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zee-writes-and-draws · 3 years

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Normal world AU where the different buildings are just random groups of people and all of them ended up moving to the small village near the supposedly ‘haunted’ mountain that Samon and Enki grew up on bc property values are low as shit, and all of the minors are adopted by the guards. Qi has basically just grabbed Upa and Liang and ran the hell away from the Chinese mafia. Samon sees this random man dragging two half-dead children with him and this is now the very first time any of the new residents of the village find out the ‘hauntings’ that lowered property values were just a teenage Enki post massive growth spurt and a very small and over-energetic Samon that haven’t been seen in well over a decade.

- Hajime has, unfortunately, agreed to look after Jyugo and Nico while Rock and Uno try to find legal jobs, but it’s a lot on him. He and Seitarou help Uno and Rock fight a case to get custody of the two minors. Yamato is helping Tsukumo get a restraining order against his former agent and various paparazzi, as well as going to therapy so he doesn’t constantly feel the need to put on a persona in front of others. Hajime is a teacher at the local school (since there’s a decent number of local kids and then the building children), Yamato is the school’s coach, and Seitarou sells uniforms/cute festival stuff but is also occasionally seen working with the age 7 and below kids because they’re all very small and nice.

- Kiji is trying to cure Honey of his anger management issues and Trois of his pyromaniac tendencies. His day job is making and testing makeup that everyone buys, like mascara and eyeliner and hair gel. His second in command is working in one of the other small shops, selling everyone clothes (he and Seitarou make the clothing together).

- Kenshirou is only here because some of his dogs are sick and this village has been weirdly good for their health. Along the way he lets Musashi and Hitoshi stay with him because they help on chores and the dogs love both of them very much. He helps with the local stray problem by opening a shelter and rehabilitating most of them (the few who can’t be fixed to near-perfect health are still loved and cared for). Hitoshi bakes lots of food and sells it at Shiro’s restaurant, which is also why his presence is appreciated. Musashi tutors online part-time after Mitsuru rigged up wifi for them. Between all three of their jobs they can afford a place that’s small but has four tiny rooms so each person can a private space. (They sleep in the living room that’s been transformed into the group bedroom).

- Mitsuru is considered the local nuisance in so many ways, but after all of his loudspeakers and amplifiers have been confiscated he’s forced to resort back to regular hand-made instruments, so he at least gets to learn something entertaining as he irritates everyone with his noise-making. He and Momoko live in the same house but there’s a line drawn on the inside and outside that splits the house in half so everyone realizes in all of ten seconds they’re not actually together together, just saving on rent as long-term friends. Momoko works on managing the more official stuff to keep the town from being erased. She’s the unofficial (until the next election of course) mayor of the town at this point. Mitsuru’s day job is rigging up stuff like wifi and helping Hajime with his shop class at the high school.

- Shiro moved here after hearing how wonderful the cuisine is. He approves of being able to gather fresh ingredients on the mountain. Rock is frequently seen at his restaurant, both as a customer and as a worker. Hitoshi was recruited within a week. (Hajime has some mixed feelings but Rock mostly stops acting like an idiot after the first day, so it works out well)

- Inori and Ruka moved here years ago (and dragged the Daisen brothers with them) and are pretty much the only residents who were here before everyone started moving out and the buildings moved in. They’re the only ones initially who know the story behind the hauntings and never shared it out of indifference. Inori works in construction of new buildings/clearing rubble from the old, the Daisen trio help train the different sports teams at the school, and Ruka technically co-owns the makeup business with Kiji but his preferred job is as an unofficial swimming instructor because the two of them don’t get along.

- Samon and Enki bring the village supplies and materials from the mountain and trade this way. Samon has a notable weakness for ice pops, popsicles, and zakuro shaved ice, which he gets to surprise Enki on days it seems like he might want it. The new residents are all pleasantly surprised by how sweet Noriko is. Shiro offers her a job after trying some of her desserts. She bakes on weekends and holidays only to avoid overexerting herself, but the rest of the time her jobs include checking people in, taking orders to Shiro and Rock, and keeping peace if someone starts arguments. Houzuki is the area acupuncture specialist and medic until the Otogi family moves in, but he switches to full time acupuncture and massage therapy after they take up the practice. (they’re better than him at medicine anyways and he’s ok with admitting it).

- Liang and Upa love training on the mountain. Rock joins them frequently, often chatting with Liang as they race up. Qi is marginally less interested in physical activity, but he’s willing to make the hike up with them because of the amazing plant both during the hike and at the arrival itself. In the long run, doing some exercise in this form helps him with his mental health a lot and makes him happier. Tsukumo joins occasionally and talking to Qi helps him gradually come out of his shell.

- Trois takes to the challenge of trying to be constructive in building things instead of weapons and explosives. The downside is he frequently teams up with Mitsuru (who has the most equipment necessary) and therefore there are unique ways of getting around the idea of non-destructive inventions. Honey figures out ways to get Mitsuru his speakers back on the condition that he can use the wiring for his capsules.

- Nico ends up really sad about the lack of wifi so he tries to work with Mitsuru to improve tech, but he’s got a hard time reading the manuals so now Musashi, accompanied by either Uno or Trois depending on the day, can be seen teaching Nico how to read instruction manuals.

- Yamato is still very proud of his Japanese heritage, but he also frequently encourages others to appreciate the culture they live in and the culture they came from. Thanks to him, there’s a small festival hosted each year where everyone brings something like food or games or clothing from their culture and share it with everyone.

- Kiji takes it as a personal challenge to help teach normal world culture to at least one of the Gokuu brothers. Enki is far less willing to go along with the idea that he needs help from someone, so it’s Samon. Inori, who had a similar idea for the last eleven years, is currently trying to teach Samon how to drive. It’s yielding mixed results, but he takes really well to motorbikes. Hajme and Samon have a brief ceasefire whenever the subject of motorcycles comes up.

- No one is allowed to bring up the time that Hajime got lost in the mountain. No one.

- Kuu comes and goes as he pleases. Mostly he stays at Hajime’s house but sometimes he’ll somehow appear wherever Samon Enki and Noriko are presently staying and lies down in the lap of whoever is trying to meditate. Enki tries to ignore Kuu (and fails), Samon will give him small scritches and complain about Hajime in a quiet tone, and Noriko feeds and pets him.

- In their spare time, many of the adults critique the prison systems they rescued the others from. Kiji, Hajime, and Kenshirou work with Enki to fix things on a bureactraic level, frequently accompanied by Momoko when she isn’t a sole representative in front of various international governments. Hajime knows the prison model perfectly, Kenshirou understands the police aspect that ties into it, and Kiji has several decades of experience serving as a prison guard, and their combined knowledge leads to many of their proposals being pushed pretty far up the ranks.

- Samon is working on fixing prisons on the level of how each inmate is treated. All the official and formal changes in the world don’t change that there’s also issues with inmates not receiving care, sufficient entertainment, decent things for purchase and not just whether or not they can afford them, all sorts of stuff that slips past the cracks in the paperwork. He’s also the one who’s pushing for more rehabilitation programs with Kiji and Mitsuru’s help. Between Samon’s knowledge of physical needs of people, Kiji’s balanced addition of general knowledge of what kind of education and paperwork prisoners need for proper rehabilitation to stick, and Mitsuru’s experience in communication, they have a very solid structure. Mitsuru’s ability to middleman and talk to Momoko also helps push their ideas forward.

- Slowly the buildings become more friendly towards one another. Upa smiles more because Nico helped him get out of his shell, there is a photo of Tsukumo laughing as himself for the first time hanging on the wall of Shiro’s restaurant, and Kenshirou’s dogs all adopted different humans to befriend and bond with. Qi gradually gets over his fear of dogs thanks to Musashi and ends up adopting one who works as a service dog for him and keeps him away from panic attacks and self-harming attempts, as well as (gradually) learning how to tell what kind of health Upa and Liang are presently in and alerting the doctor if necessary.

- The time-honored tradition of feuds between the different non-inmates and adults in charge of them continues, but they added in some new competitions. There are now options for multi-building tug-of-war, kids vs adults (and variations) relays, one v one competitions, and general tomfuckery. Most of the time Momoko is the referee, Mitsuru commentates, and although they rarely join in, they tend to tag-team and secure a near-effortless victory. If it’s every person for themselves, Momoko wins unless distracted by Hajime, at which point the rule of funny is frequently used to determine a victor.

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hetalia-has-a-secretary · 3 years

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Allies and axis react to their s/o opening up about their chronic depression when their bf asks to move in together?

Like, their s/o basically says “there are days where no matter how hard I try I can’t get out of bed. There will be times where I don’t shower and don’t eat, where I lock myself away and start crying uncontrollably. Are you sure you’re ready to deal with me when I’m having my not-so-pretty moments?”

QwQ I know the feeling. The bad days can suck SO hard. I think the worst one I had was when I just, laid in bed whenever I had the chance. Pro-tip. Even if you feel like doing nothing, do not lay down. It really does make it worse... Especially because I was prone to fall asleep and then I wasn't sleeping at night, and it became a mess and wasn't worth it.

Trigger warning: Mentions of depression and plausible related triggers.

Allies and Axis moving in with a Chronically Depressed S/O!

Allies:

America:

He gave them a relatively sad look, but promised that no matter what he still loves them.

He know what's like to have his downs, but that's with reason.

Not many people were by his side during those times.

He starts with basic questions like, what they need. For them, and from him.

He's more than prepared to do what it takes to help them, even if he has to make a fool of himself, or finally learn how to put himself on mute.

If they're going to have such terrible lows the least he can do is fill the rest of their days with the highest of highs! Maybe that will be the key to helping them get through things.

Expect cheesy love letters to be slipped through the door during those times. It's always worth reading them.

Especially on the worst days where getting out of bed is hard, small achievements like picking up a piece of paper might be helpful. Even if it's just slightly.

England:

He nods and doesn't even interrupt them while they explain.

He admits that he might not be fully prepared for it, but is more than happy to learn.

If he ever does something, anything, that might make things worse to at least communicate he's done wrong.

After a few hours of research he makes sure to run his findings by his lover, and together they pick out strategies that might help in those situations.

He went as far as to buy a small hanging sign they can put on their door when they aren't feeling their best.

Even if his S/O thinks it's childish, he keeps it just in case.

France:

He knows what lonely nights feels like, but has never had any major lows.

So expect a couple tough questions about possible triggers to avoid.

He even goes as far as making a sort of safe word for them and their emotions.

He understands he can get too handsy when he tries to cheer someone up, but also accepts that some days, touching or talking is a no go.

Shoo Fly is the safe word for no touching, and a five rapid eye blinks is code for when and if they go nonverbal, or don't want to talk.

He also takes 'no' for an answer, but he hopes the silly code words and actions lift their mood, even slightly.

When the worst of the worst comes around, he'll be more than okay with just sitting beside them until it's over. Chocolates at the ready when they come around.

China:

He's super in thought.

Part of him knows it might be an uphill battle those days.

But then he remembers he literally lives on the most peaceful and calming part of his country.

Taking it into consideration he runs by them his own problems and wants to make sure they'll be able to handle him as well

Let's face it, china can be a bit arrogant and/or sensitive and sometimes just says the wrong thing.

These two traits might cross over every now and then, and he wants to know if they're going to be alright with that.

He knows he's not the best with people and can be pushy, but he can learn paitence.

Even if it takes a few mistakes.

Best thing to do when and if it happens is to not respond when he's done or said something hurtful. He'll eventually realize what he's done and apologize.

Russia:

He certainly understands what that's like.

Russia has gone nonverbal before when he's hit a low stride.

"There is no worry because I will not let you have the time to be sad!"

He says that with such confidence, but deep down he's worried something will go wrong.

He knows he doesn't always understand people's feelings, especially after being with his S/O, and is nervous.

Eventually he tells them they should wait until he does understand their problem.

Even if they have to repeat it 100 times, he's going to figure it out!

But when it does happen, and he sees how bad it can get it almost just- clicks for him.

He's immediately by their side humming to them, and rubbing their back. He let's them through tantrums, and pound their fists on him if they need it.

Anything to shake it off as quickly as possible.

Axis:

Germany:

He's a very self disciplined man, and takes such things with a serious nature.

He asks all the questions about what they need and what he can do in those times.

He, very tenderly and carefully, asks them if they'd ever had days where self harm was considered.

No matter their anwser he nods and let's them know he'll do what he can to help.

He even took major mental notes of their favorite foods and such.

Unlike some of the others this doesn't change much to the relationship.

He treats them like he normally does, via asks them occasionally where their mental health is.

Even if it's out of the blue, some days it comes in handy and the both of them either catch it before it happens, or the very least prepare a few things his precious jewel needs.

When their lows hit and no one is prepared he's going to have a good balance of giving them space, and simultaneously being by their side.

Japan:

He's very quiet and a very good listener.

Also known for reading the room, so he's had his suspensions

He obviously still wants them to move in, and even asks if they want a special room they can go too that will help them

Japan him self has a very special place he goes to, to clear his mind.

He's actually really chill about it.

His S/O might get some extra cuddles when those times come around.

8/10 times they will sleep through their lows when he's holding them.

Will always wake up to a nice warm cup of tea, a handful of fluffy animals surrounding them, and a Japan who's reading nearby.

Italy:

He gets kind of sad.

He voices his concern about not really know what to do in those situations.

That actually leads into a two person cry session because they both seem to hit their lows hard.

This is how they find out Italy has times where he forces himself to be happy for the sake of others.

It drains him both physically and emotionally.

So he's learned to have a couple days of the week where he gives himself a hard reset.

I.E a makeshift spa day.

Pasta and pastries included.

His S/O might be surprised at how hard it is to stay upset during those times.

They might still go through the motions, but Italy is right there to try and dampen the effect.

One of the face masks he makes actually bubbles and just, puts them to sleep.

The days they can't get out of bed, he will do whatever they want. He also takes the time to paint their nails or do something that requires them to do nothing. It's still a small achievement and he hopes they feel better because of it.

#hetalia american #hetalia england #hetalia france #hetalia china #hetalia russia #hetalia germany #hetalia japan #hetalia italy #hetalia #aph #hws

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starlight-loki · 3 years

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heyyy :)) is it alright if you make an hc for Loki and reader? where reader can change reality like wanda cause she's depressed and she lost her family and the avengers are trying to help her? (I'm crying, I just finished wandavision ;( )

aw mAN MY HEART😭💗

also just a warning/PSA for this one: this deals with heavy feelings of grief/loss (specifically of family members) as well as some others concerned over mental health that accompanies the grieving process? just wanted to give a warning just in case. On a slightly, teeny-tiny, lighter note, Loki is alive in this one. (We don’t accept his IW death as canon in this house ❤️)

this is a sad one, i’m sorry! but i’ve got a fluffier one coming soon, I promise ❤️

The Snap took out your entire family

Like... you weren’t even sure how it was possible that the odds were that much against you

You had hoped with all your life that with the survival rate of The Snap being 1 in 2, you would’ve been spared even one family member: a cousin, an extended great aunt, anything

but they were all gone

it didn’t hit you right away at first -- especially with other members of the team disappearing as well, you felt that there were others who were suffering more than you

they needed to be helped first

but once the initial shock of half the population disappearing wore off and the other Avengers inevitably had to keep moving forward, that’s when the weight of your loss began to hit you

you’d often hide in your room when things got too difficult, only allowing yourself to fall apart when you knew no one else was awake

it also didn’t help that the Compound was twice as silent as it usually was, due to some of your closest friends also disappearing

no one was taking it well, really, but it was harder for you than anyone because of your powers

it was tempting to shift reality to bring everyone back, even just for a moment, but you knew it would only cause you more problems in the long run.

especially with you still being in the first stage of your grief, you knew that if you brought your family and your fellow Avengers back in some way, you’d never want to leave

the dream you had a few nights later didn’t help matters either: you were back in your grandparents’ home as a young child, running around their house as old music from the 60s played softly in the background

you woke with the memory of a warm summer’s eve fading away from you like a worn blanket, and tears began to stream down your face

you’d give anything to have that memory back in the physical world, even if it meant never leaving your room again

you decided right then and there that you were going to turn your room in the Compound into your own safe haven

it would look like your grandparent’s house in your dream, and everyone you loved -- friends and family alike -- would be there.

the entire Compound trembled as you altered reality in your room, and while you were resurrecting everyone in your own way, somewhere across the hall Loki shot up out of bed

he felt your magic alter the very strings of reality

he had given you space to grieve by yourself, but now he was getting worried

you often spoke about this between the two of you -- using magic to alter fate for your own benefit -- and it was something the two of you swore never to do

magic always had a price, no matter how tempting it seemed.

It scared Loki to think of what you might have done

back in your room, there were tears of happiness running down your cheeks now as you took in your surroundings

you were back home with everyone you loved. they were safe. you were safe. no more bad feelings.

the air smelled like freshly baked cookies and the orange glow of the sunset warmed the walls of your grandparent’s house, and you couldn’t keep the smile off your face as you caught sightings of Bucky, Wanda, and Peter roaming the house

This was home.

To your surprise, however, you heard a loud and obnoxious knock on your front door

Everything was soft and gentle here -- something was definitely wrong

you opened the door to find Loki frowning worriedly at you

“Loki! You’re just in time, my grandma made cookies for everyone-”

“Y/N... what... did you do...?”

His eyes searched your face, and you couldn’t help but notice your heart skip a beat as an anxious shadow crossed his features

no. you weren’t going to be reminded today.

“Would you like to come in?” You wished there was a way to alter your body’s chemistry, you hated the way your hands trembled and your throat tightened.

“No, but I would like you to come out. With me. I can make you tea the way you like it.”

The thought of outside nearly made you slam the door instinctively. You had everything you needed right here. You had tea here, you didn’t need to go outside.

“No.”

“Please.”

It wasn’t a question, it was a command, spoken quieter than a whisper, but you could feel the urgency in Loki’s tone nonetheless.

all you could manage was a shake of your head before you shut the door

that night, you and your loved ones gathered around the crackling fire in your grandparents’ living room, but even with everyone sitting around you laughing and telling stories, you couldn’t quite quell the dread in your stomach

the little voice in the back of your mind telling you this was all wrong just wouldn’t seem to go away

your mind kept drifting back towards Loki, and you hated that there was still a part of you that longed to go back to him, to just be held in his arms as you cried

you nearly jumped out of your skin that night when Loki came into the house once more, silently climbing the steps to your childhood bedroom

“Y/N...”

“I’m not going back. I can’t.”

“You have to. None of this is real and you know it.”

You pulled the covers tighter around you and try to use your powers to block Loki out of your reality, but he’d put up a shield so powerful around him that he didn't move an inch.

“You know better than anyone that magic has a price, Y/N!”

Tears formed in your eyes because you knew he was right. you knew this wasn't real and these weren't your friends, these weren't your family.

your family was gone.

Loki approaches you slowly and pulls you into a gentle embrace, and you finally allow your created reality to fade away as you sob into his shoulder

it hits you for the first time in days just how nice it feels to be held by someone, especially Loki who understands what it feels like to lose someone better than most

he whispers soft words to you, reassuring you over and over that he’s here, you’re safe, it’s okay to cry

there’s a point somewhere in the night where Loki cries with you, because he empathizes so strongly with you and with your grief -- there’s a part of him that never fully processed his mother’s death, and being with you allows him to do that

the two of you sort of become each other’s lifeline at this point, always keeping some sort of physical contact, whether its a desperate embrace or even just your shoulders touching gently

you need him more than ever now, and Loki also realizes the longer he stays with you that he needs you just as much.

#loki x reader #loki x gender neutral reader #loki x reader hc #headcanon of the day #loki x reader headcanon #infinity war #loki hc #loki headcanon #loki laufeyson #loki x reader imagine #ask #request #mcu loki

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varusai · 3 years

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who do you think is the most dateable dark matter thief?? i know you have an opinion and i need to hear it

sorry for the late response anon i honestly had to think abt this one for a few days lmao, but yeah i have opinions. below the cut bc fr i have opinions, all of them have major pros and cons (based on my characterization at least) and really i just have to break it down for u

Boros, everyones obvious first choice, but certainly not mine.

Pros: rich, tall, pretty, fun af, passionate, will kill for you np, give you anything you want, literally anything.

cons: has a god complex, doesnt respect you, not his number one priority at all, will forget about you once its not interesting for him anymore, probably argumentative/combative af, is very very smart and has no problem manipulating you in all the worst ways, is very entitled so he will never feel bad about anything, cant win arguments either bc he’ll want to settle it with combat, will get offended over little things just to argue bc he thinks thats fun

this is a relationship you’d get into if you literally have nothing to lose and dont care about your mental health. like hes hot but this shit would be toxic af and he will ruin your life and leave you to go fuck around and fight someone on the other side of the universe. this will be the best of times and the worst of times for you and you will never be the same afterward mentally or emotionally. the only way i would even consider it is if i lost my damn mind. The only way a relationship with him would ever work long term is if you were physically stronger than him and were capable of putting him in his place OR you were smart enough, suicidal enough, and interesting enough to him to engage in some psychological warfare and reject him if he asked you. Make him chase you for years, say yes, then decide that /he’s/ boring /you/ and leave him for another member of the squad to just destroy their established hierarchy and humble him to the point that he’s obsessed with you.

i dont have the energy for all that, so i’ll just smash and pass.

0/10 completely undateable

Geryuganshoop, also a probable second choice for many:

pros: cute, nice, tentacle alien (obviously), will respect you np, will also give you anything you want, not antagonistic at all, telepathic communication so no risk of miscommunication, emotionally intelligent and available, loyal to a fault,

cons: horrible boss/best friend that you will have to listen to him vent about for at least 3 hours a day, complete yes man as well so he will not tell boros no or cut him off and you will be stuck dealing with this no matter what, severely mentally ill and wont go to therapy bc he thinks hes handling it well, workaholic, needs a lot, and i mean A LOT of attention

this relationship would be great if not for boros lol. boros sabotages his social and romantic life but geryu has been friends with him too long to either cut him off or establish boundaries. he has no backbone (figuratively and literally) and wouldnt even consider it. he’ll ignore you in favor of his job too, to a massive degree. also i think that while the telepathic communication would be a major plus in most cases, here i feel like i’d have no less than 16 different, never before seen on earth, mental illnesses projected right into my brain just from being within a certain radius of him.

im already fucked up enough in that sense so pass unfortunately.

it would be a yes without boros in the picture tho lmao

so prob like 4/10 iffy datablillity, 1 level increase with each decade of therapy he gets tho so a lot of potential :D

Groribas, my fav girl:

pros: straightforward, realistic, very clear expectations, will not fuck around with you whatsoever like there is no mind games or anything here, will kill for you, rich and non materialistic so she’ll basically just let you do whatever with her money since she doesn t care about it, cares about her job but like...a normal amount. she absolutely has a good work/life balance, highly organized so she will not forget important dates, loyal af and will defend your honor under any circumstances, mean but in a funny way, a ton of fun to hang out with if you’re into that, no eyes so i dont have to worry abt eye contact ever

cons: extremely high expectations, like exhaustingly high, and not even a bit of flexibility there, if you dont meet the cut its a no, she’ll let you know and leave same day, she will also bully you, you need a thick skin and great sense of humor to survive, bad at feelings if you need emotional support???? go elsewhere, shes mega emotionally unavailable, will probably want to share bodies as a form of intimacy

overall its a solid 6.5/10 dateability for me i love the directness and no bs approach, we would def get along well. however, while im not sensitive, shes def gonna hit on some insecurities at some point and it will cause an argument lol. but i mean whatever. it happens. the body sharing would be an issue though, same reason i wouldnt be chill with having a symbiote despite being a major venom fucker. i need my space i cant deal with that. so thats a possible deal breaker if she couldnt get over that lol. and she wont, so we wouldnt work out. i wish it fuckin would tho😭😭😭 i would take whatever crumbs of attention she would be willing to give me

Melzalgald, my fav they/them bastard:

pros: amorphous and shapeshifting aka extremely attractive according to my taste in monsters, tall af but could chose to be a more reasonable survivable size lol, self contained and self-entertaining so they dont need a ton of attention to be happy, funny af, rich, will give you whatever you want and probably a bunch of shit you didnt know you wanted, very fun, built in friend group if you didnt already have friends, extremely emotionally intelligent and great people skills due to living in a collective, stupid af by choice, like some of em are very smart, but they dont claim that, will say fuck work and tell boros to eat shit to spend time with you, will kill for you as well, but only if you ask them to bc their first inclination is to just bother someone to death, very loyal, once they like you they like you really forever, it would take some pretty extreme circumstances to make them dislike you

cons: annoying af and its unavoidable, will talk over you, all of them at once will talk over you and do so loudly, no respect for personal space, they dont even know what that is, will probably accidentally manhandle you, they act stupid but arent so they can be manipulative, even if it isnt bad and they dont really mean to be, impulsive, forgetful of the needs of organic creatures so they will bother you at all hours of the day and night if you arent firm with boundaries, disgustingly extroverted and will bring randoms to your place without asking, or just...make new cluster members and you have to roll with it, will eat or absorb literally anything you have, will antagonize and bother you for fun, major jump scare risk since sometimes the forms are....fleshy

this ones hard for me like theyre hot af and i feel like they’d be super fun and good partners, but god....the noise. idk how long i could deal with that lol i dont like people in my house. it would drive me up the wall, but then again...i can simply kick them out when ive had enough. they arent projecting mental illness directly into my brain or requiring me to share a body sintelligento major plus. creepy thing/symbiote style hot monster without any of the invasiveness so tbh 8/10 dateability

some people date loud annoying extroverts who dont understand personal space that /arent/ rich, loyal, or emotionally intellegent so i’d be winning on a few different fronts lmao

#lord boros #geryuganshoop #groribas #melzalgald #dark matter thieves #opm #i put way too much thought into this after not thinking abt them in a long while #it was fun tho #Anonymous

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mrs-nate-humphrey · 4 years

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aight aight, real shit; let's say you got the chance to rewrite the entirety of gossip girl exactly how you want. make a brief description of what would happen in each season. (you can decide whether there's a fourth season or not)

oh i LOVE this ask, and i am so flattered to be asked this, haha. i have SO many thoughts, i’ve been thinking about this non-stop, but i’ll try to be as brief as possible. also, disclaimer, i don’t remember all the seasons equally clearly. like i barely remember s2. haha, whoops.

season 1: i love this season as is, for the most part. i think the tone of it was actually very serious and involved? like the show was actively trying not to be frivolous with heavy topics, and the way we were getting to see the characters seemed like they were trying to bring out character depth and the complexities of their lives in very deliberate ways. nate’s whole thing with his parents gets so much focus, and it’s not something the show glorifies, it’s something that is meant to make you uncomfortable and worried for him.

i would have nate be less of a dudebro, jenny & nate’s friendship being a little more solid, dan being a little more involved in jenny’s problems + helping her find her space, vanessa/nate to happen earlier - after nate breaks up w/ blair and realises she looks happier, i would have him not try and get back with her (lol, dude, the fact that she’s happy after breaking up with you means you probably shouldn’t be dating her.) more exploration of eric’s mental health. more dan and blair friendship. i would keep chair the way it is this season. i would not have a derena breakup - i’d have them take a break after the georgina reveal and get back together during the summer after talking about it and deciding to be more honest & open with each other. and, what the hell, i would have lily not blame serena (???) for being taken advantage of in the whole pete fairman situation. serena wasn’t sober, she was 16, that dude was in his 30s, georgina was taping her w/o her consent. how is any of this serena’s fault??? i hate lily’s reaction so much.

season 2: i... don’t remember enough of this season, sadly. it’s been too long since i watched it. i would majorly change jenny’s arc here, though. eleanor stealing her dress was majorly, majorly fucked up, and i think jenny should’ve done something then and there. also the whole thing with ‘lily is a mother to chuck’.... i would’ve loved it if lily had been like that to jenny. the girl needed it, and lily would’ve actually been able to help jenny establish connections in the professional world and whatnot. i think jenny should’ve transferred out of constance - not necessarily homeschooling maybe, but gone somewhere else. unlike dan, she didn’t even want to get into an ivy, she wanted to make it big as a designer. so. that.

oh nate my love. i’d get this trainwreck of a boy some therapy. while i hate that the catherine thing happened, things like that do happen all the time, and i’d be interested in sort of handling the aftermath of it in a responsible way. i would not have... a lot of serena’s arc and decisions (from what i can remember) were really random in this season. i’d have her break up with dan at some point. and vanessa would need a new subject for her short film, and she’d choose serena.

nate doesn’t really date anyone, this season. but he and jenny open up to each other abt having gay crushes on people who treat you like shit - jenny’s thing with agnes - nate rescues her when they’re taking those pictures in her flat and let’s say she doesn’t go back to agnes. instead of kissing her, nate talks to her instead, and tells her about carter, tells her about chuck. and jenny talks about her feelings for blair, her feelings for agnes. and both of them sort of go... “it sucks, but all we can do is try not to become the kind of people we hate, right?”

dan pines for nate. majorly. massively. obviously. i think the only person who really notices is blair, and this would lead to new hijinks and shenanigans. also!! i do not want chair in s2. maybe it can go there for a bit but definitely not to the extent in canon. i want blair to have the same moment of being unable to deny her cruelty / needing to be accountable that she did in that ‘age of dissonance’ play. and. this sounds fucky but i want the dan/rachel stuff to stay as it is, and later, in s4, for dan & serena to talk about rachel & ben respectively and be like ‘hey, this was a fucked up thing to happen to us, wasn’t it?’

i would also like to get to know blair’s “minions” better as people. i mean. they all seemed hella fascinating to me, and the show’s decision to make them superficial and unidimensional was very depressing.

season 3: hot garbage, throw canon away. when chuck goes away to paris or wherever, let him not come back. goodbye, dude! dan, blair & vanessa friendship at nyu is so, so important to me. also im losing my mind always at how vanessa and serena catch dan on that walk of shame and they’re both like ‘college is a time for experimentation!’ and nobody does anything even slightly bisexual (unless you count that threesome later, which, blah.) a serenessa / date dynamic in college would’ve been great. dan transferring to columbia like blair does and rooming with nate and just, the gayness of it all. dan & blair become really, really close, and d&b&v watch movies + go to art exhibits together and are all SO DAMN PRETENTIOUS. serena finds it sexy, nate finds it terrifying.

the william stuff would be interesting if he were actually held accountable. like that man has no right being a doctor, and medical malpractice needs to be brought up. and jenny’s whole arc this season makes me so sad. i think it would’ve been interesting if she’d been a ‘queen’ and ruled alongside eric, and just, the two of them forcing people to be nice, sort of like they try to do with people who are mean to nelly in s2 i think it is? but also.. jenny out of constance is very good, and i think i mentioned that earlier, haha, whoops.

season 4 : serenessa breakup, for whatever reason, probably to do with the william fuckery, because i think vanessa would react in similar ways to nate (”serena, i know he’s your dad, but we have to do the right thing” / “it still wasn’t your call to make” / “he’s a certified doctor, serena, a man like that has no right -” / “god vanessa, you really don’t get it, do you?” ). uhhh i would actually... if i had to choose i would honestly go blairnessa >>>>> dair. i love how blair & vanessa can keep each other on their toes and hold each other accountable. like? blair’s classist or racist and dan’s just like, *smiles*. vanessa would actively be like ‘hey, stop that.’ (this is one of the few actual criticisms i have about d/b as a relationship, RIP.)

(edited to add: yeah, i think blairnessa WOULD be a sustainable relationship, more abt that here! )

yes to the milo arc, but dan gets to keep milo (his friends threaten georgina and go all ‘you made him sign the certificate. don’t make us take you to court’ because i love these morally grey assholes but also because g DID trick dan into thinking milo was his and dan was ready to reshape his whole life around that kid which is more than georgina was willing to do. plus endgame: jack/georgina are not parents i want milo to have.) i would also have more of a rufus & dan fallout over the milo thing. i think rufus would be really nasty about it all tbh.

the dair arc for blair and vanessa! let the juliet stuff happen, but let it be less awful + let it be seen as Bad + let serena get help & not forgive her for it. let serena NOT date ben after, what the hell. i want d&s to talk about their shared feelings for high school teachers and to realise, in retrospect, as adults, that what happened was crossing lines. let blair and vanessa suddenly drop dan and do the movies + galleries stuff on their own. and dan’s like ??? but he’s busy being a parent with nate supporting him. dan’s drama is very much parenting things. there would be some nonsense involving nate’s family pushing back, because ‘we stood by while you dated him, nate, we thought it was a phase. but raising a child with another man? this is unacceptable.’ i would like nate to get disowned by the family, and need to find his own feet. and to get a REAL SHOT AT HAPPINESS away from that terrible environment.

season 5: i want this to be a good serena season. let her find her calling doing creative things. let her and carter travel the world. let her just be whoever she wants to be. let her and vanessa patch their friendship up. let her have an open relationship with carter, let her have a lot of sex with a lot of random people and not feel guilty about it. let her really really blossom. i want more eric! maybe he’s in london with jenny, and she’s working on her fashion stuff, and he’s realising that he really wants to be a counsellor.

some time-skips, maybe. i really want to see dan’s whole thing of being a parent. sending milo to kindergarten and spending the whole time milo’s gone on edge and anxious about everything that could go wrong, while nate comforts him. let nate try to get a job because he no longer has a trust fund, and navigate everything that comes with that. let vanessa be there for him. why the fuck am i phrasing my sentences like this - can you tell that i studied physics once?? oh well.

blair & vanessa handling a lot of things. vanessa meeting harold!! vanessa’s parents being disapproving of blair, but ruby standing up for her. blair & vanessa planning their future properly. blair & vanessa babysitting milo and talking about kids.

and there can be drama too, there should always be drama. but i would like wholesome stuff at the centre of it too, you know? the ivy/lola nonsense can go on in the background, i don’t actually care that much. as long as ivy doesn’t go around fucking people’s fathers for no understandable or discernable reason, i don’t really care lkdhlfdkhg. (it was just so inexplicable and so random!)

season 6: uh, i don’t know. this was a bad season for everyone in canon, except chuck. i would throw it all away. i would actually love if we had pre-series rufly instead: every time those two bring up their past together i’m like 👀 because it sounds like a dream. or focus entirely on jenny and eric and their life. i am obsessed with jenny and eric being... sort of queerplatonic, sort of like, best friends. there’s no romance and no sex between them (eric’s canonically gay, and jenny’s a lesbian because i said so) but i think the way jenny and eric are is very, very life partners in a way that isn’t romantic OR sexual. so they’d have a little place together and would support each other. and just. what are they up to now? also. kati, iz, penelope, hazel, nelly... what r they doing now? one of the few things i actually liked about s6 as it was was that nelly was that reporter and that she’d found her people in yale. nelly yuki getting a happy and fulfilling ending and being a successful woman was so good and we actually got a little bit of that. i’d like more of that, for the rest of the girls, you know?

#anon #long post #this is almost 1.9k words long but it was fun to write LDKHLGKHFGKH #gossip girl #i know there's no dair i am so sorry about that #but honestly the way this was panning out i had to like #choose between dair & blairnessa #RIP #meta #??#prompt #my writing #???#gg rewrite

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crimeronan · 4 years

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2020 in review

it’s been a weird year for me.

by all accounts, it Should be a bad year.

lots of bad things happened to me this year. i found places i adore in my new town - a certain cozy chair in the library, a corner table at a 24 hour coffee shop, a park bench in direct sunlight for most of the day - just in time to lose them all. i started pursuing health answers in january, only for all the hospitals to close on my birthday, rendering answers impossible to find.

i waited months for the hospitals to open again, from home, unable to pursue any of the nightlife or queer meetups or community theater i’d vowed to get involved in. eventually i found out i have scoliosis and a serious vitamin D deficiency. i hoped to get better by treating these things. instead the health problems continued, worsened. i slept through most of may and november, i had intermittent weeks where i’d sleep for 20+ hours a day and be in too much pain to get out of bed upon waking. i missed rent a few times. borrowed money too many times. relied on my loved ones way more than i’ve ever been comfortable with. (it’s the adam parrish ass in me.)

i developed a painful deformity in my leg. spent stupid amounts of time in urgent care and the ER. thought it was a dislocation due to connective tissue issues, but my x-rays came back clean. so did an ultrasound for blood clots. my doctor referred me to a dermatologist, who did a biopsy. not super pleasant considering i faint when punctured with needles, but i’d already had my blood drawn and IVs stuck in me, so whatever. found out i have an autoimmune disorder. went from the most-perceived-as-able-bodied person in my house to the one most likely to get killed by the pandemic in the span of a single phone call. might have a shortened lifespan, might not. don’t know yet. probably will know by the end of the year.

so it should be a bad year. none of this was pleasant. i’ve had spans of time where i’ve cried harder than i’ve ever cried in my life. had to keep myself from calling my mom and telling her i needed her, because i knew she’d drop her job and her responsibilities and her plans to race across the whole-ass country, and i didn’t want to do that to her

but i don’t think it was a bad year. not really.

it was my first full year living in the portland metro area. which, don’t get me wrong, deserves some of the Cringe Hippie Liberal Anarchist Moron reputation it gets. but it meant living in a city full of queer people and openly trans-friendly businesses. it meant having enough healthcare providers near me that i could actively seek out ones who could treat my complex mental and physical health issues without some of the biases i’m used to. it meant that i found an adequate psychiatrist within 10 minutes of me, an adequate primary care doctor within 20.

i used to live in rural new hampshire. i drove 70 minutes to see my psychiatrist. i never found a primary care doctor for physical health issues. i would have had to go to boston, and i don’t like driving in downtown boston. (masshole reputations are real and boston’s city planning is hell on earth.)

i also had the very strange experience of being taken seriously by every doctor i interacted with. i am not used to this. without getting too deep into it, i have been pretty badly scarred by experiences with having my autonomy violated because of my status as a psychotic individual, even though my fears were not psychosis-related. also less scarring but equally off-putting experiences with being a perceived-as-woman individual whose pain was shrugged off by men as, like, normal hysterical woman agonies. or whatever.

so, i had a leg deformity. and doctors took me seriously. because it was a visible, inexplicable symptom. and because a lot of them looked at it and thought, oh fuck, this girl is dying.

(i could still be dying, i guess. just a lot slower than they worried i was. i’m not about to keel over from a blood clot or from my rotting bones decaying into my bloodstream.)

this has gone a long way toward alleviating my intrinsic fear of doctors. being SICK is scary, sure, but it’s odd to be able to (cautiously) expect that doctors will try to help me instead of hurt me.

it was also my first full year living in an apartment of my own, with the family i chose. my first full year of having my own space that i built. my first full year of being independent, aside from the times i wasn’t. my first full year of interacting exclusively with people who make me feel happy and loved instead of people who drain me. and i felt better, mentally, than i have in a long time.

which is reflected in my creative work. this was my most creative year in... ever, i think? even though i was so sick and slept through so much of it. even though the pandemic kept me from seeking out inspirational experiences. i made a lot of fandom friends & got closer to friends i met last year. i got a lot more confident in writing what i wanted to and talking about what i wanted to and not worrying about pleasing anyone but myself.

i published over 150k words of fanfic. the vast majority of it was exploring feelings about chronic illness. i outlined an original fiction project from beginning to end, added about 30k words to it. i started fucking around with digital art a bit, although i have nothing even Remotely worth showing people. i gained something like 900 tumblr followers from a combination of shitposting and earnestly talking about my feelings re: chronic illness, mental health, fictional meta. i gave some ppl life advice that i guess was helpful. apparently i inspired some people to survive the year, which is very weird to think about, but also very nice.

so, uh. that’s my year i guess. should be bad, but it wasn’t. dunno how to conclude this so i will simply say: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

#long post #year in review #autoimmune tag #my writing

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youllallriseintheink · 4 years

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Sanctuary

Request from Threadedsafetypin: a story about Jack helping Sammy to recover from ink infection.

---

Most members of the Joey Drew Studios music room knew that Sammy behaving strangely was status quo. So, when was Sammy first infected with ink, few people were alarmed. Complaining about seeing Bendy in his sleep? Stress. Increased irritability? Stress. Spacing out more often, seeming more exhausted, looking more drawn and bedraggled than usual? Poor guy really has to get a grip on his life- but at least he’s still functioning well enough to get the songs out on time.

Jack Fain, Sammy’s best friend, was the only one who realized that this wasn’t just one of Sammy’s episodes. He’d confronted Sammy about it a couple weeks ago, and it hadn’t gone well. He had snapped about his health being his own business and told Jack to go away.

Jack was used to Sammy being irritable, so he didn’t take it personally. “Okay. I can’t help you if you’re not ready. Just know that I’m here for you when you’re ready to talk. I care about you, and want you to be okay. Alright?”

Sammy had grumbled an “alright,” and left. His symptoms had only worsened since then, and Jack was rather worried that Sammy would never be “ready”- at least, not until he was very ill. But he couldn’t think of any way to help the process along unless Sammy was on board as well.

Then, one day while Jack was working in the sewers, he heard footsteps. Only Sammy knew that he hid away in the sewers, so it had to be him. Jack got up to meet him, and saw that Sammy had a defeated look on his face.

“Remember when you said to come to you when I was ready? Well, I’m ready,” Sammy said, as though admitting a dark secret. He took off the white gloves he’d taken to wearing lately, revealing ink-black hands. “The ink did this to me, and tried to convince me that it was a good thing, but I can’t deny that this is a problem anymore. I don’t think that a hospital could help me, and I’m scared that Joey would kill me if it got out the public. I don’t know what to do.”

Jack stood stunned a moment, looking at Sammy’s hands. They clearly weren’t just stained, but tainted down to the bone. It looked like there were some pockets of ink just beneath the surface as well.

“It’s okay. I’ll find out what to do,” Jack promised.

---

“Norman, can you come with me for a minute?” Jack asked. “I need to ask Mr. Drew something he won’t enjoy answering, and I’m hoping that if you’re there next to me, he won’t kill me on the spot for it. Alright? All you’ll have to do is stand there. And you’ll probably get some nice secrets out of it.”

Excited at the thought of listening in on such a conversation, Norman agreed, and the two of them made their way to Joey’s office. The door shut loudly.

“Joey,” Jack began, in a tone one might use to calm down a wild animal, “someone I care deeply about is infected with ink. Now look- I don’t want trouble. I don’t have any personal reason to want your secrets to get out. Please tell me how to help him get better, and I’ll do it completely inconspicuously if it’s possible.”

---

“What did he say?” Sammy asked. The look on Jack’s face wasn’t especially encouraging.

“Well, he said that a hospital can help you- if we take you a couple miles from New York, first. He said that the ink is alive in you, and it needs to be taken away from the ink machine in order to kill it. If we don’t do that, the ink will live in you no matter what anyone tries to do to get rid of it, and you’ll be in and out of treatment for the rest of your life- which would likely be a very short, unhealthy one. So, that isn’t an option.”

Sammy didn’t understand why Jack looked so hopeless at the thought of killing the ink. “Okay,” Sammy said cautiously, “That sounds doable. What else?”

“Well, the thing is that once the ink is dead, it won’t be able to help keep you alive, so all that tissue damage, organ damage, and dehydration is actually going to hurt you. Joey gave me some tips on how to increase the chance that you’ll end up at the hospital alive, but it’s still possible you won’t make it.”

Sammy was in shock. “I-I might die before I make it the hospital?”

“Yes. Joey said that you should go home and eat something with a lot of liquid in it. I take it you physically haven’t been able to drink anything but ink in a while, have you?”

“It’s been a few weeks,” Sammy admitted.

“He also said that we should lance any obvious deposits of ink before we head out. I can help you with the lancing. And... one last thing, Sammy?”

“Yes?”

“I quit this place, because it’s dripping with a deadly biohazard. I definitely suggest you do the same- especially if you’re in the habit of drinking ink, which Joey said you might be.”

Sammy sucked in a deep breath. “Please tell me that’s everything.”

“That’s everything.”

“Alright. Thank you, Jack. Honestly, thank you.”

The two went to Jack’s place, and with a knife, they set to work lancing any obvious deposits of ink. Sammy had them all over- on his legs, on his chest, his back, and some fairly severe ones on his hands. One by one, they were cut open, squeezed out, and bandaged. By the end, Sammy was in a lot of pain, and Jack’s bathtub was stained not only with substantial amounts of ink, but with a fair amount of blood.

“I don’t feel stronger,” Sammy admitted, looking down with his arms crossed over himself. “What if Joey gave us this advice to trick you into killing me? Or he didn’t understand how far along I was?”

Jack sighed. He’d made a good point, honestly. But Sammy needed comfort. “He didn’t lie. I’m sure of it. Just trust me, alright?”

“Alright,” Sammy replied.

“Do you want to stay over tonight?” Jack asked, “It might help you dread tomorrow a little less.”

“Are you sure you want me here? I’ll get ink and blood all over the place.”

“You will? Then we haven’t bandaged you up enough- you shouldn’t be leaking like that. And anyhow, don’t worry about it- it’s just one night, I don’t want you to go through this alone.”

Sammy agreed to stay over, though all he wanted to do was wash off and rest. The next day, the two of them headed out of New York in Jack’s car.

“Alright, Sammy, you know the drill. Tell me when you feel the ink dying, and I’ll turn the car around as quickly as possible.”

Sammy nodded. It was only a few miles before he did.

“Now,” Sammy croaked. He was already looking greener. Jack found a place to turn around and took it.

“Everything hurts...” Sammy complained. It was true. He felt weak and heavy, as though a large percentage of his body had suddenly become dead weight. His lungs stung, and when his breathing was wet and slightly laboured. Pain was building in his head, in the cuts he’d given himself the day before, and especially in his organs.

“It’ll be okay, Sammy. I promise. Just hang in there, and drink some water.”

Though it was hardly his most overpowering sensation, Sammy was very thirsty. Jack watched with concern as Sammy took one of water bottles in weak, shaky hands, took a sip from it, and then fell forwards, entirely limp.

Jack slammed his foot on the gas pedal. He was going about 85 miles an hour, and he mentally calculated that he’d need about eight minutes to get Sammy to the outskirts of town and hopefully not too much longer to get him to a hospital. Risky as it was, Jack grabbed Sammy’s hand to check for a pulse. It was certainly there. A cop by the side of the road saw them, but let them go by- perhaps seeing that Jack was hardly doing this for pleasure. Thankfully, traffic was thin that day. Jack checked Sammy’s pulse again while at a stop sign- still strong, and pulled up in front of a hospital. He ran in, pushed his way past a line of people, and spoke to the secretary. “My friend is in my car. He’s unconscious and I have reason to believe that he needs immediate attention if he’s going to live. Please help him.”

Within a minute, Sammy was being rushed in for medical attention, leaving Jack to wait in the lobby and fill out the necessary forms. Hours later, a nurse approached him. “You’re Jack Fain, the one who brought in Sammy Lawrence?”

“Yes,” Jack answered.

“Well, Mr. Fain, we have some serious questions for you. What happened to Sammy? His condition isn’t exactly easy to identify.”

“His workplace is filled with a biohazard. He got infected and kept it secret for weeks. How is he? Is his condition stable?”

The nurse grimaced. “Stable, yes. He’s on life support, but we’ll be able to keep him alive. We’re not sure when or if he’ll wake up again since we haven’t been able to diagnose. Would you like to see him?”

“Sure,” Jack replied.

Seeing Sammy laying still as a corpse on a hospital bed, with three different IVs in his arm, a tube in his throat, and the beep of a heart monitor nearby, was not an encouraging sight. It moved Jack to tears. “Call me when he’s up. Or when it’s time to say goodbye,” Jack croaked to the nurse. With that, he left.

Jack spent the next few days fraught with anxiety. To make matters worse, the hospital had called Jack to ask where Sammy had worked and gotten infected. Jack had said he didn’t know, because he didn’t want to risk either of them being killed by Joey for leaking his secrets. If Sammy died, he’s have to wonder if it was partially on his own hands. Jack’s husband tried to reassure him that he’d done all that could be done, and Jack knew it was true, but it was still a scary time.

In what felt like weeks but was actually just a couple days, the hospital called Jack and told him that Sammy’s tissue damage seemed to be repairing itself and that he was responding well to treatment. Thankfully, none of his organs had been damaged enough to require a transplant. A week later, he was called to tell him that Sammy was awake again.

Seeing Sammy again was a massive weight off Jack’s shoulders. The dark spots on his body had shrunk significantly, and he looked much healthier, especially now that most of those tubes and wires were gone.

“Sammy. You’re alive.”

“Yep. I must be part cockroach because it takes quite a bit to kill me.”

Jack smiled. “Ha, yeah. The radio is calling you a walking miracle. Even though probably haven’t walked yet, since you just woke up.”

Sammy prickled. “No, I can walk. I’m not that weak!”

“Right, sorry. So, when you woke up, did they pepper you with questions on how you got into this state in the first place?”

Sammy took a quick look around the room to make sure no one was listening in. “Well, they asked me where I worked. I told them it was an ink manufacturing plant that I didn’t remember the name of. I think they bought it. Why, are people pestering you about it?”

“No. But I’ve been hearing about the investigation on the radio. They all want to know about the man who who somehow got several pounds of ink into his system and lived. As far as I can tell, no one suspects a thing about our old workplace, or magic. I think we’re free of it, buddy. I don’t think Joey is ever going to be in our lives again.”

Now Sammy looked like a weight had been lifted from him. “I had no idea how badly I needed to hear that until now.”

Over the coming weeks, Jack regularly visited Sammy in the hospital. He looked stronger every time Jack saw him. The news story died down without much fanfare. Sammy got out with a clean bill of health, and Joey Drew Studios gradually became a distant memory to them.

#Bendy and the Ink Machine #sammy lawrence #Jack Fain #my fanfiction

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whump-town · 4 years

Text

Shattered Hearts, Fractured Lungs

(Chapter Two; Warnings for: school shooting, violence, language, and heart failure; you can find the first chapter here)

Emily Prentiss just wants to do her job but a messy case sends her sprawling into the arms of a dying man with a toddler and his weird, broken family.

“It’s been very rare to have known you, very strange and wonderful” --F. Scott Fitzgerald

She comes back the very next day.

It’s about noon and she’d seen the blonde one-- the happy one, uhm… Penelope! Emily had watched Penelope pull up in the driveway at about eleven thirty. So, she knows someone’s home over there but when she steps out on her porch she’s not expecting him to be sitting in that rickety old rocking chair.

Idiot-- because she’d seen, from her kitchen window, Penelope helping him outside. The woman was talking his poor ear off.

The icing on the cake, of course, is that she was creating a dialogue for what to say when she got over there.

Out loud.

So, he definitely heard her talking to herself like a crazy person.

“Hey,” she says lamely, stopping in her tracks. Now she’s in a really bad spot. He looks like he didn’t sleep last night and definitely not in a talking mood with the oxygen mask over his face.

Of course, she can’t really know that he didn’t sleep last night. Spent the whole night breathlessly fighting with Dave over his own health and how he was feeling. Of course, like shit is the truth but he’s fighting the clock and he doesn’t want to go to the hospital over a little labored breathing. Now he’s paying the price. He couldn’t even stand on his own this morning. He’d laid in bed until Garcia got here and been forced to ask her to help.

Life is slowly becoming unbearable.

“I need...” she blows out an unsteady breath. She has to clench her hands to stop them from trembling. “Do you have any bananas?”

Idiot.

Stupid fucking idiot.

But he nods. It takes him a moment but he reaches up and pulls the mask off his face, pinning it against his chest. “Just go…” he curses himself, mentally for his inability to do something as simple as breathing. Why should heart failure come with not only a permanent ache in his chest but also the double hit to the lungs? Anatomy is so stupid.

“Ask Pen,” he rasps, gesturing with a head tilt that he means for her to go inside. “She’ll get you one.” He knows there’s bananas in there because Garcia always brings him some from the store. He used to eat one every morning with his coffee. Now he can’t even stomach the thought.

Insult to injury is the awkward silence that passes between them as Emily steps into his house.

She comes out a moment later, Penelope trailing her. She shows him the bananas from last week. They’re pretty brown but she’s smiling. “Actually,” Emily says, stepping out and smiling between Garcia and Hotch, “the recipes Derek’s mom’s. She, uh, sent it my way to keep me from getting bored.”

Garcia nods and Hotch rolls his eyes fondly. He’d spent the last half an hour listening to Garcia go on and on about Emily’s sexy little partner Derek Morgan. And, as insufferable as it had been, he had seen the signals the two of them were sharing. The good thing is that he was visibly not the only person unsettled by Garcia and Morgan’s flirting.

Reid really hated it.

“She’s making banana bread,” Garcia tells Hotch, bumping her hip against him.

Emily blushes, “yeah but…” She twists her shoe uncomfortably in the dirt. “I’m not that great of a baker.”

Garcia shakes her head, “don’t be so hard on yourself! I’m sure it’ll be great.” She grins, “besides if you need any help Hotch and I are more than willing to be unbiased judges or helpers.”

Emily could laugh at the face Hotch makes. He most certainly does not want that. She shakes her head, “I’m gonna go throw these in. If they’re good, I’ll send you a piece?”

Garcia nods and they watch in silence as Emily goes back to the house.

The banana bread must not turn out so great because she never brings a piece over but the next day she knocks on his door with a plate of pancakes.

He’s in a sweatshirt-- Georgetown’s logo slapped on the front and worn with age-- and a pair of grey sweats that make her cheeks flush a little. Nice, idiot, she thinks as she explains she used the leftover bananas to make pancakes and wondered if he’d like some. Mercifully, he either ignores or doesn’t see her making intense eye contact with the floor so she doesn’t look anywhere near his hips.

After that, they form a strange pattern of her showing up with various baked goods or other types of gifts and such.

Otherwise, they’d both sit in their homes all alone with nothing but the silence. Or, rather, he’d have the silence because she is very loud. He likes to sit on the porch and listen to her blasting music through her house. Occasionally, he knows a song but mostly he just likes the way the rest of the neighborhood scowls at their houses.

It’s about nine in the morning when Hotch hears the knocking at his door. For a solid moment, he considers not even answering the door. There’s about a ninety percent chance whoever it is he doesn’t want to talk to. The number of people who have sent cards, and food, and made weird phone calls is numerous. So, if they don’t have the key to his front door or the familiarity to just come busting in-- it’s not worth his time.

Besides, he’s feeling grumpy and he’d like to just wallow for a moment… in peace, alone.

But then the door does bust open.

He’s trying to read the paperwork either the hospital or the school sent-- obviously, he hasn’t gotten very far into it if he can’t even tell what the papers are for. All that he knows is there are vibrantly colored sticky notes where his signature should be. But he isn’t just going to go singing his name willy-nilly. He’s not that far gone.

He looks up and Emily Prentiss is blindly-- her hands are over her eyes for some reason-- trampling through his living room.

“Can I help you?”

At the sound of his voice, her head jerks up. Two paired fingers separate and she looks just like one of his students as she lowers her hands and grins at him. It’s an awkward little grin but it’s not bad. “Uh,” she motions behind her to the door. “Sorry about that… Dave, he, uh, he told me that you’d be home all day and you are home all day and if I needed anything to just--” she grimaces as if she’s just considered how strange this is. “You didn’t answer and Dave said you always answer and you do and I didn’t want something to be wrong…”

She stops talking.

Mercifully.

Hotch grunts, “I do, normally.”

Somehow, the only good thing to come out of the last month is that Hotch gets to spend his days at home. Besides the drastic rise in homeschoolers in their town, the school had been gracious enough to handle his disability checks. Of course, everyone had smiled and thanked him for what he’d done to save his kids but Hotch is still very aware of the lawsuits and trouble David Rossi would cause if everything hadn’t gone smoothly.

Being the semi-famous author of a very successful line of children’s books earns Dave that power. Although, Hotch has seen him use it for good and for… well, mostly sex.

The downside is he gets pretty lonely at the house.

Jack goes to his aunts. Haley’s sister Jessica has been a huge help over the last few weeks. Reeling from the loss of her sister, she’d been more than happy to keep her only family close. Even if it’s just her ex-brother-in-law and nephew. Not that Aaron and Jessica’s relationship was severed just because of Haley and Aaron’s divorce.

It had been painful but not ugly. It had never been about the devotion they felt for one another or even the love.

Life just gets complicated.

A few teachers had still managed to get some more leave time and with Hotch’s heart actively failing, Reid, Garcia, and Rossi are on the receiving end of lots of understanding when it comes to asking for time off. They have a schedule set into place now: Garcia brings him lunch, Reid picks up Jack, and Dave brings stuff to make dinner for all of them.

It’s simple but affected. Daily and boring.

“Now this is going to make me sound like a dumbass--”

He’s known Emily Prentiss for all of week. He excludes the school thing from memory and the timeline. It’s better for his mental health-- which isn’t doing much better than his physical health if he’s being honest. The problem is, the woman is kind of crazy. It’s in an endearing kind of way but still.

Now he’s sitting in her living room. She’d come barging into his house just thirty minutes before, a hand over her eyes. He’d had to listen to her awful explanation for that while slowly and painfully making his way across the whole five feet separating their houses. The hand over her eyes had been in case he was naked because she may invade his personal space but she really doesn’t want to see his junk.

He’s not entirely sure where this comfort of hers is coming from. All he does know is that Dave has swindled his way into every aspect of Hotch’s life and now Hotch has his neighbor’s phone number. It’s for “emergencies”, of course. In case Hotch, God forbid, needs help and his only contact is his batshit neighbor.

“I mean it, Aaron,” she’s standing right in front of him with two spices in her hands. “It’s really going to make me sound like a dumbass here but what exactly is the difference between Cinnamon and Nutmeg?”

God, she’s crazy but she’s funny and hasn’t passed any judgement on his inability to get dressed. Just like now while she’s standing in a simple, well-loved tanktop and work jeans and he sits in his flannel pajama bottoms and a Hanes t-shirt that’s seen better days five years ago.

But they kind of passed lots of mile markers for judgment a long time ago. As in, last week.

He’d watched in silence as she emptied the contents of her stomach over the railing of his porch and she’d put pressure on the bullet wound that tore through his side. It’s why it was so easy for her to, after that night on the porch, to bring over a plate of pancakes and offer to grab him stuff from the store. Of course, he’d told her he was good and he, mostly, was.

Which is in direct consequence for why he’s here now.

“Nutmeg tastes like Christmas,” he explains because he has no idea how he’s supposed to explain this to a grown woman. “What are you making?” He’s suddenly very worried for whatever dish she’s making. Especially if she put nutmeg where cinnamon is supposed to be. It’s freaking September and, if he’s being honest, he really hates Christmas. That might make him too biased to figure out if she’s really messed up though.

She grimaces at the containers in her hand. She pulls her lip into her mouth and mumbles, “apple pie.”

His grimace is too much and if she weren’t so bummed with the aspect that her apple pie is most definitely ruined she might laugh. His accent is thick enough for her to comfortably assume he’s from the south not to mention he’s got a lot of that southern gentlemen charm.

“How much nutmeg did you use?”

Her face says it all.

He places both his fist on the sides of the chair and forces himself onto his feet. If Emily weren’t standing in silent horror that he might fall over or pass out or a hundred other things she might lend a hand. Then again, they haven’t established those boundaries and she can’t flawlessly just know like Dave does.

“Let me see the damage,” he grumbles but she can see that he’s not actually mad; he's just wary of what she’s done. He’s strange in that way. For a man who has made a career around working with children, he’s got a horrible resting face.

She lets him set the place, pointing him in the direction of the kitchen. It’s only a few feet but they make it two-steps before she decides she can’t do this silently watching thing. “Do you--” she offers him her forearm, the same way she’d seen Dave do the other afternoon.

He scowls at her arm but after a moment, he takes her hand. His skin is startlingly cold and his hand trembles until he settles his grip. It’s surprisingly easy and she doesn’t think much of it. At least he’s not dead weight to lug around. She’s had plenty of people hang onto her, she doesn’t even mind this.

“I think I might have used too much nutmeg,” she concludes before he can see the damage and rule her incompetant. It’s a warning.

He glances at her out of the corner of his eye… too late for the incompetant thing, she decides. He already thinks she’s a moron.

Rightfully so but still…

She’d known he was tall. It’s not that hard to see but as she’s standing beside him, his body pulled in and hunched over, he’s still towering over quite a bit. He’s a big man and he smells nice so he’s got a lot going for him. Too bad about the heart thing because he’s kinda cute.

“That’s all…” she moves him to the kitchen table and brings the pie to him. She really doesn’t want him falling in her kitchen. Dave likes her and she’d like to keep it that way. Besides, there would be so many awful and weird questions to answer if she had to take him to the hospital.

And now he’s sitting in horror at this pie in front of him.

“That’s all…” he repeats himself, shaking his head in disbelief. The pie is covered in a brown powder and he’s slowly processing that it’s all nutmeg.

She grimaces and nods.

He looks up at her, mouth open but disbelief making it impossible for him to say anything. He’s seen a lot of weird things. Preschoolers are… they’re a piece of work but this is testing every bit of training he has.

“It’s bad, isn’t it?”

He nods, “definitely.”

Huffing in a way that he recognizes from dealing with one too many headstrong four-year-olds, she places her fist on her hips. She scowls down at the pie. It’s cooked and it smells okay but if she’s been too generous with the nutmeg there’s no way that’s going to taste good. After a moment she hums and turns around, pulling out two forks she comes right back to the table.

“Well,” she says with a tilt of her head, “christmas apples can’t be that bad, right?”

He takes the fork being offered to him with no interest whatsoever in eating this pie but it's kind of funny and he’s having a good time. Together they break the baked dough and get a bite- sized piece. He’s fairly adamant but somehow it’s got nothing to do with his tricky stomach or the fact that he hasn’t been able to keep down much besides water and saltine crackers. It’s going to taste like shit and it’s exciting.

Emily chokes on her bite coughing and grimacing as she rushes to spit it out. To his credit, Hotch swallows his bite. “That was honestly the worst apple pie I’ve ever tasted,” he tells her, honestly.

She laughs and that feels so good. She hasn’t laughed in a long time.

He shrugs, “I’m not gonna lie to you.”

She tosses her fork on the table and shakes her head at the pie. So much for that.

“How exactly--” he bites down on the wave of pain that rocks through his body as he forces his legs underneath him. He stands, trembling and waving slightly with the effort it takes. “Why were you making apple pie so early in the day?”

Emily is still frowning at the pie so she doesn’t even look up at him. “Bored,” she mumbles. She’s upset about her pie. Damn… this whole nutmeg vs cinnamon thing is stupid. They look exactly the same so they should taste the same, right?

“Maybe you should try something else,” Hotch says, one hand still keeping his balance on the table. “Baking just doesn’t…”

Emily frowns at him, “I like baking, though!”

Hotch looks away, tilting his head and raising an eyebrow. “Baking doesn’t like you,” he mumbles.

She smacks his shoulder and he chuckles-- this isn’t the first failed attempt of her’s he’s tried. There was the cookies from Monday (that were burnt on the bottom and raw on top) and the banana bread he’d only seen but-- they could have killed a lesser man let alone him and his broken heart.

“Maybe I can try cooking,” she proposes.

He shakes his head, “are you gonna make me eat that too?”

She clicks her tongue, faking offense. “What, are you afraid?”

He smiles and it takes her breath away. He’s got high, sharp cheekbones and when he’s not carrying so much tension in his shoulders it’s so much easier to appreciate just how soft his dark hair looks. Her neighbor is hot. She’s not sure if he knows that though.

“A little,” he admits playfully, “but maybe you’ll be better at cooking than you are baking.”

She crosses her arms and scowls down at her pie. “I don’t think it’s going to take a lot to be better at cooking than baking.”

He makes a soft sound, “you said it, not me.”

She shakes her head at him but there he is smiling again. She can’t even be mad. “Maybe I’ll make dinner,” she proposes, tucking her hands under her armpits as she thinks. “Are you interested?”

Honestly, no but he doesn’t want to pass up on hanging out with her. So he nods.

“Six o’clock should be enough time to cook something, right?”

Jesus, she’s going to kill him.

“Why don’t I come over and help?”

Oh, she hadn’t thought of that. She nods, “okay. You wanna come over at three, then?”

It’s dangerous, without a shred of doubt there, but his heart does this little flutter. “Uh,” he has to clear his throat. “Yeah, sounds like a plan.”

Except three rolls around he’s a no show. Three turns into three-thirty and she’s not trying to be a buzzkill but the recipe calls for caramelized onions and she has no idea what that means but she hopes it doesn’t mean what she thinks it does. Carmel on onions? Sounds disgusting.

“Knock, knock?” She’s already barged into his house once today so it really shouldn’t be that big of a deal but something doesn’t feel right. She can’t shake it and she certainly can’t just… leave. “Hotch?” God, she hopes he’s just in the bathroom.

He isn’t.

“You okay?” she falls to her knees beside him. She’d never been this far into his house. Mostly, she’d never passed the living room but now she’s kneeling in his hallway and can see his bedroom from here. As much as she’d like to evaluate that-- because the space is strangely neat and God, who knew the bare minimum of a clean room was such a perfect green flag--

Right--

He shakes his head.

Oh.

“Should…” she knows he hates the hospital, who doesn’t? But… he’s gasping for breath on the floor, his pale hand clutching at his chest. The sight is very overwhelming and hurting her deeply because it’s bringing feelings back that she thought were getting better. “Do I need to call--”

To the school and to the blood pooling between their bodies.

He nods. He’s terrified but just seeing Emily brings some strange comfort. Her and her awful cooking might just get him through this. He won’t die on this floor. Not on this ugly ass rug Dave made him put down.

The ambulance comes, bounding the sirens shrill sound up and down the block. Making a spectacle out of an awful experience.

He winces when the IV goes in and she just stands, bouncing from foot-to-foot awkwardly watching. It’s not until he’s on the gurney, fighting the drugs rushing through his system. “You can come,” he rasps but no one can hear him clearly from behind the masks. Reaching up to pull it away, several hands swat his hand away and he makes a grunted, annoyed sound at hte back fo his throat.

An EMT leans over and calms him back down before Hotch starts trying to fight his way back up into danger. “Easy, buddy.” The EMT pushes on Hotch’s shoulders and it's not a lot of force but Hotch isn’t strong enough to fight it. “The pretty lady can come, okay? Just settle down.”

She stays with him and tells herself it’s because she doesn’t want him hurting himself but she really doesn’t want to leave his side until she knows he’s going to be okay. There’s no hand holding because they’re still at the point where they smack shoulders and stand feet apart but they’ve only known one another for a week and-- Emily can’t fathom what she’s supposed to do if he dies in the back of this shitty ambulance.

“Can you--” the EMTs give him something that nearly knocks him out on the spot but his breathing gets better and he stops gasping and wheezing. He just lays supine on the gurney. Limp. “Dave?” He can’t keep his eyes open but he hears Emily make what he thinks are words of confirmation but his sentence didn't exactly make sense so maybe she didn't understand him.

He’s pulled under by the warmth spreading through his limbs before he can repeat himself or worry with it.

“You can’t go back there, baby.”

Emily blinks and there’s an older woman stopping Emily’s zombie-like march beside the gurney as they rush Hotch off to the side. She can’t tear her eyes off of him. Watching numbly as they cut his shirt down the middle and start to attach to electrodes to his alarmingly pale chest.

Her hands are trembling as she pulls her phone out of her pocket. “Dave?” she’s breathless with the anxiety swelling in her own chest. “I’m so sorry--” and she’s crying. Why? He’s not her friend? He’s her neighbor who she’s known for a whole freaking week and yet-- And she can’t deal with Dave being mad either. But he isn’t.

The minute he steps into the hospital, he comes right up to and pulls her into a hug. She sobs into his arms and he lets her because he’s seen Aaron this bad before. He knows it’s unnerving.

“Do you have any news?” Dave asks her and she shakes her head. He squeezes her arm and smiles at her tear-stained face. “I’ll be right back, okay? They know my face, I might be able to wrangle some news out of one of the nurses.”

She nods her head and watches dejectedly as he walks away.

Aaron had told her that Rossi had slept with many nurses while he was in the hospital. She’s thinking about the way he’d smiled when he told her that when she falls into the waiting rooms stiff chairs.

#shattered hearts fractured lungs #aaron hotchner #tw school shooting #emily prentiss #whump #hotchniss #hotly #penelope garcia #spencer reid #derek morgan #david rossi

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thejakeformerlyknownasprince · 5 years

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Disability and Loren

@zarohk asked for my thoughts on a Disability Studies/Media Studies perspective on the disability depictions in Animorphs. Which was foolish, because I’m teaching an entire dang class on the subject of superheroes and mental health, so I have Many Thoughts. [PLEASE NOTE: I am nondisabled, so if I err, please tell me so.]

Loren’s role in #49: The Diversion does a lot of things right, and a lot of things wrong. She incurs a traumatic brain injury that results in memory loss and blindness a couple of years after Tobias is born, and lives with said injury for about ten years before Tobias finds her and gives her the ability to morph, which restores her sight but not her memory.

A few places where I commend the depiction of Loren:

It gets into the massive underemployment of disabled Americans. Loren is smart, canny, athletic, compassionate... and working a call center job in exchange for state benefits. Said state benefits do not afford her a decent standard of living; Tobias notes that she has few possessions and almost no time for leisure activities. Americans with disabilities are twice as likely to be unemployed as those without, and those who do have jobs are ten times more likely to be paid less than minimum wage, e.g. in sheltered workshops.

It shows how inaccessible a lot of systems are in the U.S. Tobias notes that Loren accidentally grabs an expired quart of milk — because nothing on the label is printed in Braille. Putting raised text and/or Braille on food packaging is a health and safety issue, one that the U.S. ignores even though it violates its own laws (e.g. the ADA) because companies tend to do what they want and “what they want” is usually not to spend more money on packaging. The call center and bus system are both marginally more accessible, especially when Loren has Champ to help, but they’re still clearly spaces set up for sighted people that don’t take blind users into account very well.

It shows some of the workarounds that help deal with accessibility problems. Loren’s house is set up so that there are clear paths to and from all of the relevant spaces. She’s doing that to allow herself to move around comfortably in that space, because she’s made it accessible for herself. She memorizes the layout of the local store, and uses that to get around as well. All of those details help show that she’s adjusted, and actively interacting with her own circumstances.

It drives home the difference between service dogs and pets. This distinction is extremely important, and it gets ignored all the time by entitled ableists who want to bring their pets into stores. Tobias and Marco both assume from the outside that it can’t be that hard to become a service animal — just do what Loren says to do, right? — but it takes Tobias 0.02 seconds to realize that it’s not that simple and that he cannot imitate Champ’s lifetime of training on the fly. He says that he manages to get his mom home in one piece, and that that’s about all that can be said for his sad performance as a guide. Champ has skills like ignoring interesting smells and applying exactly the right amount of pressure to the harness that most pets don’t have and also most pets can’t learn. Champ is not a pet, at least not while he’s in that harness; he’s a gainfully employed expert assistant.

It rounds Loren out as a character, and definitely does not just make her into a lesson or problem for Tobias. Loren is gently humorous, tolerating her coworkers’ teasing and Ax’s attempted juvenile delinquency with an eye-roll. She’s compassionate, listening to other people’s problems on the phone with genuine concern and not swatting flies if she doesn’t have to. She’s tough-minded and stupidly brave, chucking rocks at Visser Three’s head and flying at attack helicopters as a three-pound bird. She’s fallible, unable to support Tobias emotionally even when he asks her to do so and unwilling to check in on him after leaving him with her sister. She’s a fully rounded person, one whose personality is informed but not defined by her disability.

It talks about some of the unromatic aspects of a Traumatic Brain Injury. Too often in other works of fiction, we see a person get bonked over the head and wake up with no episodic memory but all other brain functions intact (*cough* Rachel in MM1 *cough*). Loren actually gets into the fact that she forgot huge chunks of language, forgot how to brush her teeth, forgot how to walk across a room. She obviously lost her sight as well, and she mentions lifelong balance and coordination problems. Even her amnesia isn’t absolute — she has some traces of recall, but can’t make anything coherent of her impressions. Her injury isn’t 100% realistic, but it’s more so than many TBIs we see in fiction.

It focuses on the intersection of disability and social class. Tobias notes that Loren is under a compounded threat because of her inability to move to a more secure neighborhood and her obvious vulnerability. He feels a lot of disgust with himself when he and Marco and Ax are harassing Loren, because it’s so clear that this isn’t the first time she’s been harassed. Tobias understands that his experience with poverty as a nondisabled male minor is different from Loren’s for those reasons.

A few places where Loren falls into the common traps of implied ableism creeping into fiction, as written about in Narrative Prosthesis:

She gets “cured.” Loren falls into the “kill or cure” dichotomy, like most of the other disabled characters in Animorphs. In her case, it’s that she gains the power to morph and in the process regains the ability to see. It isn’t a complete cure, true — she still has no memory — but it means that she’s no longer blind for the rest of the series. Having the occasional character no longer be disabled sometimes isn’t automatically problematic; having every disabled character get either “fixed” or killed off inherently treats the disabled body as a problem that needs to be solved, through sci fi nonsense if no other way is available.

She implies that she’d rather die than continue to be disabled. When injured by dracon burns, Loren initially refuses to morph out even though Tobias tells her she’ll die if she remains a bird, because (they both assume) to morph out is to return to her blind human body. This moment buys into the stereotype that it’s better to be dead than disabled, again inherently devaluing the lives of actual blind individuals.

There’s a certain amount of mystery around how she became disabled. It’s interesting that we never actually get a definitive answer on that one — Loren says she was told it was a car crash, but there’s also an implication that she was attacked by controllers, and we don’t know for sure. However, the fact of her disability is treated as an aberrant state that needs to be explained, the book inherently asking “why are you like this?” By contrast (for instance) she doesn’t ask Tobias “why are you in the body of a hawk?”

She views herself as a burden, and the narration doesn’t do enough to contradict her. Loren says that she couldn’t possibly be expected to raise a child while also blind and coping with a TBI. Real blind people raise kids all the time, however, including blind single parents, and it’d be nice to see some evidence in the story that Loren’s assumption is wrong. Loren also apparently assumes that she can’t begin to play a role in Tobias’s life even now that Tobias is more self-sufficient, again because she views herself as relatively helpless and non-contributing due to her disability. There are some hints that she’s wrong, but we don’t really see her either begin to contribute to the resistance or build a relationship with Tobias until after she’s become un-blind.

Tobias’s view of Loren is often pitying. As much as Loren doesn’t initially view herself as a potential maternal figure to Tobias, he doesn’t view her as a potential mentor either. He repeatedly expresses horror or sadness at her life circumstances, and assumes that her life must be barren due to the spartan nature of her home. (Of course, that begs the question of why the hell a blind woman living alone would ever bother hanging pictures on her walls or putting doilies on her coffee tables, but Tobias doesn’t consider that angle.) Again, Tobias is allowed to assume that her life must be meaningless if she’s disabled, but it’d be nice to see some contradictory evidence in the form of her having close friends or inane hobbies or some other proof that to lead a disabled life is not to automatically lead a lonely one.

Loren expresses bitterness and desperate desire to be nondisabled. Again, it’s fine for any character to say “I wish my life was different,” and it’s a common consensus among blind writers/bloggers that being blind is often a pain in the butt. However, views as extreme as “you need vision to have a fulfilling existence” or “vision is part of what makes us human” are ableist crocks of shit. Loren doesn’t go so far as to espouse those extreme views, but she also doesn’t seem to view herself as having a well-rounded life in spite of her disability. It’d be nice to see Loren talking about sight as handy or enjoyable or a thing that the designers of 99% U.S. environments assume everyone must have, rather than a necessary precondition for a minimum standard of life.

Loren’s disability is somewhat medicalized. Same caveat as above: disabilities are by definition medical things that some bodies do or have that other bodies do not. However, discussing disability primarily through “this is how your body is different from Implied Normal of Nondisabled Body” and focusing on doctor’s notes, diagnoses, physical differences, etc. can serve to disconnect the lived experience of the individual from their body. It also tends to focus on the ways that the body is “the problem” rather than focusing on the ways that environments and attitudes are problematic, which then prevents anyone from asking hard questions about the environments and attitudes. Loren’s doctor’s note, discussion of scarring and loss, and repeated physical descriptions are somewhat more medical than social. It’d be nice to see a little more emphasis on the social factors that make blindness a disability (e.g. improperly labeled milk), and less on “your eyes are different from those of Implied Normal Nondisabled Person.”

#animorphs #animorphs meta #long post #loren fangor #ableism #disability studies #disability representation #accessibility #social model of disability #animorphs criticism #blindness representation #49 #the diversion

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mean-green-imagines · 4 years

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Mutant Side of the Tracks

Basic Information

The University of South New York, or USNY, is a college about 30 minute north of New York City, and it’s one of the few universities in New York that accepts mutants and will actually allow them to attend classes and live on campus with the human students. Although, the campus is not as happy and accepting as they make themselves out to be. Even though they let mutants to attend, they make it exceptionally harder for them to get in...price-wise.

The majority of mutants grew up in poverty since before they can even remember. There were no good jobs for mutants and the ones they could get would pay the absolute lowest they could without getting in any trouble. So, it’s harder for them to afford college and they usually worked hard to get a scholarship to help pay for most of their expenses.

As for housing, mutants will more often be seen living in apartments or small houses with at least one roommate or more to help split the rent. The campus dorms were simply too expensive, even with the scholarships, so the mutants tended to live off campus, anywhere from five to almost twenty minutes away from campus.

Character info:

Leonardo Hamato: Leo is a fourth year business major and he’s always been very dead set on opening up his own martial arts studio once he’s graduated. He is on the football team as a running back and is also in one of the biggest fraternities on campus. Leo doesn’t live in the frat house though. He lives by himself in a one bed/one bath apartment. He has to work a lot to afford his rent but it’s worth it so he can live by himself. He’s always had to live and share everything with his three brothers and home would usually be chaos and not very relaxing, so this apartment is definitely worth it to him. Leo works part time as a student assistant in the business department. He basically just takes a lot of phone calls, scans papers, and brings coffee to the professors if they ask for it. When it comes to parties, you usually won’t find Leo in the smoke circle like Donnie and Mikey. He’ll be drinking beer and throwing back shots. But maybe he’ll join in the smoke circle if he’s really feeling spunky.

Raphael Hamato: Raph is a fourth year physical therapy major and has been playing with the idea lately of changing it to sports management, but he’s so close to being done with his original major that he can’t bring himself to switch. Raph is also on the football team and is usually the kicker when he’s not on the defensive line. Raph lives in a two bed/one bath apartment with his friend, Casey Jones, who is on the hockey team. Raph and Casey like to throw parties in their apartment, but they tend to get out of hand pretty quickly and the cops usually end up showing up to shut it down. Raph works part time at the school gym, making sure everyone gets checked in and out as well as keeping the equipment clean and disinfected. Raph will smoke with Donnie and Mikey happily anytime, but never at parties. It just freaks him out too much with all the noise and the lights, so he’ll be with Leo taking shots.

Donatello Hamato: Donnie is a third year biomechanical engineering major and he managed to get into school with an academic scholarship as well as a basketball scholarship, so he is also on the basketball team. The coach saw Donnie’s height and his strength and stamina at the tryouts and knew that Donnie would be great for the team. Of course, Donnie jumped at the opportunity and was overjoyed when he received a hefty academic scholarship on top of that. Even though Donnie has a busy schedule with his classes and basketball practices, he still works part time at the movie theater that’s about ten minutes away from campus. When he’s not working or studying or practicing basketball, he enjoys playing video games and smoking with his brother/roommate, Mikey. Donnie is a low-key stoner and doesn’t smoke quite as often as Mikey, but he’ll smoke just about everyday once his day is over and he can relax, but not if he has too much homework or studying to do.

Michelangelo Hamato: Mikey is a second year art major with a minor in photography. He shares a two bed/one bath apartment with his brother, Donatello, and is a very active member of the university’s art club. Mikey has a part time job working at the local pizza place, just downtown from campus. He works in the kitchen making the pizzas and sandwiches and whatnot, but when he knows he has a serving shift coming up, he lets his brothers and friends know so they can come and visit him. Mikey is definitely the stoner of the group and whenever he gets the chance, he’ll gladly hit a bowl and just relax and work on is art assignments or just play video games or watch anime. Donnie loves to partake in the herb as well since his schedule tends to be very stressful and demanding.

Jennifer (Jen) Dahl: Jen is a fourth year medical student and is in the pre-health courses studying Chiropractic Medicine. She’s always had problems with her back and often needed to see chiropractors. So when she was deciding her major, she remembered how much her doctors helped her with her back and decided that she wanted to help people like that too. Jen is also minoring in creative writing, so sometimes you'll find her at the cafe typing away for hours on some days. She works part time at the campus gym with Raph, so they’ve become good work buddies and good friends outside of work as well. She loves to smoke, but has been cutting back so she can focus on her school better and make better grades.

Carol Scott: Carol is a third year architecture major with a minor in interior design. She is apart of rather large sorority, which happens to be Leo’s sister sorority, so the two know each other quite well through sorority/fraternity events and mixers. Although she is planning on leaving her sorority since the events take a lot of her time, she’s also leaving because she hasn’t been able to connect with the other girls and she feels left out the majority of the time. Her personality just doesn’t mix with theirs, and she found that out pretty quickly after joining. Carol is also good friends with Mikey since they both have a lot of art classes together and she got to meet Donnie through Mikey when she got invited to their place to smoke and hang out. Carol, like Mikey and Donnie, smokes everyday. She rarely drinks though since she has a very sensitive stomach and can’t handle a lot of alcohol. So she sticks with a small glass of wine or a hard cider when she does decide to drink. Carol works part time as a student assistant in the art department and does basically the same things as Leo does at his job.

Juniper (June) Ferrari: June is a second year computer science major who got in on a full academic scholarship. She may not exactly act like it, but she’s very intelligent and can fix any computer that you bring to her. Her main focus is learning how to program video games and how to make software for computers so that they can run big PC games that take up a lot of space. June is a bit of a party animal and she's become pretty popular with the rest of the upperclassmen since you’ll see her in the smoke circle one minute and then in the living room or kitchen taking shots the next, and she was always fine the next day. June works part time as a waitress at the same pizza restaurant Mikey works at and she splits the rent with Jen on a small house only five minutes away from campus.

Aurora Giovanni: Aurora is a third year psychology student and she has plans of becoming a mental health practitioner. She used to live a rather lavish life before choosing to come to college, and when her parents fell through on funding, she found her roommate, Carol. The two girls split rent on a two bed/one bath apartment and she always enjoys joining Carol in her visits to Mikey and Donnie’s apartment. Aurora works as a sales assistant at a high end clothing store in the mall about fifteen minutes away from campus. She wears very nice clothing, which usually gets her a good bit of attention, and she’s a bit of a party person like June is. You can find her either in a smoke circle or in another room taking shots.

#tmnt #tmnt fanfic #tmnt au #mutant side of the tracks au #college au #tmnt donatello #tmnt leonardo #tmnt michelangelo #tmnt raphael #tmnt oc #tmnt ocs #tmnt aurora #tmnt jen #tmnt june #tmnt carol #romance #angst #love triangles

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picturejasper20 · 4 years

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Steven universe future: Growing pains analysis

"Growing pains" is one of those episodes that's hard to talk about. Not because the plot is too complex to explain, but for being an episode that completely changed Steven universe.

This is first time Steven goes to see a doctor and it puts into context everything that happened on SU.

It opens with Steven still dealing with the aftermath of the events of "Together forever". He has been feeling down since he was rejected.

The gems are doing a field-trip and Greg is on a tour with Sadie and Shep.

He calls Greg and tries talking to him about what happened with Connie. Greg is too busy to actually pay attention to listen to what his son it's trying to say. He asks Steven if he wants to talk later, Steven, as always, tells him it's not important and hungs up.

And now he's alone.. with no one to talk to, to help him, to tell him that everything is going to be okay.

Steven keeps trying to avoid everything that reminds him of the proposal and Connie. This triggers his pink powers and makes him grow in size. It's a reaction he can't control. His powers are getting worse every minutes that passes.

The cell phone rings, it's Connie. By accident, he answers the call and they start talking.

She quickly notices that Steven is swelling up and inmediatly tells him he should go to see a doctor. He insists in she shouldn't worry, that is not a big deal but he takes his Connie's advice just in case.

Connie's mom,Priyanka, meets Steven and asks him who is his GP.

"GP?"

"You know, your general practitioner? Your regular doctor?"

"I guess you? I've never been to the doctor before."

"You're 16-years-old and you've never been to the doctor?!"

She decides to run some tests to study Steven's medical condition. As he has never been tested on before, Steven gets very nervours, making him lose control of his shapeshifting powers.

After they are done, Priyanka explains to Steven that his presents fractures in his body but they seem they had been healed instanely. She's worried is not so much about the fractures but Steven's mental health.

"Well, you seem to have made a series of miraculous recoveries, but that doesn't change the fact that you experienced trauma. You've recovered physically, but have you recovered mentally?"

He then proceeds to tell her about his childhood, as he speaks his facial expression darknes, the scene gets tense and some clips of the moments he describes show in the background.

"Steven, this is serious!" "I think all these experiences have been subjecting your body to a harmful amount of stress, and that's affecting your ability to respond to new forms of stress in a healthy way. You've been dealing with genuine threats from such a young age, your body is now responding to minor threats as if your life were in danger!"

There are a few details worth of pointing out :

1) Steven's trauma didn't start in "Jailbreak", it started way earlier in the show, during the first episodes.

2) Priyanka explains to Steven the physical response his body has to trauma and PTSD. I have watched a few cartoons that tackled trauma before but i think have never seen one that really took the time to explain how your body reacts to PTSD.

Steven doesn't understand why he has been getting worse lately. So, she continues explaning:

"Stress is less harmful when we have people we trust to help us through it. Maybe if you're losing your supportive relationships, or if you had a recent experience that was practically off.."

Until now Steven universe future has been about how Steven feels disconneted from his family and friends in Era 3, how everyone is moving on and no one needs his help. This has been putting him in very stressful situations that trigger his gem powers to respond as his life was in real danger.

Our protagonist remembers the proposal in "Together Forever" and suddenly his body grows in size and glows pink.

He demands for Connie and Priyanka to leave the room as quickly as possible before they get hurt. Thakfully Greg enters in the room, mother and daughter leave to give them space to talk.

"I'm swelling up over these third era problems! What do I do? How do I move on from all the stuff I've been through? How do I live life if it always feels like I'm about to die?!"

Greg reassures him that is okay, he's here to listen to him and help him any way he can. Calming himself down, Steven returns to his normal size and they both go home.

Once they are back at home, Greg conforms his son by telling him that figuring oneself out takes time. He doesn't have to solve all his problems in one night. Glad by hearing this, Steven goes to sleep after having such a complicated day.

----

This was a very intense episode. While it was not hard to guess that Steven suffered from PTSD due to previous episodes giving many hints of this, it's heartbreaking to watch Steven trying to explain to his dad what his going through. It's nice to see the episode ending with Greg conforting Steven and telling him he doesn't need to solve all his problems in one day.

#steven universe #steven universe future #steven quartz universe #su analysis #Greg universe #Priyanka Maheswaran #Connie Maheswaran #Growing pains

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canttelliotte-blog · 3 years

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Incredibly long, overly detailed post I spent too much time on.

Tl:dr AITA for telling someone they were coming off as an ungrateful, privileged asshole who didn't seem to recognize or truly appreciate what they have? I blew up after a series of encounters, they seemed oblivious to their lifestyle and support and how truly different life could have turned out without it. I called them out after weeks of trying to be empathetic but couldn't take how helpless they were acting when I would kill for the kind the support they were complaining about and taking for granted.

I should use a throwaway because I know this person will probably see this but I don't have the energy. I'll try to keep this short (actually super long sorry) I feel like I already know I was sort of harsh and out of line. This whole thing has just been sticking with me and I feel really messed up about it.

Alright, so context, back story. I had a breakdown in February and tried to kill myself. By some miracle, I got a bed at one of the best mental hospitals on this side of the east coast. After a long history of chronic mental illness, being on disability for years with medicare, getting an opportunity like this was amazing. I had been on waiting lists for months before my attempt, but fate, acuity, and availability all lined up. A true miracle. Unless you have a family with money or amazing health insurance, getting a bed is just extremely difficult at this particular facility.

The reason being, they provide real treatment. Comprehensive, attentive, life-saving treatment. They actually provide real care with empathy, actual therapy, psychiatry, and groups, with educated staff, real food to eat, world-renowned providers, and treatment teams that listen and work with you to come up with effective long-term solutions/aftercare plans that set you up for long term success.

Out of pocket, this place is unfathomably expensive. The more exclusive programs on-campus are for the ultra-elite/ ultra-wealthy, taking celebrities like Selena Gomez. The institution itself is known for its education and research. It is not funded by the state like almost everywhere else. Most state-run facilities are atrocious. a disgusting holding cell, where you're stripped of your clothes, dignity, and rights, fed prison food, overmedicated, physically and chemically restrained, only to be thrown back on the street in 3-5 days with no aftercare, med refills, or plan. Been there, done that, many times, not the point. The point was, I got some really helpful expensive ass treatment by the luck of the draw.

While I was there, I met someone lovely. We instantly connected and expressed interest in one another. They seemed really cool, we talked at length about income inequality and how unfair it was that this kind of treatment wasn't the norm or easily accessible and how unfair that was. They seemed passionate and bright and we got along great. They were set to discharge only a few days after I got there, so we exchanged info before they left. We talked a bunch while I was still there (my discharge was a couple of weeks later) and decided to go on a few dates after I got out.

A few days after I got out, I unintendedly overdosed, confused about my meds, and was incoherent by the time I got to the ER. I was restrained and chemically sedated. I was confused and fought so was deemed severely acute, and got sent to a state-run facility similar to what I described above. It was all very traumatic and I shut down once I got home. I was lucky I made it out semi-okay, that they let me out at all.

I wasn't replying to anyone's messages but the person I had met kept reaching out wanting to hear from me and make sure I was okay. I was embarrassed but it was really sweet and soon we starting talking a lot again and really connecting.

As I got to know them, I definitely thought they were very cool, we seemed to have a lot in common, they made me laugh and we got along really well. I was really digging them and saw us potentially becoming a thing. After talking for some time, we decided to anxiously have our first date. It went okay but something was off.

I didn't really pick up on it at first but the more we talked, the more privileged they offhandedly revealed they were. I know it's judge-y and lame, but that kind of put me off. I've been poor my whole life and struggled hard for everything, it's a whole different world living in poverty, so it made me a bit uncomfortable. I still live in poverty, on disability, with food stamps, and can barely hold it together enough to have a part-time job, but I have no choice. It's rough. I've been homeless, lived in institutions, went through foster care, and have no familial support. I have one of the most serious debilitating mental illnesses. It's been very very hard.

I am biased but I haven't met anyone well off who gets it. Some people don't realize how hard things can be when you've really had nothing, and had to work hard for everything. Even simple things are taken for granted, not understood, or there are miscommunications or assumptions made due to the lack of understanding. That's just my personal experience, it's hard trying to explain things and it's invalidating sometimes, it can be hard to relate or connect due to the lack of understanding.

Honestly, though, it took me by surprise. We had both talked passionately about the struggles of being on disability, the importance of income inequality, how unfair the system is set up, the barriers against the poor receiving adequate mental health treatment. They explained how they advocated for social justice and regularly went to protests. I felt dumb because I did meet them at higher-end facility, but I assumed they ended up there by dumb luck as I did with how they presented and initially came across.

They made it seem like we were in the same boat, poor af, chronically mentally ill, and 4 ever struggling. It was just a surprise because that was very much was not the case.

They moved up here from Florida, (where admittedly their life was much harder and different), but since moving, they were being supported by their aunt and uncle, who were very, very well off. They had a very expensive private practice psychiatrist, multiple treatment providers, and an apartment in a very well-off area, that their aunt owned, so they paid no rent. Their car/insurance/phone everything was paid for.

They seemed to have money to burn, dancing around being well taken care of and not really having to worry. They were on disability though receiving payments and food stamps in addition, not reporting the assistance from their family. When I lightly inquired, they said their grandmother mostly controlled their finances and they didn't deal with bills etc. They spent freely, getting take out almost every night, etc. enjoying all the pleasure of life without a second thought.

I was uncomfortable with this like I said, but they did seem cool and understanding, we did get along and I wanted to give them a chance. I put my biased experience aside and tried to give it a go.

First example that really blew me away was their dog. They had several animals, including a cat and two dogs. Even for someone working, three animals is a huge expense. I only have one cat and while she's my world, it gets hard sometimes. The vet is expensive, litter, food, treats, it adds up. And she's only one animal!!! I provide for her and take care of her, but a $350 vet bill still packs a punch. Of course, I pay it, she's my baby, but it might mean only eating sandwiches for a few weeks. I love her, so I sacrifice, she is worth it in every way, but animals are expensive and a lot of work/responsibility.

When this person and I first started seriously talking, they mentioned the dog they were closest to was very sick with a rare condition. I don't know the full details, but I guess it took a while for the vet to figure out what was wrong, he was on a lot of medications, needed loads of tests and scans. There were weeks of extensive treatments/ blood transfusions, all in a long, painful, and strenuous attempt to save him. They tried for a long time in the hopes he would get better.

He, unfortunately, passed away a few weeks after we started talking. It was devastating to them and I tried my best to be supportive and help them grieve. They were understandably at a huge loss. Their mental health tanked. Their dog meant the world to them, I understand that completely. Pets are family.

A few weeks after he passed. They were talking a little about the course of treatment and how hard it had been and what a long, painful road it was. They kind of casually remarked that his treatment cost over $20,000.

I honestly thought I had misheard. I had to ask twice because I thought they meant $2,000. No. $20,000. $20,000.Holy shit.

I just...$20,000 is what I make in a year. A year. Dogs are family, I totally, totally get that. People will do anything to save their loved ones. A pet is like an uninsured child, even with pet insurance, it can be expensive. I get that. If you have that kind of money, you pay it, without a thought, no problem.

I just... wow. I still couldn't even wrap my mind around it. My cat is my world but it breaks my heart to say, if anything happened to her like that, it would kill me, but I would be forced to put her down. I just couldn't believe, $20,000. And they said it like, no big deal, of course, like anyone would/could afford that, it was obvious, a no-brainer. I just...wow.

Next, kicker. I  came over to hang out one night and watch movies. I had never been to their apartment before. They claimed it had been super messy and they made a big deal about how they had cleaned for me. Sweet, but unnecessary, I get mental illness is tough. It was two bedrooms, all to themselves, decent space and light, but definitely scattered and cluttered. They had a huge king-sized bed, a bidet in the bathroom, and a super nice living room set up. Big comfy couch, loads of nice blankets, and honestly the biggest tv I had ever seen. They joking bragged about having all the streaming options. No kidding. Hulu, Disney plus, Netflix, Amazon, HBO, Paramount, and at least half a dozen more I hadn't even heard of. It just seemed crazy and excessive paying for that many streaming services every month.  But to each their own I guess.

We were both huge fans of anime, and they sort of decided to venture to studio ghibli. They asked if I had seen a particular favorite of theirs. I hadn't. They searched and it was only available to rent. $17. I nearly had a heart attack. I was like no way, we could definitely find it streaming for free somewhere if we look, or watch something else, shortage of options. They were like no it's no biggie that's what I want to watch and clicked rent. Like no problem *sweats intensely* Anytime I spend money, I have a heart attack and second guess it, it takes me like 10 minutes to click buy and my heart always drops when I do. I overthink, whether I really need/deserve it/whether there's a cheaper option, or if it's truly necessary. I know that's a poverty thing. It's just like we could have easily found it somewhere for free with a little effort!

We go to order food, we both have celiac so finding takeout is a chore. They knew the area better so I was trusting them. They were very adamant about ordering expensive sushi. It was $36 for just one of the things they wanted. Not including delivery or tips or fees or anything else, which included appetizers and drinks, the whole nine. I wasn't feeling sushi. They were like fine, we'll order from two separate places then. Double the delivery fee, not something I ever do, it would be cheaper finding a place together, I could get something small and affordable but they wouldn't budge. I didn't really have money to order a big thing on my own, I wanted something small, but I felt pressured. I figured anything I got would be cheaper than having to split a big sushi order I didn't want. I was like okay fine.

They kind of seemed annoyed that I didn't just give in and get sushi. They were a little short with me, didn't give me many options of other places, and were weirdly controlling, not letting me look at their phone to find something. I kind of gave up and said like just a burger is fine. I figured it would be cheap and filling, probably $20 max. I didn't take into consideration that they live in an extremely expensive area. It ended up being almost $30, plus tip. For a burger. I almost wanted to cry. I would have picked somewhere else cheaper given the option. They didn't even tell me the price until after they ordered it. I was like oh how much like $15 and they were so casual like oh no, $30 with tip. When it arrived, it was cold and disgusting, really inedible. I picked at the fries, which gave me a stomach ache as they were not gluten-free friendly and had been cross-contaminated in the fryer. I assumed they picked a place that they knew was safe.

When I wasn't eating, they asked if it was bad. I said yeah and they were like oh well just order something else. Like no, I can't afford anything else, it doesn't work like that. I was like no it's fine I'm not really that hungry. I wanted to say, I trusted you, and you kinda fucked me. I guess they picked that place because there was a gluten-free brownie sundae (prepackaged and not cross-contaminated) on the menu that they really wanted. Obviously more important.

My stomach ached all night. They ate their food happily. No big deal to them, $30 wasted on food I didn't really want, that I couldn't end up eating and got me sick. If it were them, they would have just ordered something else. No big deal to them. It was more important they got their brownie sundae and expensive sushi than making sure I was able to get something edible. Didn't matter that was half my grocery money for the week. Bologna sandwiches it'll have to be then. Awesome.

We spent the night talking, I didn't let on to how sick I was or that I was upset about not being able to choose food. They picked all the movies. I wanted to go home, but it just got later and later, one more movie I just *needed* to see. I asked them several times as the clock was ticking if it was getting too late to drive me home. No, no they were fine. Let's just watch another one. Then casually, they went to their room and brought out their night meds, threw 'em back, and settled into the couch. I started to panic. I asked again, you're taking me home, right? I guess they decided they weren't. I was miles away from home, no public transit running or close by. They were like oh I'm so tired, it got so late. Just order a car. I pulled up uber, $25. That would definitely overdraft my account.

Thankfully, after they saw me sweating and looking panicked, they were like, oh, I feel so bad, I'll order the uber for you. (If they hadn’t, I would have had to explain like, getting home on my own wasn't the plan nor was staying the night. If they thought I would be cool with just staying, they should have said something, if they wanted me to stay, it should have been a discussion, not a surprise.)

I just felt really disrespected. I was simultaneously hungry and sick from dinner, broke and unprepared to stay over with no prior discussion. I didn't have meds, my cat didn't have food out, I was blindsided and essentially stranded/put in an awkward position. They didn't consider that it might be stressful or beyond my limitations to get home. Being able to just roll with punches isn't financially feasible for everyone. It just felt like they were self-centered and inconsiderate. The whole night was what they wanted, what they wanted to eat, where they wanted to order from, what they wanted to watch, changing plans to what was convenient for them without any regard toward how it might impact me. Just inconsiderate and self-centered behavior.

We did keep talking though, I just sort of chalked it up to miscommunication and sort of beat myself up for not speaking up. It was weird though, kept just casually mentioning shit that was so privileged and complaining about shit that made them sound so ungrateful. I don't think they realized how it came across, just completely oblivious to their access to resources and not appreciating their position or supports.

They started talking about starting ketamine treatments to combat their ongoing depression. They had received them in the past and went on about how life-changing and helpful it was, and that everyone should try it. Now, being on disability (and even with most insurances) the treatments are not covered. The clinics that administer them are all out of pocket, bougie as fuck, and extremely expensive.

They talked about having several rounds in the past like it was nothing. It's easily $250-400 a pop and they were going 1-2x a week for a long time. They kept talking about all their options like what a painstaking burden. Should they start with lozenges and work up to IV clinic or ask for patches, and start that way. They wanted to work up to twice a week again but their family was giving pushback. They wanted me to agree with them, saying it was so unfair and lame and unreasonable/closeminded of their family for not immediately agreeing. The same family that would be footing the bill. No, not unfair or unreasonable at all. You sound privileged as fuck.

I was super bothered they were endlessly going on about it and complaining about pushback and asking me to agree with them. My treatment-resistant depression hasn't responded to anything, I've been on every waiting list for MDMA-assisted treatment whenever they pop up but never been selected due to demand and availability. Even ECT is too expensive and not covered. I'd kill for an opportunity like that! And it wasn't even like their family was saying no, they were discussing it in family therapy and seriously considering it.

They talked about it so nonchalantly and kept going on and on about how amazing it was. Like great, tell me all about something else I'll never be able to afford. I'm sure Paris is great, and backpacking across Europe is awesome, like please do tell me more.

I finally mentioned like okay that sounds great, will never able to afford it, glad it's so helpful They told me that I could just buy it off the street. That's what they used to do occasionally. It's only a couple hundred dollars and you get way more. Like oh okay. Let me just not pay a third of my rent in the hopes that this jam band kids ketamine isn't fentanyl or some shit and maybe have a shot at not wanting to kill myself for a week, you know on the off chance it works. Sounds great, super safe, much more affordable. And like as ridiculous as it was to offer that as an alternative, that still wouldn't be something I could afford! They just came off so clueless and privileged and oblivious.

What really got me was how they eventually talked about their family. They did weekly family therapy with their aunt and uncle and occasionally their dad since moving up here. They stayed with their aunt and uncle (lived down the street) more often than not so they weren't alone. This was encouraged/appreciated/welcomed. They did activities together regularly to help with depression and loneliness/ managing symptoms. They had their grandma and brother, whom they saw often and cherished greatly. They portrayed the relationships as really solid and important. I thought wow, truly wholesome and wonderful. They seemed so loved, close, connected, cared for, and supported. Across the board, they had support.

But then tables would turn. They complained often their family was too close, too conservative, and not understanding. They didn't want them so involved in their life, their treatment, decision-making, and recovery process. They resented the support, complained they weren't a kid and were capable/in sound mind to make decisions/have control of their life. I tried to listen and be understanding but I didn't get it. They came off almost like a spoiled, ungrateful teenager.

You're getting help, love, and support all around, everyone wants to support you and see you do well and will give whatever that takes. Like legitimately whatever ?!? You don't have to work, pay for anything, and it is made sure you don't have to struggle for anything. Anything you need, you've got.

I get the concept that having family so close/involved could be crippling or invasive or just downright unproductive. But it was such a slap in the face they would complain to me of all people about having that kind of support.

Family/support is such a foreign concept to me personally. Like I said, I grew up in foster care. I've never had family involved, healthy relationships, or any sort of support like that. The concept of calling your aunt when you're sad and she offers kind words, support, and tells you to come over to do something fun? Like, can't relate. I could only take so much of them complaining about being taken care of.

Living with extreme mental illness, not being able to work for periods of time, living solely on disability paychecks and food stamps is damn is impossible to survive, especially where we live. Without the help they were being given, they wouldn't be able to survive. The cost of living is out of control, you can't even rent a room with a single disability payment. I know, I'm doing it. It takes everything for me to keep a part-time job, barely making enough to make ends meet. But if I don't. I'm homeless again. No matter what, no matter how bad symptoms get. And I have one of the hardest, most debilitating mental illnesses. I don't have any other choice.

Their aunt would pay for them to go to school or learn a trade or anything they wanted. They have a world-renowned private practice doctor that prescribes them literally anything they could want or need to help and they have a great bond/ working relationship. I have a psych who can barely remember my name and sees me for 5-15 minutes maybe once or twice a month. I was asking for medications recently to get through a hard time, nothing serious, but my state-assigned psych does not prescribe benzos. Period. Neither does my PCP. It's state rehab or psych facility for me or bust. Another thing they take for granted. They almost bragged to me about immediately getting two heavy-duty benzos and another maintenance medication, just by saying their panic attacks were slighting increasing. Meanwhile. I was at risk for DT's after relapsing and begging for basic Librium to maybe not die and was denied.

The real reality of being on disability is the bare minimum or bad treatment. My psychologist is thankfully amazing but it took 10 years and hitting absolute rock bottom and being homeless to find her. She's a diamond in the rough but only works with the sickest of the sick. I would be in a state institution right now if it weren't for her and I avoided it by the skin of my teeth.

So here's where I'm probably the asshole. After weeks, I broke. We were texting as usual and they started to sort of mope and complain. They were venting about having a hard time again and how symptoms were bad and there was just nothing they could do and it was so hard. They started going on about how helpless they were and how there was no opportunity to get better and everything was just super hard and impossible for them and how rough they had it. Their family was checking in on them too much and they were annoyed at them for being concerned and that they had no options and no chance and everything was just so hard and impossible.

I understand, that's depression. I'm pretty empathetic and understanding and have been up to this point but it just felt like the rich person complaining to the homeless guy sleeping on the street, how awful it was they forgot their umbrella that day, and how unfortunate it was to be getting wet. I just wanted to scream. If you're anxious take your benzos, take your other meds! Call your aunt. Text your on call therapist. Call your fancy psych who answers night and day. Utilize any of the resources you have and all the support you are given!

I was just tired of it. Things in my life have been super difficult, especially lately, and I have to figure it out alone. The voices were getting loud again which lead to a bad relapse that went off the rails, which I had to pull out of completely unassisted. I am in between jobs, my housing isn't stable, my bank accounts are low, my mental health is chronic and very severe, my treatment team was threatening to section me if I didn't reel it in. Things were bad. But I deal with it, alone.

I know it was wrong of me, but I couldn't take it. They have everything to help themselves!!! They could go to a fancy hospital, they could ask all their supports for help! They would receive the best care. All the medicines, the best treatment. Anything.

I basically kind of spelled it out for them. You have privilege, you have support, you have money, resources, a great treatment team, family, everything... please for the love of God, USE IT! You wouldn't have to worry about losing your job going into treatment, you wouldn't lose your housing. You wouldn't have to worry about falling behind on bills. You'd be fine.

How can you not see or appreciate all you have and or see how oblivious and privileged you come across and how hurtful that is? You're complaining to the wrong person.

I went on a bit too long. I was definitely coming from a place of hurt, mental illness, and jealousy. I wasn't trying to make them feel bad, I just wanted them to understand. That kind of support would make all the difference for so many that are struggling. They are sitting with gallons of water around them, complaining to be inconsolably parched and that don't know what to do, all while sort of offhandedly bragging about how much water they have and how they can easily get more. I've been carefully conserving a 16 oz Poland spring bottle, rationing for weeks not knowing if/when I will be able to refill. They aren't alone, expected to make it on just disability. They weren't recognizing their position, how they were coming across, how hurtful that was. I didn't get anyone to catch me, love me, support me. This is the real reality of living with extreme mental illness on disability looks like without that opportunity or support. This is hard fucking work. We are not the same. You got lucky. Now do something with it.

They ended up calling me a dick, saying I didn't understand, that I was being cruel and mean for no reason. We haven't talked since. I do feel bad, I just couldn't take it anymore.

So if you made it this far, lay it on me, AITA?

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alesbiancowboy · 5 years

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Get ready folks, this one is going to be lengthy and heavy. That's right, we're looking at the Rose Queen episode, AKA "Let Patsy Mount breathe for five f*cking minutes please".

Since this is a very Patsy centered episode, and I don't have the mental bandwidth to break down every scene, I'm starting when shit gets real for Patsy: when Noakes comes and talks to her and Trixie.

Okay, this face speaks volumes. You see the pissed off, dejected Patsy when Noakes talks about putting in the pretty police to “Smoke out his type”. First of all, he’s talking about Tony like he’s some sort of vermin (I see what you’re doing there with the symbolism of the rat infestation Heidi, I see you). But this is Noakes telling Patsy that people like her aren’t normal and should be flushed out and gotten rid of.

As I have said in like all of these breakdowns, Patsy is motivated by self-preservation. This most likely cemented itself from her times in the camps, but this episode is the one where we see it truly taking root within her, and then it later affects how she interacts with everyone including Delia.

Of course, Patsy “I’m good at my job” Mount takes her frustration at the situation and focuses on what Mrs. Amos needs. This is something that a lot of people do in a stressful situation, they deflect what they’re feeling and focus on what they’re feeling or how to help someone else’s problems. She’s stuck in this place where she can’t make her true feelings known, but she needs to get out her indignation for this in some way, so she does so on behalf of the mother she’s there to take care of.

This is a gorgeous moment for Patsy and Trixie’s friendship. Trixie is saying how she couldn’t forgive Tony if she was in his wife’s shoes and Patsy automatically assumes it’s because he’s gay, but Trixie (the true MVP of this episode) automatically says how she doesn’t care that he’s gay, just that he cheated.

Emerald does this small thing where she looks at Trixie as she says she can’t forgive him and then does a small look down and tries to busy herself with her bag as she asks if it’s because of “what he is” so she won’t have to look at her best friend and roommate voice some sort of hate for people like Patsy.

Then we get Trixie being supportive of the community and we get that iconic Patsy Mount half-smile as she realizes that Trixie isn’t like other people and wouldn’t hate her for loving Delia if she ever came forth and told her (to be honest, I have a theory that Trixie already knew, but that’s for another time if you wanna hear it just dm me).

THEN we have them laughing over the “no dark secrets” thing, and we have a fucking amazing acting moment from Emerald where she’s laughing and smiling, then her face just falls. It’s so small and I couldn’t really get a good picture, but I will sell my soul to whoever can get a good gif of it. But this is Patsy remembering that she does have a “dark secret” and it could cost her everything but in a way, this would be Patsy having to decide between the two great loves of her life: Delia or her work.

Now we have Patsy at work with Mrs. Amos. She knows what’s up and is clearly trying to lighten the situation any way she can. She’s cheerful and smiling more than we’ve ever seen her smile on a regular house call, but she’s also being very attentive to how Mrs. Amos is acting, she doesn’t want to really let her know that she knows what’s up. She’s worried about her patient but is also clearly trying to judge how she’s feeling, because if she doesn’t like the gays, then Patsy could be in a difficult situation.

I love this moment, like so so much. Patsy is coming at this from her role as a caregiver but is being so smart with her wording and how she approaches this. She starts it with “my work, it’s about caring”. Not “I am”, this is because you can bet your bottom dollar that Patsy wouldn’t be here if not for her work. This is a difficult space and situation for her because a badly hidden reaction could cost her everything.

Then she makes sure that she lets Mrs. Amos know that she’s there for her, not just the baby, she cares about this mother and her situation and is there to help. I think it’s very telling how she doesn’t say anything in response to Mrs. Amos saying how she can’t be upset. Patsy knows that no matter what she says it would be insensitive or could be taken the wrong way, so she stays silent and carries on with her work.

This little line makes me so happy. Any discussion that she has with Mrs. Amos about this situation could hurt Patsy and she knows this. She knows that Mrs. Amos is holding onto a lot of anger and sadness and so she does what’s right as a caretaker and offers a shoulder and a sympathetic ear even though it could hurt her feelings and possibly her mental state. This is the core of who Patsy is. She’s a loyal friend who will put other’s needs before her own for those few people she lets in and it’s so touching and nice to see her letting Mrs. Amos in and giving her a safe place and person to talk to about all of this because we know Mrs. Amos won’t be able to talk to anyone else about all of this.

This lunch (dinner?) scene is delightful. Nonnatus is talking about the Amos’s and we get to see Patsy just stay quiet (most likely so she can not incriminate herself in any way) and not look anyone in the eye until Sister Monica Joan (who Patsy has some truly great moments with throughout the show) and Trixie stand up for Tony and the community. There are those small moments where you see something in Patsy’s eyes while they’re standing up for Tony that could be read as hope and it’s delicious to watch.

She literally puts her fork down and stops chewing while Sister Winnifred says all of this. This poor girl is so tired and already feels the weight of the world on her shoulders being in charge of the Amos baby, then she has to hear this sort of hate being spewed about LGBT people in her home with people that she has to live and work with.

Now we have the shitty neighbor lady yelling about the newspaper and we see Patsy get visibly anxious. The woman walks in and Patsy is still in her full posture, then she says something about secrets being out and Patsy seemingly shrinks just a little. Still, she automatically is watching Marie worried because at the end of the day she knows that she is in charge of her wellbeing, and this won’t be good for her physical or mental health, the first thing she does is move to help get Marie out of there.

This shot is everything. I love how they played into Emerald’s height to make it a fight for the power at this moment — she is taller than the frame and she’s physically looking down at this woman for 1. hurting Marie and 2. being a homophobic asshole. Not to mention, Patsy is someone with a lot of actual power and respect in the community. She’s a midwife, a nurse, and she’s in charge of the cubs, there is no way that she’s not known in the community and I love the way this woman looks surprised and taken aback that Patsy is standing up fro Marie and Tony because it’s her using her power to actually say what she’s been wanting to say this entire episode. And it’s clear that the way she says this line, she’s talking about herself just as much as she’s talking about Marie.

Just this look. I don’t have anything else to say... okay that’s a lie. her saying “small-mindedness has no place here” is just too good. This is as close as we get to Patsy snapping from all of this hate and bullshit and it’s done in a way that’s still respectable and is using her power for good. She then literally runs to go comfort Marie and it’s beautiful and she goes from being hard and laying down the law to soft and comforting (showing that soft underbelly and loyalty she has to the people she decides gets to see it.)

This is (as far as my knowledge) the only time we hear Patsy say any sort of formal identifier for the LGBT community. This is also just so good because I see this as Patsy doing a final test to see if she can truly trust Trixie. Trixie has been doing great this episode standing up for the LGBT community where Patsy cannot, but so far, it’s all be just talk. And we know from that first big Patsy episode that she truly believes that actions speak louder than words. the second Trixie says it’s not their battle to fight, you can visibly see Patsy put her walls up again.

She then argues “mother and baby first” when Trixie talks about the Rose Queen, bringing up her work (we are seeing a reoccurring theme this episode of Patsy having to seemingly choose between her love of her work versus her love for Delia). THEN we get Trixie asking (as sweetly as possible) why Patsy cares so much about this, giving Patsy a very clear opening to come out, but instead, we see Self-Preservation Pats come in and she shuts it down before going to bed and ending the conversation.

Patsy is called to the birth and we see the (very artfully done) “Queer” spray-painted across the door and goddamit she looks like she’s about to cry. Still, she powers through, walks into the house and gets to work. She has to ignore just how much this hurts her and has to focus on what she’s there to do.

When Marie tries to talk about the vandalism, Patsy stops that conversation before it even starts and stays in her work mode. If she let that conversation happen, it would have been hard for her to do what she needed to truly be there for Marie.

We get to see Patsy genuinely happy for the first time this entire episode when the baby is born and it’s just too good. This birth almost serves as a reminder for her that no matter what sort of hate is out there she’s good at her job and what she does brings actual joy — it’s a labor of love.

This is the first time Patsy gets to see Tony since all this insanity went down. She’s watching this entire interaction closely because she’s in the room with someone who has been living her worst nightmare of being found out then criminalized, but she’s also still there as a support for Marie. Then we get a close up of Patsy watching them worried, she knows that not everything is all fixed and happy, the Amos’s may never be the same as they were.

I love this. I love this so much. The very very small smile that Patsy gives Tony as he checks to make sure Marie is still able to do the Rose Queen is just true wlw/mlm solidarity and it’s perfect.

Then we see Tom give an excuse as to why they weren’t planning on having Marie there and we see Patsy’s face fall and she sighs. It’s a reminder to her that the community’s stance on people like her and Tony haven’t changed. She literally scowls at the homophobic ladies as they’re spewing hate and then everything changes as soon as Trixie starts talking.

This is the action that Patsy believes in. Trixie saying her beliefs about the LGBT community in Nonnatus when they’re surrounded by people they know and love is one thing, her standing up for Marie and Tony in front of the Popular community is a big deal, and we see Patsy smile and she’s trying to hold back her facial expressions because her best friend just stepped the fuck up to the plate and hit a home run.

Patsy going to hold Tony’s hand is again Patsy’s actions speaking louder than any words she could say. We don’t see her really say a lot to Tony, and we don’t see a lot of people touch Tony besides Marie, so this small moment is Patsy’s way of saying she’s here for him and the way he looks down at her hand says volumes. She’s not afraid to touch him and accept him, and that’s a big deal that Tony has been struggling with this entire episode.

Then we get the standing ovation, which is cheesy as hell, but so sweet.

Anywho,

ding dang that took a while, huge thank you to @ms-shady for requesting this one. This is a hard episode to get through just based on the subject matter, but goddamit it’s so satisfying to just watch the journey that Patsy goes through this episode. If you wanna see a breakdown lemme know!

#Call the Midwife #patsy mount #episode breakdown

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