re last reblog I do see fanfic culture pushing/replicating a certain model of "what trauma looks like," "how trauma works"
this is a problem across all areas of society obviously, but transformative works are, well, transformative. they're about crafting and modifying narratives where the fan-creator sees a flaw or a lack -- often for the better! don't get me wrong, I've done my fair share of "I take a hammer and I fix the canon," it's the main thing that gets my creative gears spinning -- but what happens when that "flaw" is simply a narrative not conforming to popular expectations?
some people just don't get PTSD from events that sound obviously traumatic. they're not masking, and they're not coping; they just straight-up didn't get the permanently-locked stress-response that defines PTSD. they walk away from a horrible experience going "well, that sucked, but it's over now." some people do get PTSD from events most people wouldn't find traumatic. we don't really know why some people get PTSD and others don't. but fandom has an idea of events that must be traumatizing, of a "correct" way to portray trauma. you see the problems with this lack of understanding in e.g. fans pressuring the devs of Baldur's Gate 3 to add dialogue where the player character badgers Halsin about his own feelings on his abuse -- because he must be traumatized, and his trauma must fit a certain mold and presentation of sexual trauma, under the mistaken impression that anything outside that narrow window is somehow "wrong" and disrespectful or even harmful to survivors.
take, for another example, the very common trope of a traumatized character who hates touch or sex "learning" to like touch or sex as a part of their healing process. certainly that can be healing for some people; other people will never like, or want, touch or sex, because of trauma or because they just don't. the assumption that someone who doesn't want sex or doesn't like to be touched must be traumatized, must be suffering from this perceived lack, is seriously harmful -- to asexual people, to people with sensory issues around touch, and to people for whom healing from trauma means freedom to refuse sex or touch.
and there's a secondary trope, one that's slightly more thoughtful but ultimately repeats the problem -- that once someone has learned that their boundaries will be respected, they'll feel it's safe to soften those boundaries. once they feel safe refusing touch or sex, they'll feel comfortable allowing it on their own terms. but many people don't, and many people won't! many people will simply never want to be touched, and never want sex, and they are not suffering or broken or lacking because of it. the idea that proving you'll respect someone's boundaries entitles you to test those boundaries -- the paradox is obvious, and yet this is something i've seen hurt (re-traumatize) people i care for.
people are imperfect victims. people don't heal in the ways you expect. many people have positive memories of their abuse, of their abusers. many people hurt others in the course of their trauma, in ways that can't easily be unpacked in a 5k oneshot. very few narratives of trauma and recovery actually fit the ones put forward by popular children's media and romance novels -- which are the ones I most see replicated in fandom spaces, because they provide the clearest narrative and easiest catharsis, and so they're easy and soothing to reach for.
that's not necessarily a bad thing! i am not immune to goopy romance tropes. i am not immune to teary catharsis. not every fic has to grapple with ugly realities. but there's a problem when these narratives become predominant, when people think they're accurate and realistic depictions of trauma, when the truth of trauma is unpleasant and uncomfortable, and doesn't fit any single narrative, let alone one of comforting catharsis
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short asl thing based on @where-does-the-heart-lie's modern au :) i started this over a year ago but the beginning is all dialogue and felt more like a script to me i suppose??? which deflated my desire to work on it. anyway i checked it over recently and it's completely fine lmfao, self-confidence restored here we go !
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"Yo. Aren't you usually in the middle of your shift by now?"
"I've been banned from the hospital."
"Like, for life?"
"No. For the next, uh.. Twenty-two hours."
"That's oddly specific."
"It was twenty-four, but I fell asleep after leaving the building."
"That wouldn't have to do with why they kicked you out, at all?"
"Hmmm. I'm too sleep-deprived, apparently."
"Ah. And, um, you called me because...?"
"I pressed a random number in my call log after waking up. Lucky you, I guess."
"Yeah. Right. Lucky me. And your car keys are...?"
"Confiscated."
"Ah, right, of course."
A beat of silence. Two. Three, then "Look, if you're busy, then–"
"No, no. You called me, so I'll be there. Give me twenty minutes."
"Alright. Thank–"
"Thank someone else. Also, if you fall asleep in my car, I'm taking it as express permission to drive you around wherever I want."
"Ugh, go die. I don't even know why I bothered."
"LUCKY YOU, I guess," sounds off way too loudly in his ear. "No take backs. See you in ten."
"I thought you said–" Sabo breaks off as the call ends, leaving him staring blankly at his phone's too-dim screen. He squints, turns the brightness all the way up, and still squints as the sunlight proves too strong for the display.
Ace shows up in more than ten but decidedly less than twenty minutes. Sabo doesn't waste much brain power on it, only climbing into the passenger seat and yawning into his palm while his other hand fixes the seatbelt into the buckle. Not a second too soon, too, as Ace roars the engine to life and peels away from the curb at record speed.
Ace fiddles with the radio. He turns the music up, then dial it back down to inaudible. They hit the expressway and he leans over the steering wheel, frowning with his eyes fixed on the road far ahead. Sabo yawns again and this appears to be the limit to his patience.
"Hey, so, I had a thought after you hung up on me."
Sabo grimaces. "You mean you–"
"Today's Wednesday."
He doesn't elaborate. Sabo is too tired to process. "Yes," he follows, after a second. He glances at the sky out the front window. "What time is it?"
"Oh, uh." Ace fumbles with hand placement so he can lift his watch to his face. "Nine forty."
Sabo takes a couple beats to try and process this, moves his eyes away from the skyline, and sighs as he pulls his phone out. 2:47 is what the display reads, which sounds much more believable.
"How did the minute hand get off?" he mutters to himself, chancing a look at Ace's busted wristwatch. Ace raises a brow, taking his gaze off the road to scrutinize Sabo. "No, it doesn't matter," he mutters to himself once more, sliding his phone away back on his person and out of his hands.
"My point is," Ace continues, like he hasn't just been interrupted by a whole thing. "Your timeout will be done midday Thursday. Did they switch your days off?"
"No." Sabo sighs. "They technically gave me the next thirty-six hours. Technically closer to forty. Something like that. I go back in on Friday. Sometime.” He tries to smile and it turns out very lopsided, from that he can make out in the rearview mirror. “Can you tell I’m tired?”
“I don’t think ‘tired’ is an accurate description,” Ace quips. “When did you eat a proper meal last?”
“Uh, yesterday. Maybe.”
“Maybe??”
“A ‘proper meal’ means different things to the two of us,” Sabo huffs. “On my account it was yesterday. I’ve had food since then, of course.”
“Alright, so here’s the plan,” Ace announces before absolutely whipping it around a curve. Sabo is his passenger in the passenger seat and had fully prepared to be so when he got in the vehicle, but he’d been vastly underprepared for this sudden course of action, which is how he ends up halfway out of his seat with his cheek slammed into the cold window. Ace doesn’t quite notice his brother’s terminal velocity until the car is once again on the straight and narrow, and only then it’s because of the audible thunk Sabo’s face makes when it collides with the glass.
“Aw shit. You good bro?”
“Ow,” Sabo mutters. “If I have broken bones I’m suing your ass.”
“Well, if you’re good enough to make jokes, I think you’re better than you’re letting on.” Ace keeps the wheel steady with one knee while he takes both hands away to crack his fingers. When he glances over at Sabo again, he looks even more pathetic – like he’s becoming one with the glass. “Anyway, as I was saying.
“I’m taking your ass home. You’re going straight to sleep and while you crash, I’ll make you something decent to eat and stick it in the fridge for you to heat up later. I’ll even make you two servings to eat two different times, since you clearly can’t be trusted to take care of yourself correctly.”
“Ouch.”
“I want you to conk out for as long as your body allows. We can reset your sleep schedule tomorrow, alright? Put your phone on silent; do not answer any calls. In fact, you know what, just give it to me.
Sabo glances over to see Ace’s hand held out to him, palm up. Fingers wiggling expectantly. His lips pull up into a grimace. “I’m not doing that.”
“Fine.” Ace takes his hand back. “But you will comply with everything else.”
“Wow! It’s so funny, I didn’t realize you turned into my mother overnight! Really tapped into your mom potential, huh? Anything exciting happen in your life that would cause that? I guess I wouldn’t know, since I’ve been a zombie for the past two days.”
“There’s nothing wrong with acting like your older brother, you dipshit, especially if you keep putting yourself through the wringer like this. You go home. You sleep. You wake up and eat. You go back to sleep. Then we do laundry. Does that sound agreeable?”
“That’s negotiable, at the least,” Sabo mumbles. “I will accept good food as a form of bribery.”
“Oh, nice, because I’m flat broke at the moment.”
Sabo makes a mental note of that, and then they’re pulling into the driveway. Ace lets him exit the vehicle by himself and then promptly manhandles him all the way onto the couch where it will be easier to force his body to relax than in a real bed. Ace knows this, so he calls him weird before chucking a loose blanket at his head. Sabo is almost too tired to function at this point, so he lets Ace have the last laugh in favor of finally closing his eyes.
Coming to is a surreal experience, especially since the sun is still out. He must make a noise because Ace is suddenly within view. His limbs are tangled in the blanket and still so heavy that he doesn’t bother moving. “Thought you would be gone,” he half-groans, eyes slipping shut again for a moment.
“I did leave,” Ace confirms. “I had to go pilfer some stuff to make stew with. It’s almost done, so I’ll hang here until then.”
Pilfer. That could mean any number of things. Sabo chooses to believe in the option where Ace is an upstanding citizen, and then remembers Ace saying earlier that he had no money. He frowns and squirms on the cushions enough to where it looks like he’s checking his pockets. “Where’s my wallet, Ace?” he bluffs.
“Somewhere around here,” Ace pipes up. “Your stomach will thank you for your contributions to the Portgas Household’s pantry!”
“Ugh, I got robbed,” he complains. “This sucks. ‘m going back to sleep.” He rolls over so his back is to Ace.
“Yeah, you do you, bro. Stew will still be here later. I’ll see you when you’re back in the world of the living.”
—
Luffy comes in late that night and slams the front door shut as loud as humanly possible. When he appears in the main room, he doesn’t seem to be upset, so Ace writes it off as a Luffyism. Sabo hasn’t stirred at the noise, so it’s all good.
Realizing this, Luffy pads closer to Ace’s side and looks at Sabo’s unmoving body warily. “Why is Sabo passed out like a corpse? Is he sick?”
“No, he’s not sick, he just can’t take care of himself. Which is why we are going to let him sleep for as long as possible.”
Luffy just nods to this, but it’s the uncomprehending Luffy-nod that means he’s just going to end up doing whatever he wants to regardless. Ace sighs, then jerks his head towards the kitchen. “He ate a little earlier, but I want him to eat again when he wakes up. There’s stew in the fridge if you want it – just leave him a little. Got it, Monkey D. Luffy?”
Luffy throws him a salute and then runs off in his socks. “Yippee! Ace made stew!”
“Think of your brother, Luffy, and make good choices!” Ace calls after him. “He’s a pathetic man who needs food to feel better or he’ll end up sleeping through Laundry Day!”
—
Sabo does not sleep through laundry day, but he does sleep for sixteen whole hours, so it’s just around noon when he forces himself up off the couch and into a warm shower.
Ace is around, which is mildly unexpected. But he’s still half-asleep, so everything is at least a little unexpected. He glances up from playing video games with Luffy to see Sabo leaving the steam-filled bathroom with his hair hanging around his shoulders. “You look like a wet cat,” he calls.
“Sabo’s awake!” Luffy cheers. “Ace thought you died at one point.”
Ace elbows Luffy in the gut, making him hunch over. “I did not!”
“He totally checked to see if your heart was still beating!”
“I’m undead, actually,” Sabo says completely seriously.
“Does that mean you don’t need to eat anymore?” Luffy questions. “Because I ate all the stew last night.”
“I saw that coming and made extra.” Ace finger-guns in Sabo’s general direction. “That’s why I bought two sets of ingredients. With your money!”
“With my money,” Sabo echoes, because it’s such a wild statement to have to deal with this early in the day. Well, early for him. “Fuck you.”
“I mean, I can tell Luffy where I hid–”
“Thank you, Ace, for agreeing to share your quarters with both of your brothers so we can all do laundry today on your dime!” Sabo raises his pitch so his voice is mockingly squeaky when he says this. He starts moving down the hall before Ace can start to argue, letting his and Luffy’s voices bleed into the background.
When he comes back out, now dressed, it smells significantly better than before. “I reheated the stew,” Ace announces, gesturing for Sabo to take a seat at the kitchen counter. “Let’s all have lunch before we head out.”
“You have to drink this too,” Luffy tells Sabo, sliding a Gatorade across the counter so it sets in front of him when he finally does take a seat. “Ace’s orders.”
“Gotta get those nutrients back somehow.”
“Aren’t we so considerate, Sabo?”
“Do you even know what ‘considerate’ means?” Sabo asks, lips quirking up into a half-smile. At Luffy’s shrug, it turns into a real smile. “Well, thanks anyway. Both of you.”
“No sweat. And look!” Ace brandishes a five dollar bill for both to see. “I found this baby for us to use on coins! It’s all on me today–”
“Where’s my wallet, Ace?!”
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Riz has counted four casseroles this week alone. Five, if one goes by the method of cooking, but Yelen's scary when she's crossed, and calling her burek by its proper name is important to her, so Riz does her the courtesy and doesn't include it in his mental tally.
He holds the tupperware over his head to keep it out if the way as he takes careful steps over the piles of notes in his path. The dockman case just closed, relevant documentations handed over to relevant personnels, evidences dealt with as needed; all he has lying around now is just record of the process and traces of himself thinking through it. Unsurprisingly they still haven't invented a surface more convenient for people under five feet who like to pace to put pieces of paper on than the ground.
Actual records go into the case folder with the other documents. Anything else with at least one side still blank is going to the school kids in the block - they chew through an astounding amount of paper just learning arithmetic. The rest is for the recycling basket.
Later. It's his mandated lunch break right now.
Riz sits down in front of the corner file cabinet. In an office often overrun with papers and strings and sometimes even thumbtacks, he's never really managed to clutter up this exact square of surface like every other ones. Ever since the bottom drawer rattled for no discernible reason a day long past, his eyes have always just kinda decided to slide across the space without acknowledging it.
It's years out, now. Riz doesn't know why he thought it such a big deal anymore, back then. He wasn't scared, he doesn't think. Not anymore. Maybe just uncomfortable with the idea that certain things persist despite all efforts to change.
He opens the tupperware. Dame Carabelle's experiment greets him with enough spice in the aroma alone to knock out a small mammal. When he chopped the vegetables for this casserole he couldn't really imagine the eventual heft of it, evident even through just these few ladles' worth, maybe weighing heavier for being still warm. His folk eat more through the smell and the textures and the aftertastes than the taste itself. His folk's meal is really the cooking rather than the eating. The eating is the meal's end.
"Hey," he tells the file cabinet's bottom drawer. "Um."
It's the anniversary. Riz doesn't know the exact date of his dad's death; nobody currently alive does. He and Mom both use the date of the funeral, though as he moved out to Bastion and then got more directly involved with Interplanar he hasn't really been going to Dad's grave as much. Doesn't seem like very efficient use of his time, catching a train or borrowing a car or spending a whole spell slot on going somewhere he knows Dad isn't at. They're sorta coworkers now. They talk on and off every other week between missions. When he goes now, it's just to clean up the place, keeping the landmark tidy and respectable.
Without that work to mark the date he doesn't really know what it serves anymore. But he still remembers it. Still takes note, absently or not, when it comes around.
There's not really a good way to tell the drawer that. Riz looks for another way to start the... conversation, hopefully. The question at play, he'd guess, is why he's doing this. He's been pretty content ignoring all the rattlings and the knocks from inside and the times it sits slightly ajar without him ever opening it himself; hell, he still uses the three drawers on top of it. Space is fucking precious in Bastion.
Precious enough to finally fix this damn drawer so he gets his turn to use it? Riz asks himself. Is that what we're getting to? Then he dismisses the thought - he didn't manage to fix it the times he actually tried, let alone-- now. When he doesn't really care that much to.
That's probably a good place to start. "'s fine if you keep being in there, turns out," Riz says.
The lunch hours are quiet in the block, sleepy and bright with the brief window of sunlight that manages to break through roof overhangs and extended balconies and laundry lines and climbing vines. Riz's work isn't loud here (the loud parts happen away from his office, if everything goes right), but the fragment of early summer heat reflected in the steady warmth his meal still carries compels him to lower his voice even more. It makes the words feel intimate, in a way he's never been familiar with - if he says something he just says it. He doesn't whisper. If he gives his friends something, he gives it open-palm. He's found out, along the way, that people usually don't think of rituals and courtesies the way he does.
Small voice for a diminished monster. "You know why I think so?" Riz asks. "Because almost two decades ago you kidnapped me and almost killed me, and now you rattle a drawer in my office."
It doesn't sound as much like a taunt as Riz wanted it to; the drawer has made a lot of noises again this morning when he checked the calendar, and he was definitely annoyed at it. Now, though, facing it like this after cooking the whole morning with more grandparents and peers from the block than he can count on both hands to cater for a tenant union meeting, he thinks the annoyance has morphed. Changed shape.
It has the shades of something like pity. Riz is not prone to pity, and especially not at these kinda matters. It's slightly maddening that he coheres perfectly outside of this one spot. That he commands his spaces, except for a drawer.
He puts the tupperware onto the floor between himself and the cabinet. "I know we're aware it's the anniversary," he says at the drawer. "You do this every year. You make a ruckus every time I decide to go do my job instead of mooching off my friends' aircon, and every time I get an invitation to some stupid social thing I want to turn down, and every time one of the old people tries to introduce me to a child or a nibling, because being a bachelor over thirty is weird," he pinches the bridge of his nose. "I have three fucking jobs. I love doing my fucking jobs. I'm forcing funds into infrastructures. You're never leaving, are you."
The drawer vibrates lightly. It's a very, very mild acknowledgement, considering the history of reactions Riz has gotten from this thing. Riz thinks it's emanating joyous agreement, or satisfaction.
It only sharpens the pity. Riz doesn't like that, but it's how it is. That's, ultimately, the lesson he's been taught over and over and over again, just by existing as himself, turned every which way by space after space that don't see him eye-to-eye: it's not like he'd quit living over any of it. It's not like any of it can sand off these fundamental pieces of him.
He's outgrown a lot of things, he's found out. Again, and again, and again. A childhood home, a yearly trip, a monster.
"'s probably scary for you, huh?" He asks. "Because I left."
He thinks he hears joints creak that sound like you did. Probably the way a scorned lover would say it, in a movie or a yellowback. He has no more connection to the idea than he did as a kid. Less, because it doesn't even scare him.
"That's what it is, right? That it's the anniversary, and I'll never be like Dad." He raises a knee from the floor, pulls it back closer to him. Slings an arm over it. "You love to remind me. The thing is, Dad also left. He loved Mom and he loved me, and none of us wanted it to happen, but it still did. Because love does fuckall to make anyone stay on its own."
He's long past being bitter about it. It's just the facts. Once upon a time he looked into the future and the specter of his friends' happily-ever-after casted lightless, fathomless shadow over him. Love, marriage, that kind of devotion, to a fifteen-year-old with more solved cases than friends seemed so eternal. Final.
But you can only watch your friends build up apps' worth of jilted lovers for so long before getting over it.
"You know what I learned?" Riz tells the drawer. "Love doesn't make anyone stay. Project management does."
He stands up, and picks up the tupperware of Dame Carabelle's casserole, that he helped make, that he helped share with a block's worth of neighbors and members of a community he's at home with, and goes sit at his desk to eat. "Last chance to get any," he drops an offer over his shoulder as he walks away.
He doesn't eat all of his share in one go. What he's spared he leaves on the desk when going outside for a smoke break. Baron looks the exact same as when he saw them last, when he catches a glimpse; they haven't grown at all. They aren't there when he comes back inside, but the leftover has gone days-old cold, like someone's sucked the future out of it.
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