#i do hate how italics never copy over on this fucking website

[volantium]

count the windows to your fire escape (aka 1k of soft domestic fluff, also on ao3) 

Harley wakes slowly.

The sunlight filters in between the blinds, leaving streaks of gold across the hardwood floor of their apartment. Dust floats in the air like shining pinpricks of bright, sparkling stars in what Harley’s starting to realise is the midday sun.  

Flings out an arm across the other side of the bed in his sleep-fogged haze, and it’s when he doesn’t accidentally-on-purpose hit the other body that’s usually beside him that he wakes up proper. He blinks his eyes open, slate grey-blue with the unique exhaustion that comes with being a mechanical engineering working for Stark Industires. Twists around to pick up his work phone on the bedside table. Takes a brief look at the myriad notifications underneath the damning 13:03 and promptly flings it down the bed. He can already feel it vibrating with another message between the covers.

It’s his day off. Fuck the phone.

Their day off, and Peter’s nowhere to be found.

If Harley was any less of a morning person than he already isn’t, early afternoon as it is, he would’ve noticed by now the faint sound of music playing throughout the apartment. Hozier drifting softly from the where the record player sits in their hallway by the kitchen back to the bedroom.

It takes him another fifteen minutes to roll out of bed. Runs a hand through his hair in order to bring it under some semblance of control, despite it being a futile effort. Shrugs a t-shirt on that from the sandalwood smell of it is actually Peter’s. Trails a hand along the wall as he pads down the hallway, eyes skimming over the plethora of family photos they’ve gathered over the years. Harley’s favourite—by far—is the one of he, Morgan, and Peter, crowded together in the frame as if the confines of the photographs were too small to contain them. Harley has one arm looped around Peter’s waist, the other in the process of fist bumping Morgan, dressed to the nines for her university graduation, the bachelors degree held aloft in Peter’s hand like the holy grail. The thing that gets him about it is the look on Peter’s face. Looking at the two of them like they hung all the stars in the sky and—Harley’s gotten used to it, sure, they’ve been together for years—but it never fails to make him short of breath, the sheer amount of love shining in those honey-caramel eyes.

There’s another one, from a lifetime ago, of him and Abby and their mom, that sits in pride of place at his desk in the office, right beside the picture of his and Peter’s own graduation, three years ago.

Harley stops in the hallway, just before the threshold of the kitchen. Peter is facing away from him, standing at the counter messing with what’d be an overkill of scrambled eggs and bacon if he wasn’t Spider-Man. Take a moment just to watch before making his way over.

“What’re you doin’ in my kitchen, darlin?” He says, winding his arms around Peter’s stomach, dropping his chin on his boyfriend’s shoulder.

“Last time I checked,” Peter replies, and it’s the way he unhesitant leans back into Harley’s chest that get’s Harley, every time. “Both of our names were on the lease.”

Harley laughs in the curve of Peter’s neck. “Last time I checked, we both agreed you and your non-existent cooking skills weren’t allowed in here.”  

Peter doesn’t reply straight away, and in Harley’s sleep-hazed brain it takes a while for it to click, how unusual that is for him not to quip back right away. By the time it finally does he’s all but dozing hooked over Peter’s shoulder, swaying the both of them gently to the sound of Hozier’s Irish croon of ‘cause my baby’s sweet as can be, she gives me toothaches just from kissin’ me.

“Peter?” He murmurs, lifting his head. “You alright in there?”

It takes a second, but then Peter’s blinking back at him with a small smile spreading across his face, like an early morning sunrise, soft and surprising in it’s beauty.

“Yeah, baby,” he says, twisting his head to brush a kiss across Harley’s cheekbone. “Never better.”

Harley hums, a nonsensical sound to encourage Peter to explain. Peter turns his focus back to the frying pan. Poke’s uselessly at the mass of eggs with the bright pink spatula MJ had gotten them as a house-warming gift for reasons that Harley still isn’t sure of.

Harley plucks the spatula out of Peter’s hand. “How did you manage to burn these already?”

“I just really love you, you know?”

“I love you, too,” Harley replies automatically, setting the spatula on the bench. “That was random.”

“Not really.”

“A little bit, darlin’.”

“Maybe a little bit,” Peter agrees, twisting around and twining his arms around Harley’s neck. “Doesn’t make it any less true.”

“No,” Harley says, eyes flickering over the soft and content look on Peter’s face. “I suppose not.”

“It’s just—”

Peter cuts himself off, but Harley knows. Harley knows. Because it’s the same thing he’s thinking about. They fit like a puzzle piece. Have ever since Tony introduced them and decided that the world could handle the unique chaos the two of them had the potential to cause. Harley doesn’t believe in soulmates but Christ, if he did—he’d be Peter’s and Peter would be his. The world doesn’t deserve Peter Parker and that’s the truth. But Harley will be forever grateful for him, the fact that they met on a Tuesday afternoon, the fact that even now, years and years later on yet another fateful Tuesday, he’s bursting at the seams with it, this all-encompassing, hard-to-put-into-words love they have for another.

“I know,” he says, instead, hand running up Peter arms to cup his jaw.

Peter raises an eyebrow. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Harley dips his head to press a kiss to the corner of Peter’s mouth, easy as anything. “I love you so much I don’t know what to do with myself.”

It comes out a soft, tender admission, mumbled against Peter’s lips. The agreeing hum from the back of Peter’s throat switches into a drawn-out moan halfway through when Harley catches his teeth on Peter’s bottom lip. It goes like that for a while, making out against the kitchen counter like when they were teenagers, trading lazy kisses in the early afternoon sun as the eggs get overcooked beside them.

Harley drifts back to reality with Peter’s hands tangled in his hair and the smell of burnt bacon in his nose.

“Love me enough even though I burn everything I touch?” Peter grins cheekily up at him.

“And then some, darlin’,” Harley replies. “C’mon, I’ll makes us a late breakfast.”

“Coffee?”

Harley leaves one last, lingering kiss on Peter’s lips. “You’re the best.”

And as Peter moves away to make then coffee, and Harley takes over the sad excuse of scrambled eggs on the stovetop, he thinks, yeah, this, always.

[ill-be-istj-if-no-one-else-is]

ISTJ social developmental phases

I was reading through your posts when i found one with the anon asking about talking out loud. This got me very curious, so i was wondering if there were more social developmental phases that overlap due to the TJ part. This is, however, my own recount as best i can manage. (INTJ)

Teenagehood - i sucked as a person. No development, social or otherwise. Skipping.

College years - i think more of my functions started developing then. Still sucked big time.

Exploration phase > the initial phase where i realised i needed to interact with people, because group work.

Starting out, i had nearly zero social skills. Very limited. College was also a new environment, so i eased up on the ‘danger everywhere’ button. The social skills i had pretty much existed in theory, from reading…

So yeah. I had a bunch of buttons, but did not know what will happen if i poked them. So i went around pressing all of them to see what happened. I faked expressions, interest in things, dodged personal questions. I found out that playing dumb was the easiest guise. Mainly because i literally could not continue a conversation without giving up the gig. It was less of a conversation i was looking for, and more of watching the other person react. Some opinions (lies) made people uncomfortable, some agreements (still lying) would backfire when i was asked to further the convo. Even when i was 'doing’ i was still observing. Ni-Te?

I burned out in 2 weeks. That was the end of the exploration phase. I’m pretty sure ISTJs would be better at the exploration part. I went fuuuuucckkkk itttttt and shut down most of my attempts at socializing.

I just upped and stop caring about getting along. In my defense, i had a pretty good reason for not trying again until my class reshuffled.

See, people started plagarising my power point slides. As well as the slides from their seniors who went through the same modules. It was an open secret, each 'generation’ would pass their 'perfect’ slides to the next. It was 'perfect’ because they downloaded them from the teacher’s teaching version.

So the only guy that did not get the cheat code was me. Cause i sucked at talking to people.

So what happened was that nearly everyone’s work was the same. Mine was original. So i got an A. Granted, it was the first few lessons, so nobody was expecting that much.

As i was presenting the first power point slides, i was also wondering as to why the hell were people panicing so much, spam clicking their mouse, looking at my slides, then at their computer, then at my slides, then at their computer. It kept happening for the first few days. Then someone got the idea that i was hiding some slides away from others. So i got blacklisted by the class and i had absolutely no idea what was happening and why were people so hostile all of a sudden.

That was how i gave up trying to be nice by the 2nd week. Too damn exhausting.

After that, my teammates slipped the rest the slides that i was doing. They would leave for an 1 ½ lunch, and come back to edit the free slides.

That was not the worst part.

The worst part… WAS THAT THEY ADDED GRAMMAR MISTAKES!!!

WHYYYYYYYY!????!?!?!?!?!

As the weeks went on,

Next up is practice phase.

… i think i submitted the first half accidentally

To recap, i want to know if there are overlapping  trials and tribulations in developing the Te-Fi part between INTJs and ISTJs.

Aight, here’s the second half.

The plagiarism got so bad, that several websites including webMd banned access from my college wifi.

Only the people who did not depend on first page google survived to tell the tale.

Wikipedia was surprisingly tolerant.

I mean, my classmates left the colour, font, font size, italics, underlines, and that little boxed up number at the side that refers you to the references INSIDE THEIR POWER POINT SLIDES. More than 1 person did that. Actually, more than half the class did that.

I don’t know if this is an Fi thing, or human thing, but i was judging them sooooo damn hard.

And i was still being blamed for having original slides

Needless to say, my relationship with my class deteriorated into mutual hatred. I went back into my INTJ ‘everyone is stupid, people suck’ zone.

I stand by my decision to create a ‘no-friend’ zone.

I went into a YOLO phase, where i steamrolled over everyone and anyone without a care. The only ones where i tried being nice to were those people that actually tried working hard. Or just asked nicely. My decency baseline was honestly, just hard work.

As the weeks wore on, the module became harder, and more people started getting desperate… for cheaper ways to cheat past the teachers grading system like they were blind or something.

My developing Te started crapping up more. Cause i sucked at explaining things, it translated to badly written slides as well. The only redeeming point was that the classmates that hated me would pressure the neutral ones i was nicer towards to explain my slides to them. That was how i got plenty of practice with my Te.

The biggest issue was that my Te still sucked at translating my Ni. And my Ni was all over the place. I kept trying to guess what the teacher wanted to see in the slides.

In the end, half my class lived or died by my Te’s competency and my Ni’s accuracy for the next 4 months until they finally realised that i could not be depended upon.

Hey, not my fault.

My Ni screwed me over less than it screwed others over because i could defend my points (most of the time) and through the teacher’s questions figure out what was the understanding that the teacher wanted. Leading questions are leading. Sometimes i would have an epiphany midway through the presentation, and rewrite my script as i was presenting my slides.

Those people that copied and read off my slides got fucked over so damn hard. Even when i changed nothing, they could not understand where my Ni was going on the slides and got screwed over anyway.

Because i had the tendency to screw over the ‘alpha bitches’ in this manner by accident, within the year i became notorious and universally hated by my entire cohort. People that i never met knew i was an asshole. I was still blissfully unaware until i actually made some friends.

Cue the next set of modules in the second half of the year, where the class rearranged.

One day an INFP and an INTP had a discourse.

I joined in.

We tried to kill each other with theories.

We became friends.

Don’t ask me how that happened. It just did.

That also explains how i have so many enemies in class. If that was how i made friends, i can only imagine how i made enemies.

I still don’t know how i made enemies.

But i did, and it was entertaining to skin them alive when they try to snipe me with questions from the left field. More than one time the teachers had to stop me from explaining how wrong their assumptions were and how the correct line of thinking would have went, followed by the multiple scenarios should they pursue the different lines of thought i picked out in the one question they thought was a good idea to throw at me for fun.

Man, Te really only gets better when you don’t restrain it. I honestly think that letting loose is the only way to learn when you have Te.

Cue months of practise later, i finally (about damn time) can explain things in the way people can understand without blowing my top with frustration, and settle with perfecting how to word things nicely.

Still on the way to that.

Looking back, i don’t see much of Fi in my own development, but i am interested in seeing how Te-Fi manifests and develops in ISTJs.

----

.....I didn’t entirely follow this anecdote and I’m not sure what you are looking for from it but based on the last sentence I can point you to some Te-Fi resources.

A good overall ISTJ development guide is here: https://mbti-notes.tumblr.com/post/120439387597/mbti-development-istj. The level 4 description covers the beginning of tert Fi development.

The MBTI Resources ISTJ page has some items I’d recommend reading with a grain of salt (the tert Fi description was an okay description of tert Fi but fell into a lot of the pitfalls of misunderstanding Si), but it might be useful.

Speaking personally my Te and Si seemed pretty okay by college, so much of my development in college was Fi: understanding that people who had different perspectives, particularly moral/ethical ones, could simultaneously be ‘correct’, as well as developing an identity that went beyond Si and Te. I went to college being basically the smart, dutiful one, and I had my interests but I didn’t really have an ‘identity’ so to speak. That was the bulk of my college and early 20s experience: figuring out who I was when I wasn’t defined by external standards.