#he would be a Basset Hound if his ears kept going

[katb357]

Sicktember 22: Flu

H. Stanley/M. Stoker/A Shift/Emergency!

Johnny just knew he shouldn’t have come into work that day. Three different calls just that morning to deal with patients who most likely had the flu. The first was a four-year-old kid who sneezed right in his face… twice. And now he was starting to feel crummy. His throat was scratchy, his head was pounding, and his stomach was queasy. And he’d used up all his sick leave back when he broke his leg. So,when the Squad rolled into the engine bay after their most recent run, he wasn’t interested in lunch. He wandered into the dormitory and sacked out on his bunk. He was out like a light within minutes.

Roy had known his partner wasn’t feeling good on the way back from the last call because he was quiet--too quiet. His suspicion was confirmed when he turned down lunch and headed to the dormitory and his bunk instead. He’d likely caught the flu from one of the cases they’d treated that morning. Great… just peachy. He was liable to catch it next. That was just the way it went around the station. Normally, he had a good immune system, but there was just something about Johnny’s germs that got to him every time. Stubborn little buggers!

“You OK there, Roy? You’re lookin’ kinda pale.” Cap sat down across the table from his senior paramedic with his loaded submarine sandwich. “Where’s John got to? That twit had better not be planning any pranks to get even with the Phantom.” He scowled at Chet, who was on the sofa petting Henry. “You’ll be on latrines for the next six months for the stunt you pulled this morning.” 

Chet listlessly raised a hand in acknowledgement but said nothing. He went back to scratching the big basset hound behind the ears. 

Roy told Cap he was fine and that John was asleep and escaped as soon as possible. It wouldn’t pay to have to undergo a third degree from Cap about how he was actually feeling at the moment. He couldn’t afford the time off.

Cap took a bite of his sub and looked around. “No one hungry in this place but me? Buncha twits.” He leveled his gaze on Chet again. “Not even a word of complaint about latrine duty? No blaming the Phantom?” He shook his head in bewilderment. “This day keeps getting stranger.” 

Chet wanted to complain, but he was too nauseous. It would just be too embarrassing to lose his breakfast in front of Cap so he kept his mouth firmly shut. Henry’s warm bulk felt really good. He knew he should call out sick, but he was trying to save up to take Cynthia out on a nice date, so he didn’t want to lose any pay. Besides, it was only a little over half the shift left. He could hack it.

Cap’s gaze lingered on Chet for a while and finally he raised an eyebrow. “That’s an interesting shade of green ya got goin’ there, Kelly.” He took another bite of his sub and then decided to look for Mike. Probably out polishing Big Red. He left his plate and half-eaten sandwich on the table and headed for the engine bay. “Mike? You in here?” 

No Mike. However, Cap heard some really bad sounds coming from the latrine. Someone was losing their lunch in a bad way.

“Oh great,” Cap groaned. “Just what I needed.” With a heavy sigh, he headed for the latrine to see who it was he needed to send home.

Marco was the one losing lunch as it turned out. He and John had spent some time together playing cards and John had given him his flu. In a hurry apparently.

“All right, Marco. I’m callin’ in a replacement for you. Go home, pal. Get some rest and get better quick.” Hank stood back what he hoped was a safe distance from his lineman. He figured he would probably have to send Chet home too--no wonder he looked green.

Just then, Johnny came lurching in from the dorms, a hand over his mouth, and pushed his way into the restroom. Cap sighed again. “You too, John. Finish up there and go home.” 

“Can’t, Cap,” came the weak reply. “No sick leave left.” 

“Go home anyway. I’ll fix it.” 

“Yessir.” John came out of the restroom, still green around the gills. “Sorry, Cap.” He washed his face and brushed his teeth.

Cap remembered his original mission to find Mike, then realized his own throat was beginning to itch. He was gonna kill the whole buncha twits! He went in search of Mike and found him outside working on the radio in his car. He had his normal healthy tan and looked as if he felt fine. “What’s up, Cap?”

“How you feeling?”

“Same as always. Fine. Why?”      

Cap’s eyes narrowed. “Huh… figures.” He coughed. He was starting to regret that submarine sandwich. At the moment, he kinda felt like he was in a rowboat on a stormy sea. He looked at Mike once more and then turned tail and ran for the latrine.

Mike watched him go and shrugged, then turned back to the radio he was fixing. He’d find out what was going on eventually.

While Cap was losing his lunch in the latrine, the klaxons sounded. Sam’s voice came over the loudspeaker. “Engine 51, trash fire at 1285 Grand Cross streets Grand and Molton.” 

Cap backed away from the porcelain throne and wiped a sleeve across his mouth. He was pretty sure he couldn’t manage this, but he had to try. He stumbled for the door and out into the engine bay. But wait… he’d already sent Marco home. And where was Chet? 

Chet wormed his way out from under Henry and really did try to get up…but he was so dizzy he fell over. He managed to get back up but collapsed back onto the couch. Henry climbed back into his lap protectively. “Cap,” Chet croaked, “I got a problem!”

“You an’ me both, buddy,” Cap mumbled. He watched as Mike came jogging into the engine bay. Wait… two Mikes? He blinked hard, but he was still seeing double. “Can’t do it, Mikey.” 

Mike nodded and called the station unavailable, letting Sam know what was going on. Sam advised Mike to call HQ to replace the entire shift, himself included, just in case. He was to send the others home and wait for the replacements. The joys of being second in command.

Mike called wives and girlfriends to pick up the others who couldn’t drive, and waited for the replacements. He played solitaire for the two hours it took to get the full shift replaced. Then, he headed home himself, for an unexpected half-shift off. That was fine with him. He’d take Beth and the boys to the beach. Sometimes he was grateful for a really good immune system!

The End

[nanamin-3]

Black Swan.

summary:  A meeting by chance between two very different people. The attraction is obvious, but will they let the obstacles they face get in the way of each other?

pairing: AU Sukuna x f!reader

chapter warnings: tension, language, angst

It was thankfully a slow day at the shop. Sukuna took a swig of his water and continued cleaning the wrenches on his desk. He hummed happily. He usually didn’t have time to sit down and listen to the radio, his favorite Elvis song playing in the background, Lilly, his basset hound looking up with sleepy eyes at him. “If you keep doing that boy’s job, then there's no reason to pay him,” Ren’s booming voice sounded from behind him. Sukuna chuckled, throwing the last wrench in the box and standing up, giving Lilly a scratch behind the ears on the way up. He looked at the old man, who was scowling at him scratching at his white beard. Throwing an arm around his small frame, he walked them over to the window, separating the office and the shop and both looked inside. “You're right, but this way he can help out inside. Yuuji’s a smart boy, im sure he can multitask in case you need him to do anything else.” Ren scoffed but smiled once Sukuna gave his shoulders a squeeze. Giving one last squeeze, Sukuna opened the door to the office, ushering Ren in first. “Hey kid, the old man Is starting to get grumpy. How about picking up some food for all of us,” Sukuna said, while pulling out his wallet. Yuuji quickly stood up, pulling out some bags from the cupboard and placing them in the desk. “Already done! Mr. Ren had been saying how much he had liked that shops ramen and dumplings, so I went and picked some up a bit ago.” Sukuna smiled, glad for the boy’s proactiveness. They started passing the food around, getting ready to eat when a loud screech made them turn around.

A sleek black acura NSX pulled up into the shop, and three people got off.  An older lady, with an expensive looking pant suit walked toward the entrance, speaking loudly on her phone. Two younger people followed her, a man about Sukuna’s age with an expensive suit and a girl, wearing much more understated clothes, but still looking like they all came from money. Sukuna huffed, handing his food to an impressed Yuuji, who placed it under the counter. Heading over to the shop, he took a seat behind his desk. He figured once they knew what the issue was Yuuji or Ren would come over and tell him what it was so he could start working on it. They knew how much he disliked dealing with clients, which made this job that much more perfect. Besides, Ren was also getting older, and while Yuuji had been a great help around the shop, it also allowed Sukuna to sic the old man on the kid, with the excuse of having him keep an eye on him just to make sure the young one could “handle it.” Besides, being in the business district in Tokyo brought them good clients. All the wealthy businessmen bringing their luxury sports cars brought them in a good profit. While they were a small shop, Ren had been in business for many years and was one of the best mechanics around, earning him a good reputation. While he had thought about closing as he’d gotten older, once Sukuna came around he taught him everything he knew, and both kept the shop running.

At that moment, Yuuji walked through the door, looking flustered and tossing Sukuna a key fob. ‘Whats going on little man,” Sukuna said standing up from behind his desk and heading to the car. “That lady is a handful, feel kinda bad for her kids.” Yuuji said in a whisper. Sukuna didn’t say much. In his experience, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. Yuuji was still a young kid so he always saw the best in everyone. Heading over to the car, he looked up at Yuuji expectantly. “Oh! Lady says that it’s making a weird sound and she cant accelerate.” Sukuna chuckled, it should be an easy fix. Opening the hood, he said, “Head inside and just keep an eye on Ren for me. Don’t worry, this shouldn’t take too long. Car’s pretty new so I’m sure its just a dirty air flow sensor.” Sukuna got to work, time passing by quickly. He could hear the sudden commotion of angry voices from inside, mixed with Lillys soft snores, here and there. Sukuna had migrated to the underside, planning to finish with an overall check of the car. It had been the sensor as he had guessed so he figured he had the time. He thought she might mention the shop to her other rich friends so the business would never hurt. After a few minutes, he heard another commotion from inside and suddenly the door opened and slammed shut. He figured it was Ren or Yuuji but after taking a glance could only see some fancy pink Filas walking around.

Confused Sukuna kept looking at the feet walking around. He figured that fashion was always trendy among young people, but knew the shoes were not Yuuji’s style. He continued working, finishing up and pulling his coveralls down to his waist as it had gotten hot under the car. About to roll out from under the car, Sukuna suddenly hear sniffles. He froze, it was the girl that had walked in with the other two. Closing his eyes, he cursed internally. Yuuji loved letting people into the shop. Ever since coming in, he had kept everything very well organized, so its not like it was a hazard for anyone but still. He thought about staying under the car until she left, when he heard the click of paws. Shit- Lilly was old and a cuddler, so he figured seeing a new person excited her. He groomed her regularly but since she refused to stay at home or inside with Yuuji, he always let her lounge around the shop. She was bound to step on some oil or dirt walking around here. He heard the girl cooing, and a faint “What a pretty girl,” with Lilly making some low moans, clearly pleased. Sukuna froze, he had never heard Lilly making those noises. He usually hated anyone she didn’t know and Yuuji had had to bribe her with a lot of treats for them to be any sort of friends. He stayed still listening to the two of them. The girl continued talking to Lilly with a few giggles here and there.

He rolled out from under the car, looking around for both of them. He was confused, he expected for her to be seated on a few chairs next to the door to the office, but she was nowhere to be found. He started thinking he was hearing things, until he saw her sitting down in a crate next to his desk. What he saw next made his heart drop. While Lilly and her where still playing around, her tan pants were full of dark smudges, most likely from Lilly. She continued scratching and hugging Lilly, when she noticed Sukuna staring at her. Her face went a bit pale, but she put Lilly down and quickly stood up, dusting herself off and failing to see she was dirtying her pants even more. “Im so so sorry, the boy inside told me I could come in here, he said there’d be no issue. And then I saw this pretty girl,” she said, looking down at Lilly with a smile, “and I couldn’t help myself. I know some people don’t like others to pet their dogs, but I love dogs.” Sukuna smiled, standing up and cleaning his hands on a rag. “Oh I’m sorry, you probably don’t care it looks like you’re done so ill go tell my mom its ready. Sorry I kinda talk too much when I’m nervous,” she finished in a hush. Lilly gave a small yelp, which seemed to bring her out of her silence. Striding forward, she held out her hand, “I’m Y/N.” Sukuna was speechless, what was even happening.  With a chuckle, he held out his hand and she gave it a firm shake. “Sukuna, and no worries. Shes not very nice to other people, so I am glad shes actually nice to others.”

They remained like that for a few seconds, when Y/N remembered that there was a huge window to the office she was sure her mother was looking for her out of. Letting go, she cleared her throat and asked, “So what did it end up being?” Quickly turning and grabbing the keys from the hood, Sukuna went into mechanic mode. While he explained to her as simply as possible what he had done, Y/N couldn’t help but look at him. He had an imposing aura and was very tall. But it was very contrasting that he looked like a big thug and had pink hair. She couldn’t help but smile. She thought that he must work out to ensure his hair was not a point of discussion on his toughness. She notices the top part of his coveralls were tied around his waist. Slim waist might she add and left his muscular arms on display. She gulped, feeling flustered. She tried to pay attention to what he was saying but was failing miserably. When she realized he had finished and was looking at her with a questioning look, she smiled at him and took the fob from his outstretched hand. While they had both stretched out the conversation as much as humanly possible, they began walking back towards the office.

While walking, they both didn’t notice a puddle of grease near the door. Before Sukuna could open the door, Y/N stepped on the puddle and felt herself falling face first. Quick to react, Sukuna was able to quickly grab her arms, and pull her towards him. Y/N figured she was a goner and had closed her eyes as soon as she felt herself slipping. She didn’t realize she was holding her breath, bracing for the impact and probably scrapes, when she felt a warmth suddenly envelop her. Opening her eyes, she saw Sukuna’s strong arms around her, not realizing she had also wrapper her arms in a death grip around him on instinct. “Are you o-okay,” he grunted out. Letting go, she gave a nervous laugh. “Im so sorry! Are you okay!” Sukuna couldn’t help but laugh, this girl had almost face planted, and she was more worried that she had squeezed him too hard. He stiffened when he felt her hand on his arm. She realized what she was doing, and her face turned red instantly. Pulling her hand away, she was about to apologize again when her mom burst through the door. “Y/N, what is taking so long. We are going to be l-“huffed her mother impatiently, when she saw how dirty her pants were.

Walking towards her car, she started texting on her phone furiously while staring daggers at Sukuna. “Y/N, what were you doing. You know we have that lunch with your father’s associates, and I can’t bring you along if you look like the help.” At that moment, everyone else walked through the door into the shop. Sukuna narrowed his eyes, hoping Yuuji and Ren had not heard that. “Whoa little sis, were you rolling around back here with this dude or what?” Y/N quickly glanced at Sukuna with a deep blush. “Aoi, don’t say such things,” she whispered mortified, once again looking over at Sukuna. He tried not to be irritated but couldn’t feel embarrassed at those words too. Y/N was a very pretty girl, with long brown hair and big doe eyes, so he couldn’t say he wasn’t affected by her. He was sure though, that being well off she had plenty of suitors to pick from. He wouldn’t get his hopes up on someone he knew was out of his reach.

Sensing the tension about to escalate, Yuuji quickly cleared his throat. “Well, everything is squared away so you’re free to go maam.” Sukuna was about to head back to his desk, a bit dejected, when he heard Aoi snicker. “Mom, obviously theyre not going to let me in at the restaurant at dad’s office. So Aoi and you can go by yourselves.” Everyone sensed that this would not end well, so with a weak excuse, Yuuji and Ren went back into the office, and Sukuna began to walk to his desk with a wave to everyone. “Y/N, don’t be ridiculous. Toji’s son is going to be there and he’s very excited to see you.” Sukuna couldn’t help but feel those words were directed at him. ‘Besides, what are you going to do? You know how long these things go and you don’t even know how to ride public transport.” Feeling she had defeated her daughter; she began to get into the car. Aoi, feeling her sister’s despair, gave her shoulders a squeeze and headed to get on the passenger seat. “Mom, she doesn’t have to go if she doesn’t want to. Besides, Dad said you were the only one he wanted there. Theres no need for us,” Aoi finished, winking at his sister.

Trying to hold back a smile, she started waiving to her mother. She huffed and looked at her watch. “How are you going to get home then? Call the chauffer to pick you up.” Y/N shook her head, with a smile. “No way, its Yaga’s day off! Besides,” Sukuna noticed Y/N turned to look at him with a big grin. “you’re right. I should begin to learn to use the buses and trains if I’m going to start working next summer.” Her mother looked at her suspiciously and Y/N continued. “Ill just stay here and make my way back home! Yuji and Sukuna can tell me what way to take to get home.” Her brother snickered at her audacity. Their mother was not one for public scenes, so they knew her hands were tied. “No, this is not happening. I don’t feel-“Y/Ns mother continued, refusing to loose. Sukuna felt something inside of him suddenly. He always followed the rules, worked hard and took care of people who depended on him. He was never selfish. Looking at Y/N, he saw how determined she looked, hands balled into fists at her sides. Wanting to be selfish for once, he walked back and stood next to her. “Ma am, don’t worry. Ill make sure she gets home safe.” Sukuna felt Y/N turn to him almost instantly, with a smile that wanted to make him melt. Aoi smiled and their mother put her sunglasses on roughly. “Fine, whatever. Were late anyway.”

Backing out into traffic, the car accelerated away rapidly. Realizing what he had just done, Sukuna turned to look at Lilly nervously. She stood on two legs against him and gave his hand a reassuring lick. “Well,” Y/N said with a sigh. “What do you wanna do now?” Sukuna turned to look at her and couldn’t help but blush with how she was smiling at him. “are you hungry?” Sukuna asked, opening the door to the office for her. They smiled at each other and walked inside, not realizing the road they were about to go on together.      

[husbandomail-archive]

those of you who don’t know him yet, here is my beloved Casey meeting his beloved puppy

He was suspiciously quiet behind his bedroom door.

Charlie hesitated for a moment— tonight’s argument had been especially bad, and she couldn’t even remember why their father had begun yelling. She brought up a hand and gently knocked. No answer.

“... Casey?” Her voice, although kept at a whisper, was nearly deafening in the exhausted silence that had smothered the air out of the household.

“Go away,” was the feeble response. All the fight had gone out of his voice. She tried again.

“Really wanna show you somethin’,” she muttered, pressing her forehead to the chilled wood. “Your birthday’s not over yet, even after— all that.”

More silence. All she could hear was her own breathing. Finally, when it was obvious she wasn’t going to move from her spot without a proper reply, a quiet rustling started inside. She pulled back as the door swung open.

There Casey stood, fresh pink streaks in his light brown hair, fresh tear tracks down his angry-red face. Bruises were slowly darkening around his neck, half-heartedly covered with frantic streaks of makeup.

As siblings, they’ve progressed past the need for words; Charlie grabbed her older brother by the hand, their fingers tangled together as comfortably as when they’d been children, and she tugged. Casey followed her silently down the hall to her own bedroom.

Casey’s hands had always been delicate against her own— as she pulled him into her room and shut the door, it vaguely crossed her mind that there’s a host of new scars.

Hopefully they’re only from his sewing machine.

The door clicked shut, and a sense of security settled over the room. Casey sighed and slowly lowered himself onto his favorite of Charlie’s beanbag chairs— the same pale blue as a cotton candy lollipop.

As her brother settled himself, Charlie couldn’t stop the grin that broke over her face. It had been another hard day, yes— but hopefully this made everything a bit brighter.

The briefest jingle of shaken metal echoed into the room, notable enough that Casey tilted his head to listen. His eyes scanned the room for the source of the odd noise. “What was that?”

Charlie was flooded with so much excitement, she had to fight to keep her voice steady as she wandered towards her closet. “Y’know,” she started, “I made some decent money with my first few paychecks—”

“Charlie,” Casey hissed, “don’t waste your money on m—”

“And when I saw this, I just knew you’d love it.” She finished as if he hadn’t said a word. Her eyes were bright as she twisted the brass knob and yanked her closet open.

“Casey, for your birthday, I want you to meet the newest King.”

A puppy.

Wrinkly face. Stubby legs. The floppiest ears known to man. When their eyes met, Casey was sure his heart would stop.

The tiny basset hound instantly burst forward, as if propelled by his tail, wagging so hard that his little body couldn’t walk in a straight line. He tripped over his long ears, too, and tumbled happily into Casey’s lap.

Charlie watched her brother carefully— his eyes were wet again, and his hands trembled as he brought them down to the puppy’s level. The dog wasted no time in taking Casey’s delicate fingers into his mouth, licking and gnawing like they were toys.

Casey laughed, all at once, so sudden and clear that the puppy barked right back at him. Charlie finally relaxed too, all the collected tension melting out of her chest. Of course her brother would love the dog. She hadn’t needed to worry.

Casey scooped the wriggling puppy up in both arms, the dog’s ears and tongue lolling out happily. Trying to stifle his laugh only left his shoulders shaking as the basset hound squirmed playfully. When he finally caught his voice again, Casey turned to his sister, all traces of the earlier argument gone.

“I love him so much.”

[darkurgediary]

Two Worlds, Two Hearts: Chapter Five

Summary: News of Jareth's disappearance affects Sarah in ways she didn't expect, and brings on a new wave of conflicting emotion.

Warning(s): complicated relationships, creepy nightmare (which is all italicized so it'll be easy for anyone to skip over), and Ludo tears! If I missed anything please let me know!

-------------------

The Labyrinth was crumbling.

Jareth was missing.

And now Ludo was crying with such an intensity the ground started to shake.

Hoggle didn’t know how much more of this he could take. The dwarf wove his way through withered hedges till he came upon Ludo, the great beast brought to his knees, thick tears streamed down his face, and a pitiful cry lurched from his throat. Sir Didymus stood before him with tiny paws rested on Ludo’s forearm. Uncharacteristically quiet in the face of his brother’s pain.

“Sarwah,” Ludo’s lower lip wobbled and he tried desperately to pull a string of snot back up his nose, when such an attempt failed, he instead wiped his face on his left forearm.

Hoggle grumbled to himself but still decided to ask, “whats tha matter with'em?”

Sir Didymus perked his ears, looking to Hoggle with a defeated express, “Sir Ludo claims to have seen young maiden over that way.”

The dwarf glanced in the indicated direction, just as he'd thought, no one was there. Hoggle even approached the area and walked around it. Like he was trying to prove to Ludo that his eyes had played a cruel trick on him. Hoggle understood it though, to a degree. Ludo claiming to see Sarah became a common occurrence over the years. Each time, it was harder and harder to explain to Ludo it wasn't real.

“If she ain't been back already then she ain't never comin' b-”

A whisper carried in the breeze and cut him off, “Ludo...” 

Curved horns raised from the ground as brown eyes widened, and basset-hound shaped ears desperately searched for the sound.

Sir Didymus behaved in a similar manner, his bushy tail swishing side to side in a blonde blur, “My lady!” 

Hoggle whirled around, eyes wide as dinner plates. He stumbled back and fell into the dirt. Gazing up at the translucent image of a woman standing over him. Tall, with long black hair, and pale-green eyes. Hoggle rubbed his eyes but still, the haunting presence lingered like a ghost in a graveyard.

If he’d been by himself he would have discredited it easier. With Ludo and Sir Didymus in his company, not even he could deny the sight of the specter before him.

“S...S'it really you?” desperation clung to his words, along with a loneliness he'd kept buried deep.

The image of Sarah looked around, confused at first, and then she saw him. 

Hoggle tried to swallow the knot in his throat as he extended a shaky hand towards her. The thin image of her flickered, and upon contact, Sarah disappeared again.

-----

“Sarah?”

She didn’t look up from the floor, focused on the arguably-ugly patterned carpet like it offended her. Sarah was at her wits end. First she had a Spriggan to deal with and now a Fiery of all things! She didn't even want to think about Jareth, Toby's claim of him missing affected her in ways she didn't understand.

Her name was called again, “Sarah.”

The tick of a clock brought her senses back one by one, slowly, she raised her head. Tired eyes shifted to the old fashioned clock nestled on the corner of the wooden desk. Sarah set her sights on the coffee table next where a teacup sat in front of her. It's contents long abandoned, the liquid just as cold as the blood in her veins. 

“You drifted off,” a melodic scratch of pencil against paper mixed with the question, “where did you go just then?”

Sarah studied him for a moment, Dr. Zakar looked more like an Oxford Professor than a therapist. His brown suit was freshly pressed and his shoes polished. Red hair slicked back save for the few strands hanging just about his brow. Black, thick framed glasses obscured his eyes so she couldn't look directly into them.

A lie would do little for her, yet Sarah couldn't find it in herself to give him the truth. Not the whole truth anyway. He would call the whole incident a wild hallucination.

“I don’t know,” She admitted. Leaning forward to drop her head in her hands with a sigh, “I’m sorry. I didn’t get much sleep last night.”

He set aside the notepad, giving her his full attention, “Another nightmare?”

“No,” Sarah managed to compose herself. Without realizing it, she started to gnaw on her thumb nail.

“Remember that my job is not to judge you, Sarah. I am here to help encourage you through your struggles. You already have everything you need to conquer them,” Zakar explained calmly, recognizing the anxious habit. “That being said, I cannot give you any guidance if I don’t know the root of the problem.”

He had a point, she couldn’t deny that. As the events of the previous night played in her head like a broken record Sarah wondered where to even begin. It all spiraled out of control in a way she could barely process.

“Last night I found out someone I knew was…” the words trailed off into tense silence. Did she mention the Spriggan and the Fiery or leave it at that? “Missing. He went missing and honestly? I don’t know how I feel.”

“It sounds as though this person left quite an impact on you, I take it you were close?” His inquiry was laced both with concern and caution, showing his condolences but not wanting to further upset her.

“It was complicated, and it was a long time ago. We were different people then. I knew him without really knowing him,” Sarah clenched her hands tight in her lap, “some part of me feels like I should be worried, like I should run through every worst case scenario. What if something bad happened? What if he’s hurt? But...”

Zakar tilted his head, “another part says otherwise?” 

“It’s been fifteen years since we last saw each other. I wouldn’t even know what to say if I saw him again,” Sarah rubbed her temples and groaned, dark brows pulling together.

The clock on his desk chimed twice.

A frown pulled his features, “It seems we’ve reached the end of our session. Though I want you to know, Sarah. You will overcome this grief. Nothing has to be resolved tomorrow, there is a lot to process, and even more to work through. Go home and paint your frustrations, or write them down. Anything to get them out.”

As Sarah left the office she noticed the air felt significantly lighter than it had before she went in, Dr. Zakar’s parting advice stuck with her. She hated how much she thought of Jareth. Even before the news of him missing, the Goblin King often dwelled in a dark corner of her mind. If Jareth wasn’t in the Underground then where else could he possibly be? Sarah started her car and focused on the road ahead.

Upon return to her apartment, the last bits of anxiety washed away as the sound of whimpers and nails against hardwoods echoed behind the door. Sarah didn’t realize how much she missed having a dog till Gwendolyn came into her life. “Hey pretty girl,” Sarah cooed once the door opened Kneeling down to greet her three legged companion. Gwendolyn was a five year old pitbull with a coat the color of caramel and big brown eyes. Sarah’s heart went out to the pup, who came from a hard life on the streets. She felt like she couldn’t leave the shelter without her.

Sarah scratched behind her ears and paused as she set her keys down on the kitchen counter. She stepped towards the half finished painting, the one she’d done the instant she woke from her dream. At first she’d been in the forest with Hoggle, Ludo, and Sir Didymus in her company. Then the forest fell into a sea of white and silver. Sarah shuddered as the details haunted her:

She descended into a broken ballroom. Once pristine chairs and tables were thrown to various parts of the room, scuffed, bent, and broken. Shattered glass and glitter covered the floor, save for a bare circle where Sarah stood in the center of the room. Dawning the white princess dress she’d worn fifteen years ago. Frantic eyes took everything in as her head whipped around. Dancers laid sprawled over one another like puppets with their strings cut. 

Except for him.

His name left her tongue barely above a whisper, “Jareth.”

Rather than address her, the Goblin King stood frozen. The dark mask with twisted horns remained against his face, hiding his eyes from her. In an unusual motion he reached a hand out for her. Though he didn’t move in the same fluid, captivating way he had before. Instead Jareth moved like an old toy being wound up for the first time in forever. A crystal appeared in his hand, and his last words echoed around her.

“I ask for so little.”

He stepped towards her.

“Just fear me,”

Another step.

“Love me,”

Sarah retreated with each advancement, eyes wide, and skin white as a sheet. Whatever defiant remark she had ready to shout at him died on her tongue. Jareth loomed over her now, her back flat against the wall. She had nowhere to run.

Forced to look into vacant eyes as he sounded so defeated.

“Do as I say and I-”

Gwendolyn whimpered beside her, gently butting her head against Sarah’s leg.

Black curtains cascaded down her back as she turned to look at her companion, Sarah gave her a sad smile and smoothed a hand down her neck, “It’s okay. I’m okay.”

Sarah looked back at the expression she’d been so desperate to capture. Why should she be worried about Jareth? Why did her heart absolutely ache at the thought of him cold, alone, and hurt? Her hand started to reach for his half painted cheek but something stopped her. Sarah bit her lip in wonder as the idea of calling him raised to the surface.

With a small shake of the head, Sarah covered it, and tried to bury any other thoughts of him away for the time being. She had other things to focus on. The Spriggan, the Fiery, and Toby’s growing obsession with the Labyrinth. She took one final glance at the painting, “Where are you Jareth?”

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Taglist:

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[autumnleaves1991-blog]

Day 14: The Test Results - Santiago ‘Pope’ Garcia

Day 14: The Test Results - Santiago ‘Pope’ Garcia 

Todays story was requested by @itspdameronthings​. Thank you so much for the request and I really hope you like it. This is the longest of all the stories I have written for the November Writing Challenge.

November Writing Challenge Masterlist 

Day 13: Water Flowed- Llewyn Davis 

Day 1 

“Do you have to go?” Your voice is quiet as you watch him pack his bags from your seat on the bed. 

“Querida, you know I don’t want to but they are asking me back as a favor AND I’m being compensated. I worked in Columbia for three years, it's where my mother was born. I feel like I need to do this,” he kneels in front of you, taking your hands in his own. “It’s only four months and I promise I will call and text you every single day. It’s killing me to leave you but...I feel I have to do this.” 

Santiago ‘Pope’ Garcia was a former member of Delta Force in the US Military before leaving to go work for the DEA in Columbia. Three years ago, he left Columbia to return home but not without one final mission. He got together a few of his old buddies from the force and robbed a drug lord before killing him and fleeing the country. But something went wrong. Well… a lot of shit went wrong, resulting in the death of his old captain, Tom, and forcing them to leave millions of dollars off the side of a cliff buried in the snow. 

Santiago had accepted a temporary assignment with the DEA to return back to Columbia and train some new recruits. You were not one bit okay with this plan but the one thing you loved and also kind of hated about your husband was how headstrong he could be. Unfortunately, you are just as stubborn as him. The last few weeks leading up to his departure had been fraught with arguments. You didn’t want him to go. Even though it had been years since that last mission, you didn’t know what the situation down there was. Were they still hunting for the men who had robbed and gunned down Lorea? Was he walking into a trap? No money was worth losing the man you loved, and he didn’t seem to understand that. 

“You don’t have to do anything.” The words are bitter on your tongue and Santiago winces, before moving to stand. “We don’t need that money, and you have no idea what you walking into baby…” 

“Y/N, we have talked about this enough. I am going!” He slams the top of his suitcase closed before pulling the zipper harshly and walking towards the door. He turns sharply at the door pointing at you, “Why do you keep arguing with me about this? I have told you a million reasons why I need to do this! Instead of supporting me you're just fighting with me!” 

“I do support yo-” 

“Well, you sure have a funny way of showing it.” he swings his backpack on his back, puts on his hat and walks out the door. You’re on your feet in a hurry. “Goddamnit, Santiago! Will you just fucking listen to me for two minutes?”  You grab his shoulder and turn him to face you. He’s fuming and you can tell the volcano is seconds away from blowing. “I DO support you! I understand WHY you feel the need to do this but I LOVE YOU and I don’t want to LOSE YOU!” 

You're out of breath from shouting, and you see the anger slowly fade from his face as he comes to stand closer to you, “Querida...baby you're not going to lose me. I love you….so … damn … much. I never really felt alive until I met you, and no one,” he puts a finger under your chin and raises your eyes to his own, “no one is going to take me away from you.” 

“You can’t promise that…” Your words come out broken and a choked sob escapes you. “You don’t know what’s going to happen. Santi I can’t lose you. I won’t survive without you…” 

“Shhh.” He pulls you close and you collapse in a sobbing heap into his chest, your tears soaking the front of his t-shirt, his hands are strong as he holds you close. “I know nothing is one hundred percent but I love you and I am going to come home back to you. Nothing could ever keep me away.” He pulls you away from his chest, wiping your eyes before kissing you gently.

“I love you too Santi, so much.” You sigh into the kiss and hold him tight before he pulls away, walking towards the door, grabbing his duffle bag from the floor and walking out, taking your heart with him. 

Day 31 

Santiago kept good on his promise and called and texted every single day, each time letting you know he was safe and how much he loved you. He was working hard down there, and he loved the adventure, even if he missed you like crazy. You missed him too and the combination of being without your husband, taking care of the whole house, your shared basset hound, and work was draining. It was only a matter of time before you started feeling under the weather. You had been feeling fatigued, sore throat, cough, and after two days of vomiting throughout the day you had to admit it, you were sick. 

On your nightly call with Santi the worry in his voice warmed your heart. “Baby, you need to go to the doctor and get checked. Remember when you got bronchitis last year? It was pretty bad.” 

You hack into the receiver “Yeah, maybe you're right. I just feel like shit Nauseous all day long. Jonathon actually sent me home today. Said he was worried about me ‘infecting’ the office.” 

Santi mutters under his breath but you hear him and snort. “Yeah I agree he is a dick, but I appreciate being sent home. I’ll go to the urgent care tomorrow.” 

“Do you promise?” 

“Yes, I promise. I want to feel better...I just hate going to the doctor.” You recall the many times Santi had to drag you kicking and screaming (sometimes literally) to the doctor. 

“Why don’t you ask one of the guys to go with you?” 

“Maybe...Frankie mentioned he was off tomorrow when I called him yesterday....” 

“See. It was meant to be. Why don’t you text him after you hang up with me and he will make sure you go? Then I can rest easy tonight knowing you’re ok. I wish it were me though. I would take such good care of you baby.” 

“Oh yeah?” What would you do if you were here?” You snuggle down into the comforter with your box of tissues, hot tea, the humidifier and his deep soothing voice lulling you to sleep. 

It doesn’t take long before your soft snores fill the phone and Santi smiles to himself. Listening to the sounds of his love finally feeling at rest. When you wake up three hours later to throw up the light from your phone signifies a message. 

I called Frankie, he’s going to come by at 10 o’clock to take you for an appointment. I booked it online through the app. Get some rest and drink lots of fluids. I love you. - Hubby 

You smile before brushing your teeth and crawling back into the warmth of your bed and falling back to sleep, dreaming of your husband. 

Day 32 

The next morning Frankie rings the doorbell at exactly 9:45.Like all the other Delta Force guys (except Benny), they are meticulously early. You greet him with a cup of coffee with his own special airplane shaped mug, complete with his name engraved on the side. You knew that when you married Santiago, Frankie came as part of the package. 

“Hi Garcia, how ya feeling?” He wraps one arm around your shoulder and you lean into the embrace, placing your head on his arm. 

“To be completely honest Cat? I feel like shit.” 

Frankie lets out a small laugh before rubbing gentle circles on your back. “Well then let’s get you to the doctor. You got your insurance card?” 

“Yeah it’s in my bag.” You grab your brown knit bag, swinging it over your shoulder. 

“Then let’s get going.” He guides you out to his truck, helping you into the seat before running around the front to the driver's seat. 

About twenty minutes later you're pulling into the parking lot of your doctor. Frankie walks you inside helping you get signed in. It's another thirty minutes before you're put back into a room, sitting on crinkled tissue paper, Frankie reading back issues of People. The door opens and you sit up a little straighter. 

“Mrs. Garcia?” You nod. “I’m Dr. Jacobs. What can I help you with today?” 

You proceed to tell her what’s been going on and she goes through the motions, asking you all about your symptoms, checking your ears, nose, throat, and chest. When she's done she types everything into her tablet, “one more question, when was your last menstrual cycle?” 

You open your mouth to answer before closing it slowly. “When was my last...Oh. Uhm,” you laugh nervously at a loss for words, “about a month ago it should be starting any day now…” 

“Is there any chance you could be pregnant?” she asks, looking between you and Frankie. 

“Oh, he’s not my husband!” 

“I’m her husband's best friend. He’s out of the country.” 

“Well it sounds like you may have the flu but I would like to run some labs as well if that’s alright with you, and maybe a pregnancy test just to be sure?” 

You laugh. “Sure doc whatever you need, but I am not pregnant.” 

Day 35 

You swing your car haphazardly into the driveway narrowly missing a planter box and running over Mia’s pink bike. The front door slams open. Frankie is running down the driveway, yanking the car door open and pulling you into his arms. Your sobs are staining your cheeks and you're a blubbering mess. 

“Garcia! What the hell! Are you ok!?” Frankie checks you over. You shake your head frantically. 

“NO! No I am not ok!” you shout! “The test results came back!” 

“Oh god, is it bad!? Cancer? Diabetes? Fuck! Did Pope give you some kind of STD because I swear I will kick his ass for you!” 

“NO! God...no...I'm...Pregnant!” You break down in sobs and hold onto Frankie who starts to laugh. “Stop laughing! This is serious! Frankie!!” 

He chuckles squeezing you tighter, “Garcia this is wonderful! You're gonna be a mom and Santiago is going to be a daddy! Mia will have someone to play with. Fuck, I’m so happy for you guys.” You pull away to see a huge smile on his face. 

Some of his excitement rubs off on you and you rub your nose on the sleeve of your shirt before you smile, “I’m gonna be a mommy…oh shit Frankie what do I tell Santi?

“We will worry about that later. But right now let’s get you home and back to bed. You still have that cough and you need your rest.” 

Day 36 

“Hey baby. How is my favorite man?” 

“Oh Querida I miss you so much. I think I forgot how much I love being out in the field. The rush, the thrill. It’s addicting.” 

Your heart drops and for a minute you say nothing. How the hell could you tell him about the baby? He would want to come straight home and he’s loving the work.

“Everything is great here. Yeah, I got the test results yesterday from the lab and everything is normal. I just have the flu and since I’ve been off the last few days I’ve rested and drank lots of fluids and I am feeling much better.” 

“Oh good, I was so worried about you.” He sighs. “I got a new app on my phone that counts down to the second till I get to be back with you.. I love you so much Querida.” 

You bite your lip to keep from crying before letting out a shaky breath, “I love you too baby, and I can’t wait to see you soon.” 

The conversation shifts and when you hang up with your husband you shoot a quick text off to Frankie. 

Don’t mention ANYTHING about the pregnancy to Santiago. I’ll tell him when he gets home. 

What? Why? 

He loves being there and if we're going to have a baby then he's not going to be able to do this again. If I tell him you know he will just come home early. 

Ok...I still think you should tell him. You're going to need support though...he’s still going to be gone for three more months. 

Your right...Frankie...will you be my person? 

... of course. Get some sleep Garcia. 

Day 100 

Four months doesn’t seem like a long time. But when you're pregnant and missing your husband it seems like a lifetime. It had been one hundred days since Santi had left for South America and only twenty-two more days till he came home. When you did the math in your head you had become pregnant two weeks before Santi had left. Meaning you were well on your way to being a very noticeable pregnant woman. 

You had been shopping a couple times with Benny to Motherhood Maternity store to get some bigger clothes because yours refused to fit. Also a very interesting trip to Babies-R-Us where after much convincing he did not purchase the entire store for his future niece/nephew. Will had been attending your doctor and lab appointments with you. And sweet Frankie had been helping you around the house, getting groceries when you were too tired, keeping up the yard, and taking you and your dogs for walks to keep you moving. Your husband’s brothers had become your own, and you loved them for it. Only 22 more days. 

Day 120 

You're sitting at the kitchen table doing a puzzle with Will when Frankie comes in carrying takeout and a squirming Mia. He puts her down and she rushes toward you. 

“TIA GARCIA!” she screams, launching herself into your arms. 

“MIA!” you shout, squeezing her tightly before tickling her sides. She giggles before shimmying out of your lap and running to the kitchen. Coming back a moment later carefully balancing (at least as careful as a three year old can) a plate filled with watermelon to you. 

“Papa says this is for the baby,” she tells you in what could be called an attempted whisper but more like a shout. 

“Why are you whispering Mia?” 

“Papa says that I have guts to be quiet because the baby is sleeping.” She leans forward and hugs your slightly protruding belly before climbing into the kitchen chair across from you. 

You give Frankie an amused look and he smiles with a shrug before plating out the food. Pizza for them and watermelon for you. It’s all you seem to want anymore. “Oh come to mama.” You spear a piece before placing it in your mouth, moaning as the cold sweet juice goes down your throat. 

“So I’m taking you to the airport on Friday to pick up Santiago. Any ideas on how you're going to tell him?” Frankie asks, taking a large bite of pizza. 

“Well I think he’s going to know.” You gesture to your stomach, spearing another piece of melon. 

“I’ve been looking up ideas on how to tell people you're pregnant, and you could give him a jar of pasta sauce,” Will says and you all look at him like he’s nuts, “No, hear me out it’s Prego pasta sauce...get it, Prego?” 

You groan before taking another bite, “I think he’s going to notice I’m pregnant before I can even give him a jar of pasta sauce Will.” 

“Not if he doesn’t see your stomach first…” Frankie says, “what if you made a sign?” 

“A sign?” 

“Yeah like when we used to come home from a tour and the families would have signs. You could make a sign!” 

You think about it for a minute before you fall in love with the idea. You go to the office and come back with a couple poster boards you kept for work presentations. You place one in front of Mia who squeals and grabs one of the markers you provide. You get to work outlining the words and filling them in with his favorite colors blue and red. When completed, you lift it up and show it to the others.

“That’s perfect!” Frankie beams. 

“Bet you 50 bucks he cries,” Will says. 

“Deal,” they slap hands and you glare, before smiling at the two. Only two more days. 

Day 122 - Santiago Comes Home 

You feel sick, what if he doesn’t want to have a baby? Will he be mad I kept this from him? Shit, maybe this was a terrible idea. What the hell was I thinking? 

“Garcia, you need to calm down, you're making me stressed.” 

“What if he doesn’t want this? What if he is disappointed? What if-” Frankie stands up and puts his hands on your shoulders. 

“Garcia listened to me. Santiago loves you more than anything in this entire world and he is going to love this baby just as much maybe even more. He may be surprised yeah but trust me. Once he wraps his brain around it, he’s going to be ecstatic.” He pulls you in for a hug and you take a deep breath, calming your nerves. 

The constant flow of travelers does nothing to lessen your anxiety. You take a deep breath and almost choke on the smell of espresso from the nearby Starbucks. Frankie gives you one last squeeze before handing you the sign and stepping back as people flood out of the gate. 

You rise to your tiptoes in search for a familiar head of salt and pepper curls. When in a break of the crowd you see him, running in a full sprint towards you. His face split into a megawatt smile. As he gets close enough to touch, you hold up the sign. He slows down slightly as he reads and you watch the smile fade only slightly before it’s replaced by shock. 

Welcome home daddy 

He reaches forward, holding tight to the poster board and slowly lowering it, eyes transfixed at your swollen belly. Silence. His hands shake as they put the sign on the floor, his eyes never leaving you. Your heart races and you feel the urge to vomit return again before he drops to his knees. 

You wince, “Baby, your knees…” reaching down to pull him up, but he makes no move to stand, his hands coming to your stomach. Placing his lips gently over your shirt. His forehead rests against you and tears drench your shirt. The baby chooses that moment to make their presence known kicking softly against his cheek. You run your hands through his curls and he looks up at you with a watery smile and a small laugh. 

“Querida, you’re pregnant. We’re...we’re having a baby…” he sniffles and you can’t help the tears in your own eyes. “Why...why didn’t you tell me? I would have come home…”

“That’s exactly why I didn’t. You’ve been so happy these past few months and I knew you needed to do this. Yes, I was scared as hell about losing you but...I understood.” 

“I don’t deserve you,” he whispers before shakily getting to his feet and clutching you tight, his hands frame your face and he pulls you close getting lost in the kiss, “I love you...so fucking much,” he whispers putting his forehead against your own. “I love you too. I’m so glad your home… I mean the guys have been great but I’m excited to go shopping for baby stuff with you, attend my doctor appointments together, and have you bring me platefuls of watermelon.” 

He laughs pulling back, “Watermelon? Is that what you’ve been craving?” 

“Oh god yes, even talking about it makes my mouth water.” 

“If that is what you want Querida, then you can have as much as you desire,” he kisses you again. 

A cough sounds from behind and you turn to see Frankie smiling at you.  Santi reaches out to give him a slap on the back, the two conversing in Spanish. You hold your hand out and Santi latches on, never letting go as you make your way through the terminal and out to the truck. 

The world passes by in a kaleidoscope of color as Frankie drives you both home. Arriving, you thank him before leading Santi by the hand and into the house. When the door is latched behind you, he presses you into the door gently. Every touch, every caress, left you breathless. His lips warm and wet against your own. When you take a breath his tongue snakes inside and he drags you from the door, striping each other, leaving a trail of clothes to the bedroom. 

After you’ve been thoroughly fucked and your wrapped up in Santiago’s strong arms, legs intertwined together, and he’s rubbing your belly do you finally relax. Sighing into his chest, and kissing it lightly. “Your really happy about the baby?” you whisper, breaking the comfortable silence that had settled between you. 

His grip around you tightens, “I promise you, I am very happy about the baby. You made me a daddy Querida. I love you...so much.” 

You sigh, “I love you too.” 

3 months later 

Eight months of pregnancy has flown by. After Santi got home from Columbia he took over doing everything. Attending your appointments together, buying and building things for the nursery, and bringing you platefuls of watermelon at all times of the day and night. Santiago takes the roll of daddy very seriously. All of those year in the military have come into play the last few months as he has transformed your house into a fortress. God help anyone that tries to hurt you or your unborn daughter. 

It started small with a few extra cameras on the perimeter, then installing a new indoor security system. A new fence was put up around the pool two months ago, and most recently the baby monitors set up throughout the house. He was beginning to drive you a little insane and you honestly just wanted him to lay off a bit. The perfect opportunity arose one fateful morning during breakfast. 

“So I’ve been thinking Querida, how do you feel about putting carpet on the floor of the nursery?” 

Part 2: Carpet (If you haven’t read it, check it out!)

Day 15: Just Walk Away- Ezra (Prospect) 

[thisartofeveryday]

For those of you who thought I should make my life story into a book…here is the outline. For the sake of clarity as you are reading, let me explain who the characters are. The kids from my Dads first marriage: Jim1, Patty, Seana. The kids from my Mom’s (Mary Ellen) first marriage: Mary Jane and Jim2. My brother that I am a full sibling to is Charles (chuck).

I think you might know that 95% of our lives are lived from the unconscious mind. From birth to age 7 a childs mind is in Theta wave (hypnosis) and everything that they learn in those years (mainly through observation and repetition) is the program that their minds run for their entire lives. Knowing this – I look back on the first 7 years of my life.

I think we moved 7 times in those 7 years. I am certain it was because of Dads extreme anger management problems and the fact that he is a sociopath, a pedophile and a rapist. Zero stability or chance to make lasting friendships. My dad was sexually abusing me and unpredictably violent. I was terrified of him. I was being terrorized/bullied by my brother, Chuck, who was every bit the sociopath that my dad is. My mom was overwhelmed by the number of children she was responsible for - none of which she actually wanted- and add to that, her husband was sexualizing all of the kids, so really being the last of her kids I was the last of her problems. Being the youngest (and as traumatized as I was), I was quiet and easy to forget about or push to the side. The older kids were the ones in the spotlight and where all the attention went. They were enrolled in activities and they were more the same age, so they were a unit. I was just an observer of them. I felt so left out and forgotten. Always.

I was a mistake and a burden (dads exact words to me on my 11th birthday). Mom made sure I knew that she thought I was mentally retarded- she would joke about it all the time. (I guess she never made peace with her sister being autistic) She also loved humiliating me even when I made it clear she was hurting me. Remember her sausage fingers joke or how many years I got called Boomer? I absolutely hated both of those things, made it clear, and yet she refused to give up the name calling and humiliation. There was very little respect for my personal boundaries. Dad would assault me in the middle of the night and I would wet the bed out of fear- then he would make me sleep in it to teach me a lesson. Mom would do nothing to help me, though she was awake in the middle of the night when I would work up the courage to go into their room to ask for help. She let him treat me like that. Goddamn…I remember the night terrors and being scared to be in my room at night because the scary man was sitting in the rocking chair, in the dark, next to my bed.

I have a memory of being in the garage in our house in South Windsor. I was playing with our basset hound, General…I was crawling around on the floor and the dog mounted me and was dry humping me. Dad got this sick laugh and let it happen. Mom walked in and got mad at him, but did nothing to help me. My personal boundaries were nonexistent. Nobody was protecting me from him. I remember him eating the food off my plate at dinner…or kissing me on the ear or touching me when I would tell him I hated it and to stop. I remember the baths dad would have me take with him and how he taught me to touch and work his dick. I remember the photos he would take of me after the bath. I remember being 7 years old and trying to lay on his bed and be sexy enough for him. I remember kissing mom passionately the way that dad taught me to and mom getting upset and asking me where I learned that. I remember having a baby doll that I drew all over, angrily, with lipstick. I remember being scared because my ass was bleeding and I told mom while her brother and sisters were visiting and she shushed me and scurried me away. I remember him also beating the shit out of me…sometimes for no reason. I remember being deeply attracted to and absolutely terrified of him. I was 7.  These are the only memories I have of my dad. I don’t remember him being there for me, or interested in me as a person, or engaged in anyway. I just remember him being what I now know is a predator.

7 to 13: I remember some stability in Connecticut because we stayed there for three years… but I also remember having moments of being deeply depressed and hiding in the basement of the house writing notes that I hoped someone would find, asking for help to get me out of there. When I look back, those were my first experiences with disassociation from stress and waves of major depression. While I was being assaulted during those years, those years were all about Mary Jane, Seana, and Jim2. These three had each other. These three were a team. I was just an observer to your lives. I had no voice, no opinion, no importance, never truly included and absolutely my feelings went unheard and did not matter. We can say it was the age difference, sure, that’s part of it…but that’s also just an excuse. Things could have been done to validate my importance too.  I had Charles bullying me….I had my Dad assaulting me. I was so alone.

My internal voice wants to shout: Why did nobody see this? Why did nobody help me? Where were my siblings? I guess everyone was doing the best they could…

Literally anyone looking in knowing the truth could have easily assessed that this was a horribly destructive environment for any child to grow up in. I know dad was doing this to all the kids. I wasn’t the only one. It is absolutely stunning to me that through the years of my life I have consistently been blamed by my Mary Ellen (narcissist/borderline personality disorder) and the people who chose to listen to her twisted opinions that there was something wrong WITH ME.  I mean, logically the mental health issues I have faced my entire life are perfectly normal and healthy reactions to a situation that was deeply flawed. But somehow the blame has always fallen on me.

The very first thing I think when I think of my mom is her asking me “Whats wrong with you Melissa”. Ive lost count of how many times she has asked me that very question.

I now know that its just deflection. Queen Narcissist cant take responsibility for her actions so she puts it on the person who she always denied a voice. That’s nice. Very loving and motherly. Doesn’t fix the 40 some odd years of my life that I believed her and wanted to die.

Right around age 9 or 10, we move again. I remember it being a big scandal – I think the truth came about that my dad is a sociopath, a pedophile and a rapist. (By the way, that’s in my DNA. I get to live my life connected to that. I look just like my dad. I think like a Painter. It’s fucking unsettling.)  I remember all the pressure to say nothing about the move and to constantly behave as though we were the perfect family and nothing was wrong. So incredibly demented.

I remember a HUGE fight about Seana and Jim2 staying behind in Connecticut. (by the way: I also remember Jim1 leaving for the Marines and wondering where my brother went and why he never talked to me. At one point he came back to visit and gave me a beautiful geisha doll in a glass box that mom destroyed in a fit of anger at me…she intentionally violently knocked it off the top of my dresser in one of her vindictive off the handle rages…Im sure at 8 years old I totally did something to deserve it, right.)

And, of course I remember the night Seana was killed. (why did the man that killed her not serve jail time? Why are bad people never held accountable?) Dad wasn’t there. Again, Dad wasn’t there. As I recall he was having an affair with some woman in Arizona? Mom was already distraught to be back in Michigan. That night, I remember being awake before the call came in…watching the clock radio in my bed… it had a short in the wire that would spark. I was listening to the Beatles: My guitar gently weeps…. To this day, I hate the Beatles.The phone rang. Mom screamed to you “Mary Jane, OMG, Seana is Dead”. I didn’t understand what happened. I just knew we were packing up like we did so many times before to take yet another long drive across country. It felt to me like another move. I didn’t understand death or that my sister was gone forever. I didn’t get it.  

(an aside: I struggled in school. When I was in Beginning Algebra One for some reason that class would make me check out and I would always soul travel to the night Seana was killed and it felt like it was happening to me. I took that class 4 times including summer school before I passed.)

(later, when I was maybe 13, my dog got hit by a car in the street and now I knew what death was so I freaked out like Mom did when Seana died and I remember Mom shaming me: You cried more over than damn dog than you did at your sisters funeral. Very nice. Very motherly. Very supportive and kind of her.)

At Seanas funeral, I remember not knowing what was expected of me. I was just so focused on getting it right and who I was supposed to kiss (because that sexualized stuff was already so ingrained).

There were so many goddamn rules for behavior, (rich white republican ex-military country club going family that we were) and I remember getting it wrong and being scowled at all the time. Mom was always angry and stressed out. We had to BE someone and over and over again: “Don’t forget the family name” and how important our clan was (hilarious that she kept the Sterling last name because her current husband is too ethnic and this sounds classier to her than her own actual last name)….

Meanwhile, My developing sense of self was being assaulted and neglected/ignored out of me and I felt wrong all the time for every single action I took.

I think we moved back to North Carolina briefly and then to Florida? Whatever the case….

Then we move again. Again. Again. Now we are in Florida. Im 10. My parents are getting divorced. Mom is deeply goddamn depressed. My family is falling apart. I don’t know where my brothers and sister are. Everything is exploding. Im powerless and hostage to all this. I cannot underline the importance of that sense of being hostage to a situation that I was powerless to escape and having my feelings and my personhood completely ignored and erased. It consumed me. I wanted to die. I am, as always, the least of moms concerns.

In Florida I was so incredibly dissociative. I was experiencing C-PTSD. I remember feeling numb all over. Having no ability to react to this little girl that fell off her bike in front of me….I just stared at her…the adults nearby yelled at me for doing nothing. I went further into my head. I was so checked out. People just thought I was quiet or shy or retarded. I was deeply traumatized and needed help.

I remember Mary Jane and I sitting on the bed watching this music video by The Cars. In the video there is a woman who is laughing and crying. I remember asking MJ what she was doing because I do that too and I think she told me she was having a mental break down.  

I remember getting a Walkman and listening to the Police nonstop. That was my only retreat from how much I hurt. WHY DID NOBODY SEE THIS AND HELP ME?

I remember during that time that I was given another baby doll. I remember MJ and mom watching me play with it to see what I would do. I felt scared of them both and the creepy way they were lurking to watch me. I felt ganged up on. I couldn’t trust anyone. I was so alone. I wanted to die.

In Florida, I remember my birthday and dad cocking his fist back like he was going to punch me in the face…he did that sick laugh and told me he wished I was never born and that I was a mistake. (later when I told this to Patty she explained he punched her in the face on her 11th birthday. Im related to all that. That’s in my dna.)

My body was changing. I was getting my period. I felt crazy. I was in that HUGE school in Jacksonville and I had no friends and I was so scared. Everything was terrifying….and Dad was getting more unhinged thus Mom has Jim and Lynn move in to protect her and had you come back… and then I remember walking in to the living room in the middle of a sunny afternoon and mom on the pull out sofa, trying to make dad jealous, was fucking the guy who was there to buy the house  that we had just moved in to because we were MOVING AGAIN….

Not to mention, I remember MJ and I quickly taking Dads gun to the beach to bury it so he because he wanted to kill us all.

Im not even 13 yet….. Are you exhausted?

Any one of these things would make a fully functioning stable adult fold like a house of cards. “Whats wrong with you Melissa?”…. It took something like 20 years of therapy but now I have some clues to answer that question. Here are some more clues:

We finally make it to Boone. Mom followed her best friend, Mary Jane. After all that… that incredible pressure cooker of my pre teen childhood we arrive in bumfuck nowhere, North Carolina….and everyone is gone except the sociopath brother. The house is basically empty. Everyone abandoned ship. Where did my brothers and sisters go? I remember coming home after school and there would be nobody home. For my entire life I had come home to my family but now there was no one. I would sit on the couch and watch the clock with growing anxiety and cry until mom came home from work. It was beyond torturous. And then she would be pissed off that I needed her because she just got home from work. At this point Mom is just angry and exhausted all the time. She had to get a job outside the home for the first time in her life which she hated, she was sick of being a mom…she wanted it all to be over so she could have HER life. Charles was getting more and more abusive- physically and mentally and had to be sent away for our protection.

And then she starts dating Don Bailey. I think the sex must have been amazing because the guy was an utter low life. He was living off of her/my child support money… and beating the shit out of her. Their fights were never goddamn ending. I would hide in my room after school and not come out. I was so alone. I had no friends and no escape. Mom was friends with Mary Jane, not with me. Mom wanted nothing to do with me. One day we were driving home and I was so attached to her. I needed my mom so goddamn bad… I was struggling to make friends at yet another new school and the PTSD made me feel so distant from everyone but I had no words for what was wrong with me I just thought I was terrible at making friends (I remember this: pathetically I checked out a book at the library: How to be your own best friend)… She pulled the car over and told me “we cant be friends.” Mom has some glorified memory of us driving around looking for our favorite tree in Autumn… the only thing I remember is that conversation…her rejecting me when I needed her the most… after we moved to the town my sister lived in so she could be close to her.

Again, still no help with the major depression, the CPTSD… just a lot of blame “why cant you be happy Melissa…whats wrong with you?” and I cant be clear enough about this: all her spare time at home was spent on Don, not me. I didn’t have clubs and groups and activities that she as sure to enroll me in. I didn’t have my brothers and sisters there with me. It was just me, after all that, trying to figure it out.

I was a burden to her. She couldn’t wait to get rid of me and be done. I felt it always.

An aside: When she was unsure if she wanted to stay in Boone, I remember her asking Charles if we should stay or go back to Florida…after he chimed in with his answer, I gave my opinion which she angrily scoffed at me and told me it didn’t matter what I thought, Id go where they tell me to go.   My voice didn’t matter, I was a burden to her. I had no value as a person. I was powerless. So there I was in my bedroom that was the walkway between the living room and her room… at the mercy of whatever happened with no privacy or power over my life….. whats new.

Another aside: During that time we had gotten a dog that was a total pain in the ass for her to take care of. She gave it away while I was at school. I came home and the dog was gone and I was tearful thinking it ran away. She gave my dog away without telling me.

Then we moved out to Valley Crusis (9 miles outside of town…so isolated. I was so alone. The isolation was killing me. Where were my siblings. I needed help. I needed someone who was just there for me.) and Dons abusive behavior got even more extreme. I remember him picking me up from a concert that I was at….because he had sent Mom to the hospital with a sprained wrist and a busted lip. He was laughing about it when he told me to get in the car. Another time I remember Don looming in my bedroom door when Mom was at work and it was just us in the house… telling me: “Go ahead and call the police, nobody will believe you anyway.” I remember the woman who lived up the hill from us, with the curly hair…I think her name was Susan… coming down to the house while Mom and Don were gone and telling me If it ever gets too bad, you can always run up here. The neighbors knew I needed help. Where were my brothers and sisters? Where was my Mom? FUCK.

I remember Mom having many off the handle rages at me because I looked like a boy and my hair was crazy and I was so fucked up. I remember one morning after she had raged at me so hard that I was in stunned silence… we were sitting at breakfast at St Sinners and MJ kept looking at me, she knew something was wrong, I was clearly checked out and fucked up. I needed my sister. I had no voice or ability to speak up. I was scared of her husband, Glenn. Nobody helped me. Mom was the star of the brunch party!

I remember getting my first job at 15 and working at St Sinners…. Then, when mom bought the restaurant I stopped getting paid. She cut me off from my paycheck and told me it was my “duty to the family”… but she had Jim2 and his first wife Lynn there working and they were getting paid…and also stealing her money to fuel their coke habits. She didn’t value me, or my efforts but her golden son Jim can do no wrong even when he is fucking her out of her business.

I remember Jim2 offering me coke at a house party and John Golden and another friend getting me out of there away from my own brother. I remember Lynn being LIVID that I would stop by their house when I was lonely and wanted my family but instead I got shamed for thinking I could stop by and see them…and mom would tell me that “they had BUSY LIVES and I should leave them alone.”

I remember being so fucked up and alone in Boone….I mean, I now know I was just in shock and experiencing major depression. Mom kept asking me Whats wrong with you Melissa…when I was your age I had to choose between boyfriends… etc. Its incredible to me how Mom normalized my childhood abuse and completely erased my feelings or my personhood then blamed me for somehow being a problem child or wrong in whatever way….more incredible: people believed her.  

During those years in Boone I remember her doing things like openly making fun of me when I thought I might be gay, fixing regular hamburgers and telling me they were tofu when I became vegetarian…starting a burn pile in the back yard full of toxic things after I told her how important recycling was to me and laughing at me as I cried…..every chance she had to make me feel awful about being me and disrespected she took.

Once I visited her at her office and she told me I was “too ugly to look at and she didn’t want anyone to know I was her daughter and to never come to her office again.”

Shes right, we were not friends. She was a jealous mean girl, obsessed with appearances and her shitty boyfriend.

Lets not forget when she, with Mary Janes help, stacked my portfolio with MJs lithographies and coached me how to lie to get me in to Governors school for the summer. She wanted me gone and she got her wish. I remember feeling like a fraud that summer. I wasn’t good enough to be there. I had to lie to be included. I remember she didn’t even drive me there. She had Don do it. He harassed me in the car all the way there, 3 hours…. then dropped me…16… off on the curb in front of the college and drove away. All the other kids had parents excitedly helping them get set up in their rooms…excited about their major accomplishment of getting in to Governors school… I was there with my milk crate of shit, a fraud. alone. Acting like a tough girl who didn’t need anyone. I was a pro at that. Mission accomplished, she was rid of me.

I remember how deep my depression was becoming by the time I was 18. That last year of high school I would bang my head against my bedroom wall in an attempt to knock myself out, in hopes that I would get sent away to a treatment center or something. I couldn’t take all the fighting between her and Don. I fucking hated him and he was in my house and there was nothing I could do about it. I tried to throw myself down the back stairwell at school. I barely graduated high school my depression was eating me alive.

Amazing that nobody IN MY FAMILY SAW THAT I NEEDED HELP. I was invisible. Mary Ellen cast her proclamation that all was well, she was amazing and I was a problem child and that was that.

I have a million stories about Mom demoralizing me during those years…. Whats weird is that I have no memory of my Mary Jane there. I think she was so involved with Glenn and way up the mountain, I had no way to reach her. And I was scared of her husband Glenn. And, we were never close. And, she was Team Mary Ellen…. So I was just alone and wanted to die. Sincerely. Goddamn. Let it end.

I remember Don telling me that Mom was using my child support payment to make her car payment. So I asked her about where my child support was going and she told me she used it for my Blue Cross Blue Shield Insurance…. So I called the insurance company to see if I had coverage…. They had no record of me. She was, again, a liar….

When I graduated high school she couldn’t get me out of the house fast enough. She pawned me off on my boyfriend Gebeaux and expected him to simply take care of me. We broke up. He didn’t sign up for that. I was basically kicked out of the house in valley crusis. I wasn’t prepared for life on my own. I wasn’t ready. She just wanted to be done being a mom so Hey..I came back to the house one day and all my stuff was packed and that was that. I had to figure it out. Fuck me.  

At one point during that time I was living in a trailer with my friend Stacy. Mom was horrified about this. I was getting food stamps and she was so ashamed of me for being so low class. She came to the trailer and was completely off the handle. She said there was “no air” in there and grabbed a 2x4 and smashed out all the windows. Mind you from her perspective it was just another example of what a loser I am, living in a trailer on food stamps how did I end up such a piece of shit when she is such a wonderful mother… it must be because there is something inherently wrong about me.

She has seen me as trash who is incapable of being anything great my entire life.

Somewhere in there she stopped dating Don and started dating lawyer Rand Sterling…who broke her ribs multiple times and literally pushed her out of a moving car and then she walked 5 miles back to his house to be with him.  That relationship took her to Texas. She followed the money. The insanity of that relationship is all I heard about from her. She needed Jim2 to come protect her from her husband multiple times. I absorbed all of this through her very rare but insane emails to me. She has always used me as her emotional manipulation dumping ground.

I had my first total mental break right around 19 years old. I was fetal position on the floor at my girlfriends house… Jenn… I couldn’t stop crying for multiple days and I felt my mind split in two. I literally went into a black hole and was begging for death. Jenn and the next door neighbor scooped me up off the floor and drove me to the Watauga County Mental Health and got me some help… but at this point I was having a total mental collapse… the part of me that was traumatized was a child denied her voice or any recognition of her Self, so I had no way to articulate what was wrong and Mom had denied and normalized the abuse and denied me voice and my personhood for so long that I had ZERO chance of articulating what was wrong… it was buried so deep inside of me and I was so scared to trust anyone…. I was experiencing schizophrenia and Major depression.

Jenn helped me with my depression. Jenn made sure I was housed and fed. Jenn took care of me. I owe her my life.

I mean, that is an extreme mental health episode. Where was my family? How could none of the people who were supposed to love me the most see any of this? Why did none of them help me? Why did all of them think I was to blame? (my guess: Team Mary Ellen)  

Somewhere in that year my friends were moving to Chapel Hill so I packed up the car that my child support paid for and I went down the mountain. She threatened to call the police on me for stealing the car.  She told me I needed discipline and needed to go into the Army. She just didn’t know what to do with me…such a problem child. If I remember correctly, you echoed her sentiments. Everyone was always so angry at me for being so wrong and so bad. None of my family (meaning MJ and mom because my brothers had long bailed on me and my extended family has never made a single attempt to reach out to me or know me at all.)  were my friend, or loving, kind or compassionate.

I got away….I went to Chapel Hill and lived with my best friends Kerry, Lesley, Julie, and two other guys in Kerry’s Moms rental house. I was working at the Columbia Street Bakery and dating this boy, Richard…. Who happened to be a really abusive drug dealer… who held me down one night and violently orally raped me and when I called mom for help she told me with the exasperation of a mother who had supposedly tried so hard to do the right thing and raise her child with love and support but that child was just tragic and terminally fucked :

“I don’t know whats wrong with you Melissa, I guess you just like the bad boys.”  

Again, no self reflection on her behalf…she did nothing to help me.

I didn’t know how to get away from Richard who was playing mind fuck with me and I was getting high with him (LSD) …which was basically, me being drugged and him using me for sex but not being loving or kind in any way (felt like home)  Eventually, Richard got busted for selling a page of lsd to an undercover cop and threatened to kill me because he thought it was my fault… so I had to get out of there and I went to New York to chill out and work for the summer at the Omega Institute of Holistic Learning… to just be around hippies and eat good food. I hung out with Baba Ram Dass and Ben & Jerry…and took a class on the whirling dervish… These moments when I wasn’t in the pressure cooker of my life were both brilliant because I needed healing but also the worst because all this trauma would start to surface and I didn’t know what it was or how to speak about it. I would start to shatter again.

I believed it was my fault and there was something inherently wrong with me.

I was so lost. I needed help. I needed a parent or loving compassionate family or someone trusted to guide me through that time in my life. I had no one but my friends from North Carolina who were just as fucked up as me. I needed help. I needed help. Oh my god, I needed help.

Omega ended…I had no money to get out of there, nobody to turn to for help, no clue what to do next, I certainly couldn’t go back to Mom who hated me and was living with Rand so fuck that… I had no idea where my brothers and sisters were and no relationship with them so that wasn’t on my mind as an option…..so I caught whatever ride I could get and ended up in Boulder. One of my friends from Omega hooked me up with her cousin for a month and I tried to make it work… it was basically winter in Colorado at this point and I was out there door canvassing for Green Peace making no money and freezing to death. Just walking door to door for Greenpeace… looking in on other families and their loving lives together. I was so fucking sad. I was hungry and scared and completely out of options. I had to get out of there.

I called Mom for help. She said: “You got yourself into this, get yourself out”…. And hung up on me. The bitch hung up on me. I was stranded and so scared and I needed my mom. She hung up on me. She blamed me. She wanted to punish me for being such a problem. She was done being a mom. She hung up.

I remember having gone to the Planned Parenthood to get some medical help because I was sick. I explained my situation and the nurse looked at me incredulously and said “where are you parents?” I explained to her that Mom hung up on me.  I was devastated, living in a constant state of shock. Scared out of my sense of self or ability to connect to the present moment.

I was a fractured soul in every possible meaning.

My month at my friends place was over and I had to find an apartment or live on the streets. It took me another month of begging whatever guy I could find to give me a place to stay and then I contacted the boy I was dating at Omega, Scott, and asked him for money to get a bus back to North Carolina. He helped me. Bless him. He got me out of there.

I got on the Greyhound and ended up going to Idaho to visit with my friend Stacy (who I lived in the trailer with) and stay with her for a couple weeks to get grounded and feel safe with a friend for a minute. My mental break was coming back full force. I was inconsolable.  I remember laying on her bed fully having an out of body experience from the stress and being so disoriented. She is so patient and kind. She took care of me. When my time with Stacy was up, the next layer of insanity: I got on the Greyhound and took a 5 day no sleep, no food journey across country. I got chased down, carrying all my bags of things and looking like a little hippie… on a layover, by a group of drunk men in Wyoming…they almost got me but I found a laundromat that was open and full of people so I ran inside and hid until my bus was leaving again. I was terrified. By the time I made it back to Lesley and Kerrys house in Chapel Hill it was New Year night…I got some hours back at the Columbia Street bakery I was working at and got some money rolling in.

I want to mention that Poverty, which I have lived most my life in, is no joke and more damaging than anyone outside of the experience can understand. It is cyclical, like bi polar…. Living paycheck to paycheck or however you get just enough to maybe hold on for a moment longer but never knowing if more will be coming is a terror. Always feeling like the bottom is going to drop out…and never knowing when youre going to eat…and what that does to your hormones and your mental health…. Poverty is proven to damage people on a cellular level and have lasting effects that lead to chronic illness.

After making it back to NC, few weeks later the boy from Omega came to Chapel Hill and told me he wanted to marry me and wanted me to move to Boston with him. So we took a little road trip and eventually ended up in Boston. As a surprise to no one sane, that was not a lasting relationship. So after a year of misery in Boston, (more poverty, more loneliness, more no family) Scott drove me back to Chapel Hill and that’s when the girls and I all moved up to Asheville. All the while, checking in with Mom who was yelling and shaming me for being such a fuck up.

I can’t underline enough: I was disassociating the entire time. I was having episodes of schizophrenia. I was experiencing major depression and bi polar disorder. The stress of my entire life was more than I could handle and I had no support and no compassion and nobody validating my experience or me as a person. People just thought that was who I was. I was just fucked in every way possible and believed she was right and all that was normal and I was a terrible piece of shit. She had everyone believing that.  

Mary Jane believed her. She echoed her sentiments to me. Go Team Mary Ellen.

I moved up to Asheville and got somewhat stabilized. I was again living with my friends and I got a decent job at the Laughing Seed Cafe. I met Mark and I had decided to go to college because I thought that would make Mom happy and I needed to DO something with myself.  

Mark and I were together maybe 8 weeks before we moved across country and started a life together. Eight weeks.

I was so adept at being a high functioning  dissociative major depressive and I had no way to articulate what was wrong with me (all that stuff that had been normalized and ignored…all the ways my feelings and personhood was erased)… I just knew something evil bad was in me and it took me out from time to time. I thought it was my fault and I was ashamed of myself.  I was living in a constant state of shock. CPTSD.

So, I get myself into college and thanks to Mark and his truck we move across country.

When I hear my friends now talking about saving money for their kids college and really setting them up for success by helping them choose a school and get settled in or making sure they don’t have to work so they can focus on their studies and have a healthy social life with friends and do activities Im so confused. I didn’t know parents and families helped their kids with such things. I didn’t understand that in other families they help, protect and support. I made it through without any of these blessings.

Mark and I get a shitty apartment (the ceiling caved in out of rot and the place was full of roaches. The property managers stole my drum set and we would catch them on the roof at night peeping through the skylight to watch us), I get a full time job managing a restaurant…in addition to schooling full time...Im overwhelmed by the workload, scared to be across country, freaked out by college and the expectations… it was too much. I was away from the source of my abuse and things started to surface… I NEEDED HELP.

I needed my family except, honestly, I have none. Additional mindfuck: when I tried to talk to people about this I get the old trope about how everyone has tough relationships in their families and I need to love my mom and work it out with her.SO I KEPT GOING BACK FOR MORE WITH MOM BECAUSE I NEEDED HER LOVE SO BAD AND I THOUGHT THE PROBLEM WAS ME. Further, because I was so regressed I just sounded like a petulant child when I tried to talk about the abuse I had no accurate words for so nobody outside the experience really got it or could conceive how bad things really were for me… why would they? My family is extraordinarily fucked up, like nobody I have ever known.

In college, nobody comes to check on me and make sure Im ok. Nobody was calling. Id get rare emails or letters. When I would tell mom how hard it was, mom would mock me and tell me to suck it up when I would reach out to her and “complain” about how things were going for me… See, because its always my fault and Im never measuring up.

An aside: To this day, 40 years later, Jim2 has yet to even send me a single email to check and make sure Im ok or get to know me at all. He has never responded to the multiple emails I have sent him, so I stopped reaching out. I used to cry to mom about it and she would tell me that he “has a busy life” and I had to understand that’s why I wasn’t a priority to him. Personally, I cant imagine anything being more important than making a connection with your little sister, but I guess Im biased and not like him: busy getting high and drunk and being a cool party guy.  

During my college is when he married Lori. I worked over time and got a plane ticket to be at his wedding. I was sick to my stomach at the idea of having to be around my family but I love my brother and I wanted to be there. He ignored me the entire time I was there. I was a HUGE FUCKING DEAL that I could afford the ticket and made the effort to be there for him. I showed up for him….He ignored me. I was devastated and felt invisible and so worthless.

Another aside: I was 24 and that very first Christmas on the west coast Mom calls me, driving herself to the ER to get her stomach pumped from a suicide attempt. She was dramatically telling me her goodbye in case she didn’t make it. I was stressed and powerless beyond the telling of it. I cried all the way through that Christmas. Again: Mom always uses me as her emotional manipulation dumping ground. Out of all her children, Im the one with heart and she gets the sympathy she is working me over for.

During my college years, I would ask Mom for help she would mock me “Im sending baby Sava (MJs daughter) a care package…are you a baby? Do you need one too?”

Mean girl jealousy that I went to college and her life was taken from her by her children….

In college I had no friends, just Mark. No time for activities and my mental health was so fragile I had no ability to form friendships. I was barely hanging on. I would be catatonic in my time at home. We had this geometry screensaver on the computer and I would be frozen staring at it for hours while my brain felt like it was going to shatter. I was an absolute wreck and a shell of a person…but I was determined to prove I could graduate college and I wasn’t a fuck up. I wanted Mom to be proud of me.

I guess it should come as no surprise that after 4 years of no time off, working and schooling 80 hours a week, getting zero support emotionally or financially from my family …. that absolutely NOBODY FROM MY FAMILY CAME TO CELEBRATE ME AT MY GRADUATION.

Nobody came. Nobody celebrated me. Nobody saw the value in me or my hard work.

I remember being on the phone with Jim2 the day of my graduation. I had called him to ask why he wasn’t there for me. I was in tears. He told me that if that was the worst thing that ever happened to me, congratulations on your nice life. He thought it was bullshit that I was so upset. He thought I was being a baby. This loser dropped out of college which he had a scholarship for and did nothing with his life but drugs and alcohol and saw no value in me or what I did on my own. He didn’t show up for me.

Me going to college and graduating on time with full credits was a major fucking accomplishment on so many levels.

Not one of my family was there for me and I will never forgive or forget that.

We moved to the same fucking town Mary Jane was in when she was in college and never ONCE did anyone come to check on me and be interested in what I was doing or validate how amazing it was that I was in school and making it happen on my own.  

When I talk about how alone I feel in life, its in my bones.

I had worked over time to get Mom a plane ticket so she would be there for my graduation and she called me a couple days before to tell me pathetically “She couldn’t get the day off work.”  (Lie: I think she has some legal issue and couldn’t leave the state or something like that.)

After she called to bail on my graduation… at 27 years old… I had a heart attack on my walk home. I collapsed in my living room. Mark found me on the floor when he got home from work. She literally broke my heart. I was devastated. I was in shock. I was dissociating. I was so fucked up. I needed help. Poor Mark. He didn’t know what was wrong and neither did I.

Shortly after my graduation, MJ graduated and she drove to see her and was sure to tell me about it. I mean, they are BFFs so, no surprises there. GO TEAM MARY ELLEN, right?  

Whats wrong with you Melissa? My family. My family is whats wrong with me.

During college I was stressed to the point of being catatonic when I wasn’t at work or school. My mental health was tanking in every possible way… but the pressure cooker of school and work kept me hemmed in and my desire to prove that I was someone worth loving (because god knows I wasn’t going to be loved just for being me…No one was simply going to show up for me or simply be there. I had to earn it.)

…. then we moved to Seattle and I had three years at Amazon in that pressure cooker of a job… (10 to 14 hours a day, 6 days a week) working as a Lead running a team of 200 people to keep me too busy to feel my feelings or connect to emerging myself.  

At some point after I graduated and it no longer mattered, I remember MJ came to visit me one time. That was nice of her. Thank you for trying, MJ.

But heres the fun part: Mark. Mark loved me.

Mark is the very first and to this day ONLY person who has been intimately involved in my life who loves and respected me just as I am.

It was Mark loving me that allowed me to start developing a voice and for that very young very traumatized person inside of me to start coming to the surface. Mark was the very best thing that has ever happened to me….and, ironically, it was because he loved me that all that evil finally came to the surface…and was our demise.

All the things dad did to me, all the never ending abuse from mom that sought to vilify and demoralize me… all of the hurt from the abandonment from my brothers and sisters… all that evil came up because he Loved me enough to make me feel safe and supported…I just didn’t know that then and couldn’t see or feel that he was the most tremendous gift this life has ever given me ….

and I started sexually assaulting myself in my sleep (woke up one time with an entire box of tampons inside of me and had to go to the doctor to get them all out). I would throw punches in my sleep. I was having an utter mental breakdown/ breakthrough… and then I started acting out sexually with other men that I met online. I felt like I was being puppet mastered from some evil unknown source. I was manic and acting out sexually. That default programing from my childhood was calling the shots. I didn’t have a sense of self so I was acting from what I knew and what Dad taught me about myself and the self-worth that mom made sure I didn’t have.

I say acting out sexually. What I should say is reenacting the trauma…which there was so very much of. I was on auto pilot and at that time if you asked me if that’s what I wanted to be doing I would have said yes out of programming but the core truth of who I am knew it was not at all right or who I am or what I wanted…that core didn’t have a voice yet.

2001, Amazon had laid us all off. I got hired working at a treatment center for abused youth.  I was major depressive and would be fetal position on the floor and cry for a month at a time but I didn’t know why or what was wrong… I was just deeply goddamn depressed and wanted to die. All the time. Goddamn. Let it end.

Poor Mark. He didn’t know what was happening. He was the perfect boyfriend. He tried so hard to help me. I honestly could not have asked for a more perfect man to come in to my life…and he was stuck with me. Mentally fucked Melissa with no clue what was wrong… and worst of all, I thought I had to get out of my relationship with Mark.

Crazy,right?….I asked Mom for help. She had no relationship with me and no clue what was going on in my life…She is a complete train wreck of a human and so deep in her own denial and so wrapped up in her latest abusive relationship with a rich man that she could honestly give a fuck about me and thought the worst of me anyway… so yeah, break up with him and oh my god Melissa I don’t know what to do with you.

I kept cheating on him over and over again. I was off the rails with my manic depression. Spending, fucking, driving my car too fast…. Through a chat room, I got mixed up with a man that felt like Dad to me and I was entranced and captive to him. Mark asked me to marry him and I broke up with him, moved out.. I was off the rails with the sexual acting out/re traumatizing myself.

(Mark immediately met the woman he has since married and has been with for the past 18 years. I would give anything to have that man back in my life…Throughout these years, my memory of how he treated me has been the standard by which I have held all other men and nobody measures up….Beyond his character and integrity, the art, music and intelligence that lives within this handsome and kind man is incomparable. I blew it. Fuck. I pushed away the most incredible man I ever knew and he loved me. I still love him to this day.)

At that same time I heard a rumor at work that one of the counselors (reggie, 24) had slept with a client(raya,16). I knew reggie was capable of it (I had slept with him) so I reported it to the Unit manager, Big Mike. ……What I didn’t know is that Reggie, Mike and the guy I was so into, Cash were all friends who grew up together and in the same gang……

and so it was that month that I moved out from Mark that the man that I was so “in love with”, Cash, drugged me at a house party and raped me with 4 of his friends to teach me a lesson for reporting Reggie.

I remember sharing a beer with Cash and then feeling tired and dizzy and asking to lay down and then multiple hours of being barely coherent and having no control over my body and being passed around for everyone to fuck over and over again.

Cash was a sex trafficker and grooming me all along. No wonder he felt like home. My need for family and my daddy issues in full effect, I couldn’t break the spell. I was terrified of him and wanted him to think I was so sexy…..He was masterful with the mindfuck and kept me under his thumb at all times which felt like attention and love to me and was intense enough that I could feel it.

At that time, in Washington, you had a statue of limitations of 8 years to report a rape.

Mind you, I was so dissociative and still had no idea I was a person or had any rights to my thoughts or my body… I was really goddamn checked out at that point in my life….I was in shock. The childhood assault trauma was just surfacing and I had no words for it because it had been normalized and my feelings negated by my parents So, I didn’t know if I had been raped or not….it took me years to figure out that its wrong to drug someone and have all your friends fuck them…

I didn’t know I should or could ask for help. I didn’t believe I could be helped. I didn’t think anyone would help me. I didn’t know I was a person. I didn’t know I had rights. I didn’t know I could escape or how.

ANYONE CONFUSED ABOUT WHY I DIDN’T KNOW HOW TO GET HELP OR THAT I DESERVED IT???????

Whats wrong with you, Melissa?

In the meanwhile, Cash was making sure I wouldn’t report it.

He knew I was away from Mark, had a history of sexual assault and no family, and that I lived in absolute poverty so there was zero chance I could escape him.

I was in so much trouble. I needed help. I called Mom. I explained that it all to her. I explained that they were a gang. That it was sex trafficking… that I needed help…. To which she said “Let them play godfather. Whats the worst they can do?”….. (nice way to minimize the extreme danger I was in and negate me as a person, don’t you think?)

that bitch loves to see me suffer and struggle, doesn’t she. Doesn’t it make her look amazing when I look like shit? So she didn’t help me. She shit talked me to the rest of the family like I wanted to be in that situation because I was trash. Nobody helped me.

I remember talking to Mary Jane around that time explaining that I was getting counseling and she, like mom, shamed me and told me I didn’t have bipolar or something like that… She was Team Mary Ellen all the way and me getting counseling was just attention seeking or something like that.

See, this is why MJ and I have never been friends or close. I cant trust her. Shes not someone I think of as an ally. Sorry about that, MJ. Im not trying to be mean but… look at why I think that.

I really do look up to her though. She is so smart and capable. But I cant trust her and this is why.

By the way, here’s just a few of examples of the worst they can do while “playing Godfather”: They were so invested in making sure I never spoke about the rape they made sure I was living in such constant fear for my life (mental domination) that I was too scared to talk to anyone about it:

*They had voyeur cameras in my house…that they were making money off of.

*They had software on my laptop to collect all my personal data (social security, passwords, answers to security questions) so I am owned by them to this day.

*They had GPS on my car to track me everywhere I went and would leave notes on my car to let me know I was constantly being watched.

*They flipped my therapists office and stole all her files to make sure there was no record

*They poisoned my dog every day for a month while I was at work…I would come home to Milo cowering in the corner like he had been abused all day long and diarrhea all over the floor until one day I yelled out in my home with nobody there that I would find Cashs son and do the same to him…and I went online and found his childs home address…yelled that out to my empty apartment…and after that day Milo was never sick again….

*Then there are the 2 times they broke into my apartment in the middle of the night, drugged me in my sleep and did whatever and dumped me at the park. One of those time I woke up with half my face slack and paralyzed as though I had a stroke. By the grace of god I got the feeling back but to this day its still a little droopy.

*They sent their equally psycho boy Alex into my life to keep watch on me. He was horribly mentally abusive. I was so broken and demoralized. I needed to get away. Instead, I got pregnant. Alex also gave me syphilis ..and so I had an abortion. I had to get two Orders of Protection to get Alex away from me. When I called mom for help with the pregnancy, she was off the rails hysterical and I was yet even more scared and alone. Mom blamed me for all of it. Further evidence Im trash. I got pregnant by a mistake by a black man.

There is more, I mean it was 8 years of daily torture… but I think you get the idea. Complete mental domination was the name of their game.

I had no friends. None. I was so fucked up. I was terrified to speak to anyone because everything felt like danger. Just these men showing up when they felt like to to fuck me and terrorize me. Eight years. My 30s. I was miserable beyond the telling of it.

Whats wrong with you Melissa. I needed help. I was so scared. I needed my family. I got yelled at and shamed. I was so alone. I wanted to die. I was so depressed and fucked up. Goddamn. Let it end. And the worst of it all is that I really didn’t even have myself. I never had a chance to be safe enough to develop a self. I was a shell of a human. I was out of my head. I was so checked out with the PTSD and the trauma of it all. I was scared to be alive. Soul fracturing is real.

This was how I spent my 30s. Somehow pulling myself together to go to work during the day because I didn’t want to be homeless, coming home and having a total mental collapse at night and all the while being mentally tortured by a gang of sex traffickers and when I reached to my family for help I got blamed for being a fucked up piece of shit.

I had no one. When I talk about my isolation and how alone I am, its cumulative.  Its all this and more.

I don’t need to volunteer at a shelter on Christmas to be with someone for the holidays. I don’t need to get a dog. I need family. I need to be validated on a daily basis that I matter and am loveable just as I am. I need someone safe who is simply there. I need people in my life who celebrate me without me asking. I need people who are there for those simple mundane acts of living that define us…I need to come home to love.

The miracle: I kept myself employed and was successful in my corporate career path, I kept myself housed, and drug and alcohol free the entire time. I had the where with all to get counselling and try to work through my shit. I never gave up on myself even though I didn’t yet know who I am and my family had absolutely written me off from day one.

Then the Recession happened. I, of course, had never learned money management skills so there really wasn’t any savings to rely on. I was comfort eating like a motherfucker, I had student loans, a car payment and insurance and a foolishly large and expensive apartment, I had these lecherous men that were taking advantage of me financially too… I was manic depressive… I was paying for counselling (which if I am not mistaken over the years has totaled $100k) But to be honest, I don’t know where my money went… so when the Recession hit it took about 2 months before I was selling off everything I own and living in my car….where I stayed for the next year with my dog.

Nobody help me stay safe or in my integrity. I had no friends in Seattle to turn to. Mom told me to put my things in garbage bags and throw it all away…take the dog to the pound… and work with my counselor (she was angry about me getting help because she perceived it as being me trying to vilify her and this was her chance to punish me for getting help) and find a shelter to check in to because I wasn’t welcomed at her home.

Let me say that again: My mom knew I was losing everything, told me to throw my life away, dump my kid at the pound and told me to check into a shelter, I wasn’t welcomed at her home.

MY MOM.

Shes sees me as trash. She threw me away. Doesn’t she look amazing when Im failing?

Work in Seattle was impossible to find. I literally had 700 resumes out. Understand, I have held a job consistently since I was 15 years old and somehow mom thought this moment was me being a lazy piece of shit and just trying to manipulate her for money when I asked for help.

Sure. Ok.

I spent the next year in my car with no money coming in other than whatever odd jobs I could grab on craigslist to make my car payment. I drove back to North Carolina to seek help from my friends and my brother. My friends back home were not in a position to help me in any long lasting way but bless them all for what they did…

but Jim 2, who lives in Raliegh, was. He just declined. He made me a sandwich…told me there was nothing he could do for me (he has three houses)…and I spent the night in my car outside my brother’s house.

I had an ex acquaintance from Seattle who lived in Raleigh. He was part of the abuser sex trafficking gang. He let me sleep on the floor but would beat the shit out of me if I tried to sleep on the couch. I was so demoralized and out of my head, I needed literally anyone to be there for me….so, I stayed there, on the floor, for a month.

My brother was 15 minutes away, could have kept me safe but my brother chose to do nothing to help me.  

Whats wrong with you Melissa. My family. Definitely gonna say my family.  

When it was clear that North Carolina wasn’t going to be any better for work than Seattle I decided to drive back to the west coast. I had to drive through Texas and I didn’t stop at Moms house. I didn’t even try. Why would I?  I was so hopeless and out of my head with depression and PTSD. I was screaming into the great black nothing. I was cutting myself all over to get the evil out. I would punch my own face black and blue from self loathing… again, thinking it was all my fault and that I was defective. I mean… my own family didn’t want me. Nobody did. It was me. I was a horrible piece of shit and deserved to die. Nobody loved or wanted me. Nobody kept me safe. I was deeply lost in the void. I wanted to die. Goddamn. Let it end.

That year in the car was by far worse than the 8 years of being tortured by sex traffickers or the 13 years of living with my sex predator father or the 7 years of being stuck in bumfuck North Carolina with my moms abuser boyfriend stealing the show.

Without question having nobody and knowing that nobody cares if you are safe, in your integrity, have a door to lock, privacy of any kind, if you are fed or showered… knowing for a demonstrated fact that there is not a single person on earth who cares enough to validate your humanity is the absolute worst feeling I have ever known.  Being completely dehumanized, demoralized, erased. I begged for death.

Whats wrong with you Melissa?

Fun fact: during that time, instead of helping me or offering me a job at her business doing the exact job I did so well at Amazon (I asked for one and told her I would sleep in the attic at the office and she told me No), to mock me and show me what a failure I am and that I was just trying to manipulate her for money because Im a lazy loser

Mom went to her local Costco and applied for a job to show me how easy it was for her to get hired.

I mean, if youre going to be void of a soul, you should really go for it. Kudos, Mom.  

I drove through California on the way back home to Seattle and met my sister Patty for the first time. We look like two peas in a pod. We think exactly the same. She is undeniably my sister. It was the most incredible feeling.

For the first time in my entire life I actually felt and thought the same as someone else.

She casually declined to introduce me to her family. They kept looking at me incredulously because we look just the same… but she would shoo them away when they would come over to talk. I met her at her restaurant and then she took me to her palatial home. She has a huge family. She had tons of photo albums… and then she started talking about Dad…like she was in a trance and talking about a favorite lover… it was clear that Dad had sexualized her and maintained that relationship with her well into her adult life and that was the reason she had no contact with us and didn’t want a deeper relationship with me. One conversation was all I got with her. I slept in my car outside her home. My sister didn’t help me. Whats wrong with you Melissa???

In one shot from LA I drove back to Seattle. I figured out that the Queen Anne neighborhood had the lowest crime rate so I parked there. I was so sick to death of all the nights that year that I would wake up with someone trying to break in to the car. Thank god I had Milo with me. He saved me multiple times from intruders that year. My body was a wreck from car living and shit food. My mental health beyond destroyed. I was really just done. Run through. All the way run through.

I did a brief stint staying in Silverdale with my friend from NC that I managed to re connect with on my drive back… but the hour drive into Seattle from Silverdale was too much so I lumped it and just slept in my car in Queen Anne once I secured my job…..

I went in to Top Pot Doughnuts every day for a month and demanded a job until they gave me one. I was 8 weeks into that job, still sleeping in the car but I had forward momentum when I totaled the car. I had the very last car payment in the seat next to me I had worked so fucking hard to maintain my payments in good faith despite it all and come out of that situation with my car but nope…fuck me. I was on my way to the gym and I was giving myself a pep talk telling myself everything was going to be ok….and I ate it…40 miles an hour into a stopped truck on the West Seattle Bridge. Entirely my fault. Milo went to the pound. All my earthly belongings went to the impound yard. I went to the ER…. And I called every single person I knew and who I thought could help me.

Just when you think you have nothing left, turns out you can go lower. Nobody returned my call.  

Me, the unwanted, loveable piece of shit. I could die and nobody cared. Whats wrong with you Melissa?

I got out of the hospital, I had made contact with my online friend Rishad and he let me stay for a couple days… BLESS HIM… In those two days I got on the bus. I took the bus that goes through Capitol Hill and up to Queen Anne where my job was. I wrote down every apartment for rent phone number I could see and I started making calls. In the first true lucky break I had in years, this apartment manager woman at a really sweet little apartment on the hill heard me out…heard my story… it was the 15th of the month. I had my car payment check and I cashed it and gave her the money… She gave me the keys and a wink and told me I could move in “on the first”, that’s what the money I gave her would pay for…. and that she definitely didn’t know anything about a dog so no pet fee was needed.

I went right upstairs, LOCKED MY OWN DOOR and laid on the floor with literally nothing left to my name and cried so fucking hard.  

I had whiplash from the accident. I fractured 4 molars on my steering wheel and over the years as my dentist promised they have slowly one by one fallen out of my face. I had broken both my feet and wracked my knees…. But I had a place that was my own and a job and that’s all that mattered.

I went right to the pound the next day and got Milo. I went to the impound lot and got what was left of my life. I missed a sum total of two days of work…. I was so thankful to have a job again I blocked out the pain from my broken body and I just kept going.

(Mind you the only thing Mom has ever been proud of me for in my lifetime is losing weight. That’s what got her attention…that’s what she was impressed by. I went on a diet.)

That next year, I lost 70 pounds at the gym. I perceived my training team as the family I never had and I was good at lifting weights. They weren’t honestly my friends or family but it was something consistent and I needed that stability and I needed them so fucking bad. It took 5 years to start to return to a somewhat functioning human... Lifting helped me get back into my body and stop checking out so much. My nutrition plan made me focus on myself every moment of every day…and nothing beats depression like clean food and working out. Structure and consistency.

My PTSD was off the rails though. I was worse than a soldier coming back from war…I never signed up for that shit and it started when I was a child. I was suffering. I wanted to die. Every moment of every day. I was miserable to be around. Nobody wanted to be my friend. So, trust me…just work and the gym with my illusion that people were there for me and me inappropriately and overly attached to them.

The irony is that I looked amazing and strong and I was, yes. The reality is that I wanted to die. I begged for death. I had two suicide attempts in those years….I surprised myself and cut my wrist with my house keys on the way to work one day and another time I walked into traffic but the car swerved.

Coming out of all that happened and processing all that trauma took more will power and resolve than anything I have ever done. It was so dark. I felt demon possessed. I was out of my head. I would find myself walking out of my place into public with no skirt on just my tights or other crazy shit like that. I was talking to myself, having heated arguments with nobody there all the fucking time. I was punching myself in the face. I was cutting and other such self harm.

It was really bad. I was hurting so fucking much.

And, I had another sociopath boyfriend taking full advantage of my disadvantage…keeping me fucked up because it kept me there for him. Thomas was in my life for 7 years. Absolute Scum. But he was the only person who would show up in person for me. I needed to be held. I was so out of my head and I still had no friends in my life…just people on the internet.… So again, this familiar situation: I just let him use me so I could have literally anyone there. The social and emotional isolation was killing me and I was convinced I was in love. He felt like home. He kept telling me we would be together if I waited. That he loved me. That I was the Key! I was the only time he was happy. The reality was he wouldn’t speak to me during the week. He would just show up on a Friday or Saturday night when he felt like it, from 1am to 3am…literally show up with his dick out to fuck me…very often wouldn’t speak to me when he was there…then he would leave and that was what I considered my relationship and love. It was about 2 years into our “relationship” that the truth slowly started to surface that he was in a long term relationship and he lived with her….

The details of how twisted he is and how he manipulated my daddy issues is disgusting. How he used neglect to keep me working so hard for him to be there and begging for his attention….really sick.

He felt like home which is the worst part. He was exactly like home.

It took me three years at the doughnut shop to get emotionally stabilized enough to make a plan for next steps. I was too emotionally fragile to go back to corporate work or be in an office environment. I knew I wanted to go to massage school and I really thought it could be an answer for me even though Mary Jane and mom had previously shamed and mocked me when I said I wanted to go. Mom didn’t think I could be anything better than a waitress. She told me to stop complaining that I hated my work and just go do it.

It was around this time that I had to move out of the apartment because they raised the rent by double on my sweet apartment and I found my way into squatting in my Art studio, where I have been for the past 7 years.

This studio has been so needed and healed me in so many ways. It is private enough to have a complete mental collapse and since it was a former isolation tank/jail… Nobody can get in here….bars over the windows and a steel door…so, I could sleep at night for the first time in years. The rent is crazy affordable which allowed me to go to school and later afford activities to try to learn social skills and be a real person in the world…. This place is my everything.

When I had my first art show… consisting of the photos that I took when I was living in my car. One of the ways I survived and changed my paradigm to get out of the car alive was that I would walk around and task myself with Looking through the eyes of Love. I would try to find one thing each day that I could see beauty in so I could continue to see good in the world…thus my collection of flower photos that I maintain to this day as my gratitude practice.

Mom picked up the phone and called me the night of my show.

(Mind you, she has never been there for me. Over the years since she kicked me out I think we have talked on the phone maybe 10 times. There have been years where she refused to give me her phone number…she made a game of it for years…I would email and ask for it she would say she was going to give it to me in her reply but never would. Then she finally did and a week later she changed it again. Psycho. Another time I can remember a time we talked on the phone and I ended by saying I love you and she was silent and struggled to say it back. Whats incredible is that she has always pretended to be someone who knows me and knows whats going on in my life and talks about it with such authority. This is a narcissistic abuser in action. What she was doing was scanning my social media and whatever scraps of information she could get and twisting it into whatever story she needed to support her storyline about me being a problem child and a fuck up and what a wonderful mother she is so she could continue to live in denial. She cant face the past and she has never done any work to own her part or apologize. So, now Ive cut her off. She does things now like call the place where I get my mail and had the people who run the PO box office tell me my mother called and she is worried about me and she asked them for whatever information they had on me -so I had to get a new PO Box place where the owners have English as a distant 2nd language-  or she will go through my friends list on social media and contact people to see if they will keep tabs on me for her and share her story about what a problem I am and how she is just a loving mother who I have scorned and of course people believe her. She said the magic word: Mother. Nobody would suspect what kind of Mother she actually is and they see me all angry, regressed emotionally like a child and so fucked up and struggling in the world so she must me right about me, yeah? Text book actions when you try to break away from a Narcissist)

So…I get into the studio and Im all set up for my show and she called me to say this: “So, youre having an art show huh? You think youre so great. Youre still alone though aren’t you? (the mean girl was jealous that I somehow retained a sense of self and did something neat to be proud and again, she wanted to punish me…the woman is demented.) You know, the longest relationship you’ve ever had is with that damn dog.” And then she laughed at me. Made some shit comment about my basement studio “not having air” and some other bullshit and we ended the call. My party guests were arriving. My self-confidence was missing in action for the rest of my night.   Nice, right? That’s my mom.

Shortly after I get in to the Studio Milo got sick. Really really sick. As I promised him from day one, I would never let him suffer for my own selfish reasons…. So, I rented a car, took him to the vet and had him put down. The love of my life and my great protector. This sweet soul that was my constant source of love and hope for 14 years. When I posted on my facebook thread about his passing, mom commented that she was devastated at her loss. Because, you know… Milos death, this dog that she wanted me to throw away, was about how it impacted HER.  …yeah….ok.

I want to mention out of the context of a clear timeline that somewhere in here I trained for and ran two Tough Mudders. They are 12 mile courses with 20 really fucking hard obstacles. They are designed to be run with a team. I ran them both solo because nobody wanted to join me. On the days that I went to the events, neither my Trainer or the man I was so in love with, Thomas, sent me as much as a good luck text to wish me well or acknowledge my accomplishment. My previously 215 pound ass had shrunk to 140 pounds and, at 40 years old ran a team event solo and made it through in TWO AND A HALF HOURS completing every single obstacle, no excuses…. And nobody who should have been excited and invested in my success said a word.

I was still invisible. I still did not matter. I was still not celebrated by the people who should have been there for me.

I want to point this out: Even I did not think I mattered or what I was doing was noteworthy. I was still so checked out and erased to myself that it didn’t click in my head that my life and all that I was doing and surviving was me doing the impossible.

My friend Luke (who I met online dating but I knew we were meant to be solid friends for life) made a point to come with me to the first Tough Mudder. He spent the entire day out there and he took photos of me… He is the reason that I can now reflect on what I did and actually SEE MYSELF. That gift is immeasurable. Luke evidenced me. Im here today as a whole person in part because of him.  Also of note, the transition time between the apartment and the studio: Luke let me stay with him. He kept me safe and he was my sounding board and my true friend. I have nothing but the deepest most heartfelt love and respect for him. His story is equally harrowing and he is a miracle in action. Thank you Luke. I love you. Youre in my inner circle for life.

Now that Milo was gone and I was feeling somewhat more stabilized as a human, I knew it was time to make my career plan and try to get into massage school. Here is the next great stroke of luck in my lifetime: I went to Discovery Point and I talked to the women that run the school I explained my situation and that I was completely broke. They let me go to school for free in those 9 months with the understanding that I would clean the school on the weekends, make what payments I could as I went along and work out a payment plan immediately after graduation and that they would hold my diploma until that was complete.  OH SWEET MERCY.

My days during those 9 months were 17 hours long. I would manage the café in the morning 5am to 1pm, go to the gym to lift and run from 2 to 4, then to school from 5 to 10pm…all the while walking to get to each place. I was getting something like 12 miles a day. I did it. I made my 9 months of cleaning the school and keeping my life on track ( no cheering section, nobody doing laundry, cooking, keeping bills paid or there to comfort me but me: Whats new?) , I passed my exam and I was on track to move my life forward.

I feel like there should have been a celebration when I graduated because that’s fucking astounding…. but, hey… nothing happened, nobody in my life said a word of congratulations about it. Surprise.

I live alone. I have no friends beyond those that exist on the computer, acquaintances from community, and a few co workers that I have hung out with from time to time and I always make a big deal about that on social media which gives the illusion that I have people, but I really dont. My only contact with others is at work. I go home to an empty room and there is no support or comfort. Its really impossible to describe to people who have people what it is like to live with this constant isolation and utter lack of emotional intimacy and how it eats you alive…but this has been my life.

People who don’t understand tell me to get a dog or volunteer or pay for therapy for companionship. That’s a cruel tone deaf response. People need people and it is reasonable to want to be loved, intimately, from the outside in. What I want is to simply matter, and be loved and valued, and have someone who is there without having to do something to receive that…..

Because I have yet to be understood when I talk about it, I have for the most part stopped talking about my isolation that is to this day very real for me.

Im so lonely I just want to die. Whats new.

In the next year, I was waiting tables still and somehow managed to pay off $10k for my license… on a year where I only made $24k. again, no celebration when I told my co workers about it…. I thought it was a big deal.

During that year I went to the doctor and discovered that I was literally malnourished. I was pushing it too hard with working out and keeping everything on track and my personal trainer wasn’t actually reading the food journal I sent him each night… so I got pneumonia as well….but just kept going.

I also got my Personal Training Cert and my Nutrition Counseling cert that year and started working as a Personal Trainer while I looked for a Massage job. Things were lightening up for me. The tremendous crushing weight of my entire life was lightening up.

But the reality of who my Trainer was and what a fraud he was came to the light. He was sleeping with some of his clients and I have a laundry list of unethical things he, and his business partner, were doing. When I held him accountable that was the last straw for him. He was sick to death of weathering my PTSD and how fucked up and sick I was and how fucked up I was over Thomas all the goddamn time… and additionally I was calling out all the ways he was unethical: I was bad for business. I was bad for him in the fitness community.

He kept gaslighting me to try to get me to leave but that was my community for 5 years and I didn’t know what to do…….So, Matt did whats guys do: Shes crazy… and shit talked me throughout the fitness community.  He kicked me out of his gym and I now have no gym to work out at and no trainers willing to work with me. Thanks Matt! Super appreciate you!

I maintained my own lifting program for another year but honestly, I was in it for the community and sense of belonging that I never had before in my life. Without that and with Matt shit talking me in the background so I had no support elsewhere my program started to slip…. Add to that, I had begun  working full time in massage and my shoulder got burnt out. I have a repetitive stress injury from my Amazon days that was made worse at Tough Mudder when I got my arm yanked nearly out of its socket in an obstacle… so, Lifting started to fade… and honestly, I was burnt out on the regiment of it all. I needed a break. I deserved a huge break.

I think it was right around 2014 when Mom had me come to Houston for Thanksgiving as though we are friends or she was a Mom. The highlights of that visit include her telling me the reason I wasn’t welcome in Houston during the Recession was because her husband Rumi forbade it.

(I forgot to mention that all through the years of her being with Rumi she has painted this picture of him being physically and emotionally abusive. That she was hiding money to escape him and what a horror he is. She had some secret email account that she sent me emails from at one point and told me that she was trying to hack his email to see who he was having affairs with or some other drama….. but you know if you ask Jim2 who his best friend is, its Rumi…apparently they text all the time…so, you know…she loves to lie and paint these horrific pictures of who people are to support whatever her manipulation is to get sympathy or whatever pay off)

Anyway, While I was in Houston visiting her she was acting like everything was normal and fine and that I had just made up whatever it was that I went through during the Recession. She reminded me that since I “left home” at 18 she has had to give me something like $20k in support and implied what a burden I am and how I always have my hand out. She has kept track of the financial support she gave me as a parent and wanted me to feel like shit for needing her. Cool….

Another example of how mentally deranged she is: While I was there we went out to lunch. Mind you, I have maybe $100 to my name at that time. I offered to pay for lunch at this fast food place and after we ordered she commanded me to go pick a table. So I got a booth with a chair. I sat on the booth side so I was facing the café and could see her when she came out of the restroom… I waved her over and she sat in the chair. Unbeknownst to me, the booth side made me taller than the chair side…. She got this twisted angry look and became livid that I thought I was better than her. Paying for lunch and sitting above her like that….. The next day Mom and Rumi started playing a really fun game where they forgot my name and kept calling me “Savannah” (my niece) for the remainder of the time I was there …. You know… because at 44, they saw me as a child. Nothing like a little game of erasing your daughter’s person hood and replacing it with infantilism to let your daughter know you really see her and respect her.

I really hope this is making clear why I have a strict no contact in place with her that I will never change.

Now its 2017 and I get hired at my dream job. The Spa that I am at is beautiful. My co workers are the best. I make really fine money. My mental health is slowly coming together. I got Thomas out of my life and have enough mental clarity now to really see him for who he is.  I had spent yet another holiday season alone and the isolation was killing me, as per usual…so I decided that the best thing for me to do to help pull me out of my PTSD and stop being so scared to be seen or heard would be to go to music school…. Learn how to make friends for the first time in my adult life and be with people who were not my co workers. Try to trust people again. Try to trust that I could be liked for who I am….though rejection has been a very prevalent theme in my life… Try to learn some social skills that I missed out on basically my entire life.

How to simply hang out and play….was brand fucking new to me. Music school was really really really hard… not to mention I have no musical ability and I get triggered by stress pretty quickly and freeze… but I knew it was the right thing to do to reparent the kid inside me who never learned to make friends or be in activities with others and who wanted to play drums…. So hell yeah. I did it.

Thank you to Katy,Tracy,Melissa,and Kiyan for coming out to see a couple of those shows and being there to support me. You have no idea how much that meant to me.

I thought if I could make friends there I would have people to go out with and maybe could have a chance to meet a man and have a relationship… but all the women there were married with children and had little interest in going out at night, and I still wasn’t fully integrated as a Self yet… so that was a bust.

Music school was really me making up for my 20s and 30s when I should have been out at shows and hanging with friends and making art and and dating but instead I was being mentally tortured by my entire life. I gave it a good shot, but Im a mixed media artist not a musician and that’s really that. I have to take it in stride: Bless my heart for trying. Thank you to all my bandmates for being so kind and supportive of me and for being stellar humans

I was in my first year of Music school when I met the most amazing man, Joe. He was magical. He honestly loved me for me and I loved him right back. It was fast and deep and I felt so completely seen and wanted by him and OH MY GOD I NEEDED THAT FOR SO LONG. He made incredible things happen and took me on dates that made me feel like a Queen…. But Joe was terminally ill and two months later took his own life. I was in shock again….but kept going as I do.

Also out of context of timeline: When I got into that sweet little apartment I would go down to Edge of the Circle which was just a couple blocks away and get Tarot readings from Raven and Kiyan. I didn’t know how to simply ask for friendship so I would buy Tarot readings to have someone to talk to. These two helped me so much in so many ways…through their compassion and through helping me develop my Self and my skills. Over and over again these two have shown up as real people who have treated me with integrity. People who genuinely care about me and support me in my developing personhood. Ive made it through because of them and so many others along the way.

The shitty thing about being knocked out of your self is that even though you have people around you who care, you often cant see it or feel it and like a dick minimize what people are doing for you because the all-consuming feeling that nobody is there is so much larger than the gentle loving efforts of those around you…. And what happens: you push away the people who are there for you because they have self-respect and youre unwittingly being a dick. I want to say Im really sorry about this because I know for sure Ive done this.

Also out of context of timeline: Somewhere in here I started working in Tarot and caught a lucky break and got hired at Percys to be their Reader. Huge shout out to Krista who made that so possible for me. That Tarot night did more for my sense of Self and well being than I can explain and I was a success there largely because Krista made it so beautiful and kept that night going for me.

I also want to say Thank you to Tracy, Katy, and of course Brian who were my friends and co workers at the RowHouse Café… through those early massage school years. Endless support and encouragement from these guys, even when I was too fucked up to really receive it or reflect it back. Im really lucky to have met you and have had you in my life.

It was right around the solar eclipse and the night before that hurricane hit and flooded Houston and moms house got flooded that I emailed her a long list of things she had done that hurt me and explained that I would be taking time away from her and Id let her know when we could speak again. The next morning after I sent that email I again felt puppet mastered…. But this time by the little kid inside me… I literally woke up, jumped out of bed and started to dance. I was filled with glee. I was amazed by myself. I don’t know where that came from except to say that the kid inside me was OVERJOYED to be free of her.

In the coming years I kept proving to myself that I wont let her back in and that Im safe now… and as I have been staying true to this practice of not letting her, or anyone like her, back in my life… I have become happier and more whole as a human being…. More capable of making good choices in friends and finances….

She made an attempt to contact me around the holidays this year. I saw her call but let it go to voice mail. The message she left was something to the tune of her wanting to know if I had forgiven her yet and gotten over it. …See, because its about me and what I need to do because its my damage that is the problem here…. Nothing had changed with her. It was still my fault. No apology. No self reflection. Had I forgiven her yet. For fucks sake: I will never forgive her.  

I have learned to celebrate myself, take my self on vacations and to my great delight I had friends who spent time with me and took care of me!!!!!! Incredible!!!!!, give myself the compassion and nurturing that I always wished I had and reasonably should have had from my family. I have been working on being able to see the love that is there for me from the people that I have in my life, though I still struggle with that.  I have been working so hard on Self Love, Self Respect, Healthy boundaries, creating safety and stability in my life in all way and I know that Im doing great work because my inner me, those little kids inside of me that needed a parent are really responding to the parenting Im giving them…. Check this out:

A month or so after I declined her call I was out at the café in my neighborhood, having a treat and a coffee and doing some writing. I was sitting at the table and this incredible feeling came over me as though a golden light was shining on me and I could see it glittering down on me. I started laughing and crying like when you cum really hard and youre filled with ecstasy and bliss. And then I had a vision of being in a hospital room that was in the forest… it was just two walls of the room and then the woods…I could see deer and birds. In the hospital bed there was a person in a full body cast. The cast had moss growing on it and tiny sprouts of pine trees. The Doctor walked in to the room to check on the patient. I was both the Doctor and the Patient. I told myself: Hey, its time to get you out of there. And I grabbed my circle saw and started to cut my cast from end to end and crack to open like a sarcophagus. I told myself Welcome Back! We are so glad you are here!!! Go slow, take your time getting up. No rush.

I was so elated. I walked home immediately. Upon arriving at my studio I had another vision of all the ages of myself, down to the youngest and up to the oldest and wisest all linking hands. I recognized these women as my Sisters/MySelf… all of us agreed that the next would watch out for the next and that nobody would ever hurt us again. SOUL RECLAMATION.

For the first time in my life I am here, in this body, in this present moment. The first time in my life I am ME. Im currently 6 months in to my actual LIFE. THIS IS ME. I AM HERE. OH MY GOD. I MADE IT.

Yes now, of course, the world is ending and my career in massage is tenuous at best and I might be fucked again…. But so not worried because honestly, Ive survived worse with less. So I will figure this out and keep myself alive, housed and fed.

Over the years my attempts to talk it out with Mom were pointless… she would erase my feelings and angrily tell me that it was hard on all of us. She would hold no space for me and just be my mom and have some compassion for her baby girl. Nope: It was hard on all of us so stop complaining… but see, I was a child and they were my parents and that was my family and I had no choice…. So really, at this point, Im done. Im better off on my own.

I don’t know what else to say other than those yearly years were tremendously bad for everyone in my family, yes. I can now at this time in my life see and understand why everyone did what they did…. That my parents were also victims of abuse from their parents and all that and yeah, I have compassion and Im really sorry they had to go through that….But it doesn’t make it ok or make mom someone I will let back in my life. I mean, I went through it and Ive dedicated my lifes work to helping others heal and I try to be so good to everyone around me so…. No excuses. And, I still have questions like: Fuck, why did dad never go to jail? Im guessing it was about the money…..and really, how did nobody in my family see that I needed help?

Anyway… Ive done epic amount of self work to be here today as a whole person and really change my reality to one where I have value and can share love. Im still working on it… My social anxiety is still the worst. I can barely form words into sentences when Im out in public and I dont have a job to do as my role to play....but you know, I keep trying and its easier and keeps getting easier… and I have amazing friends like Brad to have mini adventures with… and I have my Studio to do my art in and now that Im feeling so much more whole as a person I think I might actually see some work through to completion that I can be proud of… and I have a job that I love and Im getting training for some other skills to expand my skillset and I feel that things can only get better from here so

I feel so lucky to be alive and so fucking grateful to be me and I really like myself. It’s a miracle. All things are possible if you just remember: LOVE IS THE KEY and keep moving in that direction.

That’s my experience and now you know.

[tetedurfarm]

vincedakota replied to your post “i am excellent and naming animals and you should ask me what your...”

i cant send asks and this is completely unrelated but if you want to crunch an hour or two. whats your opinion of Every Arba Breed

you asked for it get ready for some Unpopular Onions

american: have doofy faces but i like em a lot.  tried to get into whites several years ago but breeders kept ghosting me :(  not as rare as ppl think but nobody likes whites it’s only blues at shows.

american chinchilla:  bruh why do we have like three whole chinchilla breeds i don’t like chins that much in general why do we need three whole breeds of just chinchilla

american fuzzy lop:  all the worst parts of lionheads and holland lops in one little package

american sable:  never seen one in real life but i want to touch

argente brun:  don’t understand why the argentes aren’t more popular, look at ‘em.  they’re cool as heck.  give me one.

belgian hare:  do you love suffering?  get a hare

beveren:  i think they’re ugly sorry.  suddenly got rly popular and idk why.  remind me of basset hounds but with blue eyes.

blanc de hotot:  absolute showstoppers.  the supermodel of rabbits.  why can’t i have any someone please give me a hotot i will pay lots of money

britannia petite:  genuinely make me uncomfortable to look at.  the big eyes and tiny body...they are gremlins and i do not like them

californian:  boring but a good meat rabbit.  what can i say they have a niche and are good at it

cavies:  are not rabbits and make bad noises

champagne d’argent:  the only breed i ever seen enter fur shows here lol.  i wanna work with them to make silvery every other breed :)

checkered giant:  Big Angery.  only breed i’ve consistently been told not to ask to pet.

cinnamon:  really cool lookin rabbits but every feral in issaquah looks just like ‘em so either a cin breeder had an oopsie or they aren’t that rare

creme d’argent:  i’ve only seen ONE irl and it was like buttered toast.  i love them.  someone please breed them.

dutch:  the only rabbit allowed to be visibly VM (hotots are vm too but you can’t really tell.)  really cute little meat bricks.  the holstein of rabbits, in that when i think of a generic rabbit i think of a dutch.

dwarf hotot:  more popular than their commercial sized cousins and honestly it’s a RIGHT SHAME.

english angora:  that is a mop.  apparently betty chu is driving people out of the breed cos hers are all too good :’)  the one we have is bonkers and i don’t like him.

english lop:  hardly should be able to call themselves lops.  sure they got big ears (which i don’t like) but to me a lop should have a brick face and they don’t and it makes me sad.

english spot:  suuuper attractive animals, esp the goldens.  if i hated myself enough to get into a running breed i would go for english i think.

flemish giant:  BIG.  FRICKIN.  EARS.  my husband’s fav breed.  he likes the red ones.  i have three growing out in my yard rn and they’re so cute.

florida white:  for some reason they are becoming really popular with homesteaders?  but i have never seen one in real life.  really just kind of boring but apparently good for meats.

french angora:  i don’t like anything i have to groom

french lop:  BIG.  FLOPPY.  EARS.  BIG.  POTATO.  FACE.  truly the epitome of a lop.  can’t wait til i get mine.

giant angora:  ah yes let’s make MORE wool to groom no thanks

giant chinchilla:  this is a chin just Big.  boring, next

harlequin:  fan favourite of my fur clients.  if you hate yourself, show these.  ofc i’m a sucker for calico things so i have a bunch but do you see me putting them on a show table?  no.

havana:  very good little dudes.  husband likes the black ones.  i can only justify one or two itty bitty breeds so i don’t have any.

himalayan:  the stupidest looking animal i have ever laid eyes on and i love them so much.  they spark immense joy.  also very very sweet if my two are anything to go by.

holland lop:  oversaturated in both pet and show circles.  there’s just so many.  the holland rings take HOURS to get through at shows.  they are very cute but so far in general their personalities leave something to be desired.

jersey wooly:  i hear they’re little demons but other than that i don’t know much about em

lilac:  it’s a rabbit, but purple!  never seen one in person.

lionhead:  literally every byb pet rabbit is mixed with a lionhead.  my first rabbit was a lionhead and he’s evil so there’s that.

mini lop:  my first breeding rabbits were mini lops and they have a special place in my heart.  but i went with french over minis cos Big Chungus.

mini rex:  take a rex and make it small and able to produce peanuts.  5/10 not enough fur

mini satin:  i have only ever handled one and it was enough for me!  awful awful little creatures but very nice fur.

netherland dwarf:  disgOSTINgly cute but oversaturated and also dwarfs.  sorry.

new zealand:  yep that’s a rabbit

palomino:  it’s a rabbit but YELLOW.  apparently the breed joel salatin breeds but his are all vm-y and he THROWS AWAY THE FURS i hate it.  idk they’re cute i guess.

polish:  it’s small alright

rex:  supermodel of rabbits but wow is showing them the worst.  rex people think they’re better than everyone else and it’s very tiring.  so good for touching though.  pelts sell for good prices.

rhinelander:  very good 10/10 if they weren’t hard to find i’d consider them as well if i were gonna go for a runner

satin:  considered getting into them but decided not to.  the white ones look like they peed on themselves :(

satin angora: we have one and i have no complaints except that it makes wool

silver: someone apparently breeds them around here and it’s neat that chestnut is a colour they come in considering every other silver breed is like NO AGOUTI ONLY SELF

silver fox:  this is the rabbit literally every homesteader has now and i don’t get it.  they’re pretty and big but what a waste of good pelts by raising them for meat only.  anyway they only come in one official colour (with the three general self colours in COD) so i find them boring otherwise.  i can’t tell ours apart at all ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

silver martin:  never seen one in person but they’re pretty.  silver fox ppl hate them cos they “don’t even have a real silvering gene.  they’re just chinchilla otters.”

standard chinchilla:  WHY DO WE HAVE THREE OF THESE

tan:  smaller than anticipated, but very pretty.  why don’t more breeds have this colour.  what even IS this colour.  is it related to otter?  IS it otter just without white?  i’m intrigued

thrianta:  photos really do not do that colour justice.  kinda boring cos they only come in red but boy is it RED.

velveteen lop:  technically still in COD but my opinion is the same as english lop.  i don’t like their faces or the ears, sorry.

[accio-kitty-malfoy]

A Breath of Fresh Hair

https://archiveofourown.org/works/24633025/chapters/59552158

Chapter Two: Friends, Reunited.

 Charlie had arrived late into the previous night. Harry had heard him being greeted by his mother and father. He could see in his mind Arthur taking the luggage out of Charlie’s hands and Molly replacing it with a cup of tea. Harry fell to sleep with their indistinguishable chatter floating in and out of his ears. The morning after he was able to take in Charlie’s appearance. The last time he’d seen him was about four months previously and he was just a little bit more tanned, his muscles were a little bigger and his silky hair was that little bit longer. Harry’s fingers twitched at the thought of tidying it up a little bit and feeling the weight and shine of it in his fingers. Envy also flitted in the pit of his stomach. He loved cutting and styling others’ hair, but his was still an uncontrollable mop. Charlie was also clearly covering up yet another new tattoo. Harry thought that Ginny looked the most like Charlie out of all the brothers; both of them had a somewhat androgynous beauty and natural glow about them.

“You alright mate?” Ron’s concerned face came into focus over his cup of tea.

“Yeah, just thinking I guess.” Harry smiled reassuringly at Ron and began to eat the omelette that had just been placed down in front of him. It was delicious.

 Bill and Fleur arrived just after all the breakfast things had been cleared away. The heat had come back with a vengeance and Fleur looked like she was melting with her huge baby bump. A gigantic smile kept breaking out on Bill’s face every time he looked at her. Fleur was on Maternity Leave from her position as a healer at St Mungo’s and she was due to give birth a couple of weeks after Ron and Hermione’s wedding. When they’d told the family, Molly could barely contain her excitement. She’d already knitted the baby enough clothes for the first year of its existence. Harry chatted with the family for a while, enjoying the busy hustle and bustle of people having several different conversations at once, people flitting in and out of the kitchen doing jobs and Bill and Fleur’s Basset Hound Philippe playing with Charlie’s Central Asian Shepherd Hound Lucy.

 Ginny was buzzing with nervous energy next to Harry. They’d decided that Harry was going to cut their hair the next day. They were going for a style that was short at the sides with some length at the top so they could style it if they wanted to. It was currently tied up in its usual messy bun and Harry couldn’t wait to get his hands on it. Ginny had spoken to Hermione about it, worried that the drastic change would detract attention from her at the wedding and put it on Ginny instead. Hermione had just smiled and wrapped Ginny in a hug, assuring them that they should do whatever made them comfortable. Harry could tell that Ginny was worried about how her family would react. Harry knew that they had no reason to be. They’d all been perfectly accepting when Charlie had come out as gay and then later on as asexual, but he could also understand Ginny’s fears. They’d also been the only little girl of the family for a long time. Ginny was also super nervous about the upcoming trials for the Holyhead Harpies. They’d been training non-stop since they’d been asked to try out the previous month. The try-outs were still a month off, but Ginny wanted to position of Chaser so badly that all of their fiery determination had been poured into practicing and training. Harry reached under the table and squeezed their hand, shooting them a small smile, and they seemed to calm down a fraction. Ginny jumped slightly as an owl tapped frantically on the kitchen window. It was Pig with a letter. They ran over to the window to let the frantic owl in and carefully untied the letter before giving the tiny owl a treat and rushing upstairs.

“Gin’s been getting a lot of letters recently,” Ron remarked, looking up from the sketch book in front of him and tucking a pencil behind his ear. “I wonder who they’re from.”

 The Weasley kids and Harry decided to go out for a friendly game of quidditch before lunch, Fleur and Hermione watching from a blanket set up under a large parasol. Ron, Bill, and Harry were on one tea; Charlie, Ginny and George were on the other. The game soon became fierce and sweat was dripping off them all before they’d finished. Ron had become a pretty good keeper, but he was no match against Ginny. They were relying on Harry to catch the snitch, but the game came to an end before that happened when Arthur came out with a tray of his home brewed cider and two gooseberryaids for Ginny and Fleur. They were all parched and the cold beverages felt like heaven as they lounged in the shade, sipping and chatting. Molly was soon walking out of the house towards them, lugging the picnic that her and Ron had prepared the day before. It was spread out on blankets and everyone ate ravenously, and silence fell upon them for a while. When a lot of the food had been consumed and people were picking at bits that were left, conversation started up again and turned towards the upcoming wedding.

“Are you excited Hermione?” Fleur asked, resting her glass on her bump and shifting to try and get comfortable again.

“I am. There’s been so much to plan, but I’ve been so thankful for my mum and Molly helping with the organisation. They’ve been stars.”

“I can’t wait to see your dress, I bet you’re going to look stunning.” Charlie grinned at her. Harry agreed. He wondered what kind of style she’d gone with. For her job at the ministry she usually just wore smart trousers and a blouse and comfy shoes that allowed her to be on her feet as much as she needed to, and around the house she either wore cropped capris and a tank top and cardigan or maxi dresses. She usually either had her hair braided to keep it away from her face or left it natural and wore a thick fabric headband. Comfort and practicality were Hermione’s style, but she always looked effortlessly wonderful.  She smiled back at them and tapped the side of her nose. Ron looked at her adoringly.

 Ron and Hermione got together at the end of the war. There was something about them that just fit. Hermione was strong and independent, and Ron loved that about her. He knew that she could look after herself and he admired her passion and drive. She’d gone back to Hogwarts to study and get the qualifications she needed to get the job she wanted at the Ministry. She threw herself into her studies as a way of dealing with her grief and as a way of proving herself to others. Ron stayed at The Burrow and looked after his mum. He cooked and cleaned on the days that she couldn’t get out of bed and he drew a lot. He would go out for hours walking and drawing landscapes. He drew a portrait of Hermione for their first anniversary and it was one of the most beautiful things that Harry had ever seen. He’d managed to catch her power, calm confidence and wicked mischief whilst also perfectly portraying her soft curves, perfect skin and gorgeous bouncy hair. It really was a masterpiece. After a while he started drawing up plans for buildings that Dean and Seamus were working on. They offered him a position in their business as a partner. He declined, saying he’d rather work freelance, but they would have first dibs on him if they ever needed him. It was tough for the couple at the start of their relationship. They were apart for a lot of it, only seeing each other at weekends and during the holidays, and they were both broken and grieving. They made it work though. The three of them spent the weekends and holidays that Hermione was back from Hogwarts looking for ways to fid her parents and restore their memories. It took them seven and a half months, but they managed it with the help of the rest of the family and the teachers at Hogwarts. Harry blinked a couple of times, picking up a handful of blueberries and anchoring himself back in the present. Ginny squeezed his shoulder supportively and left to go and find more cider for the rest of the group and gooseberryade for themselves.

 Neville, Dean and Seamus arrived later on that day. They were going to spend the couple of days before the wedding putting together gazebos and marquees to give people places to shelter from the heat. Neville was in charge of living flower arrangements, including flowers that glowed with soft light when it went dark that would provide lighting in the evening. The next couple of days were bound to be full of stress, work and excitement. None of them minded, however, as they’d been promised Molly and Ron’s cooking. Harry was looking forward to watching everyone creating and working with the things they loved. It was fascinating to him to see people so passionate about things. He was charged with odd jobs and then styling the hair of the bridal party, which included Hermione the bride, Ginny as the maid of honour and Fleur and Luna as the bridesmaids. He couldn’t wait to see what they all looked like after he’d finished, especially when they were all in their beautiful clothes.

 After a while, Charlie, Bill and Fleur went back into the house and Harry, Ron, Hermione, Ginny, Dean, Seamus and Neville sat reminiscing about their days at Hogwarts. Neville had become a professor of Herbology at Hogwarts the year before after his Grandmother had passed away and was looking forward to going back after the summer. He adored his job; he swore when he took up the position that no child under his care would ever feel the way he did at school and Harry knew that he would stick to his word. He also wrote a plant advice column for the Quibbler and dabbled in landscaping and flower arranging in his spare time, if he ever had any. He’d been ecstatic when Ron and Hermione had asked him to do the flowers for their wedding. Dean and Seamus had brought Noodle along with them and the three dogs were bounding around the garden, making a game of who could make the biggest splashes in the pond. The group sat watching and laughing at the dogs, making bets on which one would run up to them and shake water all over them first.

 “Pizza?” Ron’s question caused a flurry of excitement amongst the friends and they all gave him their orders for him to make on his outdoor pizza oven. The pizza was crisp, the cheese was gooey, and Harry was thankful that he was Ron’s best friend; the guy knew how to cook. After they were all so stuffed with pizza that they didn’t think they could move, Seamus conjured a fire pit and Ron went to look for marshmallows. They sat late into the night drinking and talking and being at piece with the world. They were all excited about the wedding and all of the things that were planned for after it, but after a while they all began struggling to keep their eyes open and decided that it was time to retire to the house, ready for the insane amount of work that they would be doing in the following couple of days.

 Harry went to sleep with a full stomach and a full heart.

[urdbell18]

A Seed Hidden in the Heart Chapter 19: The One With the Dog

Wow I'm shocked that I was able to finish this chapter but I did! Yay me! But speaking up as you guys know two of the busiest retail holidays are coming up, Thanksgiving and Christmas. It means that I'm not going to have as much time as before to write my chapters so if my updates are a little slow that's why and I apologize. I just wanted to give you guys fair warning and thanks for understanding. Enjoy!

In the summer months Zelda took a job at the local college. The position was temporary, ending just before regular school started once again but it gave her something to do and a little more money over the summer than the packet that she got when school ended. When she collected her last paycheck Mr. Hawthorne said in so many words that she was getting a little bonus because of the several high scores that her students received. It turned out making her students taking that college level test paid off for her in the end. Mr. Hawthorne took all the credit of course. Zelda couldn’t bring herself to care anymore. Her work schedule was Monday and Friday mornings and Monday and Wednesday afternoon so the earliest she’s ever had to go in was nine and the latest she’d be there was almost 5. It worked well enough for her.

The time that she was at the school Vida was with Mary. Together she and Mary came up with activities that they could do with Vida over the summer. The aquarium and the zoo were on the list because they were things that Vida did and loved and wanted to do again but there were others like some crafts, swimming, and a small local theme park, Vida was excited about that one the most. Bust most of the time Mary kept it simple, spending time at home reading or going to the park. They spent a lot of time at the park. Sometimes Zelda would join them for lunch, usually on Mondays or Fridays but she could pull it off on Wednesdays if she wanted to. Wednesdays were usually the days that Mary and Vida went to Zelda, they would have lunch in the cafe before Zelda had to go to her next class.

It was during one park outing where Vida and Mary met him.

It was early June. The weather was nice but not stifling like July and August would be. Everything was still vibrant with color, the grass, the trees, and the flowers, all brightly colorful swaying in the gentle summer breeze. With it still being nice Mary and Vida took a walk.

There was a jogging path right next to the park and when it was nice like it was that day they walked the path. Vida liked looking at the flowers and Mary just like the soft exercise and time with Vida. Vida was curious about everything, Mary told her what she could like what a certain flower or tree was called and Mary loved how Vida would stop and watch the movements of the current bug or small creature, mostly squirrels, that caught her attention. On that day they were halfway through the walking path when a rustling of leaves from a nearby shrub caught their attention. Out of fear Vida moved behind Mary as the rustling grew louder until a dog appeared out  into the open.

The dog was between medium and small. It was long like a dachshund or a corgi but just slightly taller than either of those breeds. The dog had all the markings of the hound breed, short fur with a white belly, muzzle, and paws and brown and black patches all along its body but Mary couldn’t tell if it was a beagle or a basset hound. The dogs muzzle was too short for either of those breeds but its ears were very beagle-ish. The dog saw them and its tail starts wagging, causing his whole body to wiggle, mouth open to let its tongue roll out to one side.

“It’s a puppy!” Before Mary could stop her Vida was running to the dog. Though it seemed friendly Mary knew that could change in a snap but this dog stayed friendly. It ran in circles around Vida before standing on its hind legs licking anywhere he can reach. Vida giggled even as the dog knocked her to the ground. Mary approached the dog with caution, the dog looked at her and sniffed her legs when she was close enough. He craned his neck hoping for some head pats. “Can we keep him Mamma!?”

“We don’t know where he came from.” Taking advantage of the dog butting his head against her hand Mary felt the dog's neck hoping to feel for a collar. She didn’t find one, which didn’t really mean anything but it just meant that it would be harder to get the dog to follow them. Mary took the belt from her jeans and the ribbon from Vida’s dress to fashion a leash and make shift collar. The dog allowed Mary to wrap the belt around its middle, the belt was too thick to hold in place around the dogs short neck. After securing the ribbon to the collar Mary took two tentative steps to see if the dog would follow. He just stood there, wagging his tail like nothing was wrong. “Come here boy.” Mary tried to coax the dog but he didn’t budge. After a few minutes Vida took the slices of watermelon she was saving to lure the dog. It worked, the dogs nose twitched as it tried to keep up with the scent of the watermelon that was in Vida’s hands. Sometimes when the dog was close Vida would let the dog take a bite before moving more away. When she was down to her last slice they made it back to the main opening of the park. What was going on in the large side field gave Mary a good feeling on where the dog came from.

In a field that was sometimes used for soccer was currently holding what looked like a little fair. It was an adoption fair for a local animal shelter. There were dogs of various kinds and sizes in pens and a board with pictures of other animals, like cats and rabbits, that couldn’t be at the event but were also available for adoption. Naturally people flocked the fair, surrounding the pens to awe over the dogs. In the sea of people Mary located a volunteer for the shelter due to the light blue shirts they wore with the shelter name on one side and volunteer on the other. Mary approached a girl who looked to be in her late teens or early twenties with long black hair that she tied back in a ponytail.

“Excuse me.”

“Yes?” The girl turned around and before Mary could ask her next question the girls green eyes lit up at the sight of the dog that was still trying to get the last few bites of watermelon from Vida. “Vinegar Tom! You found him! Thank you so much. He got loose when we were setting up. Bad boy.” Taking a slip leash the volunteer slipped it over the dog’s neck so that Mary could detach the belt.

“Vinegar Tom? That’s an interesting name.”

“Yeah. Sometimes we rename the animals when they come in. I’m a history major and I reviewed the play for a paper I was doing at the time. Vinegar Tom came in on my first day almost a year ago and I don’t know something just felt right about the name.” There was an empty pen not that far away so the volunteer placed Vinegar Tom inside, scratching his head in comfort. “Thank you again for bringing him back. We have a new volunteer who’s never done an adoption fair before and he kind of lost control over a few of the dogs and he slipped away. Actually, now that I think about it Vinegar Tom has never done that before.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Tom’s really sweet but he’s usually not so energetic like this. I always think that he would fit in so well with a single person or a small family but whenever he’s considered for adoption he just… stands there or lays there not doing anything. It’s why he keeps getting turned down every time. It’s kind of depressing.” Vinegar Tom was pressed against the wire of the pen licking Vida’s fingers.

“We best be going. Vida.” Vida turned to her, she looked reluctant to move away from her new friend.

“Bye Vinegar Tom.” That’s when Vinegar Tom started to whine. He sat down on his hind legs and looked at both Mary and Vida with his big brown eyes. Vida in turn looked at Mary, jutting her lip out in a quivering pout. Between the pathetic whines of the dog and the look that Vida fixed her Mary could feel her resolve slowly dissolving away.

“What do we do to adopt?” The soft look that the volunteer gave Mary was matched with the squeal that came from Vida and the happy barks of Vinegar Tom. As Mary filled out the form Vida and Vinegar Tom played, mostly Tom rolling on his stomach while Vida gave him belly rubs. Though Mary loved to make Vida happy and Vinegar Tom was cute a cold feeling tickled in the back of her mind.

Zelda was going to kill her.

_____________________

Zelda arrived home a little after five. She had a staff meeting where all seasonal staff members were given some general info about the short semester. This wasn’t anything new to Zelda but it was necessary. In the end she couldn’t really complain because she got out the same time Hilda got off work that day so she swung by to pick her sister and niece, Sabrina saw some movie with her friends, before heading home. Everything seemed normal, Zelda had just enough time to place her keys on the table before Vida ran into her.

“Mommy! Mommy! Guess what!?” Zelda smiled at her daughter’s enthusiasm. Vida took so much joy out of anything that it truly was a guess on what made her so happy this time.

“What Vida?”

“We got a puppy!”

“You what?” Zelda might not have wanted it to come out so harshly, but out of everything that she expected that wasn’t one of them. As if on cue a dog came bounding into the entrance hall. He lost his footing on the hardwood floors, slipping and half flopping onto the floor, but it didn’t stop him. He came to a full stop in front of Zelda, sitting almost at her feet and wagging his tail so hard his whole body was wiggling. Though Zelda looked at the dog dumbfounded Hilda and Sabrina awed and surrounded the creature to shower him with affection. “Vida where’s you Mamma.” Vida pointed in the general direction of the kitchen before returning her attention back to the dog. Zelda stormed off not giving the scene before her a second glance, Mary had some serious explaining to do. “You got a dog!?” Mary’s shoulders hunched over and she turned around to face Zelda, whipping her lips from of excess tea. Apparently Zelda surprised her mid sip. Mary placed her cup in the sink before placing them on the counter.

“Don’t be mad.”

“I have every right to be mad. You got a dog without consulting me first.”

“You weren’t there. Vida fixed me with this look.” Mary mimicked the look before continuing. “How was I supposed to say no to that?”

“You’re going to have to because the last thing that I want is for this house to become a glorified petting zoo.”

“It’s not. I doubt something like this is going to happen again. It might sound cliche but I think Vinegar Tom chose us.”

“The dogs name is Vinegar Tom?”

“One of the volunteers is a history major. Anyway, the one day that the dog went against his usual behavior is the day that Vida and I were in the park. The volunteer even said that he showed no interest in anyone except Vida. So here we are.” Zelda sighed through her nose. She really didn’t want the dog but Vida was attached she couldn’t say no now.

“He’s your responsibility.” With that Zelda turned on her heel out of the kitchen. Hilda, Sabrina, and Vida were still in the entryway with the dog. They were throwing some kind of soft toy for the dog to fetch. Zelda just rolled her eyes and went up the stairs to her room. She refused to have any part of this.

___________________________

It has been about a week since Vinegar Tom joined his new family and he could safely say that he’s never been happier. He yawned and stretched before stepping out of his basket. His madam got him his basket along with his toys when he first came and he genuinely loved them. He always made sure that he kept his ball next to his basket and his lamb close to him. He went to his water bowl for a small drink and then rang the small bell that was attached to the door. He didn’t need to go out, he just liked ringing the bell. Satisfied, he left the kitchen to the stairs. There was a lot of them and he climbed them as best as he could. He wasn’t used to stairs but anything to be close to his people. Still learning his way around he used the scent of his people to find their location. When he reached the door he gently pushed it open with his nose. In one bed there was his madam and mistress, he tried to climb up but it was too high. In another bed was his little miss, he went over to her and started to nudge her with his nose. His little miss moved and murmured before she sat up, rubbing one eye.

“Tom!” Taking that as an invitation he climbed into his little miss’ bed. Well, tried, he wasn’t very good at climbing. Little miss got out and helped him, she struggled a little under his weight but it was enough to get him on. Once he was in little miss joined him, laying down. Vinegar Tom did the same, laying his head near the pillow and a stuffed octopus. He gave a contented sigh and fell asleep.

_______________________

Though most of the family was smitten with Vinegar Tom there was one family member he hadn’t won over.

Zelda.

Zelda wanted nothing to do with the dog. She didn’t feed him and refused to walk him or acknowledge his presence. The only thing that she has ever done for the dog was let him out when he was ringing the bell and it was only that one time. All other duties and needs were regulated to Mary. She was the one who agreed to getting the dog she was going to do the brunt of the work. Though she must say she was impressed with the amount of responsibility that Vida showed. She helped Mary feed, walk, and bathe the dog and even learned some commands to help train him. Despite her disinterest Zelda recognized that Vinegar Tom was a good dog. He was fully house trained so they never woke up to any accidents in the house, Hilda even trained him to ring the bell that she tied on the door in the kitchen to be let out. Didn’t chew anything but his own toys, he liked rolling around his ball and squeaking his lamb toy. He listened to what they told him not that he misbehaved often. His only crime in Zelda’s eyes was that he kept trying to climb onto the sofa when she was on it. She didn’t know why he looked at her for attention but she was consistent and kept kicking him off. Keeping herself at arms length worked until one fateful day.

Everyone in her family was busy. Hilda had to work, Sabrina had plans with her friends, and Mary and Vida had a scheduled activity that they would enjoy but Zelda necessarily wouldn’t. Hence why they scheduled it when Zelda had to work. This was of course before they got the dog.

Vinegar Tom had been with them only a couple of days. It was why they, mainly Mary and Hilda, didn’t feel comfortable in leaving him on his own for so long. And with his veterinary check up not for another week they couldn’t enroll him in doggy daycare. There was only one viable option that was available and it was that he went with Zelda.

“Absolutely not!” Zelda abruptly got up from her chair and looked between Mary and Hilda. Apparently, Mary felt like she couldn’t ask Zelda on her own and called for reinforcements. Zelda couldn’t really blame her, she and Mary weren’t fighting but Zelda was adamant in proving her point. Mary wanted the dog she was going to take care of it.

“Zelda it’s just for one day.” Her sister pleaded in that soft tone of her, the one that she uses to try to calm her down with. It worked about 70% of the time. Zelda ranged in her anger a little but she wasn’t backing down.

“No.”

“Come on Zelda what’s the harm?”

“For one it’s against the rules. Animals aren’t allowed unless they are a service animal and I’m not about to commit a criminal offense just because there is no one to watch the dog that I didn’t even want. And before you even ask no I am not going to cancel my class.”

“Zelda it’s just one time. Do this for me and not only would I not ask this of you again but next date night is on me. Please? I would do it myself but the plans that I made with Vida can’t be changed.” Zelda turned her glare onto her girlfriend. Mary was being extremely unfair at that moment. Her expression was soft and her tone was pleading. It was a rare combination and it made Zelda cave in every time. And Vida was thrown in, it was dirty move and sadly, it worked.

“Fine.” Mary smirked and got up to give her a kiss on the check. It was supposed to be on the lips but Zelda turned her head to the side. Mary has not earned that privilege back yet.

And thus here she was now, driving to work with Vinegar Tom in the back seat. Though Zelda couldn’t stop thinking about everything that could go wrong, she could get fired, claw marks in her seats, dog hair EVERYWHERE, the mutt was having the time of his life. After dropping of Hilda at work he got up on his hind legs to look out the window. His breath fogged up the windows, his muzzle was that close to the glass, and his tail was wagging up a storm. There was even drool on the glass when Zelda went to let him out. Sneaking the dog into the building wasn’t that hard, the office that she used was on the first floor and the other teacher that she shared it with taught not only on days that she didn’t work but evenings as well. She had the whole space to herself but to make sure that Vinegar Tom didn’t get into anything he shouldn’t she brought a portable crate to create a temporary pen. Vinegar Tom circled his enclosure but he seemed content with the small water bowl and pillow that Zelda gave him. He was happiest with his lamb, he wiggled in eagerness when Zelda pulled it from the bag that Mary set up for her. He squeaked it a little before settling down near the pillow. The last thing that Zelda set up in Vinegar Tom’s pen was a pee pad, Mary walked him before she left but it was better safe than sorry. By the time that Zelda finished setting everything up it was time for her to head to her lecture. Before leaving she took one last look at the dog. He looked up at her with his big brown eyes and his goofy expression that had everyone in her family in love with but gave Zelda a slight jagged feeling in her stomach.

“Don’t get me fired.” With that Zelda left and acted like nothing was wrong.

________________________

When his mistress returned to her office Vinegar Tom was sleeping peacefully. He woke up when she closed the door behind her. He yawned and stretched before watching his mistress. She set down something before coming over to him. His tail started to wag, he was hoping for some treats or a belly rub for being such a good dog. He was slightly disappointed when all she did was take away the barrier that kept him in one corner of the room. It wasn’t quite what he wanted but he was free! It was something. He explored the best way he knew, by smell. He let his nose guide him but after a while of not finding anything he turned back to his mistress. She was sitting behind something big and wooden. She was looking at something but he couldn’t tell what. Her head was bowed, was she sad? Tom couldn’t let that happen. His lamb made him happy so maybe it would make his mistress happy.

Picking up his lamb he brought it over to his mistress. She didn’t appear to notice him so he got up on his hind legs, using the side of the desk for support. When she still hadn’t noticed him he squeaked his lamb. That got her attention.

“What?” He squeaked his lamb again and wagged his tail. He wanted her to know that it was okay to take it. She just looked at him funny. “What?” This time she turned slightly in her chair giving him a space to place the lamb. He dropped it in her lap. However, instead of being happy she looked even more funny and threw his lamb to some corner. Oh! She was playing with him! She must love fetch too! As fast as his legs could go he went to get his lamb and then brought it back, squeaking it twice so she knew that he got it. She threw it two more times, when he came back the third time she ignored him completely. Oh, she was done playing. That’s okay, he was a bit tired so he’ll take a little rest. He dropped his lamb on the floor and then rested his head next to it. He gave a soft sigh in contentment.

______________________

By the time that Zelda was done  she still had half an hour before Hilda got off work, great. Gathering everything that belonged to the dog she clipped his leash onto his harness and out they went. The dog still showed the same enthusiasm as before though Zelda wished he didn’t, she just cleaned her windows of his drool and there he was fogging and slobbering them up again. With twenty minutes still on her hands Zelda had to figure out what to do about the dog. It was pointless to drive all the way home when she would have to drive right back into town to pick up her sister, it wasted both time and gas, both of which she loathed. She decided to take the dog to the park. She didn’t know how tired Mary was going to be and she had the time so why not suck it up and walk the dog once.

The dog seemed happy about it. His tail wouldn’t stop wagging and he sniffed every tree that he got close to. He wasn’t that much different than Vida in that regard. Now that she thought about it he and Vida were a lot alike. They knew how to listen, could entertain themselves, didn’t get into much trouble, and were very loving and sweet with people they liked and a bit closed off with people they necessarily didn’t like. Maybe that’s why Vida fell head over heels with the dog because Zelda would have known if Vida wanted a pet. Yes, she wasn’t exactly forthcoming with Telling Zelda what she wanted but there were signs that as her mother she was able to pick up. There was nothing. Getting the dog was a completely last minute, spontaneous thing. Maybe that’s why Zelda was fighting so hard. She didn’t like spontaneous change. Yet that explained her relationship with Mary perfectly. She didn’t plan on falling in love with Mary, or moving their relationship so fast that they were living together in such a short time. There was no rational reason other than it just felt right. It’s what Mary felt when she agreed to get the dog, so maybe Zelda could work on changing her attitude towards the dog.

She knew just where to start. Since Vinegar Tom behaved himself so well at her work she decided to get him a special treat. There was a small dog boutique not far from where Hilda worked so Zelda took him inside to let him pick out a treat. She held her breath because there was a possibility that the dog could stick his head in a container and either destroy it or eat everything and take every last dime that she had. But as he sniffed through the selection of treats he didn’t seem interested in any of them until he found one he liked. He pawed at it and then turned to her with that same goofy expression and wagging tail. Zelda paid for it and tucked the trat in her purse, he could have it later after his dinner.

Home was very peaceful. Well, more normal than peaceful, and for that Zelda was grateful. As chaotic and as crowded as their household could be it was theirs and Zelda loved it. Vida wouldn’t stop talking about what she did that afternoon with Mary and they all sat around the table for dinner. That night it was Mary’s turns to wash the dishes, they tried to rotate who did what kind of cleaning. Zelda stuck around, she was finishing the last little bit of wine and it was the first time she could talk to Mary alone. Vinegar Tom was circling her, he barked softly and wiggled as he looked up at her. Zelda instantly knew what he wanted.

“Okay fine.” Zelda tossed him his treat. It was some kind of bone thing that smelled vaguely like barbeque. It was what he wanted and was safe for him so Zelda didn’t give it much thought. Vinegar Tom happily took his treat over to his basket and started to chomp away. Finishing up the last of her wine Zelda placed her glass with the rest of the dishes that haven’t been washed yet which was when she noticed Mary looking at her with a smirk and a gleam in her eye. “Not a word.”

“Well your attitude has certainly changed.” Zelda just huffed and walked out. Mary shook her head and went back to the dishes. Zelda would never say out loud if someone was right, she would stay silent and if she could walk out of the room. Mary smirked and looked at Vinegar Tom, he was halfway through his treat. “She’s warming up to you big guy.” He woofed lightly and went back to his treat.

Later that night Vinegar Tom padded into the living room where Hilda sat in an armchair knitting, and Mary and Zelda sitting on the couch reading. He went over to the couch and climbed up on it. Every other time he did that Zelda instantly kicked him off but instead she, without looking away from her book, took one hand and gave him a few head pats. Mary saw this out of the corner of her eye and smirked. It looked like Vinegar Tom was staying for good.

[seenashwrite]

A Fluff By Any Other Name

Word Count: 1.8K Category: One-shot, Domestic Family Fluff, Husband Dean, Reader Insert Mommy, Sam And Dogs, Practical Jokes, Meet Cute   Rating: Teen & Up Character(s): Dean, Sam, You, a Newborn, a Nurse Pairing(s): Dean + You Warnings: None Author’s Note: *This is a re-post minus tags and links in an effort to get it to show up in searches*; more post-story Overall Summary: Sam arrives at the hospital to meet his newborn niece.

Dean was waiting for Sam in the hallway.

“No flowers?”

“Uh, she hates flowers. Figured I’d ask what she wants for dinner, run get it.”

“Maybe I would’ve appreciated the flowers.”

“You know, I’m going to let this go, because you’ve had a long day, but not as long as hers, so—”

“Ask me.”

“Ask… what?”

“You know.”

“Dean, did you sneak some morphine, or whatever they’ve been—”

“Ask me what your niece’s name is. Actually, no - ask me what it’s not.”

His voice hadn’t ratcheted down to the deep-deep levels of pissed off - and, to be sure, there were several subtle variations Sam knew well, having been on the receiving end of all of them - but Dean was definitely serious, and had crossed his arms for good measure.

“I legit don’t know where you’re going with—-”

“The dogs. All your foster dogs. You took the good names.”

“Okay, now, that’s— I started volunteering way before she ever got pregnant, before you two even got serious, come to think of it. And I just chose a bunch of names that I thought of off the top of my—-”

“I picked up on that, yeah - around the time you used Jessie. And on that real jumpy, kinda twitchy one, which was extra weird. And was a boy.”

“Wait, wait - that was such a sweet dog, and besides - you really would’ve wanted to name your daughter after my dead fiancée?!”

“Oh, everybody’s dead, Sam!” Dean whisper-hissed. “And, no, not necessarily, but I do wonder what Jessica’d think about that…. about that…. what damn breed was that thing?”

“A mix.”

“Of?”

“A pooset and a corgat.”

“Sam. The hell.”

“A poodle-basset hound mix and a rat terrier-corgi mix shared a special hug—”

“So it’s a poocorgaset.”

Sam stared.

“Corsetpoogat.”

Sam brought a hand up, slowly rubbed his temples.

“Can I pull from the rest of the real names? I mean, ratbassgipoo is turning my crank.”

“But always the poo.”

“Of course always the poo, what the hell good does -dle do anybody?”

The nurse cleared her throat - she was leaning into the hallway, a leg and foot still in the room. “We’re done. Everything’s looking good. She said for you guys to come on in, but if you’re in the middle of…..”

“No! No, not at all. Hey, and this is my little brother, Sam. Sammy, this is our nurse, she’s been here the whole time, basically delivered Macka… Mmmuh… my kid.”

She raised her eyebrows at that, but smiled, extending her hand and shaking the one offered, introducing herself as Dean slipped past them.

“Uncle Sam, huh?”

“Uh-huh…. oh god, I just now realized that!”

“Eh… could be worse.”

“Yeah?”

“You could have a name that your nurse had to re-write on the birth certificate five times - twice for misspells, then again because she ran out of room. Me. I’m that person. We’re talking about me, here.”

“What was the fourth? Since there was a fifth?”

“Oh, well, that one? Can’t take credit for - under ‘father’s name’, the proud papa got a case of the jitters and wrote your father’s name.”

“Jeez, I’m so… I’m so sorry…”

Sam would’ve sounded sincere if he hadn’t burst out laughing, but she immediately joined in. And though he didn’t know it at the time, he would be sincere with her many more times than not, and he’d be getting plenty of it in return. Starting that night, when he’d ask if she’d be interested in getting coffee sometime. She would be tips-to-toes sincere when saying she hoped to hear from him soon.

They’d still keep bursting into laughter, amongst and in between the sincere times, over a million different things through the years. There’d be the breath-stealing kind, prompted by the action of more amusing-than-scary hunts; the gasp-induced kind, stemming out of nervous relief over the hunts that weren’t; and her favorite, the bent-over, knotted-into-cramps kind, resulting from drunken Dean tales of hunts long past. And then his favorite, when the Winchester kids were raising hell, and there was nothing to do but laugh.

This time, this first time, after the birth of their niece, in the moment they’d met, would ultimately get ranked as the best, though it was followed closely by the tear-tinged round that erupted after another first, when they heard the justice of the peace say the words “husband and wife”.

But that’s another story.

For now, Sam closed the door quietly before tip-toeing to the bed, bending and giving you a kiss on the forehead. He glanced over to the bassinet and back, saying, “Nice work.”

“Work is right.”

Dean was seated in an armchair next to your bed, unlacing his boots, but paused and looked up at this, tacking on a clarification. “Work is damn right.”

You winked in acknowledgment before speaking again. “So listen, while I’ve got you both—-”

“We in trouble already?” Dean asked, changing his seat from the chair to the opposite side of the bed, perching near the end.

“—-I wanted to make sure you knew that I haven’t totally lost my marbles with the name, and I know that’s what you’re both thinking.”

Sam opened his mouth, ready to protest, but Dean just held up his hands in a sort-of surrender.

“Babe, I know I said I’d be fine with whatever you chose, but we ain’t lied to each other yet, and wow - it’s horrible.”

“I really wish you wouldn’t worry. It’s an old family name, and, I mean… we could squeak a nickname out of it… probably… you know how some of these Gaelic names are, it’s hard to tell how to pronounce them on sight.”

“So how’s it pronounced?” Sam asked.

“Get ready,” Dean muttered.

And Sam’s jaw dropped briefly as something largely incomprehensible - possibly worse than the name was on paper - came out of your mouth. “Sis?” he said.

“Bro?”

“That’s beyond horrible.”

“Yeah, it is. It is a vicious eyesore that she won’t be able to spell for who-knows-how-long, it makes ears bleed, and I’m a garbage parent for it, though I will point out her father was zero help.”

Now Dean’s jaw dropped, but clearly in faux offense. “I resent that - ‘cause every name I said I liked….”

“….every name we agreed on, that we loved for her….”

“….was already a dog’s name.”

You and Dean turned your heads in unison, leveling looks at Sam.

“I can’t have taken up all of them—-”

“Mary.”

“Jane.”

“Which also took out Mary Jane.”

“Erica.”

“Charlotte.”

“Bobby, which took away ‘Bobbie’.”

“Sandra.”

Dean wrinkled his nose, prompting you to roll your eyes.

“Right, right - not your fave. But we even would’ve been fine with Anne.”

“I haven’t named any of them Sandra or Anne,” Sam pointed out.

“No, but you did name that fire-engine-red cocker spaniel, the one that wouldn’t stop crawling into my lap, Anna - which was a real cute move, by the way,” Dean shot back.

“We’d already 86′d Anna, on your request, and I still haven’t heard that whole story,” you said, jabbing a finger into Dean’s chest before jabbing it in the air at Sam. “The one that really pissed me off? And I get to be pissed off because of the disaster that currently is my—”

“Whoa!” Dean interjected.

You gave him brief but pointed side-eye before getting back to fussing at Sam. “Millie. You took Millie. And she was an adorable dachshund, an absolute doll, but, I mean, come on.”

The tone of your voice had changed, leaving the realm of good-natured teasing and stepping into something akin to disappointment. It wasn’t lost on Sam, who looked to his shoes, swallowing. Then he let his gaze drift to the bassinet, keeping it there even as you went on, though now with gentle care.

“But I get it. We get it.”

“Get what?”

“That menagerie of furry fluff. Thinking they’re it. Only kids you’ll ever have.”

Sam was completely focused, spellbound by the rise-and-fall of the tiny, striped-blanket-bundle’s easy breaths.

Dean’s voice now, definitely deep, definitely serious, definitely one of the subtle variations Sam valued above all the rest, the slightly scolding one that hid a bottomless well of love.

“Can’t know the future, Sammy. I know sometimes we have, but…. nothing’s in stone. I sure as hell didn’t picture this for me. Ever.”  

Sam nodded - it was true, just didn’t feel like it.

“And even if it was? Written in stone? Find another big-ass hammer, grenade launcher, whatever - lay waste, kiddo,” you added.

The baby suddenly jolted herself with a sneeze, causing a reciprocal jolt across her audience. She shifted a little, smacked her lips a few times, didn’t show the first indication of waking up, that anything in her brand new world was even slightly out-of-sorts. Her uncle briefly thought on the realization of how hard he’d fight to keep her in such a place as he brought his eyes back to her parents.

And was surprised to find them grinning.

“What?” Sam asked.

“Check out her bracelet,” Dean said.

Sam looked to you, received a nod.

“Go ahead,” you said. “She won’t notice.”

She didn’t, but did get a hell of a grip on a finger of the hand that moved her arm, so he slid the bracelet around with a few fingers of his free hand. Sam fought his own grin as he tucked her arm back under the blanket. Well, mostly - he opted to leave her hand out, let the grip remain for as long as she was willing to hold on to him, then raised an eyebrow at his shoulder-shaking, snickering brother.

Dean kept it up as he edged to the head of the bed, scooting in next to you best he could in the cramped space, quieting only when he let his eyes close, no need to see as he tilted on his side, laced his fingers through yours like he’d done a million times before, the metal of matching angel-blessed bands briefly clinking.

“So your nurse… she was in on this?” Sam asked you.

You shrugged. “Except the father’s name snafu - that part was 100% true.”

Eyes still closed, Dean briefly gave a thumbs-up, took your hand again, went back to his dozing.

You shook your head at him a little, though a smile was on your face as you went on. “She’s the whole package, my man.”

Sam smiled, too. “Yeah. I noticed that.”

“Thought you might.”

“Speaking of thoughts, what made you think of it? Not the prank, I mean—”

“Turns out, my great-grandmother had a nice, simple, easily pronounceable, no-brainer spelling, peach of a maiden name.”

“And the story on this middle name?”

“She’ll prove herself worthy.”

“Hardy-har-har,” Sam replied flatly, but still with a smile.

“It was the first name on both our lists…”

Even in the dim light, you saw his eyes go shiny.

“….and, we hedged our bets - figured even if you ran out of ideas, you’d never name one of your fluffs after yourself. Thought we’d do it for you.”

.

Author’s Note #2: There’s some fun background behind this story (such as the bit about the crazy name prank & how the story came to be in the first place), and if you care to know it, look at the end of the original post of this story, which you can find via my Master Story Post (see below)!

Want more stories? My Master Post is linked in my profile, and it tells you about getting on the Tag List, too! If for whatever reason it gives you trouble, don’t hesitate to send an Ask and I’ll link you.

Re-blogs and feedback are fuel for a writer’s soul - please do let me know if you enjoyed. 😘

[strawberyshelley]

Star Wars Prequel Preferences #1

What kind of dog owners are they?

Anakin, Obi-Wan, Padme, Ahsoka, Mace, Jango, Palpatine 

I take requests!

Anakin: Takes his dog e v e r y w h e r e. Actually dogs plural. He falls for every stray he sees, but his apartment is never crazy since at the end of the day everyone is super tired from many many many walks. His favorite game to play with the dogs is catch! Anakin doesn’t have much patience to teach any complex tricks. 

Obi-Wan: Since he’s gone a lot for work, Obi-Wan likes an independent dog. His favorite thing to do is to cuddle with a large boi on the couch. An expert negotiator in the field, Obi-Wan likes to practice with his dogs, no wonder his two are basset hounds. 

Padme: Gifts from her many friends and family, Padme owns many brittany spaniels. Her handmaiden helps her take care of the trio, since she’s ever busy with Senate duties. When she’s on vacation, she loves to run and play frisbee with them in the meadows of Naboo. 

Ahsoka: Her Jedi training came in handy when handling her very large Great Dane at first. Quickly taking many dog training classes, Ahsoka’s dog is the best trained around! Even though he’s not allowed on the couch, they spend time together going on well behaved walks and practicing new tricks. 

Mace: At one foot tall everyone knows Mace’s is the top dog in town. The wagging tail, floppy ears, and hotdog shaped body demands respect. Getting a few too many free treats from Chick-Fil-A has boosted his ego, but it’s not like nothing a good walk can’t fix. 

Jango: Living in his car more than his home, Jango’s dog loves going on road trips. When they get drive through, the beagle loves sniffing out what Boba drops. Jango always protests but doggo wins each time. Jango doesn’t take his dog to business deals of course, but Boba is plenty qualified to keep her company. Jango prefers playing tug of war but Boba likes to wrestle! 

Palpatine: Most well kept dog around, this Pomeranian is always having a good hair day. Having done a dog food commercial, this pup is loved by many, although is quite feisty in private. Although five star dog walker Anakin would say otherwise. 

[iamwhelmed]

Win One, Have Two: Chapter 13

Okay, it has been 9 long months and I haven’t updated. For that, oh my god I am so, so sorry. I knew I was feeling uninspired but that’s really no excuse! It’s okay, it’s summer now, so I can focus a little more on writing. Hopefully you guys still have interest ^^’ Anyway,

Here it is on AO3

It'd taken them the better half of thirty minutes to collect what they'd need for what Miss Rose was referring to, for the moment, as a "field trip"- no parental release forms necessary because, as she'd made abundantly clear, "I am the only adult you need to be worried about". Except for Crawford, who spent the fifteen minutes it took everyone else to get ready standing outside smoking a cigar with an unbothered look on his face. Clara was the first of the three students done, and waited next to Crawford with her messenger bag full of supplies slung over her shoulders. She looked to him, and he lazily glanced at her from the side.

"You know smoking is horrible for your lungs, right?"

"If anything's gonna take me out 'for my livin' does, I'm gonna die a happy man knowin' it was my vice."

Clara's lips pursed into a straight line.

The front door creaked open; Hardy stepped out first, unzipping his backpack to slip the dagger through its army green folds. Isaac was right behind him, arching an eyebrow at the very functioning door that he, quite frankly, was surprised was still on its hinges after last night. He frowned and grabbed Hardy's wrist, twisting it around to look at his watch. Hardy remained unbothered, trapping his bag between his legs as he used his other hand to close the zipper the rest of the way, concealing the dagger safe and sound in a multitude of pockets. Isaac huffed through his nose- 5am. Correction, then; the attack happened *earlier this morning. Adrenaline and the primal need to not get his head torn clean off of his shoulders had kept his sleep-addled brain at bay, but now that it had time to process that the world had settled again, it was urging him to rest.

There was a hand at his shoulder. Isaac jumped, but he saw the streak of purple in raven hair and found the nerves of his brain settling. It was just Miss Rose. She caught his gaze and gave him a small smile, soft, though he could tell she was strung a little higher than usual. She brushed by him and turned only to lock the door behind her. "Is everyone ready to go?"

"Yeah," Isaac watched as Hardy slipped his bag onto his shoulders. "So, how exactly are we planning on finding our friendly neighborhood home invaders?"

Rose smiled, this time more like she usually did, bright and reassuring. "Same way I look for spectral artifacts! I let Magnus lead the way!"

Isaac raised an eyebrow, and god help him, he swore the top half of his face was going to get stuck that way someday. "Magnus?"

Crawford took another puff, rounding his lips so that the smoke took on a circular shape. Miss Rose waved it away and gave him a look- the kind wives give their husbands over shoes left at the front door- and he grimaced, but dropped the cigar and put it out with his heel anyway. "Well, don't keep 'em waitin', Rose." Clara moved closer to Isaac and Hardy, eager to get a look. Isaac glanced at her and Hardy, and the looks of curiosity so plainly painting their crinkled noses and furrowed brows. Must be new to them, too.

Rose rolled her shoulders in a semi-committal, but ultimately nonchalant shrug. "Yeah, yeah. I'm just not looking forward to the lecture I'm gonna get." She reached into her back pocket and procured what appeared to be a compass. Small, silver, sat perfectly in the palm of her hand, like it was sculpted especially for her. Her eyes fluttered shut, and Isaac could tell from the small rim of purple aflame under her eyelashes that she'd connected with her spirit.

"What is it this time, Mari?"

Rose opened her eyes, finding beady black staring into the abyss that was her soul- or, rather… maybe staring into the abyss that was her curious nature. It made her good at artifact hunting, maybe not the best spectral partner, though. "Okay, okay. I deserve that. But it's important this time!"

Magnus turned and flew a few feet away, back of his body (a long eel-like tail covered in fur) brushing vaguely against her nose. He looked a lot like a basset hound, one that a particularly squealing-prone Sherlock Holmes fan had dressed in a deerstalker and matching coat for a cute scrapbook. She remembered meeting him the first time, back when she was still greener to the spectral world.

Before she knew that spirits were typically averse to hugs and scritches, no matter how much they looked like a good boy.

Magnus huffed from his throat, gave her a look that only an elderly butler with far too much experience and Magnus himself could level her with. The expectant kind. The kind that dared her to make her case. "So you're admitting you were using me for fun before?"

She abided. "Well no, that stuff was important too, but this is…"

Magnus sighed, the sign he gave her, every single time, to signal he was acquiesce. "What do you need?"

Right, down to business, then. She sobered and stripped her hand of her black glove, holding it out for Magnus to sniff. "There should be a saliva sample on this glove. Can you track it for me?"

He hovered closer, inching his wet nose toward the glove. He sniffed once, then twice, and nodded. He registered the smell, compared it to the large database of scents and stenches he'd picked up on in his near-infinite lifetime. She watched him in silence, but took the moment to slip her glove back on. If she knew Magnus, which she did, then he'd give her a destination, maybe a word for warning. He took a few moments, then did something she hadn't seen him do before. He paused. "This could lead you into Consortium territory, you know…"

"What?" She would have hid the trepidation in her voice, but Magnus had known her too many years for her to play anything cool ever, not that she ever got it by him before. She had a feeling he was a little more a detective than he'd like to admit. Magnus glanced at her with droopy eyes, big ears flopping as he floated in place, like there was an undercurrent breeze that blew from below. "Why?"

"The scent you're handing me matches somebody long lost to the Consortium, I'm afraid. One Catriona Barrett." Rose glanced down at her hand, squeezed her fist around the glove that still had traces of saliva on it. "Disappeared after the Consortium eliminated her lover, which I'm sure you know was a spirit by the name of Emmerich."

"That doesn't make sense. The dagger is perfectly capable of killing humans, but it's just as capable of killing spirits. What would she want with it?"

"A conundrum not meant for me to solve, I'm afraid." Magnus hummed floated away from her, cracking only an eye open to glance at her. He must have seen her frown, because he sighed and momentarily moved closer to her, moved around her in a circle so that his tail could brush up against her cheek and make her nose wiggle. "We were lucky that the dagger was within Cousinhood territory, but you know I'll be leading you-"

"- All over god's creation. Yeah, I know." She smiled his way, gave him a scratch under his chin either to calm herself down or to annoy Magnus. She had no plans to ponder which it was. He glared at her, unamused as always, as he faded from her sight. "I'm afraid that's a risk we're going to have to take."

The compass hovered in mid-air, faintly radiating with the same purple that surrounded herself and Magnus. As the last of Magnus's spirit world faded from view, the compass itself pulsed, like a heartbeat. She held out her hand and waited for it to fall into her palm, cold detailed silver against the fabric of her glove. The pulsing became faster, a more constant stream of vibration until it was buzzing in her hand, meaning Magnus had decided precisely what direction to go in. She nodded south and said "Let's go."

Clara, Hardy, and Isaac glanced to Crawford, who only tipped his hat as confirmation before following closely behind Rose. Hardy exhaled, shoulders slouching as air deflated him like an old balloon. "This should be fun…"

He trudged after Rose and Crawford, Isaac and Clara close behind.

She walked beside Isaac, but he felt her eyes watching him as though they were on his back. He tensed up. "You know, if we pass your hometown…"

He grimaced. "I wouldn't say a word."

He hurried hurried to catch up with Hardy, ignoring the set of eyes that were now definitely watching his retreating frame.

Sewing, as any 18th century woman would tell you, is the cornerstone of femininity. Women practiced the art often, and with the persistence of anybody who had to live their entire life without video games or sports. Sewing also, as any of these 18th century woman would tell you, is a real pain.

Isabel pricked herself for the third- or fourth- time, tried once more to stitch the two pieces of cloth together, and instead decided she'd had quite enough of whatever purgatory she'd found herself stuck in. Sleeping Beauty only had to get pricked ONCE to fall asleep, she'd say that she more than earned a nap. "This is so-!" She flicked her tired wrist around, trying to find the right word. How to best describe the ludicrousness of her current task without lowballing her grievances or insulting her teacher. Ah, yes. That's the right word. "Stupid! This is so stupid! How is sitting here sewing going to save anyone?"

Dimitri glanced up from his sewing job, cool eyebrow raised. Zarei, too, glanced up from her task, reading a book which, comparatively, was a favorable task to whatever this nonsense was. Zarei herself looked bored, but not surprised. She'd most likely been anticipating Isabel's outburst, as was customary once every class. Not every period, no, every class that Isabel had to be subjected to some of the most boring, menial tasks she'd ever had to do for a grade. Zarei's class. "Isabel," Zarei started, and she could already hear the routine disinterest. "In a life or death situation, you may have to temporarily sew and dress or cauterize a wound." She adjusted her glasses and mumbled, in equal irritation, "they wouldn't let me have fire in the classroom, so this will have to do."

"This is a waste of our time!"

Dimitri, as chill as always, lifted one hand, a motion he seemed to carry out every time she had these routine outbursts, as though she was a wild spirit and needed to be tamed and reined in. "Isabel-"

"No! I'm sick of this! The traitor who released those monsters is still out there and we have no idea who they are or what they want!"

Zarei seemed unperturbed, though she shut her book with one snap and set it off to the side of her desk. "Isabel-"

"What are we sitting here sewing for? We're just wasting time-!"

"Isabel!"

She choked, instinctually stepping back as Zarei's hands slammed upon the instructor's desk. This… this was not part of the routine, but she supposed her outburst had been more emotionally-charged than her others had been. Zarei usually took her complaints in stride, even snarked about setting up a suggestions box for Isabel to leave comments in (that way she could dispose of them easier). This time, though, Zarei looked her dead in the eye, unblinking, unmoving. Isabel looked to her left where Dimitri sat at his desk, found his hand still raised cautiously, though it'd moved some to avoid her flaring aura.

Fine.

She growled to herself, sliding back down into her seat, but unwilling to continue stitching. Instead she glared at the two bits of cloth and used the needle to take small jabs at her desk. Zarei wouldn't say anything, would probably just be happy she wasn't complaining. She'd just have to deal with her restlessly squirming in her seat until class was over in another handful of minutes. God, she hoped Max was having a better time.

The gym was larger than the auditorium their Training 101 class typically monopolized. Once the bell had rung and all the class had been seated, when Spender announced that they'd all be transferring to the gym for the day, Max had almost felt the collective sigh of relief that hung like the usual unease in the atmosphere. He glanced at Collin, who had taken to walking the very thin line between the waking world and the unconscious one with his chin rested in his hand, eyes slowly inching shut before they popped open again after a restless three seconds of shut-eye. Johnny sat at his other side, practically bouncing up and down in his seat. Probably the least claustrophobic the psychopath has felt in weeks.

Spender stood at the bottom of the bleachers, raising his hands in a sad attempt to get his large, voluble class to more of a hushed whisper. Because Spender was a quiet man naturally, and passive normally, his voice was lost in the sea of early-morning chit-chat, the kind that was kept in-check by smaller class periods. Max watched with varying degrees of amusement as Spender circulated through every trick in the book to get a bunch of confused, aggravated, loquacious middle-schoolers to shut their overused traps. He first tried to clear his throat. When that didn't work, he tried to drop his teacher's guidebook on the gym floor- when that was stifled and dulled in the vastness of the gym walls, he resorted to yelling at the top of his lungs. That still didn't work, and Max could see the man struggling to figure out how else to reign in a hundred or so students. His calloused hands were clawing at his face, eyes visibly heavy with exhaustion, even behind his shades. When all hope seemed to be lost, Coach Oop set one heavy hand on Spender's shoulder, gave him a pitying look, and got the attention of every student the way only a gym coach knew how- screaming and just being louder than the normal teacher.

Chatter seemed to fade almost instantly, and Spender shot Coach Oop a grateful look.

He cleared his throat as Oop retreated to his office. "Class, today we are going to begin working the physical aspects of your new abilities, rather than your minds." Max could practically feel Johnny vibrating in the seat next to him. He shot the red-head an eye that he ignored entirely. "Now, I've always been more focused on the intellectual end of training-"

"Couldn't tell!"

Spender picked Max out in the crowd immediately, glared at him, and received nothing but a grin in response. "... So I've asked an old master of mine to stand in for me." An elderly man stepped forward, huge and terrifying for being gray in the face. "This is Master Guerra. Say hello, class."

"Hello, Master Guerra…." Roughly a quarter of the class even bothered, and those that did were unenthusiastic at best and downright resentful at worst, clearly not knowing what was ahead of them. Max swallowed hard; he'd heard stories from Ed about Isabel's grandfather, stories that Isabel had commented "didn't even graze the bottom" of just how tough Master Guerra could be. And that was on his granddaughter… what would he be like with kids he had no attachment to? Max felt his spine shiver preemptively at the possibilities. Collin leaned over, now much more awake than he had been two minutes prior, and whispered.

"Hey, is that Isabel's dad or something?"

Max cupped a hand over one side of his mouth so Collin could hear him better. "Grandpa, actually. And probably the embodiment of abuse of power…"

Master Guerra's eyes roamed the crowd, but there was something about his gaze that felt like he was simultaneously singling out every single child in the bleachers. Max had the crazy theory that it was because he was, in actuality, seeing every one of them, judging them, assessing them, what they could do. He clearly didn't like what he was seeing, because he took a step forward and his eyes were no less calculating. "Spineless, each and every one of you. Hardly spectrals, hardly able at all. If you want to be worth anything, you will do as I say, and you will do it the first time!"

The class, silent before, fell deathly mute.

Spender stepped forward, chuckling with a nervous edge as he set one unsure hand on Guerra's shoulder- er, tried to. He decided against it last moment. "Master, these children still hardly understand the concept of tools, perhaps you should tone it down just a little-?"

"You asked for my help. This is what you receive."

"Ah."

Isaac cringed. The little cabin he'd taken shelter in was just as creepy and run-down as when he'd last seen it. Creepier, in fact, now that he'd bled all over its floors.

Crawford stopped at the front door and puffed on the last bit of his cigar. Rose passed him by and reached for the handle, eyes on the compass in her hand. "Should I do it?"

Rose shook her head. "Don't waste the energy yet, Crawford. We know the story here pretty well already." She pressed the door open with a sickeningly loud creak, a sound that made Isaac shudder. "Catriona left this place in a hurry in the dead of night. If we want Magnus to keep her scent, we've gotta find something that will lead us to where she went next."

The group pushed on. Crawford went first, one arm protectively extended in front of Rose, other hand cocked with one of his guns. Rose glanced around, looking for anything that may emit a trace of Catriona's aura, careful to let Crawford open doors. The place should have been abandoned, but the odds of Consortium pawns and antagonistic spirits were a possibility she was unwilling to overlook. Clara clung to one of Hardy's sleeves. They were switching off who was looking out in which direction, leaving Isaac to keep his eyes straight ahead. More of a challenge than it may seem, with the cabin's darkness spanning well past Rose and Crawford. He tried to keep in pace with them, but his legs were shaking and he wasn't sure if it was because he was three different kinds of dead the last time he was here, or if the draft of the run-down walls was getting to him.

Clara edged closer to Isaac, willing herself to feel calmer with somebody on either side of her. "There's so much blood, everywhere…" Her breath hitched and trembled with every word, hot breath running down his neck. Miss Rose looked back and found his eyes. He frowned and glanced away. They made it to the end of the hallway, what Isaac remembered as the bedroom he'd taken residence of that night. He was right; Rose raised the compass and the light of her aura illuminated the very edge of the bedpost, rotting and covered in, what Isaac assumed was probably, more of his dried-up blood.

Hardy's foot made contact with something at his feet, and he leaned forward to pick it up. "Oh hey, a diary!" He said one second. "Ah!" He said the next.

Clara glanced over Hardy's shoulder to see the page he'd opened up to by chance, and stifled the scream she instinctually reacted with behind her interwoven fingers. The page was yellow with age and slick with dust from infrequent use, though it had clearly been handled somewhat recently, the way fingerprints edged the pages. The page Hardy had opened up to, the one Isaac now glanced over Clara's shoulder to see, was covered in nothing but pen- and a lot of it. Frantic. Some unlegible. Dark and as black as a widow drenched in the blackest of inks. Words scribbled next to sketches of spirits, of auras and eyes that seemed to watch from behind the safety of the page.

Why can't he see them

I'm not crazy

Help

Hardy screamed and accidentally tossed the book a foot in the air, only to start juggling it with unsteady hands the moment it came back down, whimpering the whole time. Isaac snorted and held out his hand so Hardy could pass it to him- and he did, by using one juggling hand to smack the book mid-air in Isaac's general direction. Isaac caught the diary by the spine in his open palm, flipping it back open with relative ease. "This is her's?"

Just as soon as he opened it, a gloved hand snatched it from him. Miss Rose grinned and raised to compass to the diary, humming at the confirming buzz of her tool. "This is the next piece in Catriona's puzzle, kiddies!"

Kid after kid lined up in parallel with the bullseyes across the gymnasium floor, each new frontrunner as confused as the last. Guerra and Spender stood to the side, eyeing individual auras as they hit or missed the targets- and they rarely hit. Guerra was grimacing, looking every bit terrifying as Spender felt. He kept switching from watching the students to watching his master, frequent enough to keep an eye on his reactions, but not frequent enough for Guerra (hopefully) to notice.

Max was third in one of the first lines. All the better, in his opinion, for getting this over with as fast as possible. He aimed at the target a few feet away, concentrated. He'd had so much on his mind lately. Isabel, Spender, Ed…. His eyes narrowed as blue crossed his vague vision- the kid next to him, but it was enough. He took one quick breath and took his shot. Black gas, perfectly rounded, perfectly paced, hit the bullseye head-on, nearly knocking it over in a clash of red and white against a crawling web of black that descended over it.

Spender's eyes widened, a small smile inching across his face. He'd been worried that all of the attention he'd had to put into training these classes had denied his original students somehow of the attention he felt was vital to truly learning to hone their new powers, but if Max's spectral shot was any indication-!

"Don't get so excited." Guerra was watching the children still, but Spender could feel the disappointment in him radiating from his drilled eyes. He pretended not to notice. "Spectral shots are child's play. That your student is capable of such a feat places him on par with Isabel at five years of age."

The next group of students stepped up. Max met Collin's eyes on his way back to the bleachers.

Collin looked panicked, gesturing to the targets, then gesturing back to the hands Max was well aware would be unable to conjure up any aura at all, let alone get a spectral shot off. Max winced and shrugged at him. Can't help ya there, man.

Collin got up to the bat and mimed for dear life, found other kids doing the same thing. Each pointed and breathed and stood there waiting for auras that never built and shots that never burned through the distance. They turned to each other, confused, some agitated, some lackadaisical about the whole thing.

Guerra turned to Spender with a glare in his eye, and all he could do was smile nervously and swallow the fear gnawing at his throat like acid.

Nature walks were run-of-the-mill for Master Hashimoto's dojo. Ed never quite got the importance of them, and when he asked for clarification the answer was always "something-something peace" or "something-something tranquility".

Aka, "Something-something Ed isn't interested."

But alas, they were required. Every student in the dojo would wake up at roughly 5am, clothe themselves, then walk a mile-long hike through the woods before they could all return home to feast upon the breakfast Hashimoto no doubt would have laid out for them when they got back. As beautiful as the scenery was this time of year, Ed was far more interested in getting back so he could settle the uncomfortable tugging and gurgling of his stomach.

The start of the day was always the hardest. He knew this. And like always, he'd get through it. That didn't mean he felt like trekking up a mountain of flowers today, though.

He sighed and carried onward, barley giving the beautiful red roses he passed a sidelong glance. Well, he almost didn't. The vibrant red caught his eye, and he fell a few steps behind admiring the way the morning dew dripped from the soft petals.

Red was supposed to be the color of aggression, of hunger and anger and danger, but it was also adventure, passion…

Love.

A laugh he knew better than his own crossed his mind's ear, and he almost hated the way he instantly drew the connections to tan skin and red, so much red. Ed shook his head clear and turned away, transitioning into a light jog to catch up to the rest of his peers. This was crazy, he was being crazy. What that girl said meant nothing. What Dimitri said meant nothing, just people being people and misunderstanding his relationship with Isabel. They were like siblings! She was his best friend! He shook his head clear with finality.

He caught up with the rest of the group with ease, not that it was difficult. It seemed like he was the only one eager to get back to food, because his peers had taken a decidedly slower pace. He'd lightly jogged like an old man who'd just watched his small weiner dog steal his slipper, and still, he'd managed to catch up in about thirty seconds. Ed huffed, shoulders slumping in the way that usually got him a fist upside the head from Guerra and a small scolding from Spender.

"Guys, look! He's letting me feed him!"

One of the other students had paused to bend down a few feet in front of him. A quick side-step confirmed that she'd palmed a nut from the ground, and that a small squirrel had taken interest in it. A few other students coo'ed and some bemoaned not having their phone to take a picture. Ed felt himself smiling despite his grouchy mood. The squirrel was, after all, pushing the boundaries of cute. Big beady eyes, tail twitching, head tilting as it tried to communicate with his fellow student in a language it didn't know she didn't understand. Part of his heart, which he found had somewhat frozen over the last few weeks, melted on the spot. She opened up her palm, and the squirrel readily sprinted for it, pausing on her fingers to test the nut and see that it was real. Chestnut brown fur, spots of darker hair that looked black in the early morning sunrise-

-- brown eyes under long lashes, squinting with mirth as he made her laugh, his favorite sound in this world and the next.

Ed froze mid-thought, eyes widening so much he thought they would fall out of the sockets. He'd done it again, the same thing he'd been doing the past- how long had it been? Too long! Too long for this to still be a problem! Ed took several deep breaths, one hand pressed to his chest as he hyper-ventilated, or something close to it. He was just tired, that's all. He was busy a lot of the day training to become a man worthy...of… his mind trailed off again, and Ed felt his hands tearing his hair straight off of his head before he even registered the deep-seeded hand that felt like it was tugging twenty different chords of his heart.

I do not like Isabel! I do not like Isabel! I do not like Isabel!

"Get out of my head!"

There was a silence around him, and he couldn't help but think that it was a little odd, considering all the cute-animal-fawning that'd been happening a few seconds ago. He opened his eyes, which had been screwed shut in his agony, to find his entire class staring at him. Even the squirrel, which had been so content with its nut before, had turned its curious eyes on him as if waiting for an explanation. Ed blinked. "I yearn for the sweet embracing heat of my gaming console."

His peers seemed to shrug it off, nod, mumble "yeah, yeah that sounds about right".

[lovemecharlie]

Lady Tigra

Just a small entry about how Charlie ended up with a tiger.. because why not. Literally, that's all that happens lol.

Owning a tiger wasn't technically legal in California, nor is it on the east side where I come from. That was fine and dandy, however because technically.. I didn't nor do I own Tigra. We simply have a mutual respect.

The Past

"Some take a beautiful girl and hide her away from the rest of the world." That's what Cyndi Lauper said. I sang this song to the female tiger locked away and chained like a pitbull behind a fence in a small enclosure. The yard was way too small for a tiger to thrive. They needed a basset hound or a golden retriever, but that wasn't what they were in the business of selling. Tigers were their product with no questions asked. It hurt to be at a bbq in North Carolina on a Turn Up Tour, partying while a whole sluggish tiger laid smacked by the sun and ignored with nowhere to go. I barely knew the hosts to make excuses for them. As far as I was concerned, this was normal to them. This is why I made the impulsive bargain and purchased the $500 freedom of the Bengal/Siberian tiger mix with the intention of taking her to a tiger sanctuary where she could be free to live her tiger dreams.

"You don't wanna stay a pet. You want to be a real tiger and live a real tiger life, don't you? I can help you." I spoke evenly, standing a foot away from the enclosure so not to appear threatening. I wanted to build trust because this tiger didn't know me from anyone else who handled her. The big cat's ear twitched as it laid watching me, so I kept speaking to her until she turned and stood, coming closer curiously. Sitting on the ground, I continued speaking. Eventually, I was able to inch closer and closer with minimal vocalization from the tiger. Twenty minutes passed with me feeling out the tiger's mood and level of receptiveness before I took a major risk and put my finger lightly on the fence ready to snatch it back at any moment. The tiger didn't react at first, and then she licked my finger briefly.

---

"Yeah, yeah, visit when you want. Food and all that is covered. The donation will cover it," the sporty caucasian man waved referring to the hefty sum I gave for him to house my new buddy. "So you just impulsively bought a tiger after seeing it at a bbq," he grinned. It was quite a story. I knew it was impulsive, but I had to.

The caucasian man was a big cat enthusiast by the name of Derrick. The man had four tigers already living in blissful luxury with a pool, a climbing structure, a tiger house, and lots of trees and open space. This tiger fit right in happily.

"Do you have a name for her?" Derrick stood by and the the tiger roamed, pushing between us as if sensing that the white definitely wasn't right. Derrick backed away immediately when the tiger growled, threatening him with her long fangs. He didn't want the smoke. She licked her lips, walking around me protectively and I didn't come against the behavior. Not at all. She sensed what she sensed and if she was protective, then I appreciated the care. Derrick remained a few feet away as the tiger explored her new space unhindered.

"Tigra. Lady Tigra. This is a special tiger, Derrick. I want this tiger to have space and lots of tiger memories. No breeding! I will be back."

"She's in good hands," he confirmed and based on how well the other tigers looked, I knew she'd be fine.

---

The Present

"Look at them go," Charlie and Aly'sha grin watching Frost run like hell after slapping Tigra. She was on his ass. It was just a little pounce, harmless roughhousing. The tiger sanctuary at the mansion was a Godsend and as soon as Charlie had moved in, she'd had Tigra brought over. This was now her permanent home and she'd adjusted well. They had that in common. Charlie would talk about it with her all of the time. Of course Tigra was still mildly aggressive, especially when it came to her food. No one messed with her food. However, she never once attacked. She played a little rough from time to time, but it was all love. Erik loved to wrestle with her and teach her maneuvers, having a highly intelligent jaguar of his own.

"She's as protective over you as Preyy is loyal to me," he'd said one day while working with Charlie to train Tigra how to attack on command and recognize dangerous situations opposed to harmless ones. "Should you need her in time of trouble, she'd be there," Erik nodded, watching as Tigra stalked around waiting for her IN so that she could playfully jump on him. Charlie hoped that would never be necessary, but it felt good to know that she had a second protector who would be loyal to her to the death.

@poosypoosy @bastioncarterstevens-udaku @hennessystevens-udaku @itsangeludaku @alyshastevens-udaku @itskimorafireudaku @allhailnjadaka @bidibidibombaclaat @blackpinup22 @destinio1 @hold-me-like-a-heart-beat @leahnicole1219 @vikkidc @thehomierobbstark

[ezatluba]

At the Westminster Dog Show: Top Dogs, Top Docs

America’s premier canine competition is not just a beauty contest. Supporting elite  athletes (and their owners) is a growing pack of massage and sports medicine specialists.

Clearing a hoop during the agility round of the 144th Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show on Saturday.Credit...

By Jan Hoffman

Feb. 11, 2020

At least the athlete was able to walk into the medical tent on his own four legs.

Earlier, when he had faced the broad jump during his Masters Obedience Championship trial at the Westminster Dog Show, Finn, a six-pound toy poodle, had tried to settle into his normal pre-takeoff sit position. But he wriggled uncomfortably, struggling to hold something in.

Sensing disaster, his human, Abby Cooper, swooped him up, managing to get him out of the ring just before he vomited and pooped on the sawdust.

Off to the veterinarian tent they rushed.

Official dog competitions typically include a standby vet. But Westminster, perhaps the premier elite canine event in the country, demands a crack medical squad of another order altogether. Special dogs need special docs.

Finn was monitored by Dr. Christopher Frye from the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine, an assistant clinical professor in the new area of sports medicine and rehabilitation. Also on the 15-member team from Ithaca and its satellite specialty office in Stamford, Conn. were a radiologist and a theriogenologist, who specializes in reproduction — of keen interest to breeders of show and performance dogs.

Throughout Westminster Week, they would be fielding questions from spectators and owners as specific and general as their practices: about breed genetic problems; refractive eye tests (is my Boston terrier nearsighted?), stem cell injections for aching joints; clinical oncology trials; how to care for a first puppy.

Westminster is famous as a gathering of spectacular dogs, with all the people and products attendant with canine beauty pageantry: sprays, mousses, gels, conditioners, curlers, straighteners, bows, hair implants (I’m looking at you, Standard Poodles!) and mascara (flutter those lashes much, Papillon?).

But in the last few years, Westminster has added competitions in agility and obedience, events that bring in a very different crowd — jock dogs and their humans. (“Vanish is not just some Barbie collie,” Aaron Kirzner said of his border collie, which is both a breed and agility champion.)

Those athletes are attended by a throng of health and wellness specialists, including canine acupuncturists, massage therapists and chiropractors, along with vets like Dr. Frye.

Over the last few days, the vets’ cases have included: a broken toenail; a sore toe (stuck in the crate during a long car haul); lots of nauseous anxiety (planes, crowds); a flopped ear (inflammation); and rash (the quality of the hotel sheets disagreed with one top show dog).

Finn was fine, by the way. Dr. Frye excused him from the show and sent him home. “‘Home’ is his pillow on my knee,” Ms. Cooper said, during a relieved telephone call from her hotel room.

Massaging strains and stress

The sign was parked before a quiet, curtained corner of the hall: Dog Massage.

Marisa Schmidt, a certified canine massage therapist from Hazlet, N.J., had all her agility-day slots booked for months. But throughout the day, owners and dogs were lined outside her curtain, pleading to be squeezed into her schedule.

Kyan, a border collie, was on the table. “She has some knots,” Ms. Schmidt informed Deborah Salerno, Kyan’s owner. She leaned into the dog’s spine, lifted a hind leg, working an inner thigh muscle. Kyan’s eyes rolled blissfully.

“These dogs are in incredible shape,” Ms. Schmidt said. “Their owners take care of them like any professional athlete. Would you believe this dog is 12 years old?”

Nope.

One challenge, she said, is that dogs can almost love the sport and their commanding owners too much. “Dogs are so resilient that they will run through the pain,” she said, “and sometimes we may not know right away that they’re injured.”

The athletes warm up

For the Masters Agility Championship, 330 invitation-only elite athletes raced over a course of jumps, tunnels, seesaws, A-frames and weaves. Before each round, the humans were allowed to preview the course once, walking it to memorize the series of hand signals they would give their dogs, which would not be permitted to sample the course. Spitting out rapid-fire voice and hand signals for about 30 seconds, the humans would direct their dogs through the course, the two moving as one, a mind-meld team.

Athletes never compete with cold muscles. Here is the warm-up routine for Chelsea, a gleaming, champion six-year-old black Labrador retriever that, with her teammate Dr. Elizabeth Dole, a veterinarian, has competed for the United States in European agility trials.

Walk: three to five minutes. Pee. Trot.

Stretches: loosen neck and spine by bringing muzzle to hip, both sides. Play bow. Weave between Dr. Dole’s legs. Spins. Back up. Come forward.

Work that core! Sit pretty in a begging position, paws up, hold it, hold it. Release.

More stretches: Dr. Dole leaned on a table, extending a treat. Chelsea put her paws on the table, head up, legs splayed. Hip flexors, shoulders, laterals, obliques.

Dr. Dole pulled out a toy. Tug, release, tug, release. “It’s to give her some excitement but also some control,” said Dr. Dole, who has worked in agility competition for 18 years.

“Some dogs need to be in the optimum arousal state,” she said. “But Chelsea is already so eager to play that we want her to be more thoughtful, so when she walks in the ring she’s not over the top.”

A basset hound?

Dr. Frye took a break from the vet tent to watch some of the agility trials. He makes canine prosthetics, studies gaits, manages pain. He sees the world of canine sports as vast and varied, having worked with athletes ranging from sled dogs to racers to dock divers.

Like any sports fan, he stood in the thick crowd, whooping as the dogs sped in a blur through the obstacles. The crowd racket matched the dogs that barked and yelped as they raced along, in sheer excitement. Unlike the conformation — the formal name for the sport of showing purebreds — agility and obedience welcome mixed-breeds, here simply called All American dogs. That’s because these sports are fundamentally a celebration of the human-canine bond.

Because the obstacles are adjusted for height classes, all sorts of breeds were competing: dachshunds, Papillons, Havanese, pugs, corgis, rat terriers, Nova Scotia duck tolling retrievers, Berger Picards, Belgian Malinois and Doberman pinschers.

Well, maybe it’s not suitable for all dogs. “Sometimes the giant breeds, like the Great Pyrenees and St. Bernards, can’t quite squeeze into the tunnels,” Dr. Frye said.

Border collies, with their laser focus and pliant, quick-cut, low-slung bodies, tend to dominate.

Dr. Frye had a soft spot for one unlikely agility athlete: a basset hound. “It was like a cartoon of itself,” he said. “There’s nothing about a basset hound that’s made for this course! But I loved watching that dog navigate and figure it out.”

And good for humans

Lou Avant, all but vibrating on an endorphin high at the conclusion of her agility trial, bounced out of the ring with Whimsy, her gorgeous Borzoi (tail dyed purple for the festivities).

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“Wasn’t that frigging awesome?” she shouted. “How did the universe put me together with this dog?”

Dr. Avant, a veterinarian from Atlanta, has taken Whimsy and other large dogs for years to many sports, including dock diving, barn hunting, obedience and tricks, where she meets up with a regular circuit of passionate large hound dognoscenti.

“I like running with the big dogs,” said Dr. Avant, 63. “I’m not ready yet for some little old lady dog!”

Emergency!

On Sunday, Tyson, an eight-year-old-miniature American shepherd from Minnesota, needed to go to the vet tent.

Tyson is an obedience champion. He is also an anxious flyer with a sensitive stomach. After arriving in New York, he started vomiting. And kept it up, almost hourly. “I thought, where are we going to find an E.R. vet?” said his owner, Shannon Wacker, who was there with her 17-year-old daughter, Mara. “I was heartbroken for my daughter. They had worked so hard to get here.”

Mother, daughter and dog found the Cornell vet tent, who ministered to all three. “They were a godsend,” Mrs. Wacker said. “And they didn’t bill me!”

A vet gave Tyson a 24-hour anti-nausea injection, which calmed his stomach.

By Sunday afternoon, Tyson was good to go. He did not win a ribbon, but Mrs. Wacker and Mara were thrilled. “Considering all that happened with him, we’re tickled,” Mrs. Wacker said, saying that Tyson had pushed through his misery out of devotion to her daughter.

“We just needed to get his nerves untangled,” she said. “He’s just such a little overachiever!”

[insomniaacs]

The Eye of the Storm - Benedict x reader

A/N: This came out way more angsty than I anticipated, but I hope you guys enjoy it :) I've suffered from panic attacks in the past, so I hope this expresses how truly terrible it is... I'm trying to work on my requests in a steady rhythm, and the goal is to post one story, like, at least every two days, but I guess we'll see what happens... Thanks for all the love, everyone! You guys rock ;D

Requested by anon: Benedict x reader. The reader is scared of thunder due to an abusive past. She calls Benedict just wanting to hear his voice. Not knowing he’s coming home already. Can they have a basset hound as well please. Xx

Word count: 1879 Warnings: mentions of physical, verbal and psychological abuse

Thunderstorms weren't unusual in London.

They were, in fact, quite common; the grey clouds gathering fairly quickly, forming a dark, unstable mass that hovered over the city and more often than not kept people stranded to their homes and made life just so much harder to the average tourist.

The weather forecasts also usually got it right. Mostly, you figured, because honestly, the odds that the sun would shine were just so little that there was almost no margin of error in their predictions.

That week, the news had assured the British population that London would, for the first time in quite a while, actually be graced with sunlight for the weekend, which had been quite a relief to you.

The thing was, you were tremendously afraid of storms.

Afraid in the sense that the mere prospect of it caused you to start feeling anxious and uncomfortable, and to the point that you wouldn't leave your house at least a day in advance, just as not to be caught unprepared.

So excuse you for feeling like a weight had been lifted from your shoulders after listening to the weather lady on TV.

You were feeling relaxed and at ease as you emerged from your room. You'd just gotten out of the shower, and was hoping to do a bit of reading before Benedict arrived.

He was at a press conference for his new movie and would probably be home much later at night, so you took your time to go downstairs and settled on the big leather chair of his study; the smell of him still on its cushions as you covered yourself with a warm blanket and opened your book.

The room surrounding you was perfectly cozy with its dark coloured furniture and big wooden bookshelves that went from one wall to another, and if you looked a little to your right you could see a big glass window that led to the gardens, allowing you a good view of the dog house at the very back, where your lovely basset hound was probably asleep.

You couldn't feel happier as you leafed through the pages of your book, revelling in the warmth and stillness of the room. You'd always loved the silence more than anything. It was peaceful and allowed you to concentrate on the little things surrounding you.

That was why you couldn't contain the scream that left your lips as soon as you heard the aggressive, voracious sound of a thunder coming from outside.

Your book fell shut in your lap as you sunk further into your seat, fingers already shaking as you tried to close your eyes and breathe.

The panic had risen on you without a warning, settling on the back of your head and making your heart leap on your chest and a dreadful feeling take over you.

For a moment, it was only ringing silence that followed. Then, the sky lit up with the fast and sharp strike of a lightning, and it was only then that you finally saw the huge storm approaching.

Another loud thunder echoed around the room as you kept your eyes fixed on the sky outside.

The clouds weren't grey; they were black. There, from your place at Benedict's chair, you looked outside and saw nothing but a pitch black mass approaching your house, and you felt a shudder run through you.

Your fingers came to brush at the slight raise on the skin of your arms, and you felt the verge of a panic attack threatening to take over you.

It had happened before.

The dreadful feeling of having an attack was carved into your memory like the scars etched across your arms. The dizziness had already kicked in, as had the tingling sensation at the tips of your fingers. Then, the heaviness in your chest; that constrictive feeling that made it seem like there was something pressing against it and making it hard to do anything but stay very still and try to breathe.

The rain came not soon after, its heavy droplets hitting the ceiling and windows of your house like several bullets.

You covered your ears with a whimper. They'd said it would be sunny... that there was less than a 5% chance of rain for the weekend. They'd said it, and you'd believed it and allowed yourself to relax.

All the other times, you'd been prepared. There'd been music, and a happy movie on the TV, and Benedict had always been there with you.

Now you were completely alone, and your eyes started filling with tears at the memories that came along with the sickening sound of the thunders.

'You useless piece of fucking shit-'

Another lighting.

'You move and I will fucking kill you, understand?'

The thunder that followed caused you to drop your book to the floor. Your palms were sweaty and your hands were shaking as you tried to get up.

You had to get to the table a few feet from you. You had to get your phone.

As soon as you managed to get up, you heard the loudest crack coming from somewhere above you, and you screamed again as all the lights went out in one quick motion.

Your crying turned into sobbing, and you felt lost and completely defeated as you sat on the carpet and gripped the armrests of the chair above you with so much force that your fingers became white against the pure black of the leather.

The memories kept coming, and you could do nothing but hug your legs and close your eyes to try and make them go away.

'What, you think you're entitled to speak up to me?'

The muscles on your arms started twitching; the scars carved in them catching the light of the lightnings and casting crooked looking shadows on your skin.

'Well, lemme tell you something, princess,' you could almost hear his voice speaking behind you; could almost sense his putrid breath fanning on your ear. 'YOU. ARE. NOT.'

He'd growled like an animal that night. His brown eyes had been completely black, and you'd stared into them and had seemed to get lost in their darkness.

Your eyes were still blurred with tears that never stopped falling when you crawled towards the table. You couldn't stand, so you merely lifted your fingers to search for your phone.

After a few tries, you managed to take it into your hands. They were shaking so much you couldn't even see the words written on the screen.

The room lit up again with another flash from outside and the walls around you shook violently, and you weren't sure you could take much more.

'I despise you, you hear me?'

Your fingers tapped the wrong password three times before you finally unlocked the phone. Benedict's number was on speed dial, and you clicked his name and put the phone to your ears. Your hands and face and hair were wet from your own sweat and tears, and you couldn't stop sobbing as the line beeped over and over again.

'I. Despise. You.'

It hit voicemail.

You tried again.

The sound of the beeping was silenced by another thunder, and your body jerked at the loudness of it.

You bit so hard into your lip that it drew blood.

Slash. The sound of a knife cutting through the air.

Your breath was ragged as your fingers dropped the phone to the ground. There was no use trying to do anything. Your brain had stopped functioning.

Another whimper escaped your mouth, and you curled up on the floor, crying into your shirt and your arms.

There was noise somewhere outside again, and you closed your eyes so tightly that you saw black dots from underneath your eyelids. The sound carried on through the house and reverberated through the walls until it finally reached where you were, and you felt something touch you and flinched away from it like it'd burned you.

"(Y/N)," a deep voice spoke from above you, laced with concern and desperation.

It took you a few long seconds to understand what was happening, and that the person touching you wasn't trying to inflict any more pain on you.

"Be-" you tried to say his name, but there was an acute pain on your throat that made you cough so hard you almost threw up. "Benedict..." your voice was wavering and laced with a panic you'd never heard come out of your mouth before when you spoke. It was pleading and at the same time wounded, and you felt the scars on your arms itch.

"I'm here, love," he said with the most gentle voice, offering you his hand. "It's alright." You looked up at him and couldn't help but deeply appreciate the fact that he hadn’t been the one who initiated the contact. Benedict always gave you a choice, which was perhaps what you loved most about him.

You threw yourself into his arms, desperate for his comforting touch. Your previously clean clothes were drenched in sweat, but he didn't seem to mind as he held you as close as possible; running a gentle hand through your hair.

Another thunder echoed in the room, and though you still flinched at its intensity, the panic had started to dissipate.

There were no more terrible memories or any kind of difficulty to breathe. Slowly, you started coming back to your senses. The storm begun to settle into a light rain, and though you weren’t exactly sure how long the two of you sat there on the floor, you couldn’t find it within you to let go of Benedict.

His hands were still caressing your hair and face and arms, and you looked up at him with reddish eyes and trembling lips. “I'm so sorry, love. If I’d known…” Benedict trailed off, and you only shook your head and gave him a tight smile as if to say ‘you don’t have to apologize’.

After that, Benedict helped you up. He turned on the flashlight on your phone and guided you back to your room.

You hadn’t realised, but you were extremely tired. Your eyes were threatening to close as you sat on your side of the bed and allowed Benedict to pull the covers over you.

He followed straight after you, finding your waist underneath the covers and bringing you closer to him.

Long after you’d drifted to sleep, Benedict allowed himself to look at you properly. Your hair was still damp from the sweat, and he cursed himself for not having arrived home in time.

His eyes traveled unconsciously to the scars on your arms, and he had to control his anger. He couldn’t bare even thinking about the horrible things that monster had done to you, much less the psychological damage he’d caused.

Benedict closed his eyes as well and tried to sleep.

He dreamed of a reality in which you’d never been abused or beaten or humiliated. In it, the both of you were together and happy, and there were no triggers or scars or any kind of reminder of the man that had taken advantage of you all those years ago.

Oh… he always thought, if only he had the power to make dreams come true…

[Masterlist] [Request list]

[quiteashocker]

Homeward Bound and Memories || Solo

Effie always liked her evening jogs, even when there was snow on the ground. But she also wasn’t too fond of going anywhere near Dark Score Lake after the last time she had been there—memories of swimming and shocking people and killing fish weren’t pleasant. And, if anything, the reminders of the horrible pageant that caused the ugly scars on her legs and the ugly memories weren’t desired. But once around the lake should do it, flyers for a lost dog would be distributed in the next couple of days… She really hoped Loker was okay. At this point she was starting to lose hope—they were known for hurting animals, and Loker was an old dog and she didn’t know how much stress he could even take. The two had grown closer than she had originally realized and having him gone left an awfully empty hole in her apartment.

Glancing at her phone, she stuffed her headphones in her ears and tied her hair back—thank goodness it was growing out again. Hair falling into her eyes had been a real issue, especially when trying to put teeny metal clips into her hair that could cause some… bad business with other electronics. But she let some light music fill her ears—Her phone had whatever Eva liked to listen to downloaded on it. Effie was never a music person so Eva kept trying to fix it by sending her music which she begrudgingly downloaded to her phone. Right now it sounded like that band… Dreaming Dragons? Imagine Lizards? Something like that.

Effie set out on her way in a light run. She wouldn’t get a new dog if Loker wasn’t found. Having a pet already was dangerous and probably even a little selfish of her. Honey, the family’s golden retriever they’d had when Effie was young, was fine. Honey had her siblings to take care of her and love her and to pet her properly, but Loker only had her. Even if he didn’t like to be touched, she was sure when he did ask to be petted he didn’t like the feeling of the rubber gloves; the fact that he had to have his own big doggy bed beside hers instead of sleeping up in her bed made it worse. She was glad however, that he missed her little encounter with that creature from the other night. Effie frowned as she turned a corner, her mind being brought back to the more pressing situation.

A voicemail depicting her wife and child. Christmas morning with her wife and child. A visit to a restaurant…. Effie didn’t understand why she kept having these sort of visions of something like this. It really hurt to see herself like that- happy. With a family. There was no use in denying to herself that that’s what she wanted. She could address the feeling of jealousy that she felt when she stared at Ella and Lin and their little boy. Ellie and Christina too, though she was pretty sure they both were at a point in their relationship where they just didn’t want children. She wasn’t stupid, and she knew it was normal for her to want stuff like that. As the song changed to something strange,  Effie reminded herself of the risks. And the risk always outweighed the need for something like that. She wouldn’t be responsible for someone else’s death.

Effie frowned, trying to push that out of her head as she ran faster, trying to focus on the music. Imagine Lizards really seemed to be experimenting with barking, this was a weird song. Polaroids and a deep bark from—Wait.

Stupid.

Effie skidded to a stop and whipped around. And lumbering after her was a giant, fat basset hound. His baring teeth and barking didn’t seem to die as she ripped her headphones out and he tumbled over his long ears.

“Loker!”

In a perfect movie moment, the two would have run together and embraced, but fact of the matter was was that dogs still made Effie very nervous and she couldn’t help backing up very quickly in a little backwards trot as Loker barreled to her.

“Loker- heel! Sit! Stay! Loker no!”

And—

Too late.

The dog gave a purely majestic leap through the air and slammed into her knees, causing her to yelp, fall, and slip on a small patch of ice while he scrambled to his feet gain.

Thank god she was wearing thick clothing.

She landed on her back, and Effie couldn’t help but let out a loud laugh, surprising herself as she propped herself up on her elbows as Loker started to circle her repeatedly, howling and barking all the way. His dog collar was still on and he looked like he hadn’t even been touched—how in the hell did she end up being so lucky.

“Loker! I can’t believe it! You’re okay!” Effie had started laughing so hard there were tears coming out of her eyes. The dog didn’t seem to pay any mind to that as he ran around, seemingly excited to see his owner. Of course, she was certain once they got back to the house it would go back to the way things were. She would watch television and he would growl at her every time she would move away or she would go down to her workshop and he would let out a dramatic sigh and follow her while he laid down in the corner.

She would be happy with that, she thought.

Taking a quick look around incase Azul decided to show her ugly face, Effie scrambled too her feet. “Come on Loker, let’s go home. It’s too cold out here.” Loker looked up at her, let out an old dog huff, and started trotting in the direction of her car. What a smart dog. Effie grinned slightly and started jogging after him. She didn’t even have to put him on a leash.

It didn’t take them long to reach the car. Effie unlocked her passengers side first and helped Loker get his butt in the actual car. She would feed him his dinner and then order out to celebrate. She should probably text Regan too… And finally answer Reed. But as Effie was about to unlock the driver’s side when she slipped once again on ice, and smashed the back of her head on the ground.

She was running again. It was dark, but it smelled like spring. The strong aroma of a campfire scorched her snout and she could practically taste it. Two people? A couple maybe? She could sense Paige somewhere in front of her. She was always the faster runner, but that was okay. They rounded the the campsite and saw the unsuspecting couple. They were arguing about paint colors— her nose wrinkled and she glanced at Paige, who was just visible beside the tree. Her two tails were swaying and she was practically quivering in anticipation. Paige glanced back at her, and she couldn’t help but admire the markings around her eyes and how it complemented her fur.

But Paige wasn’t feeling as lovey as she was, and she struck first. Ephie let out a bark that was almost a laugh as she followed. She saw Paige take the man, and Ephie leapt for the woman, ignoring horrified screeching as Ephie sunk her teeth into her throat to shut her up. Humans were so aggravating sometimes. Her claws sunk into her chest as she ripped at her throat, spitting any excess meat she didn’t want— it was such a shame that human hearts tasted so good. Paige said she was picky, but she swore nothing else tasted that good, except maybe the liver. But it smelled like these two had been drinking— no thanks. Ephie snarled and went to rip the rib cage open. But she took quick pause to look over at her wife, grinning as she saw her messily ravaging the man’s insides. She always went straight for dinner, didn’t even stop to see if the man was dead yet. And she would have a hell of a time washing without cussing suspicion. Ephie snorted in amusement and went back to her own meal. Her teeth sunk into flesh again. She should save Derek a piece of liver, probably—

Effie hadn’t realized she was screaming until she heard Loker whining and howling above her. She was on the ground, her eyes wide, and her head was pounding. Her scream stopped short and she hurriedly tried to scramble, tried to get in her car, tried to do anything. But her knees were weak and she was shaking, making it harder to stand on the ice and just as Effie managed to open her car door, she vomited on the pavement. What was that? That wasn’t what a Huxian looked like. That was… That was a monster. That was a giant two legged fox monster.

She was the giant two legged fox monster.