it is a thread us leading back to that moment, to learn from our experiences, to resolve past issues with the wiser perspective of our older selves.Again, there’s not much going on in terms of Thor/Loki here but on a wider scale there is. Often in fandom, for instance, it’s not really about the ship so much as the fetish. It’s disguised in the language of fandom, but people who have a bunch of incest ships are incest fetishists, full stop. There’s no difference in motive between them and the ~gross pervert guys~ reblogging porn gifs and adding incest prose to them. If geeks could more often find porn gifs that looked like their taboo OTP rest assured they’d do the same damn thing, most of them. Ficlovers like to act like their position is somehow more morally acceptable because there are no ‘real’ people involved like in porn, but whether or not a physical body is used to represent the characters/roles is a pedantic and nebulous distinction at best. Your interest is still your interest. And people are going to hate this, but it sounds so much like pedophiles on 4chan  who say that their ‘fetish’ is okay because the characters aren’t real. Furries into cubs (not the gay dude kind but the baby animal kind) feel justified the same way because the figures are fantasy creatures. But they’re still expressly coded as the infantile versions of adult characters, and again, the motive is the same. I’m not saying ALL of these things are one to one, I’m saying it’s a similar logic: “This is a fantasy and as such it says nothing about me. It would only matter if I physically did it.” Which is dishonest and illogical bc one’s fantasies  and interests arise out of their own minds. Porn consumption is a night map of the human social psyche. It’s not ‘nothing’.

Sure, most of those people would probably never touch a child, but that’s because the real world provides consequences the fantasy world doesn’t- not because they’re not interested. I know bc I’ve seen them say that themselves, many times. I was a 4chan teen. What was normal there would make a well-adjusted person puke. But I was maladaptive, impressionable and young at the time and it became normal for me. So many forms of incest, rape, pedophilia, bestiality etc became normal in the ‘shock makes things acceptable’ speed-posting culture of neverending offensiveness there. And that’s not just a 4chan thing. It’s a group anonymity thing. Any imageboard vet can tell you that. When you’re in the anonymous group, what the group does is what you do, and you go along with it, continuously being desensitized until you suddenly go WTF or…keep going. And having seen these arguments before, I’m wary of those who go to battle on the idea of all erotic fiction being totally beyond judgement, because often what is going on is that people whose interests should be judged, at the very least by themselves, argue against that so that there are other people who feel the same way who don’t realize they’ve been manipulated to cloak the offenders in their community.

But I digress.

Since my feelings on Killmonger fans* started this, I’ll offer an example of my own: I think AoU Ultron is hot. But I don’t actually want to fuck him. I wouldn’t be interested in any ‘reader x Ultron’ narratives. Why? Because despite my love for and identification with  many villains (usually bc of their victim’s rage and queer coding which always leaves them far cooler and better dressed than the hero) and my love for robots, I can’t ignore that Ultron is a heartless, people-hating, death-machine. He has no interest in love, doesn’t care about anyone, and if he bothered to fuck a person (I fucking doubt it) he’d gladly fuck them apart. And since I love myself, I don’t find that appealing. If I found the idea of being fucked to death by a robot arousing, that says something about how I feel about my existence. I know bc I am strangely fascinated by the idea of armageddon (another reason Ultron appealed to me). Spoilers: it’s just easier to feel like you want the whole world to end when you’re so certain there’s no other solution and you yourself are afraid of the emotional responsibility of weathering the world and social interactions. When you love yourself and other people, the idea of seeing the world burn stops being so entrancing. So sure it’s an enthralling literary concept. Is it something I dedicate my blog to or obsess over?

No.

Other things I’ve examined- my love for robots. Do I find myself attracted to robots because they are humanoids you can objectify free of moral conflict? No, and that sucks for me bc that’s why most people like them and that affects the kind of adult media made about them (can you tell im bitter), it’s because I find humanoid robots to be something I can identify with, I see them as symbolically human, and relating to them is, to me, acknowledging that a human is also a construct with both programming and a will of its own it uses to explore and often fight that programming. My attraction to the concept of an automaton stems from my early realization that my own body is but a fantastic collection of parts, electric signals, programmed genetic data, pulleys and fuel. Amazing! Now that I know that, have I stopped consuming robot fetish media? Well yes but only because I can’t find any I like…but in general, no. I’m not ashamed of my attraction, I’ve unpacked it, faced it, and go on about  my life. It actually did lessen the obsession, though.

So, to stay on point, sibling incest as a concept is IMO not ‘wrong’ to write/read about objectively but it is questionable to perpetuate, romanticize, fawn over, collect, celebrate, etc.  Most problematic to me is the issue of how these ships are identified. Generally any time there are 2 handsome brothers in a piece of media, some not-small-enough contingency of the fandom assumes they’re fucking, and sees all forms of affection or antagonism between them as evidence of their lust.

What does this say about your ability to recognize sibling love? What does it say about the social value (or lack thereof) of the same? When ‘all feelings lead to sex’ is the overarching theme of our entire society, I can’t really say I am uncritical of concepts like hatesex and incest being so intensely attractive to people over, say, romantic love between two people who are not related by blood. A bit of a tangent but similarly while I get the chemistry appeal, the fact that ‘hatesex’ as a concept (two people who often express aggression, hatred, intolerance etc of each other being interpreted as actually masking feelings of attraction) is so popular is ripe for questioning. How far removed is it from “He picks on you  because he likes you” and other maladaptive forms of “loving someone means hurting them…a lot” which are real actual problems people suffer for right now?

Plus, it begins to suggest as I said before that all forms of affection/relationship end in sex. Even if sex never happens, sex must logically be the apex of love if two characters who have any kind of affection, even if that affection is also seen in the presence of aggression (!) or a moral barrier (family bond), are easily assumed to be sexually compatible to the extent that fandom perpetuates.

So back to your point, this is again not really an issue (as far as where I’m coming from) with what’s right and wrong. It’s an issue of people needing to take responsibility for themselves and being curious about their own issues and interests. I’m not advocating for censorship- I’m advocating for people to enlighten themselves about themselves in which case a lot of ‘taboo’ media would be produced in a lessened capacity.

I find it interesting that when I ask “Why are you into ____?” people don’t answer that question, or seem unwilling to, since their first reaction is to flip out and cry censorship. No one seems to notice that that’s not what I’m actually saying lol.

I don’t care what people do, if it’s not hurting someone. I care that people know why they do what they do. I am critical of things and of myself. I think people should just dare to be critical. It’s a great tool for self-healing that doesn’t involve perpetuating damage.*I dislike the term taboo because it and the moral judgment it applies is a nebulous term that is used far too broadly. Incestuous pedophiles soften their interest by calling it ‘taboo’, but interracial relationships are also classed as ‘taboo’, thereby suggesting that the term is as loose as ‘whatever many people think is wrong’, which is clearly far too transient and easily-influenced. Often, I find, it’s used as ‘something that is morally objectionable for reasons we’re not going to explore, we’re just going to lump all this shit together indiscriminately as taboo’.

*Again, I don’t care about people who mainly think MBJ is hot as Killmonger, that’s totally logical. I question people whose fantasies specifically extend to Killmonger THE CHARACTER being seen as sexually attractive **because** of/specifically on the grounds of his general character (i.e. radicalized, violent, murderous, apathetic) and what kind of person would fantasize about being subject to a man like that.

[this-is-not-a]

On high school

Content warning: use of homophobic slurs

User Proyas writes, on DC’s school system:

Student misbehavior was atrocious. For example, out of the students who showed up to class, it was common for some to walk into the classroom late, again without any explanation and often behaving disruptively. As a rule, whenever a student did that, he was obligated to sign his name on a clipboard for the teacher’s attendance records (there was no punishment for tardiness–late students merely had to write their names down). Some late students would chronically resist doing this, either ignoring him and just going to their desks or yelling curses at him. My friend described an incident where one student–who was physically bigger than he was–yelled out he was a “FAGGOT” when asked to sign the clipboard, provoking laughs from all the other students, before sitting down without signing it. After seeing he could get away with that, the student started calling my friend “FAGGOT” all the time. Other examples of misbehavior included near-constant talking among the students during lessons and fooling around with cell phones.

Teachers received almost no support from the school administration. Had sane rules been followed at this high school, students would have been immediately sent to the office for formal punishment for these sorts of offenses I’ve described. However, under such a policy, the office would have been overwhelmed with misbehaving students and probably some of their enraged parents, so the administration solved the problem by forbidding teachers from sending students to the office for anything other than physical violence in the classroom. My friend had no ability to formally punish the student who liked to call him “FAGGOT” other than to use stern verbal warnings.

That feeling of impotence you get after reading this, combined with the fact that the teacher is actually objectively much more well off than the student is/will likely turn out to be, is a hint. Let’s look at this from the point of view of the student.

To succeed in school, first you need the ability to navigate a system, and second you need to choose to exercise that ability. As is the case with any setup like this, the way you behave depends on what rewards the system is likely to yield for you. If you’re high-achieving and your life is structured in a way that makes it low effort to exercise your ability (e.g. you have two parents and they are able to take you to and from school and help with homework, you don’t need to work a job, you can focus on learning and social status) then you’re likely to end up in the positive spiral in which your achievements beget enough praise and promise of a bright future to fuel your future achievements, and you need only so much as fart on a pencil to do well in school. (I’m exaggerating but I won’t say by how much!) If you’re middling it’s a bit of a crapshoot, and your outcomes will probably depend on specific things like how strict your parents are, what your friends do on Fridays, and how fast you can do arithmetic and type on a keyboard. And you’ll probably end up with some distrust in the system, but unless you’re also especially motivated, no desire to break out.

If you’re under-achieving, and you’re being raised by a single parent, or have to drop off a younger sibling at school before being 20 minutes late to your first class every day, or have to work nights, or can’t get academic help and frankly don’t see the point because all it does is make you feel like shit... well then the system tends to become your enemy -- and why shouldn’t it; it’s got no rewards for you, it’s never once praised you, all it does is repeatedly tell you you’re not good enough and you’re not allowed to leave. So you do what everyone being slowly flattened under the weight an invisible hand would do -- you start punching up. (Paper covers rock but my fist in your ass!) This is as ineffective as it is natural but you might find that it comes with some perks, particularly with regards to social status.

See, from what I remember about high school, teachers are not the top of the social hierarchy (shocking, I know, your dream wasn’t to take a teacher to prom, and if it was then you probably weren’t at the top of the hierarchy anyway, even if he was totally hot and sorta fatherly in a Catholic sorta way). In fact, teachers aren’t even in the hierarchy. You don’t measure your status against them at all. They might as well be desks. To students, they represent a part of the system, and while high-achieving and middling students see that it’s worthwhile to get along with their teachers, the under-achiever correctly determines that for him, it’s not.

We see this same dynamic between the indoctrinated youth and celebrities. “I’m not into celebrities,” you say, but subcultures have celebrities too. (Your favorite band, blogger, writer, author, activist, or CEO, and if you have none of these then congratulations your life is devoid of all consumption, where do you grow all the food you eat, and what’s with that weird portrait of the Burger King making out with Ronald McDonald?) We punch up at celebrities like they’re gods because we don’t think we will ever effect them, because, once again and all together, we probably won’t.

If you read the story above from the point of view of the teacher, then your goal was to do the job of educating the youth for not enough money, and the student was part of the game, a little space invader shooting lasers at you. You felt impotent because you realized there was nothing you could do to help him, or at least stop him from calling you a fag. You started to see him as part of the system holding you down. Teachers bravely aspire to change the world, but they can’t do that when students like this kid defy their authority and distract from their lessons. So we make the mistake of thinking that the student’s behavior is a status play against the teacher. But as we’ve just learned, in reality, it’s just a status play against the other students. The kid gets to show how cool and fearless he is by standing up to a teacher (a god) and he wins social status because there’s nothing the teacher can do about it within this setup. But actually, the teacher can leave for a nicer school district and let that kid grow up into the bad habits he’s already forming, and that’s what his real power is.

Here’s my version of what the teacher could have done:

After seeing he could get away with that, the student started calling my friend “FAGGOT” all the time. So this is what my friend did. One day in class he went around the room to every single student and one by one he had them each call him a faggot. And then he said, “is anyone curious about why I had you do that?” A few heads nodded. “Terry over here learned through trial and error that calling me names was an easy way to gain social status, since there’s no action I can take against him. But what he doesn’t realize, because he’s not as smart as me, is that he only gains social status insofar as he is perceived as being more fearless than other students. So if everyone has the ability to call me a faggot, and you all indeed do, then what power does Terry actually have?”

“Now you’re thinking, isn’t this going to cause Terry to just escalate even further? I don’t think so, not since I’ve called it out like this, because that would be proving my point, and there’s nothing more damning for social status than admitting to overtly seeking social status.”

“But why point it out like this? Do I really think this is going to change Terry’s mind about the right way to behave in school? I’m not sure. But here’s what I do know. I could leave this classroom tomorrow, find a job in Seattle and never have to think about him or his low-rent future ever again. But I became a teacher because I wanted to improve the lives of kids like Terry and I’m not going to let some idiot ruin it.”

In fact, it doesn’t really matter whether or not this changes Terry’s mind. What matters is that it changes the other students’ minds about Terry. Because now Terry has lost the branding of “the fearless one who calls out the teacher” and received the new branding of “the loser who the teacher saw right through, gee isn’t Language Arts important.”

[adambstingus]

6 Frightening New Drugs (You’ve Never Heard Of)

Since the dawn of time, mankind has endeavored to keep finding new ways to get totally shitfaced. And just because the gamut of known narcotics now ranges from a cheeky evening sherry to face-melting LSD doesn’t mean people have stopped looking for (cheaper) alternatives. So let’s take a look at the latest discoveries our often short-lived pharmaceutical pioneers have come up with.

6

People Are Abusing Their Pets’ Medication (And Their Pets)

Veterinarians may not be as well regarded as human doctors, but that doesn’t mean their work is any less difficult. Performing surgery on a cat is just as hard as it is on a person — except that if you screw up on a person, you can’t just bury them in a shoe box and call it a day (usually). Vets need about the same quality of tools and drugs to do their job properly. So it was only a matter of time before addicts figured out that if animal medication is good enough to knock out a Great Dane, it will probably also get them plenty high.

Hanna-Barbara It’s why Shaggy ditched weed and moved on to Scooby Snacks.

Unsurprisingly, most animal drugs aren’t much different than the stuff hospitals pump into us. (Try not to dwell on the fact that your healthcare’s probably not much better than your pug’s.) Heavy-duty pain relievers (like Tramadol), Valium, and even ketamine are generally available to ailing animals. The main difference between human and animal medication seems to be that one of them is a lot harder to obtain. Most of our happy pills are controlled substances, which means they’re carefully tracked. That’s not the case for animal meds, though, because nobody expects a horse to get hooked on … uh, horse.

But until legislation is put into place to stop these druggie pet owners, some states have started educating vets on how to deal with addicts coming into their practice to get high off their cat’s supply. They’re mainly taught to recognize suspicious behavior, like when owners try to get refills early, or ask for medication by name, or pretend their pet fell down the stairs but then not immediately show a YouTube video of the fall to prove it.

LuckyBusiness/iStock “Does that dog suppository fit in a pipe?” is another question that raises red flags.

But what if your pet is just too damn healthy to exploit? In 2002, one owner was caught having trained his dog to cough on command just so he could get his hands on some sweet cough medicine. But that takes a lot of work, so some addicts just resort to intentionally hurting their pets to get a fix. In Kentucky, a trash monster named Heather Pereira was discovered to have cut her dog with razor blades as an excuse to keep getting her paws on his pain medication. She was sentenced to four years in prison (28 in dog years). But that’s small potatoes compared to one small drug ring in Oregon, who used a puppy mill as a front to amass over 100,000 Tramadol pills, neglecting the puppies to the point that their crates had been flooded with their own feces. Those assholes managed to find a way to make standard drug dealers look like pillars of the community.

5

Drinking Russian Bath Lotions

In December 2016, over 100 people from the Siberian city of Irkutsk were rushed to the hospital due to alcohol-related poisoning (you may assume this is normal for Christmas in Siberia, but we assure you it is not). Their drink of choice? A strong beverage that will not only put hair on your chest, but also keep that hair silky and clean.

Biomed Even hotel minibars are getting in on the action.

Boyaryshnik is the most popular bath lotion in Siberia. Not because of the cleansing power of its hawthorn berries, but because Russians like to drink it. And while no one among us can claim that they’ve never considered chugging a bottle of delicious-smelling children’s shampoo, nobody is drinking it for its refreshing scent, but because it gets them fucked right up. The lotion has such a high alcohol content, poor Russians have been using it as a substitute for expensive vodka. But when a bad batch of lotion hit the streets of Irkutsk, the bath-time fun drink killed 61 people in record time. Instead of containing ethanol (the fun alcohol), the tainted Boyaryshnik contained methanol (the “I’m blind and I can’t feel my legs” alcohol) and antifreeze. Not exactly a party, unless your idea of a party entails shedding your physical body in order to board the mothership.

At this point it needs to be made very clear that this tragic incident didn’t happen because people started drinking bath lotion, but because they started drinking counterfeit bath lotion. This means some criminal ring thought it more profitable to make fake bath lotion than fake vodka. And they weren’t wrong. Today, over 12 million Russians drink surrogate alcohol, including perfume, after-shave, antifreeze, and window cleaner. Is it weird that some of those sound a lot more appealing than the others?

Your answer depends on how much you like blue Gatorade.

The reason for these soapy binges is mainly due to Vladimir Putin’s government, which has been steadily raising the tax on alcohol for years in order to curb excessive drinking and fill its coffers with booze money. This has left many Russians too poor to support their habit, turning to their shower caddies for sweet relief. Putin has promised to lower taxes in the future and divert the government’s attention to catching alcohol counterfeiters. Until then, Russians will just have to take pride in having the most fragrant alcoholics in the world.

4

Molly Usually Isn’t MDMA (But Something Way Crazier)

Molly is the uptown rich kid variant of ecstasy, a designer drug endorsed by paragons of cool like Jay-Z and Miley Cyrus. That must mean it’s safe as houses, right? Sure, MDMA is about as chill as hardcore drugs can get, but that pill you got off that guy juggling glow sticks? That isn’t molly. And it will probably melt your insides to a pulp.

Kind of like that other Molly. The one from the gym.

So what are these party people ingesting instead of their expensive designer drugs? It could be anything, really, from variants of meth to cannabinoids to even bath salts. All they have in common is that they’re definitely not molly and they’re definitely made by lazy idiots. Most of them are too new to have a unique name (or their makers couldn’t come up with a catchy one), so they just slid into the molly brand. Sometimes you can get “lucky” and stumble upon some chemist’s pet project like Bromo-Dragonfly, which is pretty much LSD but with “effects that can last for up to three days.” But a much more common narcotic cuckoo egg is benzylpiperazine, or BZP, the poster child for why this fake molly trend is so dangerous. BZP is incredibly easy to make, but takes a lot of cleanup to remove all of the toxins, which prevents massive kidney and liver damage — among many other terrible side effects. Dealers don’t care about that though, because it’s not like someone is going to call the Better Business Bureau and make a complaint.

They don’t worry about losing customers when their customer base is “everyone who clubs.”

Molly has become just another brand, a marketing slogan with about as much truth in advertising as “9 out of 10 dentists agree” or “Jamie Lee Curtis can help you poop better.” Its umbrella status has become such an issue that many molly-centric venues like EDM concerts, raves, and orgies have started setting up testing booths to make sure people know what’s in their entertainment for the evening. The result is quite staggering, with only typically a quarter of pills tested containing only MDMA — and just as many containing no MDMA whatsoever. Meanwhile, out of all the molly the DEA seized and tested between 2009 and 2013, only as few as 13 percent of the pills showed any trace of MDMA. You’re about as likely to get high on MDMA from some molly you bought in a warehouse loft as you would from buying Flintstones vitamins in a drugstore.

But you will get something to make you try to brake cars with your bare feet.

3

Fentanyl Can Kill A Person Just By Touching Them

Heroin might just be the scariest drug out there, especially to non-drug users. It feels like one of those drugs that, just by looking at a spoonful, could ruin your life, your health, and just about every tooth you have. But guess what, you nerd? Heroin is for wimps now. Real tough-guy addicts take fentanyl, an opioid so strong it’s the last high you’ll ever need. Or have, for that matter.

As the marketing slogan says, “Fentanyl: It’s fatyl.”

The entire fentanyl family of opioids is just a carousel of the worst horrors drugs imaginable. Like pink, a type of fentanyl that was given its cutesy name because snorting any more than what fits on the tip of a pinky is enough to kill you. In fact, just touching this shit is enough to go into cardiac arrest. Typically, one grain of a fentanyl-based drug has the same potency as a hit of heroin. Two grains will make you overdose. Not that that’s terrifyingly risky. After all, heroin addicts are known for their steady hands and attention to detail.

Then there’s carfentanil, which is like regular fentanyl except that you’re about as likely to survive a hit of it as you would a ten-car pile-up. It’s roughly 100 times more powerful than regular fentanyl and 10,000 times more so than morphine. That’s because carfentanil was never intended for human consumption: It’s an elephant tranquilizer. The only time its effect on humans was ever considered was to test how quickly it could kill them.

The answer: slightly faster than the elephant.

Ironically, it��s because of the potency of the fentanyl family that they’re incredibly easy drugs to obtain. In Canada, for example, border guards cannot open packages weighing less than 30 grams without consent — and 30 grams of fentanyl is enough to last a lifetime (which for fentanyl users is about half an hour), making them a cinch to smuggle. This easy access has been a scourge on Canada, being partially responsible for increasing overdoses tenfold in just one year.

So how come it’s easier to score mega-heroin than it is just good old classic heroin? Fittingly, this dragon also comes all the way from the home of the opioid, China. China has no real regulations against manufacturing or distributing fentanyl-based substances — and it doesn’t look like that’ll be changing anytime soon. Over the internet, dozens if not hundreds of small, shady pharmaceutical companies are openly selling their fentanyl to clients around the globe. This makes this very dangerous drug about as easy to buy as a cheap iPhone case and for about the same cost.

And with an equal probability of improving your already shitty life.

2

Synthetic Weed Is Turning The Homeless Into Zombies

With the rapid legalization of cannabis across the United States, weed is getting a bit of an image change. No longer is it just the drug of choice for lazy stoners and geriatric hippies — it’s on the cusp of becoming as acceptable as drinking a beer or taking a sniff of nail polish. Of course, these good vibrations couldn’t last forever. Enter K2, Mary Jane’s dirtbag meth-head cousin.

Instead of using cannabis leaves, K2 (like the famous mountain) or Scooby Snax (like the famous talking dog treats), K2 combines all of the natural goodness of oregano, which was what most college kids were smoking anyway, with the chemical garbage that are synthetic drugs. A K2 cigarette contains regular dried herbs with shitty chemical cannabinoids to make them more awesome. It’s basically the Axe Body Spray of narcotics.

But K2 is a lot more dangerous than regular marijuana. Cannabinoids may have the same effect as THC, but have a lot more bad side effects. In 2015, over 6,000 emergency room visits involving K2 occurred in New York City alone, with two deaths already confirmed. This epidemic has been hitting the homeless community the worst, who seem to love how cost effective these cigarettes are while still making you forget you’ve been drooling on the sidewalk for six hours straight. Cannabinoid addicts wandering the street are often referred to as “zombies,” which is appropriate, as they are the type of undead best known for being easily distracted and always hungry.

Except these ones aren’t so concerned with brains.

While K2 itself has been illegal for a while, manufacturers keep switching up its composition, leaving sellers (including many bodegas) with a comfortable uncertainty whether their product is or isn’t actually illegal. However, with the new national ban on synthetic cannabinoids and a slew of police raids, New York hospitals have seen an 85 percent reduction in K2-related medical emergencies and homeless zombie parades.

Still, if there’s one silver lining, it’s that, because of K2 existing, there must have been instances where angry parents shouted at their kids “Why can’t you just smoke weed like a normal person?” Now that’s progress.

1

NBOMe Is Lethal LSD With A Legal Loophole

Say you want to get into LSD. You’ve heard The Beatles were into it, so that’s pretty cool. But you’ve also heard LSD is very illegal, a controlled substance that can get you quite a bit of jail time. Not to worry, scumbag drug manufacturers have found just the thing for you: 25I-NBOMe, a new and exciting LSD-like narcotic that’s not illegal just yet. And the best part is, by the time bureaucracy catches up to this loophole, you’ll already be long dead from taking a highly unstable and untested chemical.

“McDonald’s? No way, that stuff’s full of chemicals.” – Hippie who then takes some NBOMe.

25I-NBOMe is one of the latest of a long line of “chemical analogs” (of which you know quite a few examples having read this article), variants of known narcotics that have been altered just enough that they can’t be considered the same as the household brands they’re imitating. This makes these analog drugs technically legal, in the same way that putting mirrors on your shoes is technically legal. Rogue chemists have been playing this cat-and-mouse game with the D.E.A. since the ’70s, always trying to be a few molecular changes ahead of the curve.

So if NBOMe is just the New Coke of LSD, why is it offing more teenagers than a camp serial killer? It turns out that its greatest asset is also what makes it so terribly dangerous. The value of chemical analogs lies in that they’re “slightly different” from their controlled cousins, but in chemistry, “slightly different” can turn your lungs into goo. And there’s no way of knowing what exactly NBOMe is capable of, as the drug was intended to be used only in animal experiments and no large human trials on its effects have ever been conducted. That means that 25I-NBOMe doesn’t have users, it only has guinea pigs.

“Hey, I removed one atom from that boring old ‘carbon dioxide.’ Wanna try some?”

Not that people know what they’re actually taking. The reason this particular variant is becoming so popular is because it’s 16 times stronger than its other NBOMe cousins. But people don’t tend to whip out their testing kits when someone hands them a sachet of white powder. It’s also quite a bit cheaper than LSD, so plenty of dealers try to pass it off as the brand name. The resulting trip is usually unpredictable and often fatal.

Deaths linked to NBOMe have been described as “violent.” One 18-year-old experienced such extreme depression after mistakenly taking the drug that he tried to commit suicide by stabbing himself repeatedly in the neck with a pair of scissors. Another appeared as if “possessed,” foaming at the mouth and smashing his head against the floor. Another teen jumped off a balcony to his death high on “N-Bomb.” He thought he had taken LSD. He also thought he could fly.

And we’ll never know if he was right because he died before we could find out.

Since it crept into drug culture in between 2010 and 2013, the NBOMe loophole has been all but closed. By 2015, most countries had rescheduled it as the dangerous narcotic that it is, making it much harder and riskier to obtain. But with NBOMe on its way out, it’s only a matter of time before some middling chemist without scruples finds another way to mod an existing drug into something not yet illegal. So the lesson here, kids, is that if you’re going to take drugs, stick to the brands you know and trust. And don’t do a taste test.

Cedric Voets is a total square who gets nervous popping an aspirin. For more of his attempts at witticisms or his famous recipes for toilet wine, do follow him on Twitter.

Also check out 5 Drugs That Turn Your World Into A Real-Life Horror Movie and 5 Awful Things I Learned About Drugs Working At A Pharmacy.

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from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/2017/10/13/6-frightening-new-drugs-youve-never-heard-of/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/166341914167

[samanthasroberts]

6 Frightening New Drugs (You’ve Never Heard Of)

Since the dawn of time, mankind has endeavored to keep finding new ways to get totally shitfaced. And just because the gamut of known narcotics now ranges from a cheeky evening sherry to face-melting LSD doesn’t mean people have stopped looking for (cheaper) alternatives. So let’s take a look at the latest discoveries our often short-lived pharmaceutical pioneers have come up with.

6

People Are Abusing Their Pets’ Medication (And Their Pets)

Veterinarians may not be as well regarded as human doctors, but that doesn’t mean their work is any less difficult. Performing surgery on a cat is just as hard as it is on a person — except that if you screw up on a person, you can’t just bury them in a shoe box and call it a day (usually). Vets need about the same quality of tools and drugs to do their job properly. So it was only a matter of time before addicts figured out that if animal medication is good enough to knock out a Great Dane, it will probably also get them plenty high.

Hanna-Barbara It’s why Shaggy ditched weed and moved on to Scooby Snacks.

Unsurprisingly, most animal drugs aren’t much different than the stuff hospitals pump into us. (Try not to dwell on the fact that your healthcare’s probably not much better than your pug’s.) Heavy-duty pain relievers (like Tramadol), Valium, and even ketamine are generally available to ailing animals. The main difference between human and animal medication seems to be that one of them is a lot harder to obtain. Most of our happy pills are controlled substances, which means they’re carefully tracked. That’s not the case for animal meds, though, because nobody expects a horse to get hooked on … uh, horse.

But until legislation is put into place to stop these druggie pet owners, some states have started educating vets on how to deal with addicts coming into their practice to get high off their cat’s supply. They’re mainly taught to recognize suspicious behavior, like when owners try to get refills early, or ask for medication by name, or pretend their pet fell down the stairs but then not immediately show a YouTube video of the fall to prove it.

LuckyBusiness/iStock “Does that dog suppository fit in a pipe?” is another question that raises red flags.

But what if your pet is just too damn healthy to exploit? In 2002, one owner was caught having trained his dog to cough on command just so he could get his hands on some sweet cough medicine. But that takes a lot of work, so some addicts just resort to intentionally hurting their pets to get a fix. In Kentucky, a trash monster named Heather Pereira was discovered to have cut her dog with razor blades as an excuse to keep getting her paws on his pain medication. She was sentenced to four years in prison (28 in dog years). But that’s small potatoes compared to one small drug ring in Oregon, who used a puppy mill as a front to amass over 100,000 Tramadol pills, neglecting the puppies to the point that their crates had been flooded with their own feces. Those assholes managed to find a way to make standard drug dealers look like pillars of the community.

5

Drinking Russian Bath Lotions

In December 2016, over 100 people from the Siberian city of Irkutsk were rushed to the hospital due to alcohol-related poisoning (you may assume this is normal for Christmas in Siberia, but we assure you it is not). Their drink of choice? A strong beverage that will not only put hair on your chest, but also keep that hair silky and clean.

Biomed Even hotel minibars are getting in on the action.

Boyaryshnik is the most popular bath lotion in Siberia. Not because of the cleansing power of its hawthorn berries, but because Russians like to drink it. And while no one among us can claim that they’ve never considered chugging a bottle of delicious-smelling children’s shampoo, nobody is drinking it for its refreshing scent, but because it gets them fucked right up. The lotion has such a high alcohol content, poor Russians have been using it as a substitute for expensive vodka. But when a bad batch of lotion hit the streets of Irkutsk, the bath-time fun drink killed 61 people in record time. Instead of containing ethanol (the fun alcohol), the tainted Boyaryshnik contained methanol (the “I’m blind and I can’t feel my legs” alcohol) and antifreeze. Not exactly a party, unless your idea of a party entails shedding your physical body in order to board the mothership.

At this point it needs to be made very clear that this tragic incident didn’t happen because people started drinking bath lotion, but because they started drinking counterfeit bath lotion. This means some criminal ring thought it more profitable to make fake bath lotion than fake vodka. And they weren’t wrong. Today, over 12 million Russians drink surrogate alcohol, including perfume, after-shave, antifreeze, and window cleaner. Is it weird that some of those sound a lot more appealing than the others?

Your answer depends on how much you like blue Gatorade.

The reason for these soapy binges is mainly due to Vladimir Putin’s government, which has been steadily raising the tax on alcohol for years in order to curb excessive drinking and fill its coffers with booze money. This has left many Russians too poor to support their habit, turning to their shower caddies for sweet relief. Putin has promised to lower taxes in the future and divert the government’s attention to catching alcohol counterfeiters. Until then, Russians will just have to take pride in having the most fragrant alcoholics in the world.

4

Molly Usually Isn’t MDMA (But Something Way Crazier)

Molly is the uptown rich kid variant of ecstasy, a designer drug endorsed by paragons of cool like Jay-Z and Miley Cyrus. That must mean it’s safe as houses, right? Sure, MDMA is about as chill as hardcore drugs can get, but that pill you got off that guy juggling glow sticks? That isn’t molly. And it will probably melt your insides to a pulp.

Kind of like that other Molly. The one from the gym.

So what are these party people ingesting instead of their expensive designer drugs? It could be anything, really, from variants of meth to cannabinoids to even bath salts. All they have in common is that they’re definitely not molly and they’re definitely made by lazy idiots. Most of them are too new to have a unique name (or their makers couldn’t come up with a catchy one), so they just slid into the molly brand. Sometimes you can get “lucky” and stumble upon some chemist’s pet project like Bromo-Dragonfly, which is pretty much LSD but with “effects that can last for up to three days.” But a much more common narcotic cuckoo egg is benzylpiperazine, or BZP, the poster child for why this fake molly trend is so dangerous. BZP is incredibly easy to make, but takes a lot of cleanup to remove all of the toxins, which prevents massive kidney and liver damage — among many other terrible side effects. Dealers don’t care about that though, because it’s not like someone is going to call the Better Business Bureau and make a complaint.

They don’t worry about losing customers when their customer base is “everyone who clubs.”

Molly has become just another brand, a marketing slogan with about as much truth in advertising as “9 out of 10 dentists agree” or “Jamie Lee Curtis can help you poop better.” Its umbrella status has become such an issue that many molly-centric venues like EDM concerts, raves, and orgies have started setting up testing booths to make sure people know what’s in their entertainment for the evening. The result is quite staggering, with only typically a quarter of pills tested containing only MDMA — and just as many containing no MDMA whatsoever. Meanwhile, out of all the molly the DEA seized and tested between 2009 and 2013, only as few as 13 percent of the pills showed any trace of MDMA. You’re about as likely to get high on MDMA from some molly you bought in a warehouse loft as you would from buying Flintstones vitamins in a drugstore.

But you will get something to make you try to brake cars with your bare feet.

3

Fentanyl Can Kill A Person Just By Touching Them

Heroin might just be the scariest drug out there, especially to non-drug users. It feels like one of those drugs that, just by looking at a spoonful, could ruin your life, your health, and just about every tooth you have. But guess what, you nerd? Heroin is for wimps now. Real tough-guy addicts take fentanyl, an opioid so strong it’s the last high you’ll ever need. Or have, for that matter.

As the marketing slogan says, “Fentanyl: It’s fatyl.”

The entire fentanyl family of opioids is just a carousel of the worst horrors drugs imaginable. Like pink, a type of fentanyl that was given its cutesy name because snorting any more than what fits on the tip of a pinky is enough to kill you. In fact, just touching this shit is enough to go into cardiac arrest. Typically, one grain of a fentanyl-based drug has the same potency as a hit of heroin. Two grains will make you overdose. Not that that’s terrifyingly risky. After all, heroin addicts are known for their steady hands and attention to detail.

Then there’s carfentanil, which is like regular fentanyl except that you’re about as likely to survive a hit of it as you would a ten-car pile-up. It’s roughly 100 times more powerful than regular fentanyl and 10,000 times more so than morphine. That’s because carfentanil was never intended for human consumption: It’s an elephant tranquilizer. The only time its effect on humans was ever considered was to test how quickly it could kill them.

The answer: slightly faster than the elephant.

Ironically, it’s because of the potency of the fentanyl family that they’re incredibly easy drugs to obtain. In Canada, for example, border guards cannot open packages weighing less than 30 grams without consent — and 30 grams of fentanyl is enough to last a lifetime (which for fentanyl users is about half an hour), making them a cinch to smuggle. This easy access has been a scourge on Canada, being partially responsible for increasing overdoses tenfold in just one year.

So how come it’s easier to score mega-heroin than it is just good old classic heroin? Fittingly, this dragon also comes all the way from the home of the opioid, China. China has no real regulations against manufacturing or distributing fentanyl-based substances — and it doesn’t look like that’ll be changing anytime soon. Over the internet, dozens if not hundreds of small, shady pharmaceutical companies are openly selling their fentanyl to clients around the globe. This makes this very dangerous drug about as easy to buy as a cheap iPhone case and for about the same cost.

And with an equal probability of improving your already shitty life.

2

Synthetic Weed Is Turning The Homeless Into Zombies

With the rapid legalization of cannabis across the United States, weed is getting a bit of an image change. No longer is it just the drug of choice for lazy stoners and geriatric hippies — it’s on the cusp of becoming as acceptable as drinking a beer or taking a sniff of nail polish. Of course, these good vibrations couldn’t last forever. Enter K2, Mary Jane’s dirtbag meth-head cousin.

Instead of using cannabis leaves, K2 (like the famous mountain) or Scooby Snax (like the famous talking dog treats), K2 combines all of the natural goodness of oregano, which was what most college kids were smoking anyway, with the chemical garbage that are synthetic drugs. A K2 cigarette contains regular dried herbs with shitty chemical cannabinoids to make them more awesome. It’s basically the Axe Body Spray of narcotics.

But K2 is a lot more dangerous than regular marijuana. Cannabinoids may have the same effect as THC, but have a lot more bad side effects. In 2015, over 6,000 emergency room visits involving K2 occurred in New York City alone, with two deaths already confirmed. This epidemic has been hitting the homeless community the worst, who seem to love how cost effective these cigarettes are while still making you forget you’ve been drooling on the sidewalk for six hours straight. Cannabinoid addicts wandering the street are often referred to as “zombies,” which is appropriate, as they are the type of undead best known for being easily distracted and always hungry.

Except these ones aren’t so concerned with brains.

While K2 itself has been illegal for a while, manufacturers keep switching up its composition, leaving sellers (including many bodegas) with a comfortable uncertainty whether their product is or isn’t actually illegal. However, with the new national ban on synthetic cannabinoids and a slew of police raids, New York hospitals have seen an 85 percent reduction in K2-related medical emergencies and homeless zombie parades.

Still, if there’s one silver lining, it’s that, because of K2 existing, there must have been instances where angry parents shouted at their kids “Why can’t you just smoke weed like a normal person?” Now that’s progress.

1

NBOMe Is Lethal LSD With A Legal Loophole

Say you want to get into LSD. You’ve heard The Beatles were into it, so that’s pretty cool. But you’ve also heard LSD is very illegal, a controlled substance that can get you quite a bit of jail time. Not to worry, scumbag drug manufacturers have found just the thing for you: 25I-NBOMe, a new and exciting LSD-like narcotic that’s not illegal just yet. And the best part is, by the time bureaucracy catches up to this loophole, you’ll already be long dead from taking a highly unstable and untested chemical.

“McDonald’s? No way, that stuff’s full of chemicals.” – Hippie who then takes some NBOMe.

25I-NBOMe is one of the latest of a long line of “chemical analogs” (of which you know quite a few examples having read this article), variants of known narcotics that have been altered just enough that they can’t be considered the same as the household brands they’re imitating. This makes these analog drugs technically legal, in the same way that putting mirrors on your shoes is technically legal. Rogue chemists have been playing this cat-and-mouse game with the D.E.A. since the ’70s, always trying to be a few molecular changes ahead of the curve.

So if NBOMe is just the New Coke of LSD, why is it offing more teenagers than a camp serial killer? It turns out that its greatest asset is also what makes it so terribly dangerous. The value of chemical analogs lies in that they’re “slightly different” from their controlled cousins, but in chemistry, “slightly different” can turn your lungs into goo. And there’s no way of knowing what exactly NBOMe is capable of, as the drug was intended to be used only in animal experiments and no large human trials on its effects have ever been conducted. That means that 25I-NBOMe doesn’t have users, it only has guinea pigs.

“Hey, I removed one atom from that boring old ‘carbon dioxide.’ Wanna try some?”

Not that people know what they’re actually taking. The reason this particular variant is becoming so popular is because it’s 16 times stronger than its other NBOMe cousins. But people don’t tend to whip out their testing kits when someone hands them a sachet of white powder. It’s also quite a bit cheaper than LSD, so plenty of dealers try to pass it off as the brand name. The resulting trip is usually unpredictable and often fatal.

Deaths linked to NBOMe have been described as “violent.” One 18-year-old experienced such extreme depression after mistakenly taking the drug that he tried to commit suicide by stabbing himself repeatedly in the neck with a pair of scissors. Another appeared as if “possessed,” foaming at the mouth and smashing his head against the floor. Another teen jumped off a balcony to his death high on “N-Bomb.” He thought he had taken LSD. He also thought he could fly.

And we’ll never know if he was right because he died before we could find out.

Since it crept into drug culture in between 2010 and 2013, the NBOMe loophole has been all but closed. By 2015, most countries had rescheduled it as the dangerous narcotic that it is, making it much harder and riskier to obtain. But with NBOMe on its way out, it’s only a matter of time before some middling chemist without scruples finds another way to mod an existing drug into something not yet illegal. So the lesson here, kids, is that if you’re going to take drugs, stick to the brands you know and trust. And don’t do a taste test.

Cedric Voets is a total square who gets nervous popping an aspirin. For more of his attempts at witticisms or his famous recipes for toilet wine, do follow him on Twitter.

Also check out 5 Drugs That Turn Your World Into A Real-Life Horror Movie and 5 Awful Things I Learned About Drugs Working At A Pharmacy.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out 4 Awful Ways Our Ancestors Got High, and other videos you won’t see on the site!

Follow us on Facebook, and let’s be best friends forever.

Source: http://allofbeer.com/2017/10/13/6-frightening-new-drugs-youve-never-heard-of/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2017/10/13/6-frightening-new-drugs-youve-never-heard-of/

[allofbeercom]

6 Frightening New Drugs (You’ve Never Heard Of)

Since the dawn of time, mankind has endeavored to keep finding new ways to get totally shitfaced. And just because the gamut of known narcotics now ranges from a cheeky evening sherry to face-melting LSD doesn’t mean people have stopped looking for (cheaper) alternatives. So let’s take a look at the latest discoveries our often short-lived pharmaceutical pioneers have come up with.

6

People Are Abusing Their Pets’ Medication (And Their Pets)

Veterinarians may not be as well regarded as human doctors, but that doesn’t mean their work is any less difficult. Performing surgery on a cat is just as hard as it is on a person — except that if you screw up on a person, you can’t just bury them in a shoe box and call it a day (usually). Vets need about the same quality of tools and drugs to do their job properly. So it was only a matter of time before addicts figured out that if animal medication is good enough to knock out a Great Dane, it will probably also get them plenty high.

Hanna-Barbara It’s why Shaggy ditched weed and moved on to Scooby Snacks.

Unsurprisingly, most animal drugs aren’t much different than the stuff hospitals pump into us. (Try not to dwell on the fact that your healthcare’s probably not much better than your pug’s.) Heavy-duty pain relievers (like Tramadol), Valium, and even ketamine are generally available to ailing animals. The main difference between human and animal medication seems to be that one of them is a lot harder to obtain. Most of our happy pills are controlled substances, which means they’re carefully tracked. That’s not the case for animal meds, though, because nobody expects a horse to get hooked on … uh, horse.

But until legislation is put into place to stop these druggie pet owners, some states have started educating vets on how to deal with addicts coming into their practice to get high off their cat’s supply. They’re mainly taught to recognize suspicious behavior, like when owners try to get refills early, or ask for medication by name, or pretend their pet fell down the stairs but then not immediately show a YouTube video of the fall to prove it.

LuckyBusiness/iStock “Does that dog suppository fit in a pipe?” is another question that raises red flags.

But what if your pet is just too damn healthy to exploit? In 2002, one owner was caught having trained his dog to cough on command just so he could get his hands on some sweet cough medicine. But that takes a lot of work, so some addicts just resort to intentionally hurting their pets to get a fix. In Kentucky, a trash monster named Heather Pereira was discovered to have cut her dog with razor blades as an excuse to keep getting her paws on his pain medication. She was sentenced to four years in prison (28 in dog years). But that’s small potatoes compared to one small drug ring in Oregon, who used a puppy mill as a front to amass over 100,000 Tramadol pills, neglecting the puppies to the point that their crates had been flooded with their own feces. Those assholes managed to find a way to make standard drug dealers look like pillars of the community.

5

Drinking Russian Bath Lotions

In December 2016, over 100 people from the Siberian city of Irkutsk were rushed to the hospital due to alcohol-related poisoning (you may assume this is normal for Christmas in Siberia, but we assure you it is not). Their drink of choice? A strong beverage that will not only put hair on your chest, but also keep that hair silky and clean.

Biomed Even hotel minibars are getting in on the action.

Boyaryshnik is the most popular bath lotion in Siberia. Not because of the cleansing power of its hawthorn berries, but because Russians like to drink it. And while no one among us can claim that they’ve never considered chugging a bottle of delicious-smelling children’s shampoo, nobody is drinking it for its refreshing scent, but because it gets them fucked right up. The lotion has such a high alcohol content, poor Russians have been using it as a substitute for expensive vodka. But when a bad batch of lotion hit the streets of Irkutsk, the bath-time fun drink killed 61 people in record time. Instead of containing ethanol (the fun alcohol), the tainted Boyaryshnik contained methanol (the “I’m blind and I can’t feel my legs” alcohol) and antifreeze. Not exactly a party, unless your idea of a party entails shedding your physical body in order to board the mothership.

At this point it needs to be made very clear that this tragic incident didn’t happen because people started drinking bath lotion, but because they started drinking counterfeit bath lotion. This means some criminal ring thought it more profitable to make fake bath lotion than fake vodka. And they weren’t wrong. Today, over 12 million Russians drink surrogate alcohol, including perfume, after-shave, antifreeze, and window cleaner. Is it weird that some of those sound a lot more appealing than the others?

Your answer depends on how much you like blue Gatorade.

The reason for these soapy binges is mainly due to Vladimir Putin’s government, which has been steadily raising the tax on alcohol for years in order to curb excessive drinking and fill its coffers with booze money. This has left many Russians too poor to support their habit, turning to their shower caddies for sweet relief. Putin has promised to lower taxes in the future and divert the government’s attention to catching alcohol counterfeiters. Until then, Russians will just have to take pride in having the most fragrant alcoholics in the world.

4

Molly Usually Isn’t MDMA (But Something Way Crazier)

Molly is the uptown rich kid variant of ecstasy, a designer drug endorsed by paragons of cool like Jay-Z and Miley Cyrus. That must mean it’s safe as houses, right? Sure, MDMA is about as chill as hardcore drugs can get, but that pill you got off that guy juggling glow sticks? That isn’t molly. And it will probably melt your insides to a pulp.

Kind of like that other Molly. The one from the gym.

So what are these party people ingesting instead of their expensive designer drugs? It could be anything, really, from variants of meth to cannabinoids to even bath salts. All they have in common is that they’re definitely not molly and they’re definitely made by lazy idiots. Most of them are too new to have a unique name (or their makers couldn’t come up with a catchy one), so they just slid into the molly brand. Sometimes you can get “lucky” and stumble upon some chemist’s pet project like Bromo-Dragonfly, which is pretty much LSD but with “effects that can last for up to three days.” But a much more common narcotic cuckoo egg is benzylpiperazine, or BZP, the poster child for why this fake molly trend is so dangerous. BZP is incredibly easy to make, but takes a lot of cleanup to remove all of the toxins, which prevents massive kidney and liver damage — among many other terrible side effects. Dealers don’t care about that though, because it’s not like someone is going to call the Better Business Bureau and make a complaint.

They don’t worry about losing customers when their customer base is “everyone who clubs.”

Molly has become just another brand, a marketing slogan with about as much truth in advertising as “9 out of 10 dentists agree” or “Jamie Lee Curtis can help you poop better.” Its umbrella status has become such an issue that many molly-centric venues like EDM concerts, raves, and orgies have started setting up testing booths to make sure people know what’s in their entertainment for the evening. The result is quite staggering, with only typically a quarter of pills tested containing only MDMA — and just as many containing no MDMA whatsoever. Meanwhile, out of all the molly the DEA seized and tested between 2009 and 2013, only as few as 13 percent of the pills showed any trace of MDMA. You’re about as likely to get high on MDMA from some molly you bought in a warehouse loft as you would from buying Flintstones vitamins in a drugstore.

But you will get something to make you try to brake cars with your bare feet.

3

Fentanyl Can Kill A Person Just By Touching Them

Heroin might just be the scariest drug out there, especially to non-drug users. It feels like one of those drugs that, just by looking at a spoonful, could ruin your life, your health, and just about every tooth you have. But guess what, you nerd? Heroin is for wimps now. Real tough-guy addicts take fentanyl, an opioid so strong it’s the last high you’ll ever need. Or have, for that matter.

As the marketing slogan says, “Fentanyl: It’s fatyl.”

The entire fentanyl family of opioids is just a carousel of the worst horrors drugs imaginable. Like pink, a type of fentanyl that was given its cutesy name because snorting any more than what fits on the tip of a pinky is enough to kill you. In fact, just touching this shit is enough to go into cardiac arrest. Typically, one grain of a fentanyl-based drug has the same potency as a hit of heroin. Two grains will make you overdose. Not that that’s terrifyingly risky. After all, heroin addicts are known for their steady hands and attention to detail.

Then there’s carfentanil, which is like regular fentanyl except that you’re about as likely to survive a hit of it as you would a ten-car pile-up. It’s roughly 100 times more powerful than regular fentanyl and 10,000 times more so than morphine. That’s because carfentanil was never intended for human consumption: It’s an elephant tranquilizer. The only time its effect on humans was ever considered was to test how quickly it could kill them.

The answer: slightly faster than the elephant.

Ironically, it’s because of the potency of the fentanyl family that they’re incredibly easy drugs to obtain. In Canada, for example, border guards cannot open packages weighing less than 30 grams without consent — and 30 grams of fentanyl is enough to last a lifetime (which for fentanyl users is about half an hour), making them a cinch to smuggle. This easy access has been a scourge on Canada, being partially responsible for increasing overdoses tenfold in just one year.

So how come it’s easier to score mega-heroin than it is just good old classic heroin? Fittingly, this dragon also comes all the way from the home of the opioid, China. China has no real regulations against manufacturing or distributing fentanyl-based substances — and it doesn’t look like that’ll be changing anytime soon. Over the internet, dozens if not hundreds of small, shady pharmaceutical companies are openly selling their fentanyl to clients around the globe. This makes this very dangerous drug about as easy to buy as a cheap iPhone case and for about the same cost.

And with an equal probability of improving your already shitty life.

2

Synthetic Weed Is Turning The Homeless Into Zombies

With the rapid legalization of cannabis across the United States, weed is getting a bit of an image change. No longer is it just the drug of choice for lazy stoners and geriatric hippies — it’s on the cusp of becoming as acceptable as drinking a beer or taking a sniff of nail polish. Of course, these good vibrations couldn’t last forever. Enter K2, Mary Jane’s dirtbag meth-head cousin.

Instead of using cannabis leaves, K2 (like the famous mountain) or Scooby Snax (like the famous talking dog treats), K2 combines all of the natural goodness of oregano, which was what most college kids were smoking anyway, with the chemical garbage that are synthetic drugs. A K2 cigarette contains regular dried herbs with shitty chemical cannabinoids to make them more awesome. It’s basically the Axe Body Spray of narcotics.

But K2 is a lot more dangerous than regular marijuana. Cannabinoids may have the same effect as THC, but have a lot more bad side effects. In 2015, over 6,000 emergency room visits involving K2 occurred in New York City alone, with two deaths already confirmed. This epidemic has been hitting the homeless community the worst, who seem to love how cost effective these cigarettes are while still making you forget you’ve been drooling on the sidewalk for six hours straight. Cannabinoid addicts wandering the street are often referred to as “zombies,” which is appropriate, as they are the type of undead best known for being easily distracted and always hungry.

Except these ones aren’t so concerned with brains.

While K2 itself has been illegal for a while, manufacturers keep switching up its composition, leaving sellers (including many bodegas) with a comfortable uncertainty whether their product is or isn’t actually illegal. However, with the new national ban on synthetic cannabinoids and a slew of police raids, New York hospitals have seen an 85 percent reduction in K2-related medical emergencies and homeless zombie parades.

Still, if there’s one silver lining, it’s that, because of K2 existing, there must have been instances where angry parents shouted at their kids “Why can’t you just smoke weed like a normal person?” Now that’s progress.

1

NBOMe Is Lethal LSD With A Legal Loophole

Say you want to get into LSD. You’ve heard The Beatles were into it, so that’s pretty cool. But you’ve also heard LSD is very illegal, a controlled substance that can get you quite a bit of jail time. Not to worry, scumbag drug manufacturers have found just the thing for you: 25I-NBOMe, a new and exciting LSD-like narcotic that’s not illegal just yet. And the best part is, by the time bureaucracy catches up to this loophole, you’ll already be long dead from taking a highly unstable and untested chemical.

“McDonald’s? No way, that stuff’s full of chemicals.” – Hippie who then takes some NBOMe.

25I-NBOMe is one of the latest of a long line of “chemical analogs” (of which you know quite a few examples having read this article), variants of known narcotics that have been altered just enough that they can’t be considered the same as the household brands they’re imitating. This makes these analog drugs technically legal, in the same way that putting mirrors on your shoes is technically legal. Rogue chemists have been playing this cat-and-mouse game with the D.E.A. since the ’70s, always trying to be a few molecular changes ahead of the curve.

So if NBOMe is just the New Coke of LSD, why is it offing more teenagers than a camp serial killer? It turns out that its greatest asset is also what makes it so terribly dangerous. The value of chemical analogs lies in that they’re “slightly different” from their controlled cousins, but in chemistry, “slightly different” can turn your lungs into goo. And there’s no way of knowing what exactly NBOMe is capable of, as the drug was intended to be used only in animal experiments and no large human trials on its effects have ever been conducted. That means that 25I-NBOMe doesn’t have users, it only has guinea pigs.

“Hey, I removed one atom from that boring old ‘carbon dioxide.’ Wanna try some?”

Not that people know what they’re actually taking. The reason this particular variant is becoming so popular is because it’s 16 times stronger than its other NBOMe cousins. But people don’t tend to whip out their testing kits when someone hands them a sachet of white powder. It’s also quite a bit cheaper than LSD, so plenty of dealers try to pass it off as the brand name. The resulting trip is usually unpredictable and often fatal.

Deaths linked to NBOMe have been described as “violent.” One 18-year-old experienced such extreme depression after mistakenly taking the drug that he tried to commit suicide by stabbing himself repeatedly in the neck with a pair of scissors. Another appeared as if “possessed,” foaming at the mouth and smashing his head against the floor. Another teen jumped off a balcony to his death high on “N-Bomb.” He thought he had taken LSD. He also thought he could fly.

And we’ll never know if he was right because he died before we could find out.

Since it crept into drug culture in between 2010 and 2013, the NBOMe loophole has been all but closed. By 2015, most countries had rescheduled it as the dangerous narcotic that it is, making it much harder and riskier to obtain. But with NBOMe on its way out, it’s only a matter of time before some middling chemist without scruples finds another way to mod an existing drug into something not yet illegal. So the lesson here, kids, is that if you’re going to take drugs, stick to the brands you know and trust. And don’t do a taste test.

Cedric Voets is a total square who gets nervous popping an aspirin. For more of his attempts at witticisms or his famous recipes for toilet wine, do follow him on Twitter.

Also check out 5 Drugs That Turn Your World Into A Real-Life Horror Movie and 5 Awful Things I Learned About Drugs Working At A Pharmacy.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out 4 Awful Ways Our Ancestors Got High, and other videos you won’t see on the site!

Follow us on Facebook, and let’s be best friends forever.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/2017/10/13/6-frightening-new-drugs-youve-never-heard-of/

[wayneooverton]

How to win friends and influence people on Instagram

Oh man, Instagram. That old thing. That photo app we love to hate. I wonder how sorry I would feel for myself if I knew the exact amount of times I opened Instagram and hit refresh per day. Shivers.

If I had to hanker a guess, I’d say around 20,000. You know, just to err on the side of caution.

Like most things in life, I go through phases on Instagram, of being so in love with it I have to be on for 24/7 and then other times where I consider deleting it. “Man, my latest sunset mountain photo only got 2,500 likes, what’s wrong with me? This is shit. I’m shit. Everyone hates me. I give up.”

Somehow, often my self-worth is tied to how successful I am on Instagram, or even worse, how successful OTHER people are. What. The. Fuck. How did it come to this?

My goodness, what is the world coming to when you feel like you are no longer validated because only 2,500 people you’ve never met before liked a picture you took. Then you upload a shot that gets 4,000 likes, and hot damn you’re back in business.

It’s a vicious cycle guys.

I’m the first to admit, I’ve been a dedicated slave to the Instagram for years. I mean, we go way back. Like iPhone 3 way back. Almost 5 years we’ve been together.

You see me and Instagram, we’ve had a tough relationship. You know, love hate. Hot and then cold, yes and then no. Or something like that. It’s the same with McDonald’s. You don’t people to know you actually like it, but then you end up drunkenly taking a taxi through the drive-through at 4 am. Nobody wants to admit that actually, on the inside, they really want those chicken nuggets. Badly.

*Crickets*

Wow, I’ve come a loooooong way since my first Instagram post!

  But I digress. Over the years I have really loved Instagram – I still do, deep down. I learned to become a better photographer through the app, to try and become more of a visual storyteller. At the end of the day I’ve met so many incredible people through Instagram, shared so many unique moments and built my own community of followers of thousands of people, and that makes me smile. That’s what it’s for right?

Through Instagram I’ve become a keen photographer, and through it I’ve learned to challenge myself creatively.

But I’m also part of that small percentage of people who also use Instagram for business. I was New Zealand’s first professional Instagrammer, and I’ve built Instagram into my overall business strategy. In addition to my blog, it’s a large part of my work.

And when I see other people directly effecting my work, I get pissed. Guys, I’M SO PISSED

So here we go, the rant you all have been waiting for. It’s been a while, I’ve been letting you down, let me make it up to you. Are you ready?

There are two ways to be successful on Instagram; one is doing it the honest way – building up your brand, sharing high quality shots, being really active and engaged in the community, being creative and original in what you’re doing, and above all, actually be passionate about the photos and stories you’re sharing. You know, actually adhering to Instagram’s T’s and C’s, being ethical and honest, and authentic and genuine. What’s that word everyone forgets? Ah yes, having integrity.

Hell, I even co-launched my own conference called the Travel Bootcamp teaching people how to build a career in this industry.

The Do’s and Don’ts of Instagram

And then there is option B. Cheating and manipulating your way to the top, which has somehow become the popular choice these days amongst the youths and Instagram newbies. Why work hard when you can pay to get it done instead?

Cheating is rampant on Instagram these days. Rampant I say! It’s everywhere. I ignored it for the longest time, wanting to believe the best in people, many of whom are colleagues and friends of mine. But it’s getting so ridiculous now I can’t keep quiet.

So many people are exceptionally lazy. They want the success that comes with having a huge Instagram following but don’t want to put in the hours of hard work yourself. Don’t worry, I’ll make it easy . So check it out, how to fake being authentic 101. A step by step guide. Here are my best tips for cheating and manipulating your way to the top on Instagram. Good luck!

1. Go out and buy some followers

For less than $70, you can get 10,000 Instagram followers! That’s enough to start elbowing your way into this industry. But seriously, buying followers for your Instagram is so 2014. I mean come on, at least try to be more creative than that. There are far sneakier and better ways to get more followers fast than just straight up buying them. Jeez.

2. Get automatic likes on your photos

SO over the years most of us have really felt the drop on Instagram engagement, right? The number of likes and comments you get on your photos often matter more than the follower number. I’ve never worked harder on Instagram than I have been, and I follow all of their rules and suggestions to a tee for five years, and I’ve been suffering from it while watching other people cheat their way to the top without a second thought.

My engagement for my follower count actually isn’t that great, and no matter how hard I try, I can barely keep it steady let alone grow it with the way the algorithms are working. And as soon as I experiment with my shots, it plummets. And my numbers are so skewed because my followers keep growing, mostly from my blog I reckon. I’ve never been more proud of my feed and my photos than I am now, and I’m so bummed that so few of my followers or new people even see it. And I’m not alone.

But don’t worry, there are ways around it. Did you know that you can pay for a monthly service that dumps fake likes on your photos when you upload them? How great is that? You don’t have to do anything and if you get enough of them quickly, you might even show up on the Explore Page! And would you believe me if I told you dozens if not hundreds of people who might even be one of your favorite Instagrammers are doing that too! What’s a little casual fraud in between Instagram posts, right? It’s not like it inflates the entire platform and makes people who aren’t cheating look bad or anything. It’s also faking your own influence.

3. Originality is dead, guys

As much as Instagram touts the idea of being creative photographers and storytellers, does it actually back it up on the platform? Is creativity really rewarded these days on Instagram? Instagram’s own Instagram feed is all about creative projects, unusual themes and cool people doing cool stuff. But is that the content that is actually rewarded on the platform?

NOPE.

What is rewarded is people copying each other over and over and over again. The same pose, the same locations, the same outfits, even the same filters. How many people have become huge landscape travel Instagrammers because they’ve traveled to Iceland and the Faroe Islands, posed in front of cabins and woodpiles and laid on the VSCO moody PNW filters a little too hard. Cough cough, I can think of tons. I mean, Socality Barbie was popular for a reason.

I mean fads are fads, and trends are trends for a reason; and they are highly effective. Beautiful places are popular for a reason, but what about those spots that people have strategically shot over and over and shared repeatedly just to build an image. You know, wearing a fedora hat and a blanket.

But I’ve worked with people over the years, some of whom are huge btw, who blatantly admit that they look out for trendy places, then go there knowing that their photos will be the best. People who don’t consider going to places that might be under the radar, but actually look for locations to shoot in those spots from people who’ve been there before just so they can take a version that will be more popular. Or peruse Pinterest and rip off other people’s ideas as their own. Jesus Christ, does it get any lazier than that?

So come visit me in Wanaka! You might not have heard, but we have this Insta-famous tree in the lake AND a ridge view called Mt. Roy, both of which have been ruined by trendy Instagrammers! You post photos from here and you’re guaranteed double engagement!

4. Be hot and show your butt off

I’m mostly talking about girls here, just so we are clear. Statistically thinking, you have a 75% chance of growing your Instagram account by 50% if you post photos of yourself in underwear or bikinis with an emphasis on your bum. It jumps up another 10% if you have a thigh gap.* Too bad my thigh gap is limited by my nugget consumption.

2. You may not post violent, nude, partially nude, discriminatory, unlawful, infringing, hateful, pornographic or sexually suggestive photos or other content via the Service. Instagram’s Terms of Use

Um, good one!

*Disclosure, I just made that up.

5. Date someone bigger than you

Need to grow a following really quick? Start dating someone who’s Insta-famous, and be prepared to hang on for the ride! Even better if they are a good photographer. Instagram husbands anyone? And nothing grows a following quite like being a hot power couple on Instagram. Actually, if I’m being totally fair here, I am not quite sure there is anything wrong with this, I’m probably just being petty.

After all nothing is more annoying that oversharing oversexualized happy couples on Instagram, right? God I’m so bitter.

6. Steal other people’s ideas

I learned my lesson a few years ago. I have always been a candid person, and I talk about what I’m working on or goals I have openly. Til I got burned again and again by Instagrammers ripping off my work.

I learned the hard way not to talk about projects I’m in the middle of working on (at the risk of having them outpitched from under me – happened to me more than a few times), to shots I was planning to take, to my favorite locations to local spots to trips I was working on. I hate it, but it’s happened too many times that I’ve mentioned it to someone only to have that person try and pull the rug out from under me.

Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I’m the kind of person that if you tell me something you’re working on, I’ll either try to help you get there or be supportive of it. It wouldn’t even occur to me to steal someone’s idea. As a creative, I find that behavior HORRENDOUS.

There is a big difference between being inspired by someone and ripping off other people’s work, and it’s something that happens all the time on Instagram, shamelessly.

7. Don’t hate the player, hate the game

There are so many games you can play on Instagram that are far from the Candy Crush variety. One of the biggest ways people game Instagram is following and unfollowing people. Back in the day, people used to do this manually. Follow a bunch of people per day, then unfollow the ones who didn’t follow you back or just unfollow again anyways. What trickery!

Then it got sophisticated and there are apps that you can use that will automatically follow and unfollow for you. Bear in mind it violates Instagram’s terms to authorize apps like that, and it’s pretty fun to go stalk people on SocialBlade to see who’s cheating this way. You just enter in the name of any Instagrammer on a desktop, then click on their IG page and then click detailed stats and have fun!

This is a highly effective way to grow your account because it brings real people in the meantime over to your page. The downside of course, besides being highly unethical, means you aren’t in control of your account anymore and god knows who you’re following. “Oh sorry, I didn’t mean to follow that nazi account, oops!”

8. Not who you seem to be

There are a few people, who shall remain nameless, mostly because I’m scared, who were the ultimate Instagram sneaks.

Like, having a feature account, which is to say a big account on Instagram that just reshares other people’s photos. Sometimes crediting the owners, most of the time just straight up ripping it off. Building a huge following only posting the best of the best, which isn’t even yours, then one day deleting all the photos and reposting your own as a personal account on Instagram.

Yes, people have done it, and some very, very successfully, though of course never admitting it.

I have two words for those people – dodgy motherf*ckers!

9. You don’t even have to be on the app

Did you know that you don’t even need to be on Instagram yourself? You can authorize apps that go and like and comment on stuff for you. I mean, I’m sure you’ve all seen it. Random comments on your photos that don’t make sense. I’ve called out bloggers who comment on all my photos but don’t actually follow me. Or better yet, friends of mine of leave comments on porn or other dirty pages. I’m sure you didn’t mean “wow what a great shot” of a teenager in a thong.

No one likes a spammer!

There are so many Instagrammers who are now super famous who got their start doing this one or two years ago. Because it brings real people over to your page, you get real growth and engagement, never mind that you didn’t even do it yourself and it’s super dodgy and straight up violates several of Instagram’s terms. Why you would do this is beyond me, let alone take the risk of losing your account.

10. Don’t be a dick! 

It’s up to you whether or not you want to be a douche. I have to believe that at the end of the day, this kind of behavior will fail. It’s not a long-term solution to this kind of work, and I think that if you build a career on deceit and lies, it will blow up in your face.

Who said that breaking into this industry and being famous on Instagram would be easy? You have to work your ass off at it, often for years before seeing any kind of real success. I have been in this industry for seven years, that’s right seven years of work! It never stops!

Real influence and real success takes real work. 

I’m mad because this terrible behavior is straight fucking up the industry on a big scale. It’s not a little problem, it’s rampant, and nothing is being done about it. It skews the numbers and screws over people who have worked and been ethical.

And here’s a shameless little self-promo: sick of seeing this kind of behavior combined with seeing a real lack of hard, credible advice to help break into the travel industry, my business partners Lauren Bath, Georgia Rickard and I co-launched our own conference, the Travel Bootcamp last year. An intensive one day, no BS workshop, we give you all the tools and facts no one talks about that will help you get paid to travel like us. Between us we’ve traveled to over 100 countries, worked for over a decade in the industry and make six figure salaries from it.

Our next Bootcamp is in a couple of weeks in Melbourne on April 29th if you want to come – we have a few tickets left.

Get your tickets to the Travel Bootcamp Melbourne here!

Have you heard of this stuff before? Can you believe it? What kind of terrible behavior have you seen on Instagram? Spill!

The post How to win friends and influence people on Instagram appeared first on Young Adventuress.

from Young Adventuress http://ift.tt/2o2Btek

[ongames]

What It’s Like To Be A Mom Who Produces Too Much Breastmilk

Before she gave birth to her first child, Brittany worried about not producing enough milk to feed her baby. But that ended up not being an issue with her first, who is now 4-and-a-half. Nor was it a problem with her 2.5-year-old or her 7-month-old. On the contrary, Brittany’s breasts practically overflowed with the stuff, like two small firehoses she couldn’t turn off.

“My kids would all start choking,” explained the 31-year-old, who lives in Kansas. “They’d pull off and when it’s very forceful like that, it’s like a sprinkler going off. It’s like, ‘Get me a rag!’ You’re getting it all over them. They’re upset. You’re upset.”

“Sometimes,” she said, “I just wanted to scream, what am I doing wrong?”

In breastfeeding support groups and consultations between dazed new moms and lactation consultants, the words “supply problem” generally mean one thing: insufficient milk. Estimates suggest that between 30 and 80 percent of breastfeeding moms believe they’re unable to produce enough milk, whether or not that’s actually true.

But for a smaller, often-overlooked subset of mothers, the problem isn’t making too little milk; it’s making too much of it. And while an abundance of milk may sound like a pretty damn good problem to have, mothers and lactation experts say it is actually extremely painful and emotionally grueling ― an ongoing battle between supply and demand that can lead to swollen, aching breasts and unhappy babies. 

Though there isn’t a hard-and-fast definition, oversupply is essentially a mismatch between what a mother makes and what her baby can comfortably take in.

“The baby put in an order for, say, 24 ounces of milk, and the mom is putting out 30 ounces,” Linda Smith, an Ohio-based International Board Certified Lactation Consultant, told The Huffington Post. “If it’s not removed, she is in pain. If too much is removed, her body makes more.”

That’s because ― broadly speaking ― milk production is controlled at the breast. When a baby empties the breast, they’re sending a signal to their mother’s body to produce more milk.

With oversupply, that balance may be thrown off because of a problem on the baby’s side (like, a tongue- or lip-tie that prevents them from emptying the breast, Smith said) or because of an issue on the mom’s side (perhaps she is pumping as she stocks milk before returning to work and over-stimulating her breasts, or in rarer cases, has a hormonal imbalance, Smith explained). Sometimes it is a combination of factors that throws off the delicate relationship between supply and demand. Smith added that she usually doesn’t consider a mom to be having an oversupply issue in the first six-weeks postpartum, because at that point many women and their babies are still finding their rhythm.

Mothers are held hostage to their pump ... they're at-risk for getting sick with mastitis, which is miserable. Leigh Anne O' Connor, lactation consultant

One of the biggest challenges associated with oversupply is having an overactive or forceful letdown, which means moms have to watch as their sweet nursing babies are quickly overwhelmed by their breast milk. As a result of gulping down air in an effort to keep up with that fast flow, many babies become gassy and cranky. “A baby who gets too much milk very quickly may become very fussy and irritable at the breast and may be considered ‘colicky,’” Dr. Jack Newman a Canadian pediatrician and lactation consultant explains on his website. Often, babies will pull off the breast or simply refuse to nurse.

Then there’s the breast pain. Women with oversupply get little relief from breasts that feel uncomfortably full, hard or leaky. And because their breasts may not sufficiently drain, they are at risk for painful plugged ducts and mastitis, an infection that leads to searing pain, redness and high fevers that moms have described as “pure misery” or the “red-eyed breastfeeding monster.”

“Mothers are held hostage to their pump,” Leigh Anne O’Connor, a New York City-based International Board Certified Lactation Consultant, told HuffPost. “They’re not free to move around, for one thing. They’re at-risk for getting sick with mastitis, which is miserable. And then having a baby who is gulping down milk is miserable as well.”

Lindsay, a 32-year-old from Chicago who has a 7-and-a-half-month-old daughter, says that in her early breastfeeding days, her milk would just “shoot out.”

“My daughter was, like, choking and flailing around, and then she would be really gassy and had stomach issues, which they said might be because the milk was coming out so fast and so hard,” she said, adding that you could see that her breasts were bulging with liquid.  

Lindsay worked with a lactation consultant who reassured her that her supply would eventually settle down, and it did to some extent ― but only after she settled into an aggressive pattern of pumping five to six times a day, often before and after feedings. And only after she developed mastitis when her daughter was 3 months old.

Complaining about oversupply can feel like going into a Weight Watchers meeting and lamenting that it's just too easy for you to drop pounds."

“I still get annoyed at night when I’m really tired, or I’ve fallen asleep on the sofa but I have to pump otherwise I’m going to wake up in pain ― and I’m terrified I’m going to get that infection again,” she said, adding that she has burned through three power cords on her breast pump since her daughter was born.

Sometimes the fix is clear. If the issue is simply that a mom is pumping too much and overstimulating her breasts, cutting back can make a big difference, said Smith. Different holds can help babies manage the milk flow better, and pumping a bit before and after feedings can help moms find a better balance, she explained, adding that women should certainly seek out help from a lactation consultant, doctor or support group.

But other times, it’s about moms and babies working together to find that delicate balance that works for them, feeding after feeding and day after day.

For Brittany, that has meant learning to hold her each of her babies in a particular way so that they don’t choke on the fast flow of milk, and pumping a little before she starts a feeding so she gets immediate relief ― and so that the letdown isn’t quite so intense.

It has also required some emotional gymnastics, working hard to view her oversupply as a good thing. Brittany has been able to donate her excess ― three coolers full of milk, as well as four garbage bags ― to a local milk bank, where it has been pasteurized and given to babies who need it. That, at least, has helped give her a sense of purpose and calm during her more dispiriting breastfeeding moments. 

Dealing with oversupply can be isolating, both in terms of how it keeps many women at home and close to their pump and how it affects their ability to commiserate with other breastfeeding women. Moms know how it sounds to complain about making too much milk when so many other moms are struggling to produce enough. Going into a breastfeeding support group and complaining about oversupply can feel kind of like going to a Weight Watchers meeting and lamenting that it’s just too easy for you to drop pounds.

“I’ve been facilitating groups for moms for years and one of the things that is so hard is that these women don’t want to talk about their problems with a woman who makes four ounces in 24 hours,” said O’Connor, the lactation consultant, who added that many times women will only speak up, somewhat sheepishly, five minutes before a support group is set to end ― and then try to minimize their problem lest they come across as ungrateful.

“You go to these groups and you almost feel bad bringing up the fact you have too much milk,” said Brittany, who wrote a blog post on the topic so other moms wouldn’t necessarily feel as lonely as she did when she was struggling to nurse her first baby. “But there really are challenges on both sides.”

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

What It’s Like To Be A Mom Who Produces Too Much Breastmilk published first on http://ift.tt/2lnpciY

[yes-dal456]

What It’s Like To Be A Mom Who Produces Too Much Breastmilk

Before she gave birth to her first child, Brittany worried about not producing enough milk to feed her baby. But that ended up not being an issue with her first, who is now 4-and-a-half. Nor was it a problem with her 2.5-year-old or her 7-month-old. On the contrary, Brittany’s breasts practically overflowed with the stuff, like two small firehoses she couldn’t turn off.

“My kids would all start choking,” explained the 31-year-old, who lives in Kansas. “They’d pull off and when it’s very forceful like that, it’s like a sprinkler going off. It’s like, ‘Get me a rag!’ You’re getting it all over them. They’re upset. You’re upset.”

“Sometimes,” she said, “I just wanted to scream, what am I doing wrong?”

In breastfeeding support groups and consultations between dazed new moms and lactation consultants, the words “supply problem” generally mean one thing: insufficient milk. Estimates suggest that between 30 and 80 percent of breastfeeding moms believe they’re unable to produce enough milk, whether or not that’s actually true.

But for a smaller, often-overlooked subset of mothers, the problem isn’t making too little milk; it’s making too much of it. And while an abundance of milk may sound like a pretty damn good problem to have, mothers and lactation experts say it is actually extremely painful and emotionally grueling ― an ongoing battle between supply and demand that can lead to swollen, aching breasts and unhappy babies. 

Though there isn’t a hard-and-fast definition, oversupply is essentially a mismatch between what a mother makes and what her baby can comfortably take in.

“The baby put in an order for, say, 24 ounces of milk, and the mom is putting out 30 ounces,” Linda Smith, an Ohio-based International Board Certified Lactation Consultant, told The Huffington Post. “If it’s not removed, she is in pain. If too much is removed, her body makes more.”

That’s because ― broadly speaking ― milk production is controlled at the breast. When a baby empties the breast, they’re sending a signal to their mother’s body to produce more milk.

With oversupply, that balance may be thrown off because of a problem on the baby’s side (like, a tongue- or lip-tie that prevents them from emptying the breast, Smith said) or because of an issue on the mom’s side (perhaps she is pumping as she stocks milk before returning to work and over-stimulating her breasts, or in rarer cases, has a hormonal imbalance, Smith explained). Sometimes it is a combination of factors that throws off the delicate relationship between supply and demand. Smith added that she usually doesn’t consider a mom to be having an oversupply issue in the first six-weeks postpartum, because at that point many women and their babies are still finding their rhythm.

Mothers are held hostage to their pump ... they're at-risk for getting sick with mastitis, which is miserable. Leigh Anne O' Connor, lactation consultant

One of the biggest challenges associated with oversupply is having an overactive or forceful letdown, which means moms have to watch as their sweet nursing babies are quickly overwhelmed by their breast milk. As a result of gulping down air in an effort to keep up with that fast flow, many babies become gassy and cranky. “A baby who gets too much milk very quickly may become very fussy and irritable at the breast and may be considered ‘colicky,’” Dr. Jack Newman a Canadian pediatrician and lactation consultant explains on his website. Often, babies will pull off the breast or simply refuse to nurse.

Then there’s the breast pain. Women with oversupply get little relief from breasts that feel uncomfortably full, hard or leaky. And because their breasts may not sufficiently drain, they are at risk for painful plugged ducts and mastitis, an infection that leads to searing pain, redness and high fevers that moms have described as “pure misery” or the “red-eyed breastfeeding monster.”

“Mothers are held hostage to their pump,” Leigh Anne O’Connor, a New York City-based International Board Certified Lactation Consultant, told HuffPost. “They’re not free to move around, for one thing. They’re at-risk for getting sick with mastitis, which is miserable. And then having a baby who is gulping down milk is miserable as well.”

Lindsay, a 32-year-old from Chicago who has a 7-and-a-half-month-old daughter, says that in her early breastfeeding days, her milk would just “shoot out.”

“My daughter was, like, choking and flailing around, and then she would be really gassy and had stomach issues, which they said might be because the milk was coming out so fast and so hard,” she said, adding that you could see that her breasts were bulging with liquid.  

Lindsay worked with a lactation consultant who reassured her that her supply would eventually settle down, and it did to some extent ― but only after she settled into an aggressive pattern of pumping five to six times a day, often before and after feedings. And only after she developed mastitis when her daughter was 3 months old.

Complaining about oversupply can feel like going into a Weight Watchers meeting and lamenting that it's just too easy for you to drop pounds."

“I still get annoyed at night when I’m really tired, or I’ve fallen asleep on the sofa but I have to pump otherwise I’m going to wake up in pain ― and I’m terrified I’m going to get that infection again,” she said, adding that she has burned through three power cords on her breast pump since her daughter was born.

Sometimes the fix is clear. If the issue is simply that a mom is pumping too much and overstimulating her breasts, cutting back can make a big difference, said Smith. Different holds can help babies manage the milk flow better, and pumping a bit before and after feedings can help moms find a better balance, she explained, adding that women should certainly seek out help from a lactation consultant, doctor or support group.

But other times, it’s about moms and babies working together to find that delicate balance that works for them, feeding after feeding and day after day.

For Brittany, that has meant learning to hold her each of her babies in a particular way so that they don’t choke on the fast flow of milk, and pumping a little before she starts a feeding so she gets immediate relief ― and so that the letdown isn’t quite so intense.

It has also required some emotional gymnastics, working hard to view her oversupply as a good thing. Brittany has been able to donate her excess ― three coolers full of milk, as well as four garbage bags ― to a local milk bank, where it has been pasteurized and given to babies who need it. That, at least, has helped give her a sense of purpose and calm during her more dispiriting breastfeeding moments. 

Dealing with oversupply can be isolating, both in terms of how it keeps many women at home and close to their pump and how it affects their ability to commiserate with other breastfeeding women. Moms know how it sounds to complain about making too much milk when so many other moms are struggling to produce enough. Going into a breastfeeding support group and complaining about oversupply can feel kind of like going to a Weight Watchers meeting and lamenting that it’s just too easy for you to drop pounds.

“I’ve been facilitating groups for moms for years and one of the things that is so hard is that these women don’t want to talk about their problems with a woman who makes four ounces in 24 hours,” said O’Connor, the lactation consultant, who added that many times women will only speak up, somewhat sheepishly, five minutes before a support group is set to end ― and then try to minimize their problem lest they come across as ungrateful.

“You go to these groups and you almost feel bad bringing up the fact you have too much milk,” said Brittany, who wrote a blog post on the topic so other moms wouldn’t necessarily feel as lonely as she did when she was struggling to nurse her first baby. “But there really are challenges on both sides.”

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from http://ift.tt/2l3XKq9 from Blogger http://ift.tt/2lKgdMr

[imreviewblog]

What It’s Like To Be A Mom Who Produces Too Much Breastmilk

Before she gave birth to her first child, Brittany worried about not producing enough milk to feed her baby. But that ended up not being an issue with her first, who is now 4-and-a-half. Nor was it a problem with her 2.5-year-old or her 7-month-old. On the contrary, Brittany’s breasts practically overflowed with the stuff, like two small firehoses she couldn’t turn off.

“My kids would all start choking,” explained the 31-year-old, who lives in Kansas. “They’d pull off and when it’s very forceful like that, it’s like a sprinkler going off. It’s like, ‘Get me a rag!’ You’re getting it all over them. They’re upset. You’re upset.”

“Sometimes,” she said, “I just wanted to scream, what am I doing wrong?”

In breastfeeding support groups and consultations between dazed new moms and lactation consultants, the words “supply problem” generally mean one thing: insufficient milk. Estimates suggest that between 30 and 80 percent of breastfeeding moms believe they’re unable to produce enough milk, whether or not that’s actually true.

But for a smaller, often-overlooked subset of mothers, the problem isn’t making too little milk; it’s making too much of it. And while an abundance of milk may sound like a pretty damn good problem to have, mothers and lactation experts say it is actually extremely painful and emotionally grueling ― an ongoing battle between supply and demand that can lead to swollen, aching breasts and unhappy babies. 

Though there isn’t a hard-and-fast definition, oversupply is essentially a mismatch between what a mother makes and what her baby can comfortably take in.

“The baby put in an order for, say, 24 ounces of milk, and the mom is putting out 30 ounces,” Linda Smith, an Ohio-based International Board Certified Lactation Consultant, told The Huffington Post. “If it’s not removed, she is in pain. If too much is removed, her body makes more.”

That’s because ― broadly speaking ― milk production is controlled at the breast. When a baby empties the breast, they’re sending a signal to their mother’s body to produce more milk.

With oversupply, that balance may be thrown off because of a problem on the baby’s side (like, a tongue- or lip-tie that prevents them from emptying the breast, Smith said) or because of an issue on the mom’s side (perhaps she is pumping as she stocks milk before returning to work and over-stimulating her breasts, or in rarer cases, has a hormonal imbalance, Smith explained). Sometimes it is a combination of factors that throws off the delicate relationship between supply and demand. Smith added that she usually doesn’t consider a mom to be having an oversupply issue in the first six-weeks postpartum, because at that point many women and their babies are still finding their rhythm.

Mothers are held hostage to their pump ... they're at-risk for getting sick with mastitis, which is miserable. Leigh Anne O' Connor, lactation consultant

One of the biggest challenges associated with oversupply is having an overactive or forceful letdown, which means moms have to watch as their sweet nursing babies are quickly overwhelmed by their breast milk. As a result of gulping down air in an effort to keep up with that fast flow, many babies become gassy and cranky. “A baby who gets too much milk very quickly may become very fussy and irritable at the breast and may be considered ‘colicky,’” Dr. Jack Newman a Canadian pediatrician and lactation consultant explains on his website. Often, babies will pull off the breast or simply refuse to nurse.

Then there’s the breast pain. Women with oversupply get little relief from breasts that feel uncomfortably full, hard or leaky. And because their breasts may not sufficiently drain, they are at risk for painful plugged ducts and mastitis, an infection that leads to searing pain, redness and high fevers that moms have described as “pure misery” or the “red-eyed breastfeeding monster.”

“Mothers are held hostage to their pump,” Leigh Anne O’Connor, a New York City-based International Board Certified Lactation Consultant, told HuffPost. “They’re not free to move around, for one thing. They’re at-risk for getting sick with mastitis, which is miserable. And then having a baby who is gulping down milk is miserable as well.”

Lindsay, a 32-year-old from Chicago who has a 7-and-a-half-month-old daughter, says that in her early breastfeeding days, her milk would just “shoot out.”

“My daughter was, like, choking and flailing around, and then she would be really gassy and had stomach issues, which they said might be because the milk was coming out so fast and so hard,” she said, adding that you could see that her breasts were bulging with liquid.  

Lindsay worked with a lactation consultant who reassured her that her supply would eventually settle down, and it did to some extent ― but only after she settled into an aggressive pattern of pumping five to six times a day, often before and after feedings. And only after she developed mastitis when her daughter was 3 months old.

Complaining about oversupply can feel like going into a Weight Watchers meeting and lamenting that it's just too easy for you to drop pounds."

“I still get annoyed at night when I’m really tired, or I’ve fallen asleep on the sofa but I have to pump otherwise I’m going to wake up in pain ― and I’m terrified I’m going to get that infection again,” she said, adding that she has burned through three power cords on her breast pump since her daughter was born.

Sometimes the fix is clear. If the issue is simply that a mom is pumping too much and overstimulating her breasts, cutting back can make a big difference, said Smith. Different holds can help babies manage the milk flow better, and pumping a bit before and after feedings can help moms find a better balance, she explained, adding that women should certainly seek out help from a lactation consultant, doctor or support group.

But other times, it’s about moms and babies working together to find that delicate balance that works for them, feeding after feeding and day after day.

For Brittany, that has meant learning to hold her each of her babies in a particular way so that they don’t choke on the fast flow of milk, and pumping a little before she starts a feeding so she gets immediate relief ― and so that the letdown isn’t quite so intense.

It has also required some emotional gymnastics, working hard to view her oversupply as a good thing. Brittany has been able to donate her excess ― three coolers full of milk, as well as four garbage bags ― to a local milk bank, where it has been pasteurized and given to babies who need it. That, at least, has helped give her a sense of purpose and calm during her more dispiriting breastfeeding moments. 

Dealing with oversupply can be isolating, both in terms of how it keeps many women at home and close to their pump and how it affects their ability to commiserate with other breastfeeding women. Moms know how it sounds to complain about making too much milk when so many other moms are struggling to produce enough. Going into a breastfeeding support group and complaining about oversupply can feel kind of like going to a Weight Watchers meeting and lamenting that it’s just too easy for you to drop pounds.

“I’ve been facilitating groups for moms for years and one of the things that is so hard is that these women don’t want to talk about their problems with a woman who makes four ounces in 24 hours,” said O’Connor, the lactation consultant, who added that many times women will only speak up, somewhat sheepishly, five minutes before a support group is set to end ― and then try to minimize their problem lest they come across as ungrateful.

“You go to these groups and you almost feel bad bringing up the fact you have too much milk,” said Brittany, who wrote a blog post on the topic so other moms wouldn’t necessarily feel as lonely as she did when she was struggling to nurse her first baby. “But there really are challenges on both sides.”

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from Healthy Living - The Huffington Post http://huff.to/2mgMY1t