#his affection for them as a child was not irrational or unnatural

[ladystoneboobs]

In the dark crypts below Winterfell, a stonemason was chiseling out his father's likeness in granite. [....] Rickon even showed them [the walders frey, big and little] the deep vaults under the earth where the stonemason was carving father's tomb. "You had no right!" Bran screamed at his brother when he heard. "That was our place, a Stark place!" -Bran I, aCoK

He did not like the crypts, had never liked the crypts, but he was no stranger to them. -Theon V, aDwD

relationship to the crypts could best exemplify theon's paradoxical position in the stark household: discomfort and familiarity all mixed together, not a stark, yet not always an outsider either. bran treats the freys' invitation to the crypts as an unheard-of sacrilege though he must have been aware that the previous winterfell ward was "no stranger to them."* theon was more a part of winterfell to bran than the frey boys could ever be, even if bran never much liked him. he'd been there since before bran was born, and was close enough to the family that his being in the crypts was unremarkable. (bran deems it not just a northern or winterfell place, mind, but a stark place.) one does not have to like extended family members or friends of the family, after all. don't we all have that uncle or cousin or sister's bf or brother's friend that we don't really care for or want to spend time with? but you still feel that person is one of you whether you want them to be or not if you attend enough family gatherings together. sometimes familiarity breeds a weird sort of acceptance.

while i do think it is important to note that theon was beaten at winterfell, which none of the starklings (including jon) ever were, and that the adults there certainly understood his position as a hostage better than bran and rickon (or sansa and arya prob) could, idt that means he was always seen as an enemy foreigner by all of them and treated accordingly. after all, even if he was meant to be punished for his father's sins if balon rebelled again, that was not really the only purpose of his being there, more a last resort. everyone was hoping and (vainly) expecting that balon would not make war on them again if his only son's life was on the line, that theon's time in winterfell would bring peace with the ironborn for the forseeable future, and that, in due time, he would end his time as a hostage not on the chopping block but as the new lord of the isles having become a friendly ally to the mainland.

that was what truly messed theon up, the insidiously damaging part of his situation: that he was always ward/fosterling as well as hostage at winterfell, contradictory as that may be. theon was never one of ned's kids, but ned "had tried to play the father from time to time", even if he mostly kept more of a distance with theon. unlike sansa with joffrey after ned's death, or theon's later captivity with the boltons, this was not blatant abuse all the time. that's what made theon want to be a stark even while he still had reason to fear for his life as a hostage, to the point that he was trying to seem like a lord like ned even when taking winterfell in balon's name. when theon expects the winterfellians to accept him as their new prince, that's obviously delusional, (bc he just became no more than an enemy foreigner by taking their home by force, promising to be a good and just lord after some of his men raped palla and while others beat poor hodor at his command!), but idt that means he totally imagined that some of these people liked him well enough beforehand, these men he'd diced, hunted, drank, and "wenched" with, and all the women he'd kissed or had sex with. they were wrong to think he was one of them in the sense of owing the starks absolute loyalty, but idt that means it was unnatural for he or any of them to sometimes feel like he was one of them all the years he was part of the winterfell household.

imo that's part of theon being foils with jon snow, the way that neither of them could ever truly be a stark yet neither was ever a total outcast with no place at winterfell either. they're stuck in a liminal status. bc that's grrm's thing more than any straight either/or categories! jon ofc did have the stark blood and had lived at winterfell since infancy, a major difference from theon, but they each had different advantages over each other while never quite seeing the areas where the other may not have had it better than them. is it coincidence that theon felt unwelcome in the crypts and jon had nightmares of wandering the crypts unwelcome by his own stark ancestors? jon's last crypt dream(s) in asos even include sounds of feasting overhead, as if he's hearing theon's dream feast of the dead**, the same dreamworld for two people dreaming months apart, each visited by bloody grey wind in turn.

*(unless robb only took theon there in the years before bran was born or was old enough to remember, ofc. but i find that explanation very unlikely, given that we know robb and jon still played down there after bran was old enough to go with them, and that theon was still familiar enough with the tombs to recognize the stone starks on sight, both with lady dustin, and before when rickard and brandon appeared in his dream feast of the dead.)

**it's commonly said that theon's feast dream was due to using ned's weirwood bed, but i think that must be a conflation with jaime's weirwood stump dream, bc i cannot find any textual ref to a weirwood bed in winterfell. people are just assuming theon must need a similar weirwood source for his dreams but if rickon could share bran's dead ned crypt dream without being a full greenseer like bran, then why can't theon (whose evilest uncle euron is likely a fallen protege of bloodraven's) have at least one magic dream without being plugged into any weirwood?

[sebstanseabass]

Afterglow (A Bucky Barnes AU fan fiction) - Chapter 12

Afterglow chapters

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x reader

CHAPTER TWELVE

The chilly wind knocked against your small windows, mirroring the pounding in your head. Opening your eyes felt impossible as the dried tears stuck on your waterline. You groaned with your mouth closed, pulling the blanket over your body. You opened your mouth, licked your dry lips like a puppy just waking up; the aftertaste of liquor sat on your mouth. You almost wanted to hurl everything you put into your mouth last night but you suppressed it, seeing that you were in no state of getting up just yet. How much did I have to drink last night? Did I do something remotely stupid? Did I go somewhere? You had more to ask yourself but your thoughts dissipated, just dreading this hell of a headache to end.

There was more pounding and knocking; left, right and in just every direction — on the windows, in your head and lastly on your door.

"Are you up, doll?" A deep voice echoed from the other side of the door. It belonged to Bucky.

Bucky. Oh fuck, Bucky.

Your eyes shot open at the sound of his voice (not minding the stickiness on your waterline), sudden vivid images appeared in your mind. The bar. Bottles of vodka on the floor. Steve. Your photos. A limo on the street. Wandavision. And Bucky's arms wrapped around you, lips fluttering on your forehead. Dead, drunk thoughts.

Everything was coming back to you. Even the taste of liquor and the smell of the damp street.

Still in a state of hangover, you couldn't bring yourself to speak just yet so you groaned a bit louder, letting him know that you were now brought back to life.

"Good morning, sunshine." He said a little too loudly for your bionic ears.

"Sshhh." was all you could muster, hiding further into the little cocoon you had made yourself just earlier.

"Come on, doll. It's past twelve but I did cook you breakfast."

The softness in his voice made your heart flutter and lessened the pain in your head. Slowly, you uncovered yourself and revealed the mess that you were to Bucky who was just standing patiently in front of you.

"How are you feeling? Do you need to hurl?"

You swallowed, and shook your head no as you slowly stood up from the bed. You grabbed the edge of the nightstand as the floor beneath you started to spiral. Before it could even swallow you whole, Bucky sped towards you and kept his arms around you until you reached the bathroom. You gestured to Bucky that you could wash your face and brush your teeth all by yourself so he let you be. He retreated towards the kitchen.

You tried to find your voice back once you splashed your face with the ice cold water. Yeah, that'll cure my hangover. You stared at your reflection in the mirror and was surprised you didn't look as much of a mess than you imagined you would be. You were thinking disheveled hair (baby hairs going up in different directions, looking like a kid who just played with the static electricity ball for the first time), smudged lipstick, running mascara, and clothes from the night before — a walk of shame starter pack.

A look of confusion crossed your face, noticing that you weren’t wearing the same clothes you were wearing last night. Then you looked back at Bucky with wide eyes, who was whistling a song while preparing breakfast at noontime.

You splashed your face with more water before going to the kitchen. Breakfast had been served at the small round table. Eggs, bacon, bagels, toast, and of course, Bucky's cereal.

"T-thank you." You managed to say.

It seemed like, you noticed, whenever Bucky did something nice to you that you obviously could yourself, the words seemed to fall out of your mouth so painfully slowly. This was the second time. No one had ever bought you clothes before, and had made you breakfast before, so saying the phrase "thank you" came somewhat unnatural.

Bucky didn't seem to notice as he scooped a big chunk of his cereal. "It's no problem. I figured you'd be hungry after... last night."

"Right." Last night.

You sighed, biting a piece of bacon. Oily, savory bacon which tasted better after a hangover. Good God.

The silence started to creep around you as you ate, among the elephants in the room (yes, elephants. I was rather a big crybaby with an undeniable thirst for affection). They were hard to ignore, of course and you knew you had to say something, at least the word "Sorry" but the simple five-letter word got stuck in your throat.

"I was expecting for us to talk once Howard dropped us off but you were knocked out." Bucky started. You mentally thanked him for speaking first but God knows, you couldn't quite handle confrontation — at least not about you. "I hope you don't mind, I changed your clothes and took some of your makeup off your face. You made quite a mess."

"I-I noticed." Third time. "And no, I don't mind at all. I think a 'thank you' is rather appropriate."

"You're welcome, doll." He grinned. "Don't worry, I didn't look. I undressed you with, uh, utmost respect."

"And hey, if you'd seen me naked then we're even." You laughed, recalling the first time you had met him.

"I promise you, I didn't see you butt naked so we're not even."

The mood lightened up a bit and started to take its own pace. You began to sit more comfortably on the chair, and grab more bacon and eggs. "Bucky," You started, hating to break what was a nice, light atmosphere, "I think I need to address the elephant in the room."

You’ve always hated that phrase. Elephant in the room. Why did it have to be elephants? Why couldn't it be, oh I don't know, dogs or cats or a raccoon? It sounded less scarier.

"I was just about to start." Bucky chuckled.

"I truly am sorry for the things that happened last night. Getting drunk, being such a fucking crybaby, and for well, you know."

Bucky knew. You knew. Even if you were drunk as a skunk, you knew all too well what you did. And you shouldn't have done it. Not like that, anyway. Not in that state.

"I'm sorry for the trouble I've caused you, Bucky. I guess I just had my jar full and I exploded right then and there. Y-you have to know," Fourth time, "I don't normally act like that. So rash, and irrational, and such a child. I usually think things through but last night, I clearly didn't. Please don't tell Parker about this. Not a word. Even though I basically take care of him, he's still so worried about me. Last night won't happen again. It was... impulsive, reckless, childish. And just plain stupid."

"Are you done?"

I frowned. "Um, yeah. I think I am."

"Look, y/n. You don't have to apologize. You're allowed to feel that way sometimes and it's okay."

"To feel that way, yes, I suppose but to act on those feelings... I don't think so. God, you shouldn't have seen me like that. Oh, God. Why did I let you see me like that?" Then, your face fell on your hands.

"I don't know if you remember this but just in case... You actually told Steve to call me.”

"I did?" You lifted your face, your eyes meeting his. "Oh no. Steve. I have to apologize to Steve. I think I said some mean things to him or... or something. And I have to pay for those drinks."

"Already taken care of. I talked to him this morning."

"You have Steve's phone number?"

"Let's just say I have my ways, yeah? Now you don't have to worry that much."

"Okay, yeah." You knew now more than ever never to question Bucky when he says stuff like that. "Thank you, Bucky. Really."

"I know, doll." He continued. "So... about your little speech. It was quite big. Ironically. You, uh, really let your guard down."

"To be honest, I don't remember much of it." You admitted, hiding your face through the little knots in your hair.

"I don't remember the exact words you said but I do think you said something of the lines of having to prove your parents wrong and that you've achieved nothing since you came here. And then you told me a bit about your friendship with Wanda and I suppose seeing her studio that fine afternoon pulled a trigger on your envy."

Suddenly, you heard yourself through and amidst the honking vehicles, the sounds of feet trudging the sidewalk, and the snotty wailing coming out of your nose and mouth. You relived it in my head, heard every crack of your voice, smelled the liquor from under your nose, and felt Bucky's hand interlaced with yours.

"Yeah, it's all coming back to me now." I really did let my guard down. All walls. Down. Just like that.

"You've never been back there? To your home?"

"No." You answered. "I have never stepped foot in New Jersey again ever since I moved here. Going back meant I failed and so, maybe I should go now." Bitterness was evident in your voice.

"Y/n, if I had your talent," Bucky set down his utensils now, his eyes digging right into yours, "I would never give it all up, even if it meant rebelling against my parents. If... if my folks were alive and would stop me from chasing my dreams... Hell, I too wouldn't listen to them. And you shouldn't either."

It was the first time Bucky mentioned anything remotely related to his birth parents or anything real in his life. You looked at him, crouched like a little child, lifting a spoon to his mouth. And there it was again, an onion peeling on its own, layer by layer by layer, but still missing its very core.

"It's been years yet I'm still stuck in the bar. That was only supposed to be a temp job to help Peter pay the bills." You knew in your heart and mind that you should stop yourself from talking but your walls were already down; the downest (is that even a word?) they've ever been. Here you were, in a room in front of a man you had only known for days and you had already revealed the most vulnerable side there was to you, that you didn't know even existed.

You didn't know if it was the remaining alcohol in your system or your walls crumbling down some more but talking about it felt right. Because you knew these words were aching to come out of your mouth, desperate for someone to hear them.

To hear you.

"I was so sure," you continued, "that I was going to skyrocket in the media industry. Making a name for myself, seeing my photos on billboards, magazines — everywhere. I wanted to see the world but I got stuck on product photography for small businesses. I was supposed to move on to bigger things... Bigger names. Now, I don't know what's in store for me."

"Y/n, you're living in the city of art and culture. You're surrounded by art and that's why you should explore more of it. And then once you do, find its center; its heart. Let that be your... masterpiece and then make more of it."

"You know, you're really good at selling some bullshit."

"You say it's bullshit now, doll." He laughed. "Until you see the big picture."

Bucky's words kept echoing on the walls of your brain as you tried your best to sleep off the headache you were still suffering from. But the pain in your head overpowered his voice, letting you doze off for a few more hours before you showered, slipped into some comfortable clothes and headed down towards the bar.

It was thirty past five when you arrived in the bar — the latest you had ever been but the realization seeping in your mind slipped away upon seeing Steve enter his office. You ignored the calls from Nick and Nat from behind the counter, wondering why you were so late. Once you were outside of Steve's office, you took a deep breath and gently knocked on his door.

A soft "come in" was heard.

You obliged and stepped inside his cramped office.

Steve stood upright by the window, holding and reading something inside a folder. He noticed your figure and slowly retreated back to his chair. He ushered you to sit across from him. You sent him a tight-lipped smile as soon as you sat down.

"I think you probably know why I'm here." You started. He nodded in response. "Steve, I am so so sorry about last night. I was just... I don't... I can't even begin to fathom why I even did that in the first place — "

"Y/n, stop." said Steve. "I forgive you. And I think I owe you an apology too."

"What do you mean?"

"Last night, you asked me why I bought those photos and why I let you put some of them here in the bar. I didn't lie when I told you that I like them and they're amazing shots but... I think I also did it out of pity.”

And there it was. The truth. Whoever said the truth sets you free never had been lied to. And whoever said it must be suckerpunched right in the face.

"You were struggling, y/n. I could count on the fingers the people who went to your exhibit."

That photo exhibit happened more than a year ago, or maybe less — you couldn't quite remember as you buried it at the back of your mind. It occurred in a space for rent here in the Upper West Side, the same size as your apartment. As Steve described the scene that day, the memory immersed at the center of your brain, placing all the things displayed, all the people who showed up one by one. And little by little, a part of you started to fade into dust.

"You don't have to remind me, Steve."

Steve slid a bunch of photos on his desk towards you. The photos you took from the walls last night were staring at you. Crumpled. "Your new friend Bucky paid me a little visit this morning. We had quite the chat."

"Bucky came?"

"He showed the photos to me and left them here after paying for the drinks you drank last night. I don't know why he did it. He never gave me an explanation but it got me thinking... All these photos, I realized, were of us, the people around you."

"What are you getting at, Steve?"

"The bar, the street outside of the bar, the streets from your rooftop, and the park. They're all a part of your routine. I know I've always shown this professional front in front of you guys but you're not just my employees. I care about you and your well being, and your dreams. That's why I'm letting you go."

"Letting me go?"

"Y/n, what I'm trying to say is you're fired."

"What?!"

Your heart started to pace quicker than it usually would. It started to feel like it was about to punch Steve right in his damn face and knock him off the wall.

"No, no, no, no! This... This is a good thing."

"What? No, it's not! I'm the best employee you're ever gonna get." You argued, trying to save your job.

"That's why I'm firing you, y/n. I don't need you as my best employee. This isn't where you belong. Bartending won't get you anywhere near your dreams."

"But it helps me pay my bills!" You exclaimed, your voice getting higher and higher.

"I know, I know that's why I'm giving you a one-week notice. To think things through, and maybe have a plan."

You scoffed. "I had a plan that took me almost a year and three years later, it didn't work out and now, you're telling me I have one week to plan my damn future?"

"I'm risking losing my best employee yet." Steve replied with a smile, leaning against his cushioned chair. "Take what you can from that."

It had been a few hours after the little talk you had with Steve. Your head was spinning all over the place. You were having a hard time taking orders, and making drinks. You’ve had a few people complain to Nat. Apparently, you had been mixing up orders for the past few hours. Nick encouraged you to take a little break and while having that little break, a familiar lavender-vanilla scene filled your nose.

Your hunches rang true as you saw Bucky enter the bar (no suit this time, just a polo shirt and some trousers). Behind him followed a black man, entering the bar for the first time. Bucky spotted you in seconds inside the farthest booth where no one usually sits. A smile landed on your lips.

God, was I happy to see him.

The moment his arm snaked around your waist, your thoughts dissipated in a snap. "Hey, doll. I brought a friend of mine."

The black man beamed upon seeing you, extending his hand out for you to shake.

"Okay, let's cut to the chase. My name is Sam Wilson and I want to make business with you."

[olivinesea]

A Mixed Blessing

Chapter List

chapter two: the faces are all the same

a/n: Warning for substance use/abuse & domestic abuse. Feeling a little weird about this but also feeling a little weird about everything so it’s probably fine, right? ~2.2k

Though memories of that first experience still turned his stomach, Aaron wasn’t deterred from drinking. Instead he pushed any concerns away with the promise of oblivion. He stole single beers from the fridge and dug to the back of the liquor cabinet, taking the dustiest looking bottles, long forgotten. He figured if he limited himself to taking small amounts here and there, the thefts would go unnoticed by a man who could drink his way into unconsciousness every night. He’d take his treasures out to one of his hiding spots, behind the garden shed, or deeper into the woods, to a tree with tall roots shaped like a bowl, where he could tuck himself in and focus on recreating the feeling he’d enjoyed so much.

The beer was warm and watery, directly contrasted by the syrupy sweet liquors. More than once he found himself on hands and knees, retching back up the liquid he had only just managed to swallow down, pushing past the foul flavors. It was proving difficult to get back to that place he’d found initially, where the world melted away and everything felt meaningless. Where he could forget who and what he was. That didn’t stop him from trying.

It didn’t take long to run through the supply of unwanted alcohol in the house and it wasn’t easy to find another source. He kept an eye out for his father, trying to gauge when he could sneak a few sips from whatever open bottle he kept close at hand. Eventually he decided it was more risk than it was worth. Each time he got close enough to smell the liquor on his father’s breath, his skin rippled with goosebumps, fear making the hairs stand on end. It was never enough anyway.

Disappointed but not any worse off than he’d been before the discovery, Aaron resigned himself to ongoing sobriety for the time being. Plus there was now a baby in the house, a useful distraction for everyone. Sean, only an infant but already fully present in the world, captivated him. He could spend hours standing over his crib, unmoving as Sean gripped one of his fingers with his chubby baby hands. Sean’s birth had shifted a lot of things in the Hotchner household. His father wasn’t any nicer to him but he surprised everyone by showing affection towards Sean, by praising his mother on occasion for the good job she was doing as a mother. Whenever he made a comment like this, not demeaning her or demanding anything, she would only stare like a deer in headlights.

Like Aaron, she didn’t know what to make of this side of her husband. He’d been charming when they met, lavishing her with love and attention until the reality of a marriage and a child set in and unveiled something sinister within him. She hadn’t expected to see this side of him again. Hadn’t believed he was still capable of kindness, that he could be gentle without a price. Aaron, who had never known this version of the man, wasn’t convinced and made even more effort to stay out of sight, stay off his radar.

It was hard to believe, hard not to feel that it was some sort of cruel joke. Mother and son waited for the other shoe to drop, for this facade to crack. Each kind word tightened the frayed strings of her nerves. She was so apprehensive she began dropping things, crying and scrambling to pick the pieces up as her husband watched without comment. When she forgot things, having to return to the store again and again for basic items, never once did he complain about the extra trips. One day, perhaps overwhelmed by the cognitive dissonance, she fainted and, acting directly contrary to all Aaron had learned about him, his father took her to the hospital.

After that day she seemed calmer. Much calmer. Aaron watched her closely, trying to figure out what had changed for her, how she was able to move through the minefield of their house without intense caution. His father hadn’t stopped hitting her, Aaron saw the bruises, heard the yelling. And yet, she had found some sort of inner peace that filled him with jealousy. He hadn’t thought it possible but he felt even more alone. It wasn’t much but at least they had been scared together.  

He observed his mother from his spot at the dining room table, distracted from his struggles with a math worksheet. He saw her stop, midway through peeling vegetables for dinner. She stared out the window, peeler and potato resting uselessly in her hands. He said her name but she didn’t respond. He repeated it again, an irrational fear pulsing through him, he needed her to acknowledge him. It was like he had suddenly ceased to exist. His voice rose sharply, waking Sean who began to fuss. Finally her eyes turned to look at him but even then she was only half there.

“What?” She blinked heavily, like she was barely awake.

He didn’t know what to say. He’d had a question, he thought, but it had dissolved in his fear that he’d become a ghost without realizing it. “Um…I think Sean’s hungry?”

She looked confused for a moment, then surprised, as if she had forgotten she had an infant to care for. She walked away from the counter, not noticing as the potato rolled onto the floor and went to Sean who was now actively crying in the living room. Once she was out of the room, Aaron got up and walked to the kitchen, picking up the half-peeled potato. He brushed at the little bit of dirt it picked up from the floor, pressing harder with his thumb than he needed to. That surge of fear and unreality crested again and he squeezed it in his fist with all his strength. The uncooked flesh was crushed, some of it splattering away from him. It wasn’t enough.

He dropped it back on the ground and stomped it with his heel. Satisfying chunks of potato sprayed out across the cabinets and floor. He looked at what he'd done, knowing it wouldn’t end well for him but he didn’t care. No one cared about him, why should he care about himself either? He heard his father’s car pulling into the driveway and instead of trying to clean up the mess, mitigate the damage, he ran out the back door. He ran as fast as he could but in the back of his mind he knew no matter how far he got, it would never be far enough. He would get dragged back every time. He was only prolonging the inevitable, eking out a few more moments of safety that he knew he would pay for eventually. But he didn’t care. He just wanted to be free of this place and these people and himself.

~

Not long after that afternoon, he discovered the key to his mother’s newfound equanimity. It was hot and Sean wouldn’t stop crying so he was looking for her. She sometimes disappeared and he would find her laying on her bed, not quite asleep but not awake either. Looking into his parents’ bedroom, he couldn’t see her from the doorway so he crept further into the room. He spotted her through the open bathroom door, her back to him. As he watched, she poured a bottle of blue pills into her hand and then slowly dropped them back in one by one. The action mimicked the sound of dripping faucet; he thought he might go mad listening. She stopped when there was only one left in her hand. She looked at herself in the mirror as she placed it on her tongue. He could see himself in the mirror too but if she noticed she didn’t say anything. He left the room silently, still hearing the steady drip of each pill hitting the plastic container.

He snuck back later and took one, curling it into his warm palm as he raced away from their room and outside. It was the first time he’d taken something from her and he felt a petty satisfaction overriding the guilt. He was eager to see how it felt, how it was able to so thoroughly transform her reality. At first nothing changed and he suspected he had somehow gotten it wrong. But as he wandered further away from the house he found his limbs growing heavier. It was as if the air had thickened and was resisting his every move. He slowed and slowed until he stopped and just lay down in the scratchy grass. He rolled onto his back and stared at the sky, watching the clouds change shape. He didn’t feel anything except the slow turn of the world. This was the feeling he’d been looking for.

He went back the next day and stole several more, hiding them carefully in his sock drawer. When he took one he no longer felt his heart racing, didn’t jump at every sound, every click of a door latch. When he was knocked down he didn’t try to get back up or even get away. He just lay there. At first this made his dad angrier but then, something about how limp Aaron was, more shell than human, it was no longer gratifying. He walked away, muttering about unnaturalness as his son lay on the floor dazed, blood trickling from his nose along the sharp planes of his cheek, catching in the curve of his ear.

Softly detached from the world, he could spend all afternoon laying on his bed and staring at the ceiling. He was barely aware of his own existence. He had never felt more at peace. But the peace had a timer on it. Each time he swallowed a pill the feeling faded faster than before, leaving him with a prickling sense of dread. He was anxious as he watched his collection grow smaller. He created rules for himself, a schedule to follow to try to spread them out but the high felt too good. Every other day became every day became twice a day.

He ran out so he waited for his mother to be occupied with Sean, another ear infection causing him to wail at all hours. Aaron wondered idly what would have happened to him had ever made so much noise, taken up so much space. He took the bottle from the cupboard and eyed the level. There still seemed to be plenty so he took a handful more. School started again and he didn’t want to go, didn’t want to give up his time spent lulled by the chemical comfort he’d stolen. He took one at school and no one noticed, no one said a word, so he did it again.

The cycle repeated itself. He felt secure with his secret trove of pills. Counting them out when he was sure no one would come looking for him. Making patterns and putting them into various groupings. He could finally understand division. But despite his best efforts, they disappeared, faster than he told himself he was taking them. So he changed their location but they only continue to disappear. The anxiety grew intolerable and he needed to take another to balance that out but he was left with nothing, checking and rechecking every hiding spot he’d ever had. He retraced his steps in case he’d dropped one but he was too careful for that.

He accepted that he’d run out but that was okay, he could just steal some more. Just needed to find the right moment. Maybe he would take a few extra this time.

He slipped back into his parents’ bathroom only to find the bottle was missing. He ran down the stairs, nearly falling as he missed his footing, grabbing the railing at the last possible moment. Still pulling against that to keep himself upright, he saw his mother standing in the kitchen. She looked up at him, her eyes sharp for once, aware of his presence in a way she so often wasn’t. His cheeks are flushed and accusations burned his lips.

You took them from me.

They don’t say a word, speared by this identical thought, anger and fear fusing them, their shared existence crashing back together after the weeks since he’d discovered her secret, made it his own. Sean crawled to her and pulled on her skirt , wanting to be picked up, demanding her attention with half formed words, the sounds still new in his mouth. Aaron knew he wouldn’t be able to find the bottle again, knew that escape route had been closed to him. He stalked out of the house, slamming the door on the way.

Outside, his vision blurred by resentment, he couldn’t see how his mom jumped at the crash, didn’t hear how Sean cried out as her arms squeezed him too tightly. He wouldn’t care if he did though. It wasn’t fair that she had taken this from him. That she could be so selfish while he was just alone.  

chapter three

[seyaryminamoto]

What would you have thought if the Kumurikage from the Avatar comics were real, and not a hoax? And that it really was the spirits that kidnapped the kids. And that the kidnappings were the spirits way of “restoring balance to the world” by making the fire nation pay for their crimes. And that Aang(and possibly Azula) must figure out a way to stop the kidnappings and figure out how to applease the spirits.

Well, damn, Anon... you see, I generally just don’t like the overuse of spiritual beings that a lot of post-canon ATLA content has relied on. Spirits, as LOK Book 2 proved, have to be handled in a very thoughtful way and canon doesn’t often do that, at least not in the comics and in LOK. ATLA Books 1 and 2 did it really well because spirits felt utterly unpredictable, from the most inoffensive ones to the most dangerous ones. You absolutely could feel that there was something otherworldly to how they behaved, to how they saw the world... whereas I never had that same feeling when I read Yang’s comics (nor with LOK Book 2). Whether because the spirits had some remarkably simple, even human-like motivations, or because they were easily roped into service of a human just because the plot demanded it (Unalaq... just, Unalaq...), it just felt off, and the Kemurikage might feel off similarly if they’re not handled properly.

I guess the thing is... even just the concept of spirits stealing kids to make the Fire Nation pay for their crimes sounds like they’d be too concerned with human reality? And I’m not sure that’d really suit spirits, at least, not the way I like to see them...

To break down what I mean: Hei Bai gets angry that the forest was burned down, and goes on a rampage that affects humans all around. Hei Bai saw no difference, fundamentally, between the humans who destroyed and the humans who didn’t... until Aang showed him the forest could be regrown. Hei Bai wasn’t attacking the village because he blamed the villagers... he was attacking in retaliation for the forest burning, an emotional, volatile reaction that only stopped when his problem was, more or less, resolved. It was irrational entirely, and highly dangerous because there was no telling just what the spirit was doing or if his actions would do a lot of harm to innocent people.

Secondly, Koh: what does Koh obtain from stealing faces? I mean, sure, he has a collection of faces, but they serve no particular purpose, do they? If he just wants to kill for the thrill of it, he doesn’t need to steal anyone’s face for it. Yet... stealing faces is what he does. That’s his power. It’s cruel, it’s creepy, it’s the subject of horror films, really xD and part of what makes it terrifying is that in the case of Koh, there’s NO REASON, no stated logic to it, he just does it because he has that power and finds amusement in destroying lives the way he does. Koh steals from animals, from humans, from spirits, from whatever he wants... just because he can. It’s not all that different from the reasoning of the Fire Nation, attacking and destroying just because they can: in fact, the Fire Nation has more ideological basis for what they do, more reasons behind which to make excuses for the destruction they’ve waged, than Koh does. Neither, of course, is justified, but Koh is notoriously unnatural because... this is just what Koh IS. A face-stealer. He gives zero shits about hurting anyone, probably even finds amusement in it... this guy is one nasty piece of work, and he’s a spirit. Which tells you... spirits aren’t simply pure and good beings. There’s some like Koh who are DEADLY. That he has no sob story (in the show) only makes him extra daunting and effective.

Thirdly... Wan Shi Tong. This guy is probably the most straightforward of all, and precisely because of that, he’s really interesting and I despise how he was written in LOK :’D but in ATLA, Wan Shi Tong outright says one of the most poignant lines of the show when he tells Team Avatar that they’re not the only ones who think their war is justified. It’s not an excuse of the Fire Nation, obviously not: but it’s criticism of war as a whole, of human violence perpetrated for whatever their reasons may be. Wan Shi Tong doesn’t give a flying fuck about their reasons, Fire Nation or not: he only cares about his library and knowledge. If these people put his library and its contents at risk over a war he must consider pathetic...? He’s not going to take it lying down. Like Hei Bai, who prioritizes his forest, Wan Shi Tong prioritizes his library and acquiring knowledge: anything that threatens his potential acquisition and preservation of knowledge is the ultimate offense against this creature. If humans are going to bring their violence into his library, he’ll be violent right back to protect his knowledge. And he’ll also isolate himself by sinking his library as deep as he wishes because... why wouldn’t he? xD if he wants to keep humans away, there’s no better way to do so than to keep his library to himself.

These three examples show there’s an inhumane simplicity to these spirits: they’re absolutely bound to be violent for their own reasons, when what they prize most is in danger, for instance. There’s also those who are dangerous just because they can, like Koh: then there’s others who are good and helpful to humans, like Tui and La (then you even have La as an example: when Tui is killed, La goes on a rampage against the killer, taking advantage of Aang’s spiritual power to do so, but La absolutely targets the enemy, La doesn’t murder the Water Tribe people willy-nilly), or even the lion-turtles. Basically? You never know what you get with spirits, and that’s the part that was really interesting about them in ATLA. The lion-turtles do feel a little more convenient and helpful because the whole role of the creature was to bestow power upon Aang just because... but there’s a shroud of mystery around it that still works, you know? No one knows where the lion-turtle took Aang, how it entranced him, why it showed up right then and there... it’s still mysterious enough that it works, as far as I can tell.

Meanwhile, LOK simplified matters so much... even featuring Wan Shi Tong somehow striking an alliance with Unalaq and being supportive of Vaatu? Why would he give a flying fuck about Unalaq and Vaatu? Why would he help them kidnap Jinora? What does that have to do with Wan Shi Tong’s long-established priority: knowledge? Instead, they featured him saying that Unalaq “was a good friend to the spirits”. Like... like the spirits are nationalistic or something? Why would it matter one bit to Wan Shi Tong if Unalaq wants Vaatu’s kite? :’D and that’s exactly what I’m referring to when I say that I dislike spirits serving human purposes: it steals from the otherworldly, starkly non-human behavior of these entities, and renders them as simple plot devices rather than actual characters.

As for Yang... I hate the Mother of Faces. Her design is interesting, but not only is she profoundly inconsistent, she destroyed part of what made Koh so intriguing by establishing a completely confusing concept of spirit motherhood and by playing it as though Koh steals faces “to feel closer to his mommy”. Why... why would you do this. Why would anyone feel the need to do this. Why would they need any connection in the first place. Why would that connection have anything to do with the Mother of Faces turning into a lamp genie and handing out wishes left and right, when she had already established she only granted ONE WISH per human encounter... *siiiiiiiiiigh* it feels so wrong to me, and it again makes spirits so unnecessarily human. Why. Just... why.

Thus, I wouldn’t want the Kemurikage to be real if they would only turn out... like that. Stealing Fire Nation children in some sort of vindictive spree to punish the Fire Nation when the war is FINALLY over...? It sounds a little weird. With the storyline established by the comic itself (though I’d honestly never hold that too close to heart, I really disliked that so-called origin of the Fire Nation...), these spirits came to be because a warlord stole all their children and they were taking revenge for that. That, at least, still sounds in-line with the logic that spirits have a specific purpose in mind, right? So... if no one’s stealing children, they probably shouldn’t show up to steal them themselves spontaneously. If they were concerned with the war and the Fire Nation’s lack of balance, they could’ve punished the Fire Nation back when Sozin was in power since that’s when it all began. Why punish it when Zuko shows up and ends the war?

In the end... I’d say if there’s no clear means to keep the spirits in question as otherworldly and non-human as possible, I don’t want stories with spirits. I think, for a story where spirits force Aang to work with Azula somehow to protect the Fire Nation, we’d need a wholly different concept, and not the Kemurikage. Just to use a quick and REALLY SOLID example from Inuyasha... there’s a spirit there from a one-time episode that plays a flute to guide the souls of dead children whether to heaven or hell. Its eyes are closed when everything’s going well, but if a child resists, the eyes start to open and if they open fully... it means the kid’s going to hell. Dark, ey? It’s a single episode and yet it nearly made me cry xD but the point of the comparison is... this spirit has a duty, of a sort. It’s not “stealing” children, it’s herding them off to the next life. What happens in the episode is that one particular soul of a very bitter and frustrated little girl refuses to heed the soul piper’s call because she’s taking “revenge” on her brother, whom she blames for her death (along with her mother): the girl’s defiance results in the spirit nearly dragging her to hell, and the protagonist has to do everything she can to rescue the girl’s spirit and in the end, the girl’s realization that she’d misunderstood her mother and brother, who of course never wanted her dead, makes her change her mind about them and the spirit gives her a second chance when it senses she’s changed indeed. There’s no morality to the duty of the piper, not really: if the child’s a rotten apple, it goes to hell. Unless the child proves NOT to be a rotten apple, as the girl did last minute, there’s no changing the spirit’s mind. If the child’s a good kid, the spirit will just herd the child off and nothing bad happens.

How to apply a story like this to ATLA? Well, it’s obviously hard to say xD but my point is... if any other spirits would show up in future stories, if there’s going to be any more of them doing... anything? It should be along the likes of Books 1 and 2, or like this soul piper. A spirit with its own concerns, with its own duties, who either coexists with humans peacefully or exists completely apart from them until whatever they care about is threatened... but not a spirit that goes on a furious rampage against humans because the crush who friendzoned him died and he assumes humans killed her. Not a spirit who has an established behavior that she then sets aside immediatley just because. Not a spirit that has some sort of random stake on the state of the human world when that’s not their dwelling and they probably see little to no difference between warring nations. Hence... the Kemurikage as a concept probably would be best off left, in my opinion, as a matter of lore rather than anything that should be making a comeback in Zuko’s era. If some other spiritual entity causes trouble in the future, I’d rather it were written with a different set of beliefs and understanding of the world rather than making them excessively human... the way all of Yang’s spirits were. Just... defeats the purpose of making them spirits if they’re essentialy humans with fancy weird powers beyond bending.

... At any rate, I’m not saying there’s anything inherently wrong with taking this storytelling route... just that I, personally, don’t find the Kemurikage all that interesting as a concept, not as the spirits they’re supposed to be, not as villainous entities. If you, personally, want to write this, you’re 100% free to do so and to explore these sorts of storylines. Just... it’s not my cup of tea, and I doubt it ever will be.

[creepy-spooghetti]

A Hapless Endearment [Creepypasta x F. Reader]

Chapter 7 - I’m On My Way

With fatigue, she leans on the wall for support and stands, weakly stumbling to the sink, refusing to look at her reflection in the mirror as she bends over and turns the faucet on. She gets soap from the dispenser on her palm and rubs both of her hands together before holding them under the water to rinse them, and immediately after that, sticks her face underneath, hoping to rid herself of the foul taste still very present in her mouth. 

She spits minuscule pieces of undigested food into the sink, letting the cool water run over and wash them down the drain without another thought. The sickening stench of bile sitting in the porcelain bowl almost has her gagging once more, so she reaches over, pushes on the little silver lever, and flushes it down into the sewer pipes, never to be seen again. 

Only then does she look at herself in the reflecting glass hung over the sink, not surprised when she sees dark bags under her eyes and unnaturally pale skin, no doubt results from lack of sleep and getting hit by an extreme wave of nausea so suddenly. Her lip trembles from the exertion, her eyes distant, stressed wrinkles creasing her forehead. What is happening? Why is it happening? Why are such terrifying thoughts invading her subconscious each time she goes to sleep?

Perhaps she can blame this one on the news she received yesterday, but that doesn’t explain the strange symbol. Why would she draw such a thing? What does it even mean? And what about the buzzing noise? It’s accompanied each dream she’s had down here thus far, and it made itself apparent before and during she was heaving her lungs out yesterday. It also started when she saw that figure in the woods earlier. Is it connected to something?

She rubs at her eyes listlessly and pushes herself away from the sink at once, switching the light to the bathroom off and wandering back into the living room at a pace much slower than normal. Her eyes trail up from the floor to Marshmallow, who sits on the arm of the couch, eyes narrowed as he stares at her with dilated pupils. Maybe this should worry her; after all, animals can sense things that humans can’t. But she can’t bring herself to care very much. She just wants it all to stop. She doesn’t want to be sick 24\7, or have nightmares far worse than what’s considered healthy, or be on the look-out constantly for something that’s possibly hunting her down. 

She flops onto the couch rather sluggishly and runs her hands through her messy hair, gaining sight of the large symbol that she seemingly sketched onto the paper for unknown reasons. Come to think of it, her hand is beginning to cramp due to how tightly she had been holding that pencil after she woke up, and who-knows-how-long before then. Does she have an illness? Is there medication to cure it? Should she go to a doctor and explain her symptoms? She’d prefer to wait and get medical attention, if it is necessary, once she returns home, so she won’t burden her grandparents with her problems and cause them to worry. 

She knows for a fact that her parents wouldn’t give it much thought if she told them she needed to go to the doctor, nor would they be very concerned. If she told them the reason, having hallucinations, nightmares, irrational and paranoid thoughts, insomnia, they’d probably call her behavior ridiculous and refuse to allow her to make an appointment. Or would they? She is still their daughter— surely they couldn’t just brush aside something like that, right? 

Then again, her father did it with the murder of his sister and the disappearance of his nephew, so she can’t ever be sure. But what about her mother? Isn’t the whole maternal instinct thing still there with her? If her child was hurt or scared, isn’t it natural to be worried? 

She glances over at her phone, still sat on the coffee table charging, unable to rid herself of the sudden thought that creeps into her mind. Somebody to talk to would be nice. But would she actually listen?

Sure, her grandparents are just upstairs, but not only does she not feel like making that trek all the way to the second floor, but both her Nana and Pops are likely fast asleep. They've done more than enough for her already, and they have enough stress on their shoulders as it is. She wants to avoid troubling them with anything else and make them unnecessarily frantic about her health, both physical and mental.

Reaching out a hesitant, mildly trembling hand, she unplugs her phone and unlocks it, scrolling to contacts and swiping her thumb along the screen until she sees 'Mom'. Should she really? What if she disturbs her? Or wakes her up? Even if she did, that shouldn't be an issue once she hears about her daughter possibly having some mental illness that needs to be fixed.

Mental illness is a strong way to word it. She shakes her head, continuing to stare at the call icon that pops up once she clicks her mother's contact. It's just... stressed hallucinations. Or... or strange coincidences. Yeah, that's all.

Letting out a soft sigh, she presses the green button and brings the small device to her ear, hearing it ring several times as the anticipation in her heart grows. Is this a mistake? Should she back out? Maybe she's making a big deal over nothing.

"Hello?" She sucks in a sudden breath, heart rate increasing as the familiar voice meets her ear. How should she start this?

"Um... hi, Mom." Clear anxiety is present in her tone, though she hopes that it isn't as noticeable as she thinks. 

"Y\n? What is it?" There's a hint of irritation hidden in that sentence, but the girl tries to ignore it and instead focuses on the reason she called her in the first place.

"Y-yeah, uh... I need to talk to you."

"About what? You know I'm busy. If it's more questions about your father, you know I—"

"No, Mom, it isn't about Dad." She's silent a moment as she hears her mother's soft breaths over the line, trying to collect her thoughts and put them into words. "It's... it's about me."

"...Well? Did you make another painting or something?"

She shakes her head, though she knows it can't be seen. "It's... weird things that have been happening to me. I-I don't know what's going on but it's really getting to me, and I feel sick and tired and stressed out. I don't know what to do."

"What exactly has been 'happening' to you, Y\n?" Her hand tightens slightly around her phone and she lets out an inaudible sigh. 

"It started out with bad dreams... really bad dreams. Of people being dead, or freaky voices, or strange markings in a tree. A-and I've been seeing things in the middle of the night, or even in the day. I can't sleep because it's so scary and I'm afraid that when I go to sleep I'll have another nightmare..."

"Y\n," An exasperated sigh erupts from the other end. "aren't you a little too old to be scared of bad dreams or the boogeyman?" It's as if a knife is shoved into her chest from the harsh words of her mother, and she fights the tears stinging her eyes, attempting to keep her voice steady. 

"Mom, it... i-it isn't like that."

"You used to complain to me all the time about bad dreams when you were a kid. You aren't a kid anymore, Y\n. You're almost seventeen."

"It's more serious than just dreams, Mom—"

"Grow up. You're a teenager, Y\n. Act like it." The girl swallows hard and lands her hard gaze on the floor, unable to stop the tears from slowly rolling down her cheeks. 

"You're not even listening to me!" She keeps her voice in a whisper but raises it slightly to make sure she gets the older woman's attention. "This isn't some stupid childhood fear. It's something bad, and it's really affecting me..."

"I don't have time for this. I have about a weeks' worth of papers stacked up on my desk and I have to do them. You'll get over yourself eventually and stop being so childish. Goodbye, Y\n." Before she can say anything else, a beep is heard before the line goes dead, signifying that her mother hung up. What else was she expecting? Sympathy? Concern? Reassurance? She should've known better. 

"Fine," she snaps, slamming her phone down on the couch beside her and releasing a huff, "who needs you anyway?" She plants her face into the palms of her hands to stifle the quiet whimpers emanating from between her lips. "I have myself and that's all I need. You're just a... a useless, irresponsible, incompetent piece of crap for a mom." Her fingers run through her h\c locks and she shakes her head, trying to compose herself. "Why are you even a mom..."

Of course her mother would blow her off. Her very own flesh and blood, brush her aside as if she means nothing to her. It's what she's been doing for years now, so why would she expect any different? I'm stupid. I'm stupid for assuming she would be worried. She doesn't care about me. She just doesn't care. She never does.

Soon, her shoulders are shaking as sobs wrack her body. She has to go through this alone, doesn't she? Her parents won't help her, her grandparents don't need that kind of pressure. None of her friends, if she can even call them that anymore, can help her. And they wouldn't. She's the one that left them behind, and they owe her nothing.

She shakily stands to her feet, wiping away the tears with the back of her hands in order to clear up her vision so she doesn't trip over anything, and begins her ascent up the stairs, not caring to bring her phone and instead only turns off the lamp as she passes it by. She walks warily up the staircase, doing her best to avoid looking anywhere but the ground for fear of seeing something lurking in the darkness until she reaches her bedroom, thankful that the light was left on previously.

She's unsure if Marshmallow will even follow her this time and bring her some kind of company, though, considering the aggressive way he was acting just minutes ago, she highly doubts it. Her gaze falls onto her bed, then onto the window that it's attached to, unable to quell the rush of anxiety that goes through her chest. The last time she was in here, she saw... something. What was it? A trick of the light? No, surely not. It was too... strange to be a trick of the light. Not to even mention the droning that formed in her mind while she looked at it. The same kind of droning that was present in her dreams, and at the river with Jack.

Is this normal? If it was, you'd think there would be more talk about it. In blogs, on the news, in books. But she's seen no such thing. Shaking her head in dismay, she steps farther inside, edging her way toward the window and anticipating what may be standing on the other side of the glass. She takes in a deep breath, hoping to calm her nerves a bit and brace herself before peering around the corner, over past her bed, and straight through to the dark woods across from the cottage. 

She scans the treeline, her heart rate slowing down when she doesn't find anything out-of-the-ordinary and releases a puff of air she didn't know she was holding in, her muscles relaxing slightly. Nothing. There's nothing, so maybe, she can actually go to sleep without having to worry about anything creeping around. She doesn't want to sleep, but she doesn't want to get sick, again, either. Although that may happen anyway if she has another unexplainably terrifying dream. She can only hope that she'll get lucky and her mind will give her a break, at least for the rest of the night.

She doesn't know what time it is, and she can't gather up the energy to check. It doesn't even matter, does it? She glances over at her lamp, silently debating on whether she should turn it off to both save electricity and hopefully hide her position to anything that may be waiting outside, or if she should leave it on to give her peace of mind. She hasn't really liked sleeping with the light on, not since she was a small child, but recently it's sounded a lot more comforting than being surrounded by pitch blackness, save for the moonbeams shining in through the window and spilling out onto the floor. 

What's better, hiding or feeling safer? Maybe there's a way she can compromise and do both. Her eyes avert around the room, eventually landing on the closet across from where she's facing. Could she do that...? Wouldn't that corner her? But it would be safer than sleeping in front of a window where some cryptic being can plainly see me. She remembers seeing a couple of spare blankets folded up on a shelf, and she could use her pillows as both a headrest and a weak attempt at a barrier. As unappealing as it sounds, staying in clear view of whatever is currently trying to get into her head sounds even less so. Closet it is.

She steps over and opens the door, switching on the light and glimpsing around for a good, somewhat comfortable spot to take shelter in. Under the clothes? No, too tight. In the little cabinet of old, stored things belonging to her aunt? Again, too tight. She decides on the opposite end of the closet, in-between a shelf and the wall, not too cramped but not too open either. And she'd be able to see the door clearly. That'll work. 

She grabs the two pillows from off of her bed, plus an oversized teddy bear that had been originally sitting in the corner of the room, untouched, and goes back into the walk-in storage room, placing all three items in her self-proclaimed area of safety, before also taking a folded-up blanket from the small stack and tossing it onto the pillows. She releases a yawn, blinking slowly afterward and shutting the door behind her prior to double-checking the room for anything else she may need, only finding her water bottle, and switches off the lamp. 

She sets it on the floor and shifts around everything until it meets her intentions, dimming the overhead light on the lowest setting, then walks back over and sits down, wrapping the blanket around her b\t frame, leaning against the wall, and tucking the large stuffed bear into her side. This is good. She feels secure here. There is nothing that can get in here without her knowing about it first... unless it's a hallucination. Then she can't escape. "I guess that's where you come in, Fuzzy," she mutters, hugging the bear half her size to earn some type of reassurance and consolation she had failed to get from her mother.

She stares ahead of her, at the closed door, waiting to hear something. Waiting to hear the creak of floorboards or the stamp of footsteps, or see the knob to the door slowly twist as it swings open. But one minute passes, then two, then five, then eight. Nothing of the sort happens. She just stays there, her breathing leveling out the more time passes, and she finds herself becoming relaxed. Maybe she should sleep in a closet more often...

She snuggles into the soft, though mildly dusty, coat of the bear, inhaling its old, washed-out scent of vanilla and allowing her eyes to droop. "Protect me if the 'boogeyman' comes in here, alright?" Her voice comes out as no more than a whisper, indirectly mocking her mother's previous choice of words to describe her state before fluttering her eyes closed and drifting off into a surprising, though thankfully peaceful, sleep.

___

His footsteps are almost inaudible as he walks through the darkened forest, his senses heightened due to the gloom around him. He's always more active at night, and it's been that way since... well, since the incident took place, all that long ago. Or was it even that long ago? He supposes it feels longer than what it actually is, probably because off of everything that's happened the past few years. But in reality, it's only been, what... eight, nine years ago? He was only seventeen at the time, and physically, he always will be. If he had been able to fulfill his career choice and live a normal life without meeting her, then he would be around twenty-six. 

Maybe he'd have a girlfriend, heck, maybe he'd have a wife, although becoming a doctor takes years of dedication so he doubts that he would have the time to put that much commitment into a relationship. Either way, he would be happy. He wouldn't have to worry about being hunted by some otherworldly entity, or stocking up on the less-than-desirable diet his body has unfortunately given him. He wishes he could have something normal for a change... like pizza. He would just about kill for some pizza, preferably supreme, but pepperoni would work, too. 

He shakes his head in disregard at his own thoughts, knowing more than anyone that pizza wouldn't ever happen, just like enchiladas wouldn't happen, or cheese sticks, or even something simple like cereal. It isn't possible, and though he accepted that long ago, he still gets certain cravings for things he used to enjoy. If he even tried eating them, now, he'd be sick for a week. One of the many disadvantages of being him. If only, right?

He checks the map on his phone that Ben had sent him about two hours prior, the direction he was supposed to go marked with bright red ink and making it pretty hard to miss. Let's see, he already passed the river, and he knows she took a certain trail to get to it. Just which trail did she take? He would follow footsteps but there's too much grass obscuring the actual dirt beneath, and even though he can see to a point, his vision has still been drastically altered, so he can't make out any pristine details. 

He makes a turn and comes across an overgrown area of the trail he's been sticking with, though it looks like it's already been walked through several times. Up ahead a few feet is what looks to be a dirt road and past that sits a quaint property with a white picket fence, a garden, and a gate. This is the place he's been searching for, right? Guess there's only one way to find out.

Will great stealth, he slinks out from behind the trees, creeping across the natural driveway and up to the house, where he hopes his target is currently resting inside. If she's awake, it would make his job quite a bit harder, and he doesn't want to take any lives if it's unnecessary. Once he's directly in front, he scans possible entry points that wouldn't draw attention. A window? Sure, if the front door isn't locked. He quietly jiggles the knob after opening the screen, only to find that yes, the door is locked. Just his luck, but he'd be lying if he said he wasn't expecting it. 

He peers in through the first window he sees on the bottom floor, quickly realizing that it leads to the living room. All of the lights are off, and it doesn't look like anybody is currently active. Releasing a silent breath from his nose, though instantly being hit with a familiar bout of hot air thanks to his mask, he slips his fingers beneath the rim, briefly tugging upward and being grateful when the window slides up without much struggle. 

There's a table placed in front of it, but he can easily maneuver over that. Conquering obstacles is something that he's mastered over the years of breaking and entering other peoples' households, so one measly table shouldn't halt his process too much. With one hand, he holds the strap of his satchel that's been thrown over his shoulder in order to anchor it to his side to make sure it doesn't make any noise, and with the other, he grips the side of the wall, skillfully propping himself up and slipping through the now-open space lacking so much as a thud. 

Once his feet hit the carpet beneath them, he does a quick one-eighty of the room, wanting to make sure he isn't disturbing anything by making his appearance, and closing the window when he deems the coast clear. She never mentioned anything about having a dog, or any other kind of pet when he talked to her, then again he didn't exactly ask her about it, either. Maybe he got lucky this time.

Thought too soon, Jack, he thinks as he finally notices the fluffy white feline perching on the back of the couch, ears folded back as it quietly growls at him. Of course it's a cat. It couldn't have been a bunny, a gerbil, or even a ferret, no. It had to be a freaking cat. When he was still human, he was never particularly fond of them, but now he hates them with a passion. They get under his feet when he's trying to work and trips him, they scratch and bite him, they latch on and it takes a lot of force to get them off. Granted, he can and does get rid of them pretty easily, but they're still obnoxious little creatures.

But he has to admit, as bad as cats are, dogs are even worse in these types of situations. At least cats stay quiet. Dogs, however, he can't get dogs to shut up. Especially little ones, like Chihuahuas and Pomeranians. God, those things love barking. How could anyone want to put up with something that isn't even cute barking constantly? He isn't Smile's biggest fan, but he puts his barking to use. And he never gets in his way. At least he can respect bigger dogs for that very reason because they actually protect rather than just yap all the time.

He huffs, brushing the insignificant thoughts aside and walking farther into the living room, ignoring the growls of protest from the cat attempting to defend its territory and making it very clear to Jack who this place belongs to. Not that he cares, he just wants to get in and back out without much trouble. As he passes the couch, something catches his attention. Not only is there a phone lying discarded on the cushion, but there also seems to be a pencil, and beside it is a sketchbook. 

He leans down a bit to get a better look, seeing and instantly recognizing the large symbol drawn—or more like scribbled— on the piece of paper, completely overriding the original picture beneath it. Not much care seems to have been taken while it was being created, which is normal if it was made during the frantic state that he imagines it to have been made in. It's been apparent to him that Y\n was being greatly affected by him, but now she's to the point of drawing his symbol, his mark? That isn't good. His stomach does an uncomfortable flip, and he spins around, going up the staircase of the house after making sure there are no bedrooms down here with him. 

The hallway on the second floor likely leads to various rooms, his only problem is looking discreetly into each one and identifying his target. He chooses to check the first door on the left, the door inexplicably wide open, only to find a nicer than average girly room. He assumes this to be where Y\n is sleeping, but to his slight surprise, he doesn't see her in the bed. Well... maybe she's staying elsewhere? But why would there be bags on the floor if there was nobody staying inside? Is this someone else's room?

He peeks back out into the hallway, seeing what he recognizes as a bathroom unoccupied right beside a closed door, likely one leading to another bedroom. And at the very end of the corridor is a door also closed. Which one of these rooms leads to her grandparents? Is he even in the right house? He has to be. Unless he's just conveniently landed himself in the home of another individual that's being mentally tormented by the ominous creature, which is highly doubtful. They would know about it.

He hears the sudden squeak of a door as it opens, and just barely catches a glimpse of a masculine figure stepping out into the hallway before he darts back into the previous bedroom, ducking for cover inside of what he assumes is a closet. He closes the door softly behind him, being careful not to make any sound whatsoever, and takes a step back, only just starting to notice the dim lighting around him. He tilts his head up, seeing a light bulb attached to the ceiling, and confirming that it's the source of the light. The question is, why would the closet light be on when virtually every other light in the house is turned off?

Looking back and into the small walk-in closet, he sees a figure curled up in the corner, bundled up in a blanket and hidden behind the clothes hanging in front of her. She's holding tightly onto what looks like a large teddy bear, her eyes are closed, and her breathing is mellow and steady. She's asleep. Good. 

He's been getting to her. She must've thought the closet was safer than anywhere else. He eases closer to her, squatting down in front and making sure to not wake her up. Getting a better look at her face, he can tell that she most certainly is the girl he's been trying to find, and quietly opens his satchel, sticking his hand inside and pulling out a needle and a small, clear bottle of a powerful anesthetic. It isn't his go-to method, usually, he would use Midazolam or even Chloroform, but then again, he isn't currently trying to sedate one of his victims, he just wants to knock her out long enough to bring her back, all without harming her in the process.

He sticks the end of the needle into the lid of the glass container after properly sanitizing it, draws the correct amount needed for the injection, and puts the bottle back into the bag. He snaps his fingers in front of her face in order to test how deep of a sleep she's in. It would be hazardous if she woke up as the mediation was being given to her, it would also be mildly frustrating and make his job even more strenuous. Thankfully, her eyes don't even flutter, giving him the leeway he needs to lightly take her arm, twist it around, stretch it, and stick the end of the needle through her skin. 

He notices when she flinches, but only slightly, and he begins to inject the sedative into her system. He had no trouble locating a blood vein, as he could hear the blood coursing through her arm from several feet away; yet another ability he possesses that makes people fear him. Most could compare him to a vampire, what, with his unnaturally sharp teeth and his constant craving for human blood. It isn't his fault, it never has been. But he's learned to accept it, no matter how disgusting it may be to others.

His intention is that it will keep her knocked out for around two hours, preferably four or five, in case he runs into any delays. This particular bottle of medicine is the only one he has that causes longer-lasting unconsciousness without any life-threatening symptoms, and he got it by mixing Propofol with another mild, over-the-counter drug with lengthy repercussions. Perhaps not the best thing to use, but oh well, it's all he has at his grasp. He isn't actually a doctor, no matter how much he may be treated like one. 

He slides the needle out of her arm, places it into a Ziplock bag, and puts the bag into his satchel, looking down at her when he senses movement. She rubs the area that the drug was injected through, eyes only half-way open as she brings her arm up to her chest, likely wondering where the small twinge of pain came from so abruptly. He stays still, waiting to see if she'll notice his presence or just go back to sleep. It won't be too much of an inconvenience, either way, considering the medicine should be taking effect in the next couple of minutes.

She blinks slowly, shifting around in her position to get more comfortable, and landing her bleary gaze on the startling figure squatting directly in front of her. Letting out a strangled gasp, she tries to crawl backward, though the wall pressed up against her back prevents that and gives him the opportunity to reach out and force his hand against her mouth, muffling her yelps of protest. He can almost swear that her skin gets pale as she takes in his unusual features; a reaction he isn't phased by at all. He's a monster, right? It's only natural to fear him. 

She grabs at his wrists, attempting to push him away and twisting her legs out of the blanket covering her body to try and get a good kick in. Only when she frees her legs does he lunge forward and straddle her, stopping any attempts she may have made to harm him, and looks directly into her wide, panicked eyes with his black, tar-dripping sockets. 

"Calm down," he instructs in a quiet, yet authoritative voice, putting more of his weight on top of her as her striving to escape gradually increases. She thrashes, pulls at his arms, punches his chest, though he makes sure to keep his neck craned back to avoid getting hit in the face. Even with his mask on, offering a layer of protection, it wouldn't exactly feel good. He knows this from experience.

She tries screaming and yanking her head out of his strong grip, though fails, and can't stop her eyes from watering from the utter terror that rushes through her.

"You're okay, just calm down." He keeps his tone gentle, knowing the thoughts that must be racing through her mind at lightening speed and wanting to make this easier on himself. The faster the drug works, the quicker he can get out of here and go back to the base. She doesn't listen to him, either that, or she's physically incapable of listening with the erratic beating of her heart thumping in her ears and briefly deafening her. 

They both sit there for another couple of minutes, her struggling getting weaker the groggier she gets until eventually, her eyes hesitantly close and her body goes limp. Before he does anything, he needs to make sure that one guy—probably her grandfather— went back to bed after using the restroom. Jack knows he was, indeed, in the bathroom because he heard the toilet flush from the other side of the wall, though he didn't hear any footsteps. 

Stealthily, he stands to his feet, walks out of the closet, and looks out into the hall just in time to see the bedroom door close softly. Perfect. Now hopefully it will all continue going as smoothly as it has been so far. He returns to the closet, taking her hands and pulling her motionless body up, and wrapping his arms around her torso before she can fall back down. Making sure he has a firm hold on her waist, he bends down, allows her body to drop over his shoulder and across his back, before standing back up, tightening his grip around her and quickly adjusting to the extra body weight as he turns and steps out of the closet. 

Hoody never told him to grab any of her things, so he assumes that he'll take care of that himself, even though he's not sure how. Is he going to sneak into her house to take them, or just get one of the girls to pick up a whole new wardrobe? Those questions are meaningless right now, he supposes, and he doesn't let it take up too much of his time before dismissing them altogether and making his way cautiously down the staircase, the girl slung over his shoulder making it a little more difficult than it normally would be. 

His hand slides down to her thighs as he comes up in front of the door, and he uses his other one to soundlessly unlock it, not willing to go back through the window with the unconscious girl and take a chance on alerting the other members residing in the household of his presence, drop her, or both, so he opts to go harmlessly through the door. Twisting the knob, he eases the door open, then the screen, inwardly wincing when it lets out a rather loud and obnoxious squeak. 

Not wanting to stick around and take any chances on being heard, he hurries out onto the porch, softly shutting the door and screen behind him, and quickens his pace once he's out of the yard and through the gate. He scans the treeline, making sure there's nothing insidious waiting for him inside, before taking his original path and pulling out his phone. He clicks on Hoody's contact and presses the phone to his ear, waiting for the ringing to stop.

"Did you do it?"

"Yeah, I got her. I'm coming back now."

[ravensroleplays]

Well, this was a nice sight... The very last time Snatcher had seen his dear 'Princess' in life, she had him carried off to the dungeon to be imprisoned before cold and hunger took him. Now, thousands of years later, here Vanessa was, imprisoned before him. Okay, it wasn't one of Snatcher's own traps that had caught the ice witch, but he could still appreciate the irony. Or, well, he could if he weren’t so livid. "RELEASE ME!" The former queen demanded. "LET ME OUT OF HERE!" The specter, currently in his human form, squeezed his chin, as if in thought, then shrugged, giving the most shit-eating grin he could. "Nah." "WHAT?!" The ice-cold fury was obvious in Vanessa's voice, but Snatcher didn't even flinch. Why should he be scared of his former abuser anymore? He was far more powerful now. And what was more, he had companions. Friends, who already had already helped him out a loud. A family, who he would do anything short of going back to stealing souls again to protect. Plus, those strings his comrades had wrapped Vanessa up in proved to be really strong. Snatcher narrowed his eyes as he glared up at the woman...no, the creature he had once loved. "I got those flowers for you, you know." He remarked, his voice almost as cold as Vanessa's ice. "That day way back when, when you had me locked up to die." He dared to step a little closer, yellow meeting red as their eyes locked. "I was paying the florist when you came. And for that, you had me locked away." Another step or two closer. "I died, the entire KINGDOM died, because of a simple misunderstanding. Because of your irrational, insane, jealousy. Look around you, 'darling'!" It took all of Snatcher's self-control not to let out a humorless, bitter laugh as he waved an arm around their surroundings. "All of this is because of YOU!" Vanessa was still for a good, long time. And then, she did something that genuinely surprised Snatcher. She cried. "All I wanted was YOU!” Vanessa sobbed. "I wanted you back...there wasn’t a day that passed that I didn’t miss you! I wanted to be with my prince again!” Her body shook a little more with sobs before waves of bitterness started to roll off of her.

"But what do I get for all my efforts?! All my magic?! An abomination that looks like it came straight from that accursed snake himself! I wouldn’t be surprised if that BEAST interfered with my spell somehow!”

Wait.

‘Snake’?

"Disgusting monstrosities, BOTH of them—that miserable little creature is better off DESTROYED!”

And like that, something inside Snatcher broke.

Whatever lingering attraction or affection he had left for this evil hag, even thousands of years later, was suddenly completely gone.

“...what did I ever see in you?”

"What?” The queen stared down at her ‘prince’ from where she was suspended in the air, and, before he could stop himself, Snatcher found himself laughing. Slowly at first, but then louder and harder, until he was clutching his sides.

“Not only are you manipulative, selfish, and unbelievably clingy and abusive, you’re as dense as they come!” Without waiting for Vanessa’s reaction, Snatcher pulled himself back up, his smirk only growing as he said “All these years later...and you still haven’t realized...”

And with that, his form grew and twisted as he changed back into his typical ‘noodle’ form, and he got the feeling that, if Vanessa still had a visible mouth, it would have fallen open as she screamed

"YOU?!” Snatcher held his arms out in a dramatic pose as he shouted

"SURPRISE!”

"You...all this time?!”

"I never left, ‘sweetheart’.” Snatcher confirmed as he loomed over Vanessa. "I just...changed a bit, since then.”

"You LIE!” Vanessa screamed, starting to flail in the strings. "You’re just trying to trick me! My Prince was sweet, and loving, and wonderful...he would never dream of defying me! You’re just...a MONSTER!”

Another harsh laugh escaped the huge ghost at that.

"I’m a monster?! I'm not the one who froze a whole kingdom full of people to death because I was having a hissy fit! And I'm not the one who tried to freeze one scared little girl solid, and treated another like garbage, since the day she was BORN, just for not turning out the way I’d hoped.” At that, his smile disappeared completely as he bared his fangs at Vanessa, fatherly instincts taking over again.

"You know, looking at it, maybe it’s a good thing we never had any kids together when we were both human...comes to find out you’re a terrible mother. You bring a new life into the world, a KID, and you act like she’s some horrible THING.” He shook his head in a gesture of mock pity, and Vanessa started to protest.

"She...IT, is! It just came out so wrong, so UNNATURAL...!”

"That doesn’t matter.” Snatcher snapped, crossing his arms. "She’s still a CHILD. A little girl who didn’t do anything to deserve the way you treated her. But you know what?” He raised an eyebrow. "You don’t want her? Fine. I'll take her...she was made from me, after all. She's just as much my daughter as the little girl I found as a baby and raised for seven years.”

With this, he loomed over his former love even more, narrowing his eyes at her.

"And if you do anything to hurt either of them, or any of my kids, ever again, I’ll make you WISH you’d perished along with everyone, and everything else all those years ago.”

With that, he turned to rejoin the others.

The specter was surprised to find how much...lighter he felt after that experience. It took a LOT longer than he would have probably liked, but he could now safely say that he had completely moved on from that evil woman.

And yeah, his hands might not have been clean, but at least he had been able to realize when he’d fallen too far, and start changing himself for his own sake, and the people around him, something Vanessa had proven herself far too selfish to do, no matter how much time had passed.

Whatever. Her loss...she had no one to blame for her isolation but herself. Let the former queen rule over her big, empty manor.

As for Snatcher...well, he had to get back to his family. ALL of them.

[anhed-nia]

BLOGTOBER 10/24/2018: HEREDITARY

I am not ready to talk about HEREDITARY. I tried it when it came out in June, and while I think I hit all the points that were important for mass audiences, I wasn’t really ready then either, to say what I wanted to say. It isn’t because it’s so unusually beautiful, which it is. It isn’t because it’s “the scariest movie ever made”, which it is not, although it intermittently reaches seldom-seen heights of horror. It also isn’t because, contrary to popular belief, it is deeply flawed, with certain understandable markers of being someone’s first feature. It is because it feels so profoundly personal to me, even while I know that this is a not-uncommon reaction to Ari Aster’s breakout debut. It doesn’t make me special that I would take this film about grief, guilt, mental illness, genetic disorder, and irresolvable family friction so personally, but as usual, I have something I need to say about it. My experience with the movie tells me something, not about why we need HEREDITARY, but why we need art.

                                                                         (spoilers abound)

This story, about a woman who recently lost her seriously disturbed mother, and who subsequently loses her also-disturbed daughter to a car wreck caused by her teenage son, has been accused of emotional exploitation by some. HEREDITARY is aggressively harrowing, with interminably protracted suspense, teasingly dense shadows, and a constant unnatural drone that characterizes everything you see, however mundane, as malignantly abnormal. Most audiences may accept this kind of brutality when it is buffered by a fantastical metaphor, as with an EXORCIST or a SHINING. You can scare someone half to death, as long as you reassure them that whatever they’ve seen probably isn’t going to happen to them, even if it reminds them of something that did, or could. If you just make people feel bad, however, they may turn on you. This is Ari Aster’s big mistake, if you want to call it that; I know parents who refuse to watch the movie, due to its infamous scene of violence against a child. It’s easy to see why any reasonable person might want to opt out of this unusually shocking scene, in which young Milly Shapiro is accidentally decapitated while her teenage brother races her to the hospital, after having neglectfully caused her need for a hospital trip in the first place. But, I think it also calls into question the place for and purpose of the artist’s contract with the audience. This concept usually refers to the unspoken promise that a filmmaker makes to his viewers, that whatever happens in the movie, even if it is confrontational, will fall within the bounds of what the viewers basically expect when they buy their tickets. It means something like, when a family-oriented entertainment producer like Disney adapts a Grimm Brothers fairy tale, the audience won’t have to see the huntsman eviscerate an animal to get his ersatz proof that he has killed Snow White, and they won’t have to see Cinderella’s wicked stepsisters mutilate their own feet to try to fit the glass slipper. Part of the problem many people have with HEREDITARY is that Ari Aster’s contract with his audience is a little unclear. It blends psychodrama about irresolvable family issues that can hit way too close to the literal home for any ordinary person, with the unthinkable but entirely doable desecration of the human body, with outrageous supernatural horrors that, while scary as hell, can seem preposterous in light of the more terrestrial torments that have gone before.

To try to be more succinct, which is difficult with such a complex film, my own problem with HEREDITARY is that it contains metaphors for real-world elements that are already in the movie. To go back to the example of THE EXORCIST: Regan’s transformation from an innocent child into a vile self-abusing demon serves as a ready metaphor for puberty, mental illness, addiction, and really anything that turns your loved one into someone you no longer recognize. Writer Peter Blatty sets this up beautifully by using banal troubles like drafts in the house or parental antagonism as agents that weaken Regan’s defenses against the forces of darkness, just as they can weaken the average person’s defenses against depression or alcoholism--the things that warp them away from their best, or at least, most socially acceptable self. HEREDITARY gets itself into a sticky spot by giving Toni Collete a family history of emotional and physical violence, schizo-affective disorder, alienation, and neglect that is as convincing as can be, and then throwing a comparatively flimsy (however great-looking) metaphorical tarp over all that in the form of witchcraft and demonic possession. A similar problem occurs in Boots Riley’s otherwise excellent SORRY TO BOTHER YOU, where he stages the action in a world--our world, however surreally dressed up--that turns on an axis of slave labor, and then he concludes his story with an outsized metaphor for slave labor. I wouldn’t really kick anything in either of these movies out of bed, at the end of the day; I’m just saying that it gets a little awkward when you craft this grandiose metaphor for a legitimately terrifying real-world thing, while that thing happens to be standing right there in the room with the metaphor. 

Anyway. It is interesting to note that while the movie seems to have hurt a lot of people’s feelings based on their own contemporary reality, its spiritual DNA has been active for hundreds of years. Witchery has been a handy metaphor for, or even out-and-out "explanation” for, mental illness in women throughout history. (Ok, so it’s been an excuse for LOTS of things that have happened to or around women throughout history, but I only have so much space!) In HEREDITARY, Toni Collette describes her recently deceased mother as being extraordinarily private, having “private rituals” and even “private friends”, which we soon realize were signs of her being a devil worshiper. However, in some ways, mother and daughter are not so different. Where the mother practiced dark arts, Collette is a successful gallery artist. Her hyperreal dioramas seem like metaphorical expressions of her feelings toward her insane and abusive parent, but as we find out along the way, they are entirely realistic descriptions of actual things that have actually happened in her life--including the notorious car crash, but also things like the mother trying to force her breast on her infant granddaughter, which we later learn was part of an effort to implant Milly Shaprio with a demon. Shapiro, who inhabits a Baba Yaga-like treehouse in the yard, is also an artist, crafting twisted-looking dolls out of refuse and carrion, and like her mother, she also has unwitting witchy inclinations, perceiving grim specters and ill omens all around. Notably, no one outside the maternal bloodline perceive these things, and it seems that male members only perceive them when being supernaturally attacked. While Toni Collete and Milly Shapiro both use handcrafted art to process the trauma handed down to them by their maternal ancestor, all three women participate (knowingly or otherwise) in an ancient artistic tradition that, for some, amounts to a legitimate religion--but for many others, especially in the modern world, it is a way of dealing with feelings of impotence and subjugation. A sense of disappointment, worthlessness, and damnation plagues the women at the center of HEREDITARY, whether it involves Toni Collette’s complaint that her family blames her for all of their misfortunes, or her accusing her teenage son Alex Wolff of failing to acknowledge his responsibility for his sister’s death, or his sister ominously remarking that her grandmother’s doting attitude disguised the matriarch’s attempts to control or deform her--”She wanted me to be a boy,” Shapiro mutters, and we’ll find out she specifically wanted the child to be a boy vessel for a boy demon (about which, more later). HEREDITARY depicts a family out of control, who cannot escape the fate that has been devised for them, but who have adopted some interesting, literally artful means of trying to synthesize feelings of power.

HEREDITARY begins to fall apart, not as much because of its indecisive attitude toward fantasy and realism, as because of its last act left turn away from its heretofore cogent discussion of the disenfranchisement of women, and the guilt women live with when they fall short of their clan’s desires for strong sons, good little girls, or perfect mothers who serve their people instead of serving themselves. Make no mistake: Alex Wolff, who delivers an above-and-beyond performance as an average young man who is alienated by his freak sister and unstable mother, is always at the center of the film. The guilt he acquires from being an unwilling murderer is as potent as anything I think I’ve ever seen in a movie. So, it isn’t that this male experience of disappointing your family, and also feeling victimized by their very existence, is absent from the first leg of the story. It’s that when the film finally tries to make sense of itself, by revealing that Toni Collette’s mother intended to offer one of her male progeny as a vessel for a masculine entity that would bring her great wealth...well, it sort of flies in the face of the psychological depths we’ve plumbed up to that point. For one thing, the movie’s title suggests a singular focus on the intergenerational passing-down of trauma and blame, and the collection of damaged women to whom we’re immediately introduced are obvious experts in this matter. It doesn’t quite work when the story vacillates between sympathizing with these doomed females, and then sympathizing with a young man’s fear and loathing of adult women, who he perceives as irrational and castrating. And how is it possible that the profound mystery surrounding the family’s progressive ruin is rooted in something as shallow as money? I tried to develop a theory that it works as the final insult of any familial loss--that death is incredibly expensive to manage, and inheritance can be just burdensome as it is a blessing--but I don’t know, there’s not enough on the table for me to make a meal out of.

Setting aside the idea of sacrificing your son to a money demon, though, one can say that even if HEREDITARY is a little unsteady in its construction, the individual components are solid. And here I don’t just mean compelling, but also, real. This is the reason I people are so bothered by HEREDITARY--that it tells the truth in a much more direct manner than most audiences expect of a supernatural horror film. While that may be an unwelcome experience, it may be more helpful to think of this unpleasantness as a gift that art can give us.  This kind of nasty confrontation with trauma is important for an individual’s personal development, integrity, and self-knowledge. The more demandingly exhibitionistic a movie is, the better chance we have to untangle ourselves from the billowing curtain of metaphor and anthropological generality, and to be purified by the excoriating light of realism--not the artistic genre, but actual contact with reality. 

Here we find my own big reveal, my left turn away from what my previous paragraphs have led you to expect. Let me tell you about my mother. My mother was an enormously popular person. Extremely sharp, funny, fashionable, cultured--all things that help keep one’s private persona in the shadows. A prolific artist, she created hyperreal paintings and drawings from miniatures, like toys and model train props, that represented an exaggerated simulation of reality. Much of her work was about female pageantry, social expectations of women, or the chintzy objects that littered the lives of 1950s and 60s housewives, like kitschy bric-a-brac and tawdry paperbacks. People absolutely loved her for her taste, her humor, her ability to express herself. She did not like me. This was so true that, even without a history of physical abuse, that her peers sometimes say things to me that reveal their awareness of the facts of our relationship, or lack thereof. I hear things like, “Your mother loved you, you know!”, in a tone of voice that suggests that they know this would be late breaking news, without ever having asked me how I feel or what I think. From the earliest age, I seemed to refuse to meet the expectations people have of their children: I hated to be touched, I cried endlessly, I quaked with anxiety and a nameless guilt day and night, I burned with an aimless anger. I could draw, and did so compulsively, but nothing nice or bright. I was acutely aware of sexuality, violence, vanity, and shame. I was no fun whatsoever. Later in life--very recently in life, actually--I discovered that I have two important, inherent qualities: One, that I have a genetic inability to process copper properly, a mineral that is psychoactive and can make you pretty unhinged in large quantities. Two, that I suffer from a form of Autism Spectrum Disorder, a range of mental conditions that have been historically ignored in women, largely because of misogynist prejudices that society holds about essentially-female dysfunctionality. Unfortunately for me, my mother died when I was a teenager, almost two decades before I would find out these things that might have made her more tolerant of me. 

Fortunately, I guess, I think I know why my mother took such an exception to me, and it isn’t all about me. It’s about her mother. My maternal grandmother was also an artist of sorts, but more in terms of artifice. I haven’t decided whether it is fair for me to spill all of the details of a story that belongs to more people than myself, but I will go so far as to say that my maternal great-grandparents meted out trauma and shame in a manner that my grandmother allowed to contribute to her painful estrangement from her sister. For my purposes, what it really did was teach my mother that darkness--any kind of darkness, even darkness that belongs to you and you alone, that you have a right to, that should be yours to process as you see fit--is inappropriate. It is just as inappropriate in adults as it is in children, which she would see very clearly in her mother’s strict orchestration of their household into an unimpeachably pure, Rockwellian model of what an American family should be like. While my mother found her way into the revolutionary world of hippie rebellion and art-making, she never let go of her prohibition against sadness and rage, even in her own child, and I suffered from it until she suddenly, rapidly and gruesomely died of lung cancer when I was barely old enough to drive. Afterward, her mother obsessed over me in a way that was simultaneously scathingly intense and unmistakably impersonal. I looked like my mother, and my grandmother’s identity was rooted entirely in dominating a family, so she couldn’t do without me. I couldn’t let her know anything about myself; my feelings about horror, pornography, death taboos, sexual identity, and media that is out to hurt you, are what make up all that I am, and are the opposite of everything she believes in. With that weight on my back, I had to pretend that we had this archetypal American familial intimacy, even when I didn’t have it with my own mother, even when I hated being touched, even when I hadn’t learned how to receive affection. Early this year, she died at 90 years old from a misdiagnosed colon condition. As my family rushed to her side to say goodbye, we discovered that her shadowy sister had pushed her doctors into lifesaving measures that would have extended her existence into something so horrific that it would have stood up to the ugliest scenes from JACOB’S LADDER, had she not miraculously died before regaining consciousness. As perversely relieving as that was, my ears ring with the sound of her last phone call to me. Intended to be a heartfelt goodbye, it devolved quickly into the woman, completely possessed of her mental faculties, absolutely screaming for her life. It was a sound as chilling as anything from any of the sadistic movies I love so well, and I really heard it, in my real life.

This all would be enough to make me talk the way that I do, but it isn’t all. Recently, my father revealed to me some details of my mother’s struggle with cancer that I had never heard before. Although my mother had been told to go straight home and make her peace upon diagnosis, she and my father plunged full bore into magical thinking. They experimented with hypnosis, acupuncture, reiki, anything that might activate my mother’s internal ability to heal herself. Soon they found themselves in the office of a charismatic self-help guru-type in a neighboring city. Incidentally, this person is now at the center of an increasingly bizarre trial that is slated to begin this January, due to her authoritative involvement with a Scientology-like cult that allegedly maintains a secret inner circle of brand-wielding sex slavers. But anyway, back to my little memoir: It isn’t clear to me what she claimed was the scope of her powers exactly, but I know that she specialized in a form of “healing” that involved hypnosis and carefully selected words, I suppose not unlike a magical incantation. She said to my mother: “I am going to heal you.” The reason she said this so forcefully, was that my mother was the physical double of a previous client of hers; a client who died from the same specific form of lung cancer that plagued my mother; and who lived in the house we had moved into, only months before my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. That woman died, we moved into her house, and by pure coincidence, my subsequently sick mother found herself in the office of the self-styled healer who had treated the previous owner of our new home for the very same illness. “God has given me a second chance,” the healer said, “and I am going to heal you.” My mother saw her for several months, until one day she arrived to find a third woman in the office. Astoundingly, the healer described the young coed as having supernatural gifts. The two instantly began terrorizing my mother, screaming at her and cursing her. My mother, sobbing hysterically, begged to know, “Why are you yelling at me?” and they replied, “WE’RE NOT YELLING AT YOU, WE’RE YELLING AT THE CANCER!” When he told the story, of course, my father accidentally said “demon”, not “cancer”, but in any case, they were trying to exorcize her. My mother never went back, and, some might remark, she died.

Naturally, I wanted to tell this story to anyone who would listen to me, as soon as I had heard it. It was one of the weirdest things I had ever heard, and it happened to my family. While some people’s jaw dropped in exactly the way mine had originally, I received some unexpected feedback, too. On some occasions, a dear friend would pause at the end of my story, make a calculated “surprise” sound, and then, very gently, explain to me that coincidences exist, self-hypnosis and group hysteria exist, and I shouldn’t take any of it too seriously. I found myself, not just disappointed, but embarrassed. I wasn’t trying to tell people that I believed my family was cursed by god or the devil, or that we had been molested by some evil sorceress. I was simply trying to say that, somehow...isn’t there some kind of spiritual truth to this? Isn’t it worth remarking on, that my life, my history, had congealed into such an incredible metaphor for itself? Isn’t it so much more compelling than any kind of fiction I could ever have written, any artwork I could ever have created in order to process the exact kind of trouble my family has suffered? Isn’t this just amazing, all by itself, without even the benefit of theatrical interpretation? Of course, the conclusion will be that I absolutely have to give this some kind of theatrical interpretation, or else I will go out of my mind. I’m close enough as it is. But, in some ways, I felt like this interpretation has already happened at the hands of Ari Aster, with his horrific fable about how inherited trauma among generations of women gives way to the machinations of a corrupt cult. People who know me well will realize that I’m still leaving out parallels between HEREDITARY and myself, in this already too-long piece of analysis. But I guess what I’m trying to say for now is that I need HEREDITARY, and we each need a HEREDITARY of our own to put our most unspeakable experiences on a pin, under a spotlight, inside a bell jar, to be examined from every angle and exactingly diagnosed, whether we like it or not.

[espejonight28738]

All That Hate

You can read it too in Ao3

"They don't know what love is. Here they learn what hate is, and I am so sad that they might never know love because hate came first." -A.S. King, Everybody Sees the Ants

Orihara Izaya wasn't like other children while growing up.

He saw things a different way the rest of them did, he understood things different, so it was no surprise he never had any friends. He was an outcast even before he turned five years, in his firsts interactions with the world, everyone gave him the cold shoulder.

But, far from upsetting him, he found it fascinating. The way boys his age would cry in an attempt to get something, or the way they just accepted everything they were told with a blind faith in adults. They didn't think things through, all their actions were irrational, and the way they were curious and afraid at the same time of everything different amazed the boy.

But for Izaya, nothing could be more interesting that relationships. How people of all ages interacted with each other.

Kids would automatically trust and cling to their parents, even though they understood next to nothing about who those people really were. Izaya's mother said it was normal, that kids felt attracted to the comfort and feeling of protection their parents provided. She never seemed hurt that her son didn't felt that way about her, she probably attributed it to her being at work most of the time.

"I don't understand it, mother. Why would someone would be so upset about something that didn’t happened to them? It doesn't affect their life in any way."

So, she tried to satisfy his curiosity about human conduct, but most of the time she could only give him an answer.

"Feelings doesn’t always have a logical reason, Izaya, sometimes they just are. People try to be sensitive about other people's problems, and share their feelings, it's called empathy. Not everything about human conducts can be rational."

Izaya didn’t like that, he wanted things he could analyze, and so he stopped trying to get reason for people's feelings, and instead he started to predict them. How would they react to a certain situation, what would they chose if they were faced with the choice? Izaya saw right through people feelings and it was as easy for him to make them do what he wanted, as for the rest of the child to control their toys.

It wasn't like he didn't have feelings at all, he did, they were just different. Something that would make any child his age make a tantrum, would just cause a mild annoyance to him, and he would just have to think a different way to make things work the way he wanted.

When he had nine years, his sisters were born. His parents tried to prepare him to have to share the attention with the twins, something that in most cases would cause a resentment between the siblings with an age difference of so many years, but truth to be told, Izaya just couldn´t care less.

Babies were boring, they didn't make decisions, nor they had thoughts more complex than if they were hungry or sleepy. Nothing that could keep his attention. But, indeed, they took away his mother's.  

And he didn't care, his parents' attention was as relevant as the one from a completely stranger to him. In fact, he didn't notice his mother had stopped explaining emotions to him until he was sitting in a classroom and the teacher told them to write a list of all the people they love, and Izaya started comprehending that humans were far more complicated than he originally thought. Love? What was he supposed to write? He knew what love was, at least in definition, but he had never tried to apply it in his life. It was far too irrational, he had no way of telling if a person would love someone or not. He watched as his classmates wrote the names of their family and their friends. That was what he was supposed to write, it was expected from a child to love their family. Those kids had love imposed to them even before they could really comprehend it. Izaya didn't write anything, even after the teacher told him he had to love someone, Izaya just shrugged and enjoy the face of his confused teacher.

The moment he arrived his house, Izaya read all he could about human emotions, he wanted so bad to understand them, but it was all so confusing. All he could find it was people talking with metaphors and hyperboles and it just didn't make any sense. He already knew his precious humans were desperate to be in company of others, but this was... too much. Why would someone kill themselves just because other person didn't return their feelings? And why would someone feel empty and alone just because one specific person wasn't with them?

No, Izaya didn't understand love at all, but there was something in his investigation that caught his eye, hate. Just like love, it has romanticized beyond salvation most of the information, but even those were far more intriguing for him. A person you wanted so desperately to make feel miserable that you would do everything, even at the expense of your own happiness, to make them suffer? A true marvel.

It was so wonderful! Humans could still surprise him like this, like they wanted to make sure they still had his attention. Like he could just forget about them! They should know he wouldn't just do that, after all...

Izaya smile at where this train of thought was going to.

His precious humans, no matter what they did Izaya was never let down, he would always take delight in all they did, and he would watch them from afar, making sure everything about them was the way he liked it. His smile grew fascinated.

Before that day, Izaya never knew how to call the way he felt about humans. But after that...

He decided to call it love.

When Izaya enter High School, it was the first time a human stood out of all the rest at first glance. Of course, through the years a few humans had caught his attention more than the rest. Kishitani Shinra, for example, was someone he could consider a friend. Even his sisters, in a desperate attempt to get his attention, had chosen their style and personality to be the opposite one of each other. Even if they were just two more of all the humans he claimed to love, he had to admit they sometimes were more entertaining to watch.

But this was different. The moment Izaya saw him, every part of him screamed for him, but why?

Heiwajima Shizuo.

Everything about him surprised Izaya, and he just couldn't stand to stay back, he needed to be closer to him, the blond wasn't someone he could just watch from afar. He was just so different from the rest, it was impossible not to notice him trying to blend with the crowd. Izaya never went out of his way to get to personally know someone, but this time he did.

"You piss me off" were the first words the one who would be known as the strongest man in Ikebukuro ever said to him before trying to hit him. And years later he would still refuse to admit that the rejection affected him more than it should, that it hurt him like nothing ever did. But in that moment, he didn't think, he stabbed him, and the chase started.

It was something Izaya couldn't quite explain, but it was something without a doubt. The way his heart would beat faster at the mere sight of him, it was impossible to ignore. It was terrible, and he had a feeling it would kill them both eventually, but he couldn't stop, it felt so good.

The problem was, Izaya was supposed to love all humans equally, despite their flaws or gifts. But the feeling in his chest every time he saw Shizu-chan, the way he ached for him or even the way he was completely unpredictable, it was completely different, and Izaya couldn't just accept that. The way he ached when he saw Shizuo being civilized with other people the way he never tried to be with him, wasn't something he should feel.

What was it? Why did this human could make him be so reckless, even if the rest of his life was perfectly planned? He would think about Shizuo  all the time, even when he wasn't doing it in an active way, just a part of his  brain was always wandering what was the blonde up to. It was because he could have hurt his beloved humans, he tried to justify himself, but it was so painfully obvious the lie in there, that he never tried telling it out loud.

It was not about humans, he still felt the same way about them, it was about Shizuo. The one who insisted to throw things at Izaya, chase him around all the city, terrifying every single one who saw them. The guy who could catch a knife with his teeth and claimed that he could even smell Izaya's stink! Shizu-chan was far too in contact with his animalistic nature.

And something clicked inside Izaya's head with that. He didn't love Shizu-chan like he loved the rest of the humans because he wasn't human, he was a monster. Yes, that made sense.

Their relationship wasn't something Izaya had ever experienced before. The need for each other, it was an addiction. An addiction far worse than nicotine or caffeine could ever be. He spent hours thinking what he could do now to captive Shizuo's attention, speculating what would drive him to the edge. He wanted to make him loose control, stop holding back his unnatural force, and he wanted Shizuo to do it all for him.

This new obsession made him ecstatic, it was like an adrenaline injection every time he saw him, his own personal drug.

He felt the need to remind him what he was, and to make sure the humans wouldn't try to tame the beast, but above all, he needed to know the protozoan thought about him all the time, that he was always at the corner of his mind, just like Shizuo was in Izaya´s.  

The adrenaline of the chase, insults threw at each other, along with knives and everything that crossed the blonde's path, and promises of killing the other, they shouldn´t excite Izaya as much as they do, but he didn't care, because while they ran, it was as if he was alone with Shizuo in the world, just he and his monster, and that thrilled him more than any human would ever do.

He didn't know what this feeling was called, but it was intense, draining, suffocating and painful.  

He decided to call it hate.

As the years went by, he really tried not to think too much about his own feelings anymore, he came to the conclusion that he felt too different from his humans to try and compare, but it was okay to him, just another thing that make him feel more like a God for all of them.

He no longer had people wanting him to act normal, no one gave a shit about him nowadays, and that was supposed to make him feel free, but instead it caused an awful sensation of void in his chest, he never tried to name it. There was only someone who cared for what he did, even if it was for bad reasons, and it was the same "someone" who made all the aching in his chest go away.

He tried not to think too hard about why the protozoan had such an effect in him.

But one day after a particular exhausting chase with his enemy, the monster of Ikebukuro, he founded himself having problems falling asleep. This wasn't anything new, Izaya slept very little without need of a reason, but this time something was occupying his mind.

He knew this must have been an error, but he was so sure Shizu-chan was missing with his projectiles directed at him on purpose, they fell to far, he had better aim than that. So, why was he pretending to fight Izaya, but wasn't doing any effort to actually win? And why did that make Izaya so annoyingly happy?

When he was finally able to fall asleep, he dreamed about a classroom, and a blank sheet, and a teacher asking him to write the name of the people he loved the most, and this time he did. But he woke before being able to read what the Izaya in the dream had written.

He had an annoying feeling in his heart, when he woke up that morning and a voice in the back of his head whispered that something was terribly wrong with him.

“When we don't know who to hate, we hate ourselves.”  -Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

Longing. That was a feeling Izaya was far too familiar with to try to deny it. After all, in the sleepless nights, his only company being himself, what could he do except think? Think about how different his life would have been if only he were normal.  

Sometimes he longed to be as the rest of his beloved humans, who could easily surround themselves with people without a worry, who acted in what they felt, even if that wasn't the logical decision. They lived a live where tomorrow guarded a thousand surprises for them, for Izaya it wasn't like that.

Of course, there were little surprises now and then, but mostly he knew what was going to happen, when, where, and who would be involved, and even if he liked it that way, he felt like something was missing.

The more he thought about it, the more he came to one conclusion: his life was loathsome.

It was good at the beginning, or at least he liked to think that. The info broker, one of the two more dangerous men in Ikebukuro. He had a lot of money, making a living of watching his humans, and playing with their destiny as if it was just a game of chess. And for him, it was.

But in the end, he was human, and he couldn't be okay with only that.

His love for humanity was something safe. He loved them all, and no one love him in return. This unrequited feeling never hurt him. Because he couldn't trick himself, he knew the truth. Loving everyone was like not loving anyone at all.

And that was fine, he never loved anyone, he wasn't like the rest of humanity. His parents were just acquaintances, Mairu and Kururi were just little inconveniences he had to take care of in the multiples ocations their parents were overseas for work until they learnt to take care of themselves.

Shinra, his only friend, didn't care for him. The only thing he cared about was his beloved Celty, and even if he could amuse himself a little by being Izaya's friend, in the end he could die any day and the doctor would only care if that brought problems to him or the dullahan.

Namie was only there because she needed the job and it was very helpful for him to have an assistant. Kadota was also an acquaintance at best.

There ended the list of the people that knew him and didn't despise him. Though he wasn't so sure about Namie and the twins.

That was the painful truth. His humans despised him, and he couldn’t help but feeling hurt.

Because Shizuo was a monster, but even he wasn’t alone. He was surrounded by people who loved him.

Humans should love Izaya. Him, who loved them in spite of who they were or the crimes they have committed. Instead, they hated him.

And he couldn’t even blame the beast for that, it was only his fault.

He was cruel.

He was heartless.

He was despicable.

A fucking blood-sucking flea at best. How cruel that it was Shizuo the one who had been right about him this whole time.

It was his fault that everyone hated him, but he couldn’t help it, he didn’t know how else to be. He didn’t choose to be like this, it was just the way he was—

Ah, so this was it. Izaya sighted as the puzzle in his mind finally started to settle. He had never understood his emotions, but he thought he knew what this was. A familiar feeling that had accompanied him all his life, and he finally was able to give it a name.

It was almost liberating to know the truth.

Izaya hated himself.

Izaya loved to spend time playing with humans. It was easy, but never boring, and it was distracting. It had kept him from thinking about his feelings for almost ten years, but in the end, he couldn’t run way from it for the rest of his life, even if he wanted it so much.

His mind was the one puzzle he has never been able to solve, but far from interesting him, it frustrated him.

So, what if he hated himself? It shouldn’t change anything, he should be able to ignore it and keep going on with his life. But there was something else wrong, and he couldn’t quite identify it.

Until he could.

It had started like any other day. He had business in Ikebukuro, so he went to his meeting. It was obviously a trap, but he was curious about what this man would try, so he went anyway.

In the end, it was just another boring ambush. Really, he wouldn’t complain if this people started being more creative, it was the second time this month!

And, as expected, Izaya walked out of it with no more than a little scratch in the cheek. He was a little careless for a second, just a slip.

But of course, this was Ikebukuro, and a certain monster there claimed he could smell Izaya from a long distance, so he wasn’t lucky enough to avoid him.

"Izaya-kun..." Screamed the blond right before throwing the first thing he saw.

"Shizu-chan, your mother never told you that throwing vending machines at people is rude? Maybe she was too busy repairing all the things you broke. I can’t really blame her."

This time he had to dodge a traffic signal, and he started to run.

"Why not instead of talking, you fucking flea stop running so I can beat the shit out of you?"

Ah, Shizuo, a master of oratory like always.

"Unlike a certain monster I know, I have a lot of things I need to do, so I can’t have you killing me. Can I, Shizu-chan?"

"What the fuck would you need to do? The world would be a better place If I killed you once and for all."

Those were the words the ex-bartender has been telling him for years, he wondered why they still hurt him after all this time, even if just a little.

"Such an awful thing to say, do you want to hurt my feelings? What a heartless protozoan you are."  

"You don’t have feelings. And I’m not saying anything that isn’t true. There’s no one who would mourn the dead of a fucking flea like you, everyone would be happier."

I know that, Shizu-chan, Izaya thought, but why does it hurt so much when you say it?

"If I stopped coming to Ikebukuro you would miss me. I’m the only one with whom you let yourself be the beast you are."

"The day I finally kill you, I’ll be the happiest."

"Then I guess I’ll just have to kill you first. I can’t let my precious humans be left alone with a dangerous monster like you."

But his words no longer carried the venom they usually did. For a reason he didn’t comprehend, those words had hurt him more than they usually did. He didn’t say anymore as he lost his persecutor in the crowd.

Shizuo hated him, that he knew. It had been like that since they met.

And he had heard those words from tens dozens of people, but they weren't supposed to hurt him. But why does the idea of Shizuo being happy after his dead was so dreadful?

He wasn’t supposed to forget about Izaya. He had twisted the blonde's life to the point everything in it was because of him. He was supposed to think of Izaya as much as Izaya thought of him. That was the whole point of making the life of Shizuo miserable! To remind him of what he was.

He liked to think he wanted Shizuo to hate him as much as he hated him. He wanted Shizuo to hate him more than Izaya hated himself. But suddenly that hate punctured his heart more than nothing ever had.

He wished he had kept ignoring his emotions till the end.

But he didn’t, instead he dialed a number he hadn’t call in years, ready to make the question he should have asked her a long time ago.

"Izaya?" Asked the voice, obviously confused at the sudden call.

"Can I ask you a question, mother?" The words tasted bitter in his mouth. The last time he had asked that was more than 15 years ago. The last time he had talked to his mother was more than 5 years ago.

The line was silence for a moment.

"I didn’t think I would hear you say those words again." The woman sounded almost suspicious, but kept talking "What’s your question?"

He didn’t say anything for a while, he even contemplated the possibility of ending the call in that moment. His mother would see right through his question, there was no way to make his motives more ambiguous. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to hear the answer at all.

He asked anyway.

"What is love?"

It was really lame. The powerful informant, Izaya Orihara, alone in his apartment, asking a question like that to his mother, so afraid of the answer as a child would be afraid of darkness.

"I guess we’re talking about romantic love, aren’t we? That’s... not something I can just answer. Love is the most complex of all human emotion." She said that, but it was too cruel to leave him like that, he must have been so desperate to call her and ask her, even when he had learnt as a child she couldn’t give the answer he wanted, so she tried anyway. "Love is something... egoist. And selfless. You want this person to be happy, even if it isn’t with you, but hate the thought of them with someone else more, to the point you would rather see them miserable. You would do everything for that person, but most of the time you don’t do anything because of the fear of rejection. Nothing can make you as happy or as miserable as love. It really is something complicated, even for... the rest of the humans"

She didn’t like to say it like that, as if Izaya wasn’t a normal human, but knew Izaya would understand she didn’t mean it in a bad way. Even if she was never the best mother, and was a little absent in her children lives, she loved them as much as any mother loved her kids.

The unconditional love of a mother is another thing that never made much sense to Izaya.

"If you want my opinion" she added when realized her son wouldn’t answer, "I think that if after all this time you had to ask me that question, it probably do is love. And I think you already know that, and just had hope that talking with me would made you realize it was a mistake. But I suppose I could be wrong, you’re the expert in humans and their emotions after all."

Those words sounded like mockery in Izaya’s ears. The woman knew she was right, and he could feel the satisfaction in her voice at being able to read him.

He didn’t expect her to say something more, so her next words caught him with his guard low.

"It’s that Heiwajima guy, isn’t it? The boy you always fought with in High School, although your sisters have told me you still fight a lot this days."

His chest ached with the mention of the blond. He wasn’t ready to admit it, much less to hear it from other.

"That mere suspicion is insulting, mother. Why would I be in love with that beast? To think so lowly of you own son..."

He had always been the perfect liar, why now his words sounded so empty?

"There's never been someone else. You said you can't love any human in a special way, so you decided to make him a monster."

He hung up the phone, refusing to listen another word that woman had to say. Who did she think she was? Just because she was pregnant for nine months, and procured he didn’t die as a child, did she thought she had this motherly instinct to know why did he acted like he did?   That was ridiculous, an insult to his complex psyche.

So how the hell was she right?

In the end, Izaya had to accept his feelings. It would be highly inconvenient to keep denying them.

But that didn’t change anything. Shizuo hated him. And it was okay, because hate is also a passionate emotion.

He didn’t need Shizuo to love him, it wasn’t necessary, and he wouldn’t know what to do if for the first time in his life his feelings were returned. All he needed was to be Shizu-chan’s most important person. If it was because for the extreme hatred he professed to him, then so it be.

He just needed to bother Shizuo a little more. Remind him that, even if he tried to trick himself into thinking he could live a normal life just because he had more people being foolish enough to befriend him, he would fail in the end. He wouldn’t be able to control his inhuman strength, he would end up hurting someone he cared about. And he would unleash all his rage on Izaya.

Shizuo could only be the beast they both knew he was with Izaya, he needed him.   And what is love, if not a passional feeling full of dependence and obsession?

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.” ― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

The cognitive dissonance theory refers to a situation in which a person has conflicting attitudes believes or behaviors that cause a feeling of discomfort and psychological stress.

For example, Izaya had the firm belief that human emotions such as jealousy or loneliness didn’t affect him. This was a deep-rooted belief in Izaya, as old as his consciousness, and a fundamental pillar in his personality

But the last time he went to Ikebukuro to meet a client, he started hearing rumors. This was nothing out of normal for him, taking in count his line of job, but this one was especially hard to let slip. Because it had all of the city skeptical, and this was a city were the Headless Ridder and a man who could throw vending machines as if they weighted no more than book were part of the daily life. It was pretty difficult to surprise the population of Ikebukuro, but this made it

Heiwajima Shizuo, the Monster of Ikebukuro, had a date.

Even the words left an unsavory taste in Izaya’s mouth, it was a piece of information difficult to process. Of course, his first though was that it was just a misunderstanding, it was the most logical explanation, and the one he wanted to believe.

As a good informant nonetheless, he had to corroborate this. Fortunately, Shizu-chan and him had a lot of acquaintances in common, so it wasn’t difficult to find some reliable information.

Unfortunately, he didn’t want the answers he got. It seemed that his beast had managed to get a date with that co-worker of him, the Russian assassin.  

And there was this disgusting feeling inside of him. It burned inside of him, and he wanted nothing more than go to Vorona’s house and teach her not to mess with what was his. And the logical part of him classified that as jealousy. But it didn’t end there. Knowing that Shizuo could just go and try to have a girlfriend, have a life outside of his hate of Izaya, it made him felt as if someone has extirped his heart out his chest.  The same part of his brain classified that as loneliness.

And so, this is where the cognitive dissonance takes place. Izaya’s beliefs were that he was different from the rest of the human, above all of them, and in consequence he didn’t felt those petty emotions. But the information he was now provided indicated he could indeed feel such emotions with the same intensity as the rest of them. And it didn’t end there, Izaya knew himself enough to be almost sure that, even if not with the same recklessness as any other person, he was about to act on those feelings.   He never acted on his feelings.

Now, there were three different pats he could take to eradicate the dissonance.

The first was to reduce the importance of the cognitions.   This one was, of course, infeasible. The foundations in which Izaya had constructed his personality were too profound to just dismiss their importance. And it would be foolish of Izaya to downplay feelings that would have a good grasp of his actions. This option was discarded.

The second one was to acquire new information that outweighed the dissonant belief. This one was temptress. If he could just justify these emotions without invalidating his beliefs, just as he had done when he declared Shizuo a monster and not one of his precious humans, the problem would be solved and he would be able to ignore these feelings. But, no matter how much he thought, he just didn’t know what information he lacked, which part of the bigger picture he wasn’t seeing.

He didn’t come up with any idea, and that left him with the last option.

The third option was to change one or more of the attitudes, behaviors or beliefs to make the relationship between the two elements a consonant one. If only he could change his feelings to disrupt the dissonance, he wouldn’t had had this problem in the first place.  

Change his beliefs...

That meant he would no longer believe he was a god for the humans he loved so much. He would have to admit he was just as the rest of them, no one special. He didn’t want that, it wasn’t worth it. But his human instinct to eliminate the dissonance was already kicking in.

It was pathetic, really.  He told Namie she had the day off so she wouldn’t bother him, he canceled all his meetings for the day, he even went as far as turning off most of his cellphones.

Of course, not all of them, even in the middle of an existential crisis he was sensible enough to know it was a terrible idea to risk being needed by Awakusu-Kai for some urgent business and not picking up his phone. He had an image to maintain, after all.

An image of a god who couldn’t be bothered by nuisances of the life like the humans he takes delight in watching. Nothing stopped him, he had no rival, no one could hurt him.   Nothing farer away from reality.

Ironically enough, if you asked people who they though could face Izaya as an equal, people would think of The Monster of Ikebukuro. They had seen them fought, none of them getting hurter than a few bruises or cuts. Force and intelligence balancing each other, neither capable of overpowering their enemy. It was just poetic justice that in the end Shizuo did managed to break Izaya, just that it wasn’t with a punch, or a vending machine. He didn’t even intend it. Who would have thought the mighty informant of Ikebukuro could have emotions as any human?

And who would have thought his heart would break just as easily?

Probably Shinra, he had an awful habit of being able to read Izaya.

He had clung to an illusion he had created many years ago, and now he was stripped of his façade he was left with a feeling impotence and weakness he hated. He was just a human, even if smarter than the average, at the end he was as weak, as predictable, as defenseless... No.

Izaya Orihara wasn’t defenseless. He was in control of all of Ikebukuro and Shinjuku, god dammit!

He would regain the advantage in the game, he would win the game.  

And the solution was easy, it had been there all along. As if nothing had changed, his future resume in two possible outcomes once again:

He would kill Shizuo, or he would die at the monster’s hands.

It was a real shame it had to come to this, but it was the only way. Izaya wouldn’t stand seeing Shizuo having a disgusting domestic life with some girl stupid enough to believe she could tame the beast. Izaya wasn’t a man who wasted his efforts, and he had been working for years in making sure Shizuo was obsessed with him, and procured the monster emerged a little more each passing day.

His work wouldn’t be in vain.

There was a lot of work left to do. Izaya couldn’t just go and kill Shizuo, God knows that if it were that easy he would have done so years ago. And, deep inside, he didn’t want Shizuo dead, because that would leave him with a hole in his chest he was sure would never heal. But if he took advantage of his survival instincts, maybe he could pull it off.

But he would have to be really desperate, at the very verge of dying. It was a dangerous bet, but it was his only option. To infuriate Shizuo more than ever, he would push him to the edge, to the point the beast would no longer respond to reason. He needed Shizuo to be ready to truly kill him to wake up his instincts and, if he was lucky, the adrenaline would be enough to manage to take his nemesis’ life once and for all.

The best part was that even if he failed in killing the protozoan, he would still win! Shizuo would be killing a human, completely on purpose.  He wouldn't’ be able to deny his monstrosity any more after that. It would be a psychological scar so profound he would never heal. He wouldn’t be able to even see himself in the mirror. The man that hated violence massacring someone. Not a day would pass without him thinking about Izaya, it would mark him for life. Perfect. He wouldn’t let any other human get near him, his self-loath and fear for himself would be enough to isolate him once and for all from the rest of humanity.

No one would touch Izaya’s monster ever again!

This was a game he would win, no matter the outcome. Just as he liked.

Just as it must be.

“The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.” ― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Have you ever wondered how things would have been had you done something different, Namie? Like what would have happened if you hadn’t show Seiji Celty’s head or something like that. The endless possibilities of a life far better of the one you have, if only you have done something slightly different, or in another moment. If you have met someone in different circumstances...”

Nowadays, listen to Izaya’s ramble was as much of Namie’s job as the paperwork or scheduling meetings. She hated it, it was disgusting to listen the twisted thoughts of a delusional man, but she had caught some patterns to the point she sometimes managed to discern the real motives behind the ramble. Most of the times she didn’t care, the motives being as despicable as the owner, but sometimes she caught glimpses of Izaya’s real feelings, and even if for morbid, it was interesting the possibilities of who could it be under the image of an asshole he had carefully created.

“What? Are you insinuating that the mighty Orihara Izaya can feel regret? Or maybe that there are some things that even you weren’t able to control? The curse of the inevitability that us humans are force to deal with. Could it be it also affects you?” Her tone full of bitterness and sarcasm, but a genuine curiosity underneath. Izaya didn’t like to admit that things could go different of what he wanted, and so he hide in a lie that his love for human made him love all the outcomes.

Such a repulsive liar, the curiosity of what could have made something so close to truth come out of his mouth was enough for she to ignore the comment about her loved brother. Just for this once.

“Of course not. I love everything my dear humans do, even when they don’t let my control their actions, in the end I always take delight in the results. But I’ll give you that your words have caught my interest. ’The curse of the inevitability’, could it be that Namie is a secret romantic and believes in things like destiny?”

“Obviously not, I think that’s a lazy excuse for people who doesn’t want to take responsibility for their life. I personally found that an act of cowardice, but I admit that sometimes there are things that seem to be meant to be. No matter how much you think about them, there could only be one outcome. Or maybe that’s another excuse because we think as unimaginable the actions we must had made to give a different result. However, I’m a scientist, so I don’t really care for ’what if’s’ as much of what was.”

Izaya’s laughter resonated in the whole apartment, as if Namie had just said the best joke he had ever heard. But it was a hollow laugh, hiding the true feelings behind it.

“Clearly, I should have known the pragmatic Yagiri Namie wouldn’t let anyone take credit for her actions or feelings, not even destiny. Your perspectives are as amusing as ever, but I have to disagree with you in something. I don’t think believing in destiny is coward, I think it is an act of hopelessness. Because if a man finds himself in the worst of situations, with no longer hope of things getting better, it would crush him to think it was his complete fault. A little bit of comfort in times of need humans have to give to themselves. Isn’t hilarious, Namie?”

She looked at the clock, and decided it was enough of putting up with her boss for the day. Anyway, is obvious she wouldn’t find out what was he thinking this time, and her curiosity wasn’t enough to keep trying. She started collecting her things.

“I’m finished for today.”

“You’re lucky you have a boss as permissive as I am. Most wouldn’t accept their secretary living when she wanted.” He said, if only to have the last word on the matter, to feel some sense of control over it.   She had finished the paperwork he gave her, so there was no real reason to keep her there, or at least no reason Izaya would admit out loud.

“In case you do are interested,” she resumed in her way to the door, “I still think is coward, and no, I don’t think of it as hilarious. More as pathetic. And I don’t know what made you bring this up, nor do I care, but I’m certain that whatever had happened, it was in its entirety your fault. Goodbye.”

She slammed the door as she left.

Everything was in silence for a few minutes until Izaya, who was still at his desk, turn to the head of the dullahan on it.

“Do you agree with her, Celty?” he asked, already use to the silence that followed his questions every time. “If you are anything like the rest of you, you probably do. Your body this has predisposition to assume everything Is my fault. I personally think her choice of best friend is partially to blame about that. Still, it is a good question, and probably the first thing I have felt so much curiosity for.”

What if?

Izaya had no control left over his life, even if he pretended otherwise. Of course, he still had his plans for bringing war to Ikebukuro, and he still had people which would do what he wanted if he just pushed them a little in the right direction. But everything was numb for him.

He hadn’t seen Shizuo in months. He knew it was the right thing to do, he was far too busy for distraction, but the absence of the beast is his life made him feel empty, and he couldn’t stop himself from thinking.

“Do you think, Celty, had Shinra presented us in another moment, Shizu-chan and I could have been friends?"

The silence in the room was absolute, just as Izaya’s mind. He didn’t know the answer either.   But it felt too fake, too simple to just blame outside forces, as if they were some plaintive case of star-crossed lovers. But it wasn’t like that, because they weren’t lovers, because no matter how much Izaya’s heart ached for it, his feelings weren’t returned, and he was all alone talking to a head that couldn’t hear him, because no one cared his life was falling apart. Not even him.

What if, indeed.

In the end, he could always dream.

“Do you think Shizuo could have love me?”

“The only things I regret, and the only things I'll ever regret are things I didn't do. In the end, that's what we mourn. The paths we didn't take. The people we didn't touch.”  ―Scott Spencer, Endless Love

“I’m sorry” the moment those words left the doctor’s mouth, he had all of Izaya’s attention.

He didn’t expect to hear those words from his only friend, much less in the situation they were currently in. Shinra was bandaging Izaya’s arm after a violent encounter with Shizuo, hardly something Shinra could be apologizing for.

“I think I’m not quite following you, Shinra, you’ll have to be a little more specific.”

“For ruining your life, and Shizuo’s. I was so sure you could have been friends, that was why I introduce you to each other in high school. Even after many years I still had some hope you would make up and be friends. No matter how many times Celty told me I was delusional, I was certain you were doing too big of a deal for it to be truly hate.” The doctor finished bandaging Izaya, and sat quietly for a moment. Even Izaya didn’t dare to interrupt. “I’ve started to realize I was wrong all along. You’re truly the worst thing that ever happened in the other’s life.”

And for the first time in all his life, Izaya was left speechless. How could he respond to that? The situation was too surreal, those words lacked of real meaning. He didn't know how was he supposed to react, so he did the only thing he could still do.

He laughed.

“Oh, come on, Shinra! Did you really though there could be anything but hate between that repulsive beast and I? Even though we are your best friends, it seems as if you didn't know us at all” Or as if you knew me too well, Izaya though. “But please, indulge my curiosity, why bring it up now? What could have made you feel some responsibility for Shizu-chan's monstrosity?”

“Vorona broke up with Shizuo” he stated, as if that explained anything in this situation.

Still, Izaya didn't try to stop the little smile coming from the warm feeling creeping in his chest.

“I still fail to see how any of that had anything to do with me. Contrary to the popular believe, I'm not culprit of everything that goes wrong is his life. Much less his...romantic involvements. Maybe the girl just saw reason.”

“I'm conscious that you aren't to blame about everything that goes wrong, but this particular incident is, in fact, partially your fault. After all, she told him she was breaking up with him because it was ridiculous of him to try and have a relationship when he prioritized you over everything and everyone. From what Celty told me, he had ditched her in multiple occasions for chasing you around.”

“I didn't ask him to chase me, it was completely his—” he tried to defend himself, but Shinra ignored him and kept talking.

“You know the best part? What he was angrier about wasn't Vorona leaving him, I'm quite sure he just saw her like a friend anyway, but that he kept allowing you to ruin his life, even when it wasn't your doing. He's been so obsessed with you since high school he can't even have other relationships for how much he hates you. Hate is a pretty fucked up feeling for you to let it rule your life, if you ask me. But I imagine you know that better than me, after all.”

Love is also pretty fucked up for people like us, he wanted to add, knowing the doctor was another perfect example of it, but he didn't.

“Well, that explains why was him so angry with me today, even though we hadn't seen each other in months. But why are you telling all this, Shinra? I don't think you actually believe this knowledge will push me to stop hating him as much as I do. Then, why go all the trouble? And why apologize for introducing us when I asked you to do it first?”

“I recognized that look in your eyes the moment you arrived. I've seen it plenty of times, but I never expected to see it in you. That was the look of someone who is ready to die.”

The stayed quite for a few minutes. Now all the cards were on the table, there was no use in trying to deny it anymore.

“And why can't it be the look of someone ready to kill?” Izaya wondered out loud, more for him than for his friend, but he got an answer anyway.

“When it comes to both of you, I think it's the same. I'll assume there's nothing I can do to persuade you, right?”

“Right.”

Izaya departed the apartment without saying goodbye, and Shinra didn't try to stop him.

It wasn't his fault, Shinra reminded himself. But Celty would be so angry with the result of this madness, be it her best friend either getting killed or becoming a murderer.   And in the loneliness of his home, he admitted he was even sadder for himself.

He was about to lose his two best friends.

One would die.

And he wouldn't be able to face the other ever again.

“Just 'cuz you get to the end doesn’t mean you know what happened.” ― Karen Tei Yamashita, Tropic of Orange

“Goodbye, Izaya” and Shizuo hang up the phone, leaving no room for an answer.

It was very anti-climactic. Boring. It wasn't how he expected his last phone-call with his mortal enemy to go. It was too... empty, no feeling behind. It didn't feel real, more as if it was forced. Something they had to do even if none of them knew why.

That, Izaya though, is a pretty accurate description of our entire relationship.

“Goodbye, Shizu-chan.”

“Do it, you monster” spat Izaya.  Most of his body was already numb, but he refused to let his voice tremble. Until his lasts moments he would remain composed, he wouldn't give Shizuo the satisfaction of seeing him weak. And if that only helped infuriate the beast further, then it was even better.

He wasn't naïve enough to think he actually had a chance to kill his enemy, he wasn't able to hold his knife anymore. This was his end, and Shinra had been right, he was ready to die.

Because in this moment he was the only thing in Shizuo's mind, he completely owned the monster. Every breath he took, every beat his heart made, everything was Izaya's. He had never fully appreciated his possessiveness over the other until now. And he was satisfied, because he knew that even when he was long gone, Shizuo wouldn't forget him. Izaya would be engraved in all Shizuo's skin and life. This was the ultimate technique to claim ownership over his enemy.

He would made him a monster only for him.

“SHUT THE FUCK UP, I'M GONNA KILL YOU, SON OF A BITCH” screamed the so-called Monster of Ikebukuro.

And Izaya didn't know if it was for the adrenaline or a possible concussion, but even in this situation he could appreciate the power of his opponent. He had just a scratch, even though he had move and throw things no human should be able to, but he did. And that display of power, of rough strength, of savagery. This had to be the epitome of all the beauty in the blond. Beauty all humans failed to appreciate except for him, and maybe he was the fool, he was about to die because of this.

Shizuo grabbed Izaya by the collar of his shirt and threw him across the room they were in. They were the only ones in the building, the offices empty for it was no longer work hours.

Izaya crashed against the wall and fall to the floor. But the moment he tried to sit, he felt it.

He couldn't see what, but something had stabbed him in his lower back. He couldn't really feel the pain, his body full of adrenaline, but he knew that was worse. The faster his heart was beating, the faster he would bleed out. He tried to think of everything he had read about exsanguination. He couldn't see how much he was bleeding, but he doubted he had more than a few minutes before losing consciousness, and just a little longer before he died. But it wouldn't take that long, he knew Shizuo was ready to give the coup de grâce.

He tried to convince himself he had to be calm about that, this was his plan all along, this was exactly what he wanted. But he was afraid of dead, just as every other human, and he felt overwhelmed by all these feelings.  

Over all, he was starting to fear Shizuo would forget about him anyway, and all this would have been in vain.  

But the blond was oblivious to everything happening in Izaya's mind. He was ready to give the final blow, to end the other life for one and for all.

But then he saw it. It was for only a second, but shocking enough to make all rage in him to stop. There, in the flea's eyes he saw what he had never seen before in there.

The flea was sitting against the wall, in obvious pain, even if he tried to dissimulate it. He was shaking a little, and didn't even tried to run. He probably couldn’t. And it was wrong, because he seemed fragile, and Izaya Orihara wasn't supposed to seem vulnerable. But above all, he was sure that, even if for a second, he caught a glimpse of the last thing he expected to see. Fear.  

And that was wrong, because fear was a feeling for humans, not for monster like them—

But Izaya was human. A normal human, for the matter, not like Shizuo.

Shizuo, who was the real monster. Who had been seconds away of killing him.

He fell to his knees in front of Izaya, his face hiding behind his hands.

“Why the fuck did you have to do this, Izaya?! Why couldn't you just leave me the fuck alone?! Do you want me to kill you that badly?! If your life is shit, you shouldn't drag other people to take part in ending it, fucking asshole.”

He's not going to kill me...? That was the only thing in Izaya's mind for a moment. But then he remembered, he was already dying of blood loss. Well, at least he would amuse himself with Shizuo before closing his eyes forever.

“You're an idiot, Shizu-chan, you can't do anything right. You are just a blow away from killing me and you stop. You're really useless... just as expected from a monster. I guess I understand why Kasuka is so careful with hiding his real name, his career would end if people knew who he was related to...” he stopped talking when a mand caught his throat, depriving him from the oxygen he so hardly was getting.

“FOR ONCE IN YOUR FUCKING LIFE TELL ME THE FUCKING TRUTH.” It was more like roaring than screaming, but Izaya didn't have the coherency to make a joke about that anymore. “Why, Izaya? Why do you want me to hate you that badly? Why do you want to ruin my life at the expense of yours?!”

He took his hand off Izaya's throat, but didn't stood back. There were barely centimeters apart. It had to be one of the closest they had ever been. Izaya could lose himself in those amber eyes, had he not been in the situation he was. And even with all the warm emanating from Shizuo' body, Izaya felt colder he had ever felt in his life. Also a symptom of blood loss, he remembered.

Izaya decided that there was no use in keep lying. He wouldn't live to face the consequences of this anyway. Had he been more awake, he would completely blame that decision in the dizziness of his head, but he wasn't. And all the strength left in him was concentrating in his next words, his last words.

He didn't bother in keeping a bay his tears.

“This is all your fault, Shizuo. I hate you so much that I don't care what happens to me anymore if that means you'll be miserable.” His voice was shaking, but he refused to go without telling him, that beast had to knew it was his fault. “You rejected me even before I could say a word to you. You kept repeating me how much you hated me, how much you wanted me to die. And then you tried to have a fucking girlfriend when you were supposed to only think about me...”

Izaya was unable to keep his seating position and fell to his side on the floor, his tears running down his face in a way they had never done. Only in that moment Shizuo noticed the hemorrhage in the back of Izaya. At first, he was definitely in shock, probably trying to understand how could Izaya could even speak in those conditions.

A little hypocrite for someone who got shot twice and the walked as if it was just a bruise to Shinra's place.

He was taking his phone out of his pocket, Izaya supposed to call Celty, but it would be in vain. Instead, he extended his hand to grab Shizuo's clothes in an attempt to avoid him leaving. He knew the grab had not an ounce of force, but it petrified Shizuo in his place anyway.

“Don't bother, Shizu-chan, I'm almost dead anyway. You killed me.”

The man probably answered something, but he couldn't concentrate enough to process the words. His eyes were now closed, so he wouldn't be able see the face of his murderer when he told him his very best secret. Such a tragedy, Izaya was sure Shizuo would make an expression disserving of remember, a mix between confusion, disgust and fear. Fear because the words he always wanted to hear came of his most hated enemy.

And fear because he had finally done it. He had killed the only person who had ever, truly, loved him.

“My love for you killed me, Shizu-chan.” His words were hardly more than a whisper, but he had confidence he had got his message across.  

And if he hadn't, well, there was nothing left to do.

Such a proper ending, thought Izaya before losing consciousness for the last time, for something that never came close to be a love story.

The perfect end for a coward like him. Confessing when he was going to the only place Shizuo wouldn't chase him after.

[icharchivist]

@elamshiin replied to “@killuabs replied to “Kurapika is pissed now wow” ...”

I think that the anger management problem was more of Kurapika's personal problem, than the general Kurta clan problem. They've always taught their kids to tone down all of their emotions (even the happiness, curiosity, surprise..) so I can imagine that most of the grown ups were stoic, clearheaded and shrewd people, so up to this day, Kurapika tries to uphold that kind of ideal that was drilled into his mind as a child growing up in the clan.

The driving force BEHIND the eyes were strong emotions. Any kind of strong emotions. WHY would they make him angry, when they were triggered by happiness, or some other emotion? It wouldn't make much sense. Kurapika has always been an unnaturally (and unacceptably!) curious and emotional child. That's where his anger management stems from; he has strong beliefs that he tries to uphold and doesn't take lightly to others stepping on them.

There is a duality in him: his id (emotions & personality) vs his superego (the Kurta clan teachings and ideals) that battle constantly inside him. Most of the time he tries to honor his clan by acting like a "perfect Kurta male" but then he just slips and gives into his id and raises Hell. I think he hates that side of himself.

ye I kinda agree tbh. And that’s why I was mostly saying that the strong emotions as Kurapika feels them are from himself, not from the eyes. He does say toward the begining of the manga that when their eyes turn red, they “lose it” and they become stronger, but I much more think that the red eyes are a consequences of major anger rather than a cause. 

In a culture like the Kurta where they had to hide, it was not really managing their emotions, it was just to try the hardest to not get affected by them, and it’s likely that it’s why when the emotion is too strong, it becomes hard to think straight and manages his emotions. (and for all that Kurapika (manages” and not conceal, he does manage himself pretty well)

As it is, tho, I don’t know to which point the Kurta were truly telling their kids to not feel emotions. When Pairo calls out Kurapika’s eyes for turning red toward the begining of the chapter, Kurapika is just “well ye, I’m angry that’s what happen?” and it doesn’t seem to faze him too much until Pairo points out that, in the outside world, it’d badly seen. I think if real restriction there is, it is for people who wants to go outside, like Kurapika (and tbh I don’t feel like his mom was the kind to tell him to keep his emotions inside)

As it is the times Kurapika really lost it were really fucked up situation. We know his eyes turn red out of anger. But even there, it’s not all the time. When Leorio tells him he’ll “end the filthy line of the Kurta here” Kurapika’s eyes don’t turn red, and he’s rather collected. When he sees Gon being beaten up, his eyes turn red (honestly I would think it’s his mom friend instinct like when he used to protect Pairo waking up). But otherwise? It’s when facing something reminding him of the troupe or the massacre, and this is in itself pretty damaging and, using the right term, triggering subjects for Kurapika that leans him to not think straight.

All I mean is that, triggers can be irrational, and develop irrational reactions to it, thus as an uncontrolled/unchecked anger. 

So it’s not really like he doesn’t know how to manage his anger, it’s mostly that it’s regarding a particularly traumatic event that he can’t controle himself (and since this traumatic event is the core of his storyline, we do see it a lot).

I think Kurapika is rather emotional, but he controles himself. a bit like you say, he knows that as a Kurta he can’t allow himself to get too emotional on the outside, but he still lets his emotions speak because it’s his personality to show it. But also he mostly shows his emotions to people he mostly trust. 

so honestly idk, I want to see more of the Kurta’s clans habit and culture to have more idea, because while on one hand I do think they would encourage toning down the emotions, I don’t think they were especially encouraging an emotionless life or avoiding the red eyes at all cost. the plan is just, avoiding the red eyes on the outside world, inside, you do anything you want.

but yup all to say, I don’t like the implication that the eyes turning red makes the anger more irrational, I do think that it’s the anger who cause the red eyes and that if issues there is, it’s with the kind of anger that’s happening