#it's so. clinically descriptive. it's a weird use of language. but it IS. something you could plausibly mishear from 'pants' or 'trousers'

[thedreadvampy]

Losing my shit about this article in which a transphobic Tory was so busy panicking about existing in the vicinity of a Trans that she almost certainly misheard "jeans" as "penis" and decided that not only was this a problem with the other woman, but also that the world must be informed of this pressing danger.

"a trans woman! I had to stand directly behind her....I thought, 'this is going well', I'm handling The Situation fine'..."

translated: I saw a tall woman with broad shoulders. How would I get out of this alive? I thought. she has a PENIS. PENIS PENIS PENIS. through some force of PENIS I mean will I managed to PENIS behave normally towards her. My hands were PENIS PENIS PENIS shaking as I tried to dry them. summoning up all my PENIS courage I said 'dryer's crap innit'. she turned to me and said " yeah I'm just goiPENIS PENIS PENIS"

It's been a week and I'm still shaking. This proves trans women are the problem and I'm not weird. I'm fine. It's fine. If you think about it I'm the hero hePENIS!!!!!

very this

[threadsun]

Anonymous Asks: "Could you maybe if I asked really nicely have pictures or descriptions of your ocs appearances cause I’m having trouble imagining them while reading your fics about them also if it’s not too much trouble could you also just write any nasty little sex head cannons for them. If not completely fine! Stay safe ❤️"

Oooh so all but two of the ocs I've written about have lil pics in my oc intro tag, Moon has drawn Zander a couple times (one with their oc/Z's spouse, Nik :3), and Lucky... uhhhh the best way I can describe him looking is kinda like Vinnie Jones 😂 I never know what to focus on in descriptions of how people look and little doodles and picrews can't fully do them justice, so if you have specific questions lmk :3

As for nasty lil sex headcanons >:3 gonna give you something for all of them so it'll be long and under the cut~

Zander

He's a complete switch verse, and very service oriented. All he wants is to make you happy. He'll forget completely about his own pleasure and is more than happy not to cum, as long as you're enjoying yourself. He's a god at oral, and has a major oral fixation. He'll suck on anything you give him and he'll take any excuse to get between your thighs. Generally he's amazing in bed because he's had So Much Practice catering to every kind of tastes.

Lee

He hasn't had much experience, but he's definitely eager. He's been 19 for a very long time and usually doesn't even have time to eat let alone do anything else. Which means he's very pent up when he eventually is in a position to have sex with someone. He can be a needy sub or a desperate dom, and either way he'll be a little bit feral about it because he hasn't cum in centuries. He's also interested in trying everything at least once!

Mavet

Mav desperately needs to turn their brain off, so when it comes to sex they just don't want to have to think too hard. This leads him to be a bit of a primal dom and a mindless sub. Anything that lets them stop thinking and get lost in the pleasure of being with their partner. He also loves to worship and praise his partner. Their main goal is to make sure you feel adored and special, because to Mav you are! He's definitely a softer dom.

Glitch

Rough tongue, barbed cock, and pointy fangs and claws. He's a catboy through and through! Not that he likes it, but it's just a fact. They're a rough, mean dom most of the time, especially because their desire tends to manifest as frustration and annoyance. If you can get them to sub for you, they're vocal and very pathetic. It takes a while to get him to let his guard down, but if you succeed (or piss them off enough) then the sex will be amazing.

Charles

I hope you like the most repressed lil freak in the world! Desire makes him feel almost as guilty as his hunger for blood. This means that when he finally snaps and gives into his desires, it's intense. As a dom, it's a lot of roughness and "punishing" you for making him snap like this. As a sub, it's lots of crying and apologising and guilt. You do have to deal with all the weird emotional repression and whatnot before and afterwards though. Good luck!

Lin

Dissection and sex are two sides of the same coin for him, and one frequently leads to another. While he can be a very cute, pathetic sub, he's a downright clinical dom. You're a specimen to him, something to be poked and prodded, to study your reactions and inspect you. His actual understanding of the language used around sex and whatnot are minimal, but he'll gladly indulge his and your fantasies whenever you want~

Etienne

Another one who gives amazing head! His injury leaves him with limited use of his legs and on his bad days he tends to experience erectly dysfunction. But there are so many more ways he knows to have fun with a partner (or multiple) that it doesn't make a difference to how good he is. He's up for anything if you can convince him it'll be fun! And honestly, there's nothing you can ask of him or do to him that'll surprise him, he's done just about everything.

Lucky

Lucky isn't as interested in sex as most of my guys. He's mostly interested in watching other people go at it, sometimes helping out if he's asked. But he's fond of groping and playing with people. Holding you in his lap and essentially using you as a stim toy. He'll absentmindedly use his hands on you, kiss you, grind against you. And if you catch him in the right mood or give him a good reason to fuck you, he's strong and rough.

Yofiel

The most notable thing about her (other than the way she'll make you feel like you've seen every face of god when y'all fuck) is that she looks beautiful at every moment. Seriously, they don't have a single bad angle, no matter how sweaty and messy and raw everything gets, they always look perfect. Not to mention every single touch from him reminds you that you're getting intimate with an angel, not just a mere human.

Yana

She's ace, and an exclusively dom sadist. Also she's stone. Don't you dare fucking touch her, just cry and let her beat you half to death. She's more into nonsexual kink, but if you really make it worth her while, she might consider touching you sexually. Specifically if she can use it to cause you more pain and/or discomfort. But really, that's all you're gonna get from her. And don't expect much in the way of aftercare either, she's straight up just an asshole.

Azza

Along with Etienne, he's your guy for intox stuff. You've gotta be okay with fucking outside though! Sure, he'll fuck in your house if he has to, but he definitely would rather find somewhere nice in nature. Predictably, he can get pretty animalistic. Primal stuff comes naturally to him. He's another switch verse, like almost all of my lil guys, and he's more than happy to take whatever role you want him to. He's all about the pleasure for both of you.

Aisling

Sex is one of the many things she finds fascinating about humans. It's so... weird and sticky and... honestly, she doesn't really understand it. But they're so down to try it! You've just gotta keep things novel and interesting for him or she'll get bored. But hey, that does mean he's up for anything! As long as it's new or fun or she can inspect you like a bug during it, she's happy. Though, admittedly, they have a fondness for hair pulling and biting.

Gin

Her favourite place to fuck is underwater, unsurprisingly. The fact that you can't breathe is a bonus! She's very fond of breathplay and fearplay~ She also has very sharp teeth and is a biter, and the taste of blood makes her a little feral. Generally, she's a good one to go to if you're into pain and fear and being toyed with like someone playing with their food. Don't be mistaken, though, there's no lack of passion from her. She's very vocal about being into you.

Missy

Physical touch isn't exactly... a thing she can do easily. If y'all can find a way around that, then things get easier! But if not... well, there's plenty of ways for you two to enjoy each other without touching. Mutual masturbation is one of their favourites. Or one of you ordering the other around, making each other do various sexy things for the other to watch. If you have a glove kink or any other sort of clothing kink, though, she's thrilled to oblige!

[bandofchimeras]

hey dude, sorry not trying to be an ass w this but I saw u had a post where in the tags you used delusional and narcissist as pretty derogatory insults towards the govt. Bashing the government is good and great but using terms that we (at least currently) need to describe mental illness (and definitely associate with it!)... in ways like that... its ableist and dehumanizing and leads to more abuse, even if it feels innocent, because if everyone who's a narc or who's delusional is dangerous....that's everyone w/ npd, or a schizospec disorder, or any other things.

Sorry this is long, and again, not trying to be rude! Just wanted to inform you and ask that you maybe be a little more careful with word choice in the future :)

hey anon, yeah thanks for your concern. I do understand the movement to change language usage around mental illness and destigmatize. And it is well intentioned.

Unfortunately, narcissistic and delusional are still pretty generally derogatory words. A person with NPD may not cause harm simply by virtue of having the diagnosis but we all agree narcissism itself isn't a fun cool trait to have. Delusions are obscurations of reality.

We still say manic, depressed, obsessive, etc in both outright negative ways and descriptive but not morally loaded ways. to me it's just part of language, and the ethics of most derogatory language does depend on who's using it.

I'm absolutely behind not calling everyone who sucks a narcissist. and would like people to stop saying "I'm being OCD" or "that's so bipolar," "he's a schizo" and so on. The "delulu" trend online is weird and fetishizes mentally ill people.

For context: I am a person with a narcissistic tendency, due to my childhood. My life has been a long train of psych symptoms... delusions of grandeur, maladaptive daydreaming, hallucinations, psychosis, derealization, depersonalization, dissociative identity states. psychology is one of my longest hyperfixations simply because I needed to understand my experience. it's been helpful and unhelpful in different ways. Pathologization is a phenomen that can't be understood separately from language, culture, history, and violence.

And yet I don't really have a problem with calling things crazy, insane, or batshit. in fact I find power in redefining and playing with these terms. I've been called crazy in a demeaning, invalidating way. And yeah, I'm a lil crizazy, a bit unhinged one might say. But if a motherfucker calls me crazy to invaldiate my argument, I instantly know they've lost. They're being weak, and abusive. It will also piss me the fuck off. I may want to show them what "crazy" looks like. The better angels of my nature will whisper "keep your head."

With the movement to neutralize mental health terms, what's always confused me is the understanding of language itself. I experience words autistically - they have multiple overlapping meanings all the time. Words are like composite images composed of billions of instances of use, fluttering and evolving as they are spoken and written. Vernacular is messy, sputtering and ever changing. Therefore words carry a multitude of connotations. When different people say them in different contexts you can see and hear different implications.

So, I really don't care if a dude at work says "that's fuckin insane bro" ...to a gnarly kickflip. Or a devastating news article. Insane delineates the magnitude of his emotion. It's out of bounds. Something normies and straights would try to contain, institutionalize, label. Christ, that's juicy. It's why I adore skater boy lingo and teen slang. It's careless and crunchy.

English itself, especially corporate and institutional English, can be a strict, bland, and often abusive language. My fellow autistic homies tend to enjoy a rousing jaunt down into the annals of historical parlance for our everyday linguistic transactions because it's fucking boring, the clinical way we are expected to speak here and now.

So therefore: thanks for your message calling attention to my words and their impact.

There are deeper better more poetic words to call the government and frankly I believe the best ones might be found in other languages.

All in all, you're right that "narcissistic" and "delusional" are not the most accurate, potent words to describe the US government. How to convey the twisted, detached from reality, spirit of that entity best in language, though, I need to expand the lexicon. Maybe using these words is cheap. Maybe it covers over the intentionality and corruption at play.

So I'm going to open this up to some language play - and ask you, anon, and anyone else what words can we find to convey the negative meaning of delusional (detached from truth) and narcissistic (inverted and self concerned to the point of dysfunction), in English? or in another language?

I hope you can take this in good faith not as a deflection but really engaging with your ask.

Being language corrected can trigger my harshest defenses. I can feel in my body all the times someone has punished, invalidated, dismissed something I've said because of using "uncivil" or foul or imperfect language. In general, trying to conform to correct ideological forms of language is like, major wretched, dude.

Hell my dorky ass disingenuous nerd of a brother yesterday called a message I sent the family group chat about Palestine "blasphemous" because I said " my god" and used it as an excuse to delete every impassioned exchange we had so the "children wouldn't see," - him be racist, cough. can't make this shit up.

But that's my background. Catholicism is a mental illness. (Sorry in advance to all mental illness havers for associating you with Catholics)

[who-ever-said-i-was-nice]

Hello friend! If these are still open, might I be able to request an Ikemen Vampire matchup?

I am an INTJ-T, Aries sun, Capricorn moon, and Cancer rising. Currently I am attending college as a psychology major, soon I’ll be going into graduate school for clinical psychology (my end goal is to be a child psychologist or professor).

Some description of myself: I’m 22 years old, she/they, approximately 164cms, chin-length hair, dark eyes, and olive complexion. I am nearsighted and I do have glasses… though I often forget to wear them (which can be a problem at times). I do have two tattoos, both located on my legs, and I plan on getting more. I often dress to be comfortable. Usually it is dark hoodies, ripped jeans, black boots… yeah, pretty much anything black lol.

Personality wise I’d say I’m pretty motherly. Sure, I’m not really good at expressing myself unless I experience strong emotion— but I try at least. Some people can be a bit intimidated by me, apparently. I suppose one reason is I can be blunt about things. Though I enjoy caring for others. Over the years I’ve developed morbid humor and a strange fascination with the dead… yes, I suppose it can make people a little weirded out, but I just adore bones. I do have high standards for myself. I’m a perfectionist and that will be the end of me. I stress and panic over little things, especially when it’s work-related. I don’t really like to show others that something is wrong, especially when I know they are going through something. I would rather help them with their issues than have them help with mine.

When it comes to relationships, I’m not too sure how I’ll be. Generally, I’m not someone that’s too big with physical touch. I’d say that my love language is quality time so I’d rather just be in the same room as someone/spend time together. I guess if it’s a romantic partner I wouldn’t mind someone hugging me? Not sure. All I know is that the only physical touch I’m okay with is someone messing with my hair lol. I’d probably like someone intelligent, who can take care of themself, and be calm. Someone who could help ground me when I stress, or help me snap back to reality— that would really be nice. It’s tiring being a support for everyone else, I want someone to support me.

Some likes/interests: Astrology, coffee, psychological disorders, health psychology, mortuary sciences, reading, art, horror movies, collecting (books, bones, crystals, tarot decks, and coffee mugs), paranormal stuff, sharks, rainy/cold weather, and conspiracy theories.

Some dislikes: Mushrooms, bright lights, hot weather, bees/wasps (they scare me), tea, loud places, parties, and getting sick.

I hope this is enough information, my friend. Please keep up the wonderful writing and if you do get to this, thank you very much <3.

Thank you so much <333. There is no better reward than knowing that you enjoy the little things that I manage to put out there. Also you remind me of myself a bit, I think we'd get along well :))))). But anyway let's get into it.

I matched you with......

.......... Isaac

Isaac is shy and inexperienced when it comes to a lot of aspects of a relationship

But that doesn't mean he can't get used to things and can't improve

I personally see Isaac as a perfectionist idk if that is actually canon or not I can't remember

When you first met Isaac, he was just kind of sitting in a corner and looked like he was having an existential crisis

And judging but the fact that Dazai and Arthur where holding apples and where reciting an apple pie recipes like poetry he probably was

It took the two idiots a hot second to realize that you where standing there

Arthur immediately started flirting with you and Dazai just smiled and started talking to

You just looked passed them and watched as a very shaken Isaac staggered out of the room

After this you frequently met in the mansions corridors but you never really talked to each other

On a clear night you went out into the garden to see the night sky

It was refreshing to see them so vividly, not overshadowed by many city lights

You where just walking when a certain scientist caught your eye

He was looking through his telescope and studying the stars

However he noticed you quickly

He invited you to join him and you happily agreed

After that day you started meeting up more often

Usually just to chat about astronomy but it soon turned into asking each other about your other hobbies

It was nice to get to know each other and Isaac found himself falling for you

He did find your fascination with bones a little weird at first but he would never judge you for it

It becomes a common thing to see you both in the library reader

One day he took you to a small coffee shop and that's where he asked you out

You to spend a lot of time together, since it's both of your love language

Sometimes you don't even talk, you just sit with each other or in each others arms and do your separate things.

He's not to experienced so you might have to help him with things

But all in all he's super supportive and understanding, even if a lot of times he can't put it in words properly

[superlinguo]

Linguistics Jobs: Interview with a Communications and Engagement Assistant

Your social media prowess is actually a job skill, you might just not know yet that those jobs are out there. Maggie is a Communications and Engagement Assistant at a disability peak body. Their work includes traditional and social media communications channels, and a need to think about who your audience is. You can follow them on Twitter (@vonbees) or Tumblr (@ritavonbees).

What did you study at university?

BA in Communications (Writing & Cultural Studies). I actually studied at a weird "technology" university and had to go through a totally different uni to do my linguistics electives. By the time I dealt with the forms and unit conversion and everything, I only had time for 101&102, which made me sad as I loved them! If I had been able to start in first year I might have changed my major.

What is your job?

Communications Assistant covers a really broad range of work! Like it says on the tin, you have to assist your organisation in whatever sort of communications it needs to do. Mine is a disability rights representative and advocacy nonprofit, so my job includes advertising, political campaigns and direct member communication. I am one of the people who tweets from our official account (including sometimes live-tweeting something like a public inquiry into systemic neglect or discrimination), updates our website, edits blog posts and media releases, creates flyers, surveys and infographics... I do a lot of "translating English to English" - explaining legalese, bureaucratic jargon and policy terminology in plain language. We need to be as accessible as possible, so aside from code-switching between Plain English and bureaucratese I do a lot of image descriptions and liaise with specialists to get really important content captioned or translated into Auslan, Easy English, etc. One of my colleagues is currently in charge of our fortnightly newsletter, but when I used to do it I would also record an audio version, sort of like a mini podcast, for members who didn't have screenreader access (usually older folks who had trouble with technology).

How does your linguistics training help you in your job?

Semantics, pragmatics and a descriptivist approach to grammar are all relevant when trying to write about things like UN resolutions and discrimination legislation in plain English! (Sometimes I imagine turning a particularly stuffy government document into a series of tree diagrams, which is at least good for a laugh). Descriptivism also dovetails neatly with an anti-ableist approach to how other people speak and write, so it's helpful to have linguistic references when pushing back against harmful ideas in that department.

Do you have any advice you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?

Yes, I wish someone had convinced me not to half-ass it! See, I got into a really great creative writing course and then couldn't attend the university that taught it for logistical reasons (would have been an interstate move). I tried to do the most similar degree I could find at a local uni, but it wasn't a good compromise - it only had two writing classes each year and I was much less interested in the other parts of the course. I should have done a full pivot to something I liked in its own right, like linguistics, instead of stubbornly clinging to a shitty version of my number one choice. I guess the most useful advice without the benefit of hindsight would have been that a degree is a big commitment and it's okay to take a gap year and give yourself more time to think about how you want to go about it. Oh, also if someone had told me I have ADHD that probably would have been helpful.

Any other thoughts or comments?

I've often thought about going back for some linguistics post-grad, but it would probably be for the love of learning - none of my plausible future career moves really need one. So I'm really glad people like you make linguistics knowledge more accessible to lingthusiasts outside academia! Clinically proven to reduce symptoms of FOMO xD

Related interviews:

Interview with a Communications Specialist

Interview with two Communications Professionals

Interview with an Editor and Copywriter

Recent interview:

Interview with a Technical Writer

Interview with a Stay-at-home Mom and Twitch Streamer

Interview with a Peer Review Program Manager

Interview with an Associate at the Children’s Center for Communication, Beverly School for the Deaf

Interview with a Metadata Specialist and Genealogist

Check out the full Linguist Jobs Interview List and the Linguist Jobs tag for even more interviews  

[that-wildwolf]

I was tagged by @crescentbunny and I'm not tagging anyone in particular because I never really have a good grip on who's already done a tag game and who hasn't...

Anyway! Here goes :)

How many works do you have on AO3?

I write lots of one-shots, so this should be around thirty... Yep, twenty-seven.

What’s your total AO3 word count?

Where do you check that? You can check that???

*spends approximately 10 minutes going through AO3 settings they didn't know existed*

Cool! A lot of features I didn't know about. Anyway, um. Yes. My total word count is, for the moment, 471,674 words.

Wow. I. Um. Almost 500K words. But—and this is extremely important—I feel like this graph contains some vital information:

How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?

Wow. Okay. I'll do this in chronological order because I never really counted.

Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Inheritance, Assassin's Creed, The Wolf Among Us, The Walking Dead, Doctor Who, Star Wars, Attack on Titan, Fallout, Sarah Jane Adventures, Elder Scrolls, Mass Effect, Steven Universe. I don't think I missed anything...?

That adds up to 13.

Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

Of course I do! I thrive on feedback! Not implying that my entire self-esteem hinges on the approval of strangers on the internet, but comments are the best fucking thing ever! Instant serotonin for a whole day! Of course I'll reply! I love getting into little conversations with my readers, too!

What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

Wow. I'm usually more of a happy ending kind of person, but A New Quest (which I wrote at the super proud age of 11) did end with half of the main characters dead and a memorial service for them as the last scene, so... You know. If you consider that angsty, then sure.

Fun fact: Crossing A Line was actually originally supposed to end with Shepard dying! The last chapter (which to me still feels a bit out of place) was rewritten completely. I'm glad I changed it, though. I'm having a lot of fun with the sequel!

What’s the fic you’ve written with the happiest ending?

A month ago I'd have said Waiting Between Worlds without second thoughts—does it count as a happy ending when the whole fic is just a happy ending?—but it's just been going downhill the last three or four chapters. Pretty much every one of my one-shots in the When I Need You series. Also, Crossing A Line, I guess, now that it has a happy ending.

Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

I... really don't. I'm wildly ace, all my sex knowledge comes from smut and porn and I'm pretty sure that if I were to actually write the adult stuff, I'd either go way overboard and make it too obscene to read or end up with something completely dry and clinical and unreadable too.

When there's sex scenes in my fic, I usually leave them implied. I say the characters had sex, but I never explicitly write the actual sex. I don't think I'd be good at it. (Actually, I've tried plenty of times and I know I'm not. It's the dirtiest, kinkiest filth you'd ever see and I'd really recommend against reading it.)

I do like writing the pre-chorus to sex, as it were, though. The sensual foreplay to the sexual foreplay. The soft or heated moments leading up to the act. I've even gotten comments about my lime being "extremely hot despite not being smut" and I'm more than happy with that description.

Do you write crossovers? If so, what is the strangest one you’ve written?

I used to write crossovers. Now I only sometimes write AUs based on a different fandom, like a Shakarian Kimi no Na wa!AU.

The strangest crossover I've ever written? Don't know if any of them were strange. I had The Wolf Among Us/The Walking Dead crossovers and Doctor Who/Sarah Jane Adventures crossovers, but both of those pretty much exist in the same universe already, so... No. No weird crossovers.

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

God, I hope not. At least none that I know of.

Have you ever received hate on a fic?

Yes. Plenty. A lot. I'd wager around 4 out of 5 comments on my Shepard Twins fanfic are negative. I haven't updated the fic in a while, but that doesn't mean I'm not writing anymore. I have around 50K words' worth of WIP of it. So no, the hate comments don't bother me. (A lie: they bother me a lot. They even make me cry, sometimes. But they're not gonna be the reason I stop writing a story I enjoy.)

Have you ever co-written a fic before?

My very first fanfiction writing experience, actually. In retrospect, I think that worked out great, because that kind of cooperation made it easier to carry the whole thing through, get it to the end, and was a very positive experience - which is probably why I've continued to write fanfic.

What’s your all-time favorite ship?

Ahhh. Royai or Shakarian? Royai or Shakarian? Stupid, since they're almost the same relationship dynamic, but they're both amazingly written. I'm edging a bit more towards Shakarian, because interspecies stuff is always a bonus. Still, it's a close competition.

Have you ever had a fic translated?

I wish! I've translated other people's fics, but I've yet to have someone do that for me.

What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

I plan to hope to finish all my WIPs.

What are your writing strengths?

Dialogue. This is going to come off as boastful, but I think I'm pretty good at replicating individual characters' speech patterns.

What are your writing weaknesses?

According to my beta, I use elispses too liberally. According to me, I have trouble with transition scenes. I never write in order, so I always end up with disconnected scenes I need to join into a chapter. And the join parts don't even come easy to me.

What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

Not a fan. (When I write fanfics in Polish, I sometimes use English, but that's not the same because everyone in Poland knows English anyway.) If it's a made-up language in the fandom, I like to include some words every now and then in dialogue - especially when it doesn't translate exactly. I love spotlighting cultural differences. I actually learned a load of Jel words for my Murkmire fanfics.

What was the first fandom you wrote for?

Percy Jackson and the Olympians. Good times. Damn, that was a long time ago. *suddenly gets the overwhelming realization that they've been writing fanfic for the bigger part of their life* ...Wow.

What’s your favorite fic you’ve written?

Big Spoon/Little Spoon, a short Shakarian one-shot exploring the psychology of the Spacer background a bit. I also used lighting in a really cool way in this one! I'm really proud of it. Even when I call it "the Spooning As A Metaphor For Nationality Issues fanfic", I mean it in an affectionate way.

As far as non-one-shots go, I'm going with Crossing A Line. It's got it all: Enemies to Lovers, language barrier, interspecies awkwardness... Plus, writing from Garrus's POV is always a treat. I get to refer to humans as "aliens". What more could you want?

[yellowocaballero]

thoughts on writing gertrude? loved your latest evil con update :)

Oooh, thanks for asking. Truth be told that the story was the result of me stress-procrastinating on a large project at work due that day, so the writing process was basically me slapping the keyboard a few times for about two hours and then posting it without really even looking it over. See if you can catch ALL of the grammar mistakes, lmfao!!!

But it was a lot of fun to write a POV I’d never written before, especially one so different from everybody else’s. She’s also a very distinct personality and character, with a lot of ‘rules’ that I had to come up with on the spot, lol. What I really did enjoy was structuring the story similarly to some of the older TV shows I like, like Murder She Wrote or Columbo. I also adjusted the internal narration and the style to be a little more flowery or film noir, with a focus on evocative yet precise language and ruminations, because I needed to drive home that she and Agnes were absolutely pyromaniac girlfriends and that she felt very much A Certain Way over her that she was refusing to admit. 

(Some characters ruminate and some characters don’t. As a writer, try to stay away from long rambling paragraphs about a character’s thoughts, because that’s dull as shit. However, whenever I write from the POV of Archivist!Sasha and Gertrude, these two people absolutely follow logical trains of thought compulsively as part of how they problem-solve or plan. They have constructive and directed trains of thought that they use to problem-solve/narrate the story. If you’re writing from Jon’s POV, he ALSO has these trains of thought, except they are nonconstructive, rambling, illogical, and soaked in stress and anxiety. I have Jon think about how he FEELS and I have Sasha and Gertrude think about what they’re DOING. But also avoid long paragraphs of internal narration cuz that shit’s boring lol.)

But writing from Gertrude’s POV was very interesting to me, because I couldn’t use her to give the audience emotional cues. Normally when you’re writing something gross you rely on both description/word choice and the POV to signal to the audience that it’s gross - the spider’s legs were luminescent, scratchy, carapaces, shifting and groaning under their unnatural weight, but more importantly Sasha felt bile rise in her throat and was hit by a stab of nausea. You can only get so scary actually describing something, you also have to lean on emotional cues through loaded language and other character reactions. But with Gertrude, the whole scene in Jon’s bedroom (that, to be clear, was a bedroom coated in giant spider webs containing a half-human half-spider teenager groaning in agony and lashing out violently) was described clinically and professionally. Because she’s a professional, and she just wasn’t fucking scared by it. Because we’re soaked in her POV, we aren’t scared either. The scariest thing to us is how much Jon is clearly suffering. But, on the flip side, when Jon’s acting and looking more human, the most normal and innocuous things he does becomes dangerous and threatening, because Gertrude’s running her little logic programs telling her that he’s dangerous. 

Beyond the joys of POV, characterization wise: Gertrude brings narrative conflict wherever she goes because she is instantly half a step away from throwing down at any moment lol, which makes her perfect for instilling tension and conflict in a story. The main tension of that story was Gertrude and her distrust/horniness for Agnes, and Gertrude and her distrust of Jon - something she ultimately only dropped because she had decided to dismiss him as a threat (orrr diiddd sheeee....). Also, exploring her and Agnes’ relationship was FUN AS HELL, because I was constrained by how little these characters wanted to talk about what they were feeling. The ‘I’m only talking to you for business reasons’ thing was lifted from WTNV, which is the platonic ideal of romance. It was fun to also kind of explore from an outsider’s perspective how weird it is that a 60 year old fire messiah (she looks more like mid-twenties, it’s a testament to how Gertrude thinks of Agnes that she thinks of her as an older woman) is best friends with a teenager and they’re both very protective of another, younger, spider-teenager. Her relationship dynamics with the other characters are fun too: she denies it but Gerry is obviously like a nephew to her, she’s entrenched in a massive Will-they-won’t-they with Agnes, and she has people in her circle, but she obviously really doesn’t actually give a shit about or love anybody but herself. Gertrude cares about herself, and keeping the world safe, and that’s it.

AU notes: so basically what happened was that Agnes had her Crisis of Faith earlier than in canon, and she’s kept up very secret and limited communication with Gerry since the 1999 Evilcon (they were banned from any evilcons afterwards, so they never met up again as kids after that and they never saw Jon again). Instead of killing herself she decided to run away instead, so she asked for Gertrude’s help in torching any of her cult members who stopped her from leaving. They Fell In Love and had A Night of Passion and Spoke Longingly of Running Away Together before Gertrude’s sense of duty to her job made her break it off. Agnes is now enthusiastically trying to live out that ‘real life’ thing when she gets word that Jon’s spider-person transformation has started happening and that he had to run away, and is now homeless in London. Gerry’s been meaning to go ditch his mom and live with Agnes too, so basically Gerry and Agnes teamed up to go rescue Jon and falsify their identities so they can all try to live the normal life they never got. They’re best friends and continue living together until we see them all as adults in the main story. Agnes and Gerry are MUCH happier than in canon and Jon’s...well, he’s having a time of it, but he’ll end up alright! Right?

Also the only music I listened to while writing the whole thing was Billy Joel, Jim Croce, Hall and Oates, etc. :) Thanks for the q!! 

[shipping-receiving]

Skeins (pt. 2 of ?)

A draft of a sequel to my Jaime x Brienne colleagues-with-benefits fic Strings. (pt. 1)

==========

It’s an irony, perhaps, that words might come so unsteadily to two people whose vocations depend entirely upon their linguistic talents. Although, come to think of it, they’ve never had a problem talking about their work, and all the deliberations and debates that come with it. Even in bed, where their vocabulary is slightly more limited, they rarely ever experience a breakdown in communication. But this? Dating? Small talk? Apprehensions, and vulnerabilities? They are so new to putting these things into words. To putting words into these things.

Anything new is usually pretty weird, he’d told Brienne just now.

They’re on the way back to her apartment, their weird brunch a ten-minute walk behind them. The food had been pretty good, as she’d promised; unassuming, and more satisfying because of it. It was a shame that they’d fumbled their way through their conversation. But Jaime had held her hand at least—in broad daylight, no less, even if she’s tucking her hands into her pockets as they stroll down the street now—and besides, there’ll be other opportunities.

Practice makes perfect, right?

He’s nervous about visiting her home for the first time. Probably not as nervous as she is, but he’s nervous nonetheless. It’s absurd. He’s seen her, been with her completely naked—two or more times a week for the past four months—and now he’s nervous about this. Not that he thinks it’ll change anything about anything, but Brienne has kept her home a secret for so long that its mystery seems so much like an unequivocal truth. In a few minutes, they will tear the veil from this truth, and there’s a lump in his throat because of it.

When they finally step through her door, though, it doesn’t feel like any kind of great reveal. In fact, it dawns on him that it’s exactly what he expected her apartment to look like.

“It’s very… Brienne,” he tells her.

She locks the door behind them. “Is that supposed to be a compliment?”

“An observation.” He looks around at the mix of simple and salvaged furniture in this snug one-bedroom apartment. A sturdy wooden dining table, where her laptop sits, fully charged now; three filled bookshelves, each of a different size and design, yet somehow making sense together; a navy blue couch, with one of its seats—Brienne’s favoured, he deduces—more sunken in than the other; her small kitchen, neat, not heavily used, but clearly used enough to keep her going; a modest vase on her coffee table, filled with flowers, a small indulgence that she allows herself. “Very practical,” he elaborates. “But… warm.”

“I should put that on my dating profile,” she quips with a forced laugh.

“Do you have one?” He’d deleted his dating app after three days, even before his second time with Brienne—which was the first time he’d asked her to come over. He hadn’t put much thought into his bio then. Just here because the woman I enjoyed fucking once might not fuck me again, it might as well have said.

“No,” she answers, walking towards the kitchen. “Water?”

“No, thank you. Sex?”

She snorts. “You didn’t even let me give you the tour.”

“Sex is the tour. We can fuck here—” he points at her couch— “or here—” he points at her dining table— “or, I assume, through there.”

He is pointing at a closed door now, one of two.

“That’s the bathroom,” Brienne says, rolling her eyes.

“We can fuck in the bathroom. Why haven’t we fucked in a bathroom? We should fuck in your bathroom.”

“Will you—” She sighs affectionately—he hopes it’s affectionate—and leans against the kitchen counter. “Do you have to be so… crude?”

“Shower sex isn’t—”

“Not that.” She casts her eyes to the floor.

“What?” He thinks back on his words. “Wait—you mean, ‘fucking’?”

She opens a cabinet, and takes out a glass. “Forget it.”

“You say it as much as I do,” he says, pulling out a chair from the dining table and settling in it. “Fuck me, Jaime, and all that.”

“That’s…” Brienne walks over to the fridge, opens the door, and removes a pitcher of water. “That’s in the moment. What else can I say?”

“So what would you prefer that I say?”

“I’m not saying you can’t say it.” She fills her glass halfway. “I just… I don’t know. I wish there was a better word for it.”

“It’s not a bad word. It’s versatile. And does the job in one syllable.”

One sip. “You know—sometimes we… fuck. But sometimes, it feels like something else.”

He runs a finger over the back of the chair. “You mean, like that Sunday…?”

Pink tints her cheeks. “Yeah. Like that Sunday. I suppose I mean—sometimes I’d like to…” she swallows, “to fuck. To fuck you, or, or be fucked by you. But—if we’re—now that we’re—”

“Dating,” he offers.

“Yes. I’d like a—a different word, or phrase for it.” She laughs, a little helplessly. “It’s silly, isn’t it? Is this an occupational hazard?”

Jaime smiles. He likes her this way, this questioning, quivering, shimmering version of her. The woman who asks if they look like they’re on a date, who asks if there’s another way to describe what happens when their bodies come together. Who tears up and tells him she’s all tangled up about him. “All of our options are quite awful, aren’t they?”

“They’re too direct. Or too casual. Or too… euphemistic.”

She isn’t one for euphemisms, he thinks. Probably despises their inauthenticity. “Humour me,” he says, waving her over. “Run me through them.”

She sets her glass down on the counter, and walks over to him. As she approaches, he catches her by the waist. “Let’s play a game,” he says, bringing her between his thighs. “A word game—synonyms. I started us off, so now it’s your turn.”

Hesitantly, she puts her hands on his shoulders. “‘Having sex’, to start. Accurate, but dry. Clinical, almost.”

“‘Sleeping together’. Unwieldy, and not particularly descriptive.” He wraps his arms a little tighter around her. “It does sound cosy, though.”

“‘Sleeping with’?” she modifies. “Still as ambiguous, I guess.”

“I’d even argue that it’s obfuscation. Apart from last night, we haven’t actually done a lot of sleeping with each other.”

“Fair point. ‘Intercourse’?”

Jaime barks out a laugh. “That one’s indefensible. Supremely unsexy.”

“You don’t want to have intercourse with me?” she teases, and lifts a finger towards the dining table. “Not here—” she points behind her at the couch, “or there?”

On her back, his fingers slip beneath her shirt to draw circles on her skin. “It does put a bit of a damper on things.”

“Quite a bit.”

“How about: ‘joining’?”

“Joining?” she repeats incredulously. “That’s vague.”

“It could work. Given the right context.”

“Given a lot of context.”

“Like my cock joining your cunt?”

“Jaime!” She wriggles out of his grip, and heads for her couch. “The point was to be less vulgar, not more!”

“You wanted context!” he laughs. “Your turn.”

She collapses on the seat that’s more sunken in. “‘Fornicating’.”

“Terrible. Banging.”

“Worse than ‘fucking’, yet somehow not as good. ‘Hooking up’.”

“‘Getting laid’.”

“‘Getting some’.”

“‘Getting lucky’.”

“‘Getting it on’,” she giggles. “Getting tired.”

That giggle makes him grin as he says:

“Making love.”

The grin disappears as soon as the phrase is out of his mouth. It’s too soon. It was only yesterday night that they were on the verge of ending things, that he was almost on his knees trying to convince Brienne to give them a chance. Now he’s saying words like that?

Brienne isn’t responding in the way he’d thought she would, though. No wide eyes, no sputtering, no changing the subject. Instead, she’s wrinkling her nose in a sort of… disgust?

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know. I just hate the phrase. I can’t imagine asking you to… do that. To me.”

“Too euphemistic?” he asks, thinking of her comment earlier.

“I guess?” She leans her head back, and gazes up to the ceiling. “It also puts a lot of… pressure on the act. Like it has to live up to something.”

“It didn’t use to mean ‘sex’, you know. Just a few decades ago, all it meant was something like courtship.”

“I know. And that’s a lot of pressure to put on some flowers, or poetry, or whatever.”

Jaime watches as her fingers trace lines across her jeans, then lets his eyes travel to the vase of flowers on her coffee table. “Is that… something you want? Flowers, and poetry?”

“Not really,” she shrugs. “I wouldn’t know what to do with things like that.”

He wonders what gifts he could offer to someone like Brienne—books, maybe, besides any underwear to replace the ones he might destroy in future—then he hears her say:

“It’s interesting. How the meanings, and implications of words can change in such a short time.”

“Mm.” He stands from his seat, and moves to join her on her couch. “Language can be so… malleable. Definitions can change within a few months. Or even… in one night.”

“One night?” She turns her head to frown at him. Then, her brow relaxes, and she bites down on the corner of her bottom lip. “Oh.”

He stops right in front of her, and leans down to kiss that bite away. “Yeah,” he murmurs. “Oh.”

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

So you know that time Jake had a really weird dream about going to the Future as an adult and it was a horrible dystopia, and then that was never brought up again? What was up with that?

No clue.  If you ever figure it out, let me know.  That book is... inexplicable.

I’ve suggested that #41 could be improved at least 67% just by making it not a dream.  Just friggin have Jake travel to a possible future, the way the kids do in #7 and MM3.  Then that book could at least have an influence on the plot.

But I’d like to make an alternate suggestion: lean into the strength of a well-written dream sequence through having Jake learn something about himself.  Specifically, I want to see more of this moment:

“Who are you?”...

“Casualties of the Fitness Policy.  But it doesn’t really matter, does it.  We’re all prey.”  He smiled.  “Your body is strong.  You must suffer mental illness?”

I could hardly argue.  “I must.”

Random Escaped Yeerk Host assumes Jake’s disabled and therefore “unfit” for infestation, asks if it’s mental illness, and Jake doesn’t disagree with that assessment.  In context, the whole thing is... not ideal.  Jake’s got a follow-up line that’s pretty self-deprecating (like everything else about Jake) and there’s some pretty ableist language in the description of the group of rebel hosts that Jake is asking about.

HOWEVER, Jake is also the only Animorph who is canonically confirmed as having a mental illness, specifically clinical depression.  I think the text supports a read of all six of them as dealing with some forms of mental illness.  But the point is that Jake’s self-diagnosis (which, yeah, in context is probably just a self-deprecating and somewhat mean joke) is eventually proven accurate.

So if I could suggest a different fix for The Familiar: how about Jake acknowledges through that dream that he’s not okay?  He’s having nightmares about the hosts he killed, he’s losing track of reality in a way that could be read as dissociation, he’s experiencing social withdrawal, he describes being constantly tired, he’s losing interest in the things he once found fun, he’s often unable to handle intrusive thoughts, he feels guilty and worthless...  If this book came right out and said that Jake’s dealing with depression, then that can open up the rest of the series to discuss its impact directly.  Jake can’t necessarily get traditional talk therapy under the circumstances, but he could potentially benefit from social support from his friends.  He could fumble his way through understanding self-care, and could at least do some reading on the subject.

The other potential avenue that would open up would be complexifying the traditional definitions of “disability” and “fitness” in a way that that book already hints at doing.  The yeerks are eugenicists — even if the series never uses that word, that’s clearly a huge part of their M.O.  Probably why their rhetoric uses the word “fit” so much.  Jake and the others deliberately take advantage of that bigotry when they recruit the Auximorphs.

But this book could go further.  It could do a hell of a lot more to show that disability is complicated, that most disabilities are invisible, that disability sure as hell doesn’t preclude competence but bigots don’t know that, and that disability (like most social identities) has a lot more nuance than nondisableds realize.  Like, it could open up questions about the minimum threshold for “unfit” from a yeerk’s perspective, and what that then tells us about yeerk culture.  It could be a way for Jake and Ax to challenge andalite culture even more radically than they already do, if they’re open (and openly “you got a problem with that, punk?”) about Jake being a vecol.  It’d be interesting from a perspective of Jake challenging not just yeerk culture that assumes he’s not worth anything if he doesn’t have the type of mind they want, not just andalite culture that’d shut him away and thus lose the war, but also human culture that stigmatizes mental illness (especially in boys) to such a degree.

So that’s my new (even more minor, even more radical) suggestion for revising #41.  Have Jake agree when the NPC asks if he’s mentally ill, and have him actually mean it.

[ashintheairlikesnow]

Reconstruction: Karen Renford’s Boys

CW: Depictions of stitches and semi-graphic description of wounds, dehumanizing language (used in a positive context? Kind of?), pet whump. But I promise this is uplifting! Sort of!

Takes place directly after Insecurity by @spiffythespook. Read that and Dismantled for context.

Henry and Wright Farling (referenced) belong to @spiffythespook​

“He needs a doctor,” Henry hissed, glancing sidelong at the door to the kitchen. He was fiddling nervously with the shock implants along his collarbone with one hand, the other tapping fingernails in a staccato rhythm on the table. “Not us. We don’t know what we’re doing.”

“You are not helping me with my confidence,” Sebastian murmured in a slow even tone, his eyes focused with total concentration on the tiny needle he was currently trying to thread with the supplies from Karen’s first aid kit. Next to him was a small tablet, flat on the table, playing a tutorial video on how to give stitches.

“I just don’t understand why she won’t get him medical help,” Henry said, looking hesitantly at the oldest of them. "WRU has a clinic, an on-site hospital…" He shuddered at the memory of waking up in one of those rooms, Karen sitting next to his bed with that slight, coldly satisfied smile on her lips as she pressed into the newly-implanted circles over his collarbone and watched him fight back the sound of pain. 

Then that gross scientist or whatever came in all bright smiles, ruffling his hair, and the other one with her stupid flat eyes...

"He needs someone who… who's at least done this before," Henry gestured at the tall man in the chair next to him.

Dex had had to be all but carried down the stairs by Sebastian and Peter, and he looked wrecked. His face had been totally torn open - Henry could barely stand to look at the wet pinkish tissue visible now that Sebastian had carefully cleaned away the fresh and dried blood.

Dex was covered in still-bleeding welts and bruises. His light brown eyes stared blankly off into space, but thankfully he didn’t seem to be… to be hallucinating any longer, like when they first tried to help him up and he flinched away from the corners of the room, panicked and lost trying to hide from things only he could see.

Kept trying to sign with broken fingers and letting out awful little cries of pain when his broken fingers couldn’t move the way he wanted.

“Look at him,” Sebastian said, without raising or changing the tone of his voice. “If we take him out, they’ll know she lost her temper. Can’t have that.” Sebastian’s mouth twisted, bitterly, as the thread finally went through the needle's eye. “Can’t have anyone knowing the ice queen nearly beat her perfect pet to death.”

Dex shivered, the only sign he could hear them, and blinked slowly. Henry had never seen anyone look as totally… destroyed… as Dex did, right now.

“So… so what? So you’re just going to sew up his face? With your experience of, of fucking cooking?”

Sebastian paused and looked over at him. His eyes were gentle, and understanding. “Henry. He’s going to be okay. I promise. I’ll get him sewn up, this is the only one bad enough to need stitches. If I don’t do it, it won’t get done.”

“But-... but she could have killed him!”

“She still might,” Sebastian said calmly. “I don’t know what happened up there, but-”

“I… I do. She said he loves someone and he’s not allowed to. When sh-she… when she told m-me to clean him uh-up…” Henry’s voice began to tremble and waver. His throat closed around the words he wanted to say.

Peter scraped his chair across the floor, pulling closer to Henry, sliding his arms around him just below his shoulders. Henry hated being touched, but in the moment, with Peter, he leaned into it and turned his head to press his forehead into Peter’s neck, clenching his eyes shut to force back the tears that threatened to come out. “She did that to him because he cared about somebody else that wasn’t her!”

Over his head, Peter and Seb looked at each other.

Dex mouthed something - it looked like his lips pushed together and then apart, one syllable -  but no sound came out of his mouth. He didn’t look at any of them - he had focused his vision on a spot on the cream-colored wall and stuck there.

“Why does he look like that?” Henry asked, and his voice was caught in his throat, it kept coming out too high, too young.

“Facility stare,” Seb said flatly, with false casual ease. “We all get it. Coping mechanism."

“It lets you go away in your head,” Peter said reassuringly. “When it's so bad you can't keep going any longer. He’ll come back after a while. It’s just… it’s just something we all learn how to do in training. Trust me, Henry, he’ll come back. He’s… he’s been doing this a really long time.”

It was only at that second that Henry really realized that Dex was old enough to be his father. He could see the hints of lines in his face, the spread of stubble along his jaw, and yet… he still looked so young, too. Especially now, blank and empty, battered and bleeding and broken.

“All he d-did was have a f-feeling for someone,” Henry whispered, burying himself against Peter, who tightened the arms around him. It was a feeble hint of defense against the evil that had trapped them in this house… in Henry’s case, literally.

He pushed his palm into the little circles, the fucking-... the fucking things she’d put in him that went off if he got within five feet of the stupid fucking wall that circled her property. Trapped here until he could be trusted.

Until he was as broken as the others.

Sebastian sighed, turning back to his work. “It was really a matter of time,” He said softly to Peter. “He’s lucky she didn’t notice before. I kind of wondered… but honestly, I thought, who could care about that stupid creep? I figured he just, you know… wanted sex so badly he’d even take it from... him.”

A strange expression passed over Peter’s face, and he cleared his throat, swallowing. “Yeah… I thought so, too. I, I guess… I guess maybe it was more than that…”

“Clearly. She beat the fucking shit out of him. She’s been sending him to see that, that bastard since way before I ever came home… Jesus, Dex.” Seb looked up at him. Dex showed no indication he could hear. “You got yourself in deep shit, huh?”

Dex blinked once.

“I can’t believe he’d get himself this wrecked over that fucking creep,” Sebastian muttered. “That asshole thinks it’s art, what Karen does to us. He’ll probably think it’s funny when she tells him she beat Dex up like this.”

The weird expression passed over Peter’s face again, and he just shrugged. “Maybe. Doubt it, though.”

Henry had found himself staring at Dex again, thinking about the older man, that he’d been here for decades and he was forty and Karen still beat him up… and he just had to sit there and take it. Henry’s life would look just like that, now. If she found out Peter was so nice to him, that he cared about Peter more than he did anybody else - except she knew, didn’t she, she’d said he was making moon eyes…

“Oh, god,” Henry said softly. “Oh my god, this is it, isn’t it, this is… this is it… this is my whole future."

“It’s okay,” Peter said, rocking back and forth, his mouth moving lightly against Henry's hair. “It’s okay, Henry.”

“No, it’s not,” Henry half-whined into Peter’s neck. “It’s not okay and it’s never going to be okay again. All he did was care about someone!”

“Sssshhhh, she’ll hear you.” Peter rested his chin on top of Henry’s head and held him, and slowly Henry raised one hand to grasp onto his arm, breathing in shaky shallow gasps as he tried to calm himself down. “Don’t let her hear, Henry. It’s just us down here, let’s keep it just us.”

Henry nodded against Peter’s skin, trying not to think about the way she’d sounded, so perfectly calm with little spots of Dex’s blood on her face, telling him that if he didn’t learn to care more for her than Peter that she’d take everything away, just like she’d done to Dex.

He thought of Dex’s broken fingers, bent all out of shape, and the awful sound of him screaming in that strange inhuman hoarse voice, like an animal's scream, and shuddered.

There was a soft hiss, and Henry blinked back tears to turn his head and look. Dex was still staring at that spot on the wall as Sebastian carefully, slowly stitched up his face.

The only way to even know that he felt it was by the soft, constant hissing sound he made each time the needle slid into his skin and back out again. In and out, in and out, and Henry’s stomach lurched. He had to close his eyes and stop watching or he’d throw up all over the kitchen table.

“Wright Farling’s not fucking worth this,” Sebastian muttered. “Why, Dex? Huh?”

Dex didn’t even look in his direction. He just kept staring at the wall.

“So, what do we do next?” Peter asked, softly, nearly a whisper. “What comes next, Seb?”

“We have to splint his fingers. I’ll… I’ll find a video for that, too.” Sebastian sighed, pausing to carefully tie off the end of the thread, clipping it as close to the skin as he could, sitting back to look over his work. Stitches ran from just above Dex's jaw on the left side nearly to his ear, looking nearly fake, like they'd been painted on, compared to his sun-starved pale skin.

Seb's face was ash-white and greenish around the edges, but he did not waver, did not shake, did not cry.

“If we’re careful, we can set them right, and he’ll be able to sign once they heal up.”

“I’ll set his fingers,” Peter said, almost too quickly. “You and Henry go… go, uh. Clean, clean up her office. Get her clothes out of the hamper and soak them. I’ll set his fingers. I… need a minute alone with him.”

“What?” Henry pulled back, looking at Peter’s face, the hint of curl to his dark hair.

Peter shook his head “Just… go with it, Henry. Seb knows how to clean blood. Just go with him and do what he tells you. I’ll set Dex’s fingers.”

Dex’s broken hand twitched, as though he were listening, wherever he had gone deep inside his mind. He hissed, again.

“But why do you need to be alone-”

“Henry.” Peter turned, biting down on his lower lip, looking pained. “Please. Just trust me that it’s important, okay? Just trust me.”

He and Sebastian looked at each other, and Henry wondered how long he would live here before he had all those unspoken communications like they did, until he and Peter could have whole conversations without saying a word.

“Okay,” Sebastian said softly. “We’ll head upstairs, and leave you two alone. Just… don’t fuck up the splints, okay, Peter? Please. He needs his hands to talk. He can’t-... don’t let her take that away from him, too.”

Peter nodded, slowly, seriously. His jaw was set, his eyes sparkling. He looked like a man on a mission, and Henry thought it felt like there was more to that mission than just fixing his hand, but he couldn’t think of what.

Dex never moved, even though Henry knew he had to hurt so, so badly. He held himself very still and stayed blank and empty while Henry took out the supplies to splint his fingers. He carefully laid each item out on the table, trying not to think about the fact that Karen had supplies for this just lying around the house, ready. Finally, he couldn’t stop himself. “Has she broken your hands before?”

Sebastian, in the process of pulling up the tutorial video for Peter, shrugged. “Not mine. A cook without working hands isn’t much use, and she’s not about to start cooking for herself again.”

“She’s broken mine,” Peter said quietly. “Early on. These are probably all still here from then. But not in a long time, and mine healed up well enough. All right, I’m going to watch the tutorial a couple of times and then I’ll do this.”

“Okay.” Henry hesitated, not quite willing to leave Peter, not entirely sure why. Finally, Sebastian stood and jerked his head in the direction of the stairs, and Henry swallowed hard, nodding. “Peter…”

“You’re okay,” Peter said softly, soothingly, looking up at him from where he sat next to Dex. “She’s not going to hurt anyone else today. We’ll be okay.”

“But he’s not okay,” Henry said. “And… he won’t be, will he?”

Once more, that look that Henry couldn’t quite read between the other two. Peter looked over at Dex, and licked his lips, thinking. “He’ll be okay,” he said finally. “You’ll see. Now go on.”

Henry followed Seb out of the kitchen, but paused just on the other side of the doorway.

“Dex, are you listening?” He heard Peter say, in a low voice. “Please. I need you to be here with me. I know it hurts, but I need you to come back. This is important.”

There was a soft sound, not quite a grunt. Some kind of acknowledgement.

“Good.” Henry could hear Peter’s deep inhale from where he stood. “Okay. While she was… while…” He paused. Henry swallowed back an urge to go back in there and help, somehow.

At the stairs, Sebastian paused and turned when he realized Henry wasn’t following him. Henry put a finger to his mouth, hoping Seb would take the hint and be silent. Seb rolled his eyes, but… after a second he came back and stood next to Henry.

“While you were still upstairs,” Peter said softly, voice shaking a little, “Do you remember when the phone rang?”

There was a soft sound of assent.

“Okay, good. So… so the phone call… was, um, was from… Wright Farling.”

The sound that came from Dex’s throat was a nearly inhuman, despairing wail.

Henry felt his knees buckle under the weight of it.

“N-no, Dex, please, be quiet and don’t get her attention-” The sound cut off and then changed into more hoarse sobbing like Henry had heard coming from upstairs when she was hurting the older man, when the sobs had been punctuated by the thwak of her cane against Dex's skin.

Henry's eyes welled up with tears again and he jammed the palms of his hands against them to force the tears back.

Dex sounded so fucking gone.

This is what the rest of your life looks like, Henry.

Peter's voice became insistent. “Dex, please don’t try to sign, you’ll only hurt yourself-... Can you please-... Dex, god damn it, stop signing-”

There were new sounds Henry didn’t understand at first, rustling and scraping of the chairs. He managed to peek around the doorframe without being seen, and caught a glimpse of Peter holding Dex, the taller man slumped against him, weeping with his teeth ground together so he wouldn't move and tear open the new stitches while Peter petted gently through his dark hair, shushing, whispering into his ear.

"Please, Dex, you're all right, you're good, we're good boys, you're a good boy…"

Henry felt a lick of disgust down his spine, but realized Dex had visibly started to calm at the words. Henry wondered - not for the first time - if he really should feel grateful to Karen that he hadn't been forced to learn the way the others had, at the Facility, dehumanized until good boy - something you said to dogs - meant more than nearly any other kind of reassurance.

Henry turned to look and next to him, tears were running freely down Sebastian’s face even as he had a hand over his own mouth to keep himself silent. Seb caught Peter looking at him and shook his head. “He’s been here so long,” Seb whispered behind his hand. “She's taken his voice and his whole life. He felt something she didn’t like and she took that, too. What else is left for her to fucking take?”

The answer hung unspoken between them.

She would take anything.

She would take everything.

Dex’s sobs finally quieted back down, as Peter continued to murmur soft good boys to him. Henry's heart beat in his throat.

“Dex, listen to me,” Peter said softly. “Wright Farling didn’t call for her. Okay? He called to give me a… a secret message for you.”

Dex went perfectly, utterly silent.

Holding his breath.

“He said to tell you he called,” Peter all but whispered. “He wanted you to know.” The sound barely carried to the two men eavesdropping in the hall. “He said… he said to tell you he’s sorry, for this. For what she did.”

There was a pause, and then Dex began to cry again, but this time the sound was different in some way Henry couldn’t have defined but understood instinctively. It wasn’t despair, now, in Dex's tears - it was something like a fragile, barely-there hope.

Sebastian grabbed his arm and pointed towards the stairs. Whatever else Peter said to Dex, Henry didn't hear it, as he let Sebastian lead him away.

Halfway up the stairs, Henry said quietly, “Does that mean-”

“Sssshhhh,” Sebastian whispered, but the tears in his eyes had changed, too.

Hope.

For Dex, if no one else.

“Give Dex a minute with Peter,” Sebastian said softly. “Let’s… let’s go clean up her mess.”

[softbiker]

Born to Run - Chapter 3

Warnings: some language, descriptions of injury and blood

Word count: 2.4k

A/N: Next chapter!! Things are going to start picking up from here - Bucky (and the rest of the gang) will be getting more involved, and making more of a mess. Thank you so much for your support of this series! As always, let me know what you think! <3

Three weeks. Three whole weeks.

It had been 23 days since Y/N moved out to the middle of nowhere, and 20 days since she had taken over her tiny clinic. She had seen tick bites and viral infections and strep throat and cysts. She had passed out prescriptions and signed insurance papers and given flu shots. She had unpacked all of her clothes into the tidy wardrobe and closet, once the mothball smell finally dissipated. And she had spent every single night alone in her house.

Y/N had thought that having roommates all through college and medical school was a necessary evil - though she always got along with them, the real dream was having a place all to yourself, right? No one coming in or leaving at odd hours, no one stealing your leftover takeout. No one to talk to. Ever.

If she had to spend one more night scrolling through Netflix by herself, she was going to jump in front of a semi.

Which was why she was standing in front of a now-full closet, flipping through dresses and shirts to wear, discarding and debating her options. When Charlotte had informed her of Back to School fair this weekend, Y/N had practically wept with joy. Charlotte was planning to take her two boys, Ethan and Caleb, and welcomed Y/N to join them for the evening - she jumped at the chance to do something, go somewhere. To wear something other than scrubs. That was probably why she had been in front of her closet for 20 minutes now - there were so many options when she hadn’t been able to wear her fun clothes in nearly a month.

She settled on a sundress and sneakers and made it out the door on the tail of an “On my way!” text to Charlotte.

The fairground normally doubled as a public park and playground on the outskirts of town. As she pulled into the vacant field across the street and parked her car, Y/N marvelled at the sheer volume of activity they were able to fit into such a small park. There was a ferris wheel, a swing ride, and one of those spinning g-force rides with a blinking sign that read ‘Gravitron’. The overwhelming smell of popcorn and fried foods drifted on the afternoon air, promising the most nostalgic foods imaginable. Carnival games and craft booths filled the park, boasting prizes and homemade goods.

Charlotte was waiting next to a white gazebo at the front of the park, a young boy with curly dark hair standing next to her. She caught sight of Y/N approaching from across the street and waved, her smile big and bright. Y/N waved back, jogging across the street to get out of the way of an oncoming truck.

“Hi,” she greeted, slightly out of breath. “I hope I’m not late?”

“Oh no! We just got here,” Charlotte smiled her easy smile, squeezing the boy’s shoulder. “This is my younger son, Caleb. He’s 10.” Caleb lifted his hand and quirked his mouth shyly.

“Hello, Caleb, nice to meet you,” Y/N gave him her warmest smile. “Don’t you have an older brother somewhere?”

“Yeah,” Caleb nodded, frowning a little. “But mom let him go with his friends.”

“Well, sorry baby, but 10 is just not old enough for boys to go off unsupervised,” Charlotte rolled her eyes fondly. “When you’re 13 you can run around with your buddies like Ethan. Until then, you’re stuck hanging out with your very cool mom.”

Y/N stifled her laughter as Caleb sighed a long suffering sigh. Charlotte just winked.

“Now, come on, I’m dying for some lemonade.”

The three of them had a blast exploring the fair; in spite of having only two adult females for company, Caleb certainly enjoyed himself, indulging in fried oreos and corndogs and sodas, and somehow still managing to hold it down when they rode the swings. Y/N won a small pocket knife in a ring toss game, which she talked the carnie into trading back for a superhero action figure that Caleb could play with. They sipped lemonade and listened to the live music from a country singer they had never heard of.

“Mom, can we go on the ferris wheel now?” Caleb asked, urgently tugging on her sleeve. “Look, the line is really short!”

“Honey, I think the cars only take two riders…” Charlotte trailed off, her meaning understood. She didn’t want to leave Y/N sitting out, or sitting with a stranger.

“No, no - don’t worry about me! I can stay right here and watch your things anyway,” Y/N insisted. “Really, I don’t mind. I’m not a big fan of heights anyway.”

Charlotte seemed unsure, but after a bit more coaxing she let Caleb drag her away to the ferris wheel before the lines got long again. Y/N smiled watching them go, licking the powdered sugar off her fingers from her funnel cake. They had had a fun afternoon, but she felt she should let them spend some time together with just the two of them.

Wringing an overused napkin in one hand, she scrolled through the photos on her phone. Between the late afternoon sun and the fairground backdrop, she had taken some nice pictures. She should post one on Instagram, probably. Just to let everyone know she was still alive. Her thumb swiped through her phone and tapped on the app, pulling up a timeline full of bright smiles and baby photos.

“WE GOT A DOCTOR HERE?!”

Y/N’s head whipped around so fast her neck popped. Who said that?

“MY FRIEND NEEDS HELP! ARE THERE ANY DOCTORS HERE?”

A dark-skinned man in a blue t-shirt was running in between picnic tables and shouting, turning back and forth in his search.

“I am! I’m a doctor!” Y/N shot up from the bench, maneuvering around her purse and Caleb’s prizes. She waved a hand at the man. “Over here!”

His face briefly softened in relief, then intensified again as he jogged between tables towards her and grabbed her wrist.

“This way, doc, he’s really bleeding a lot,” he said over his shoulder, weaving between couples and children and cotton candy vendors. Y/N’s heart pounded, adrenaline sharpening her focus.

“Have you called an ambulance already? If it’s more than I can handle, they’d better be on their way - the hospital is too far.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he gave a sharp nod. “But somebody told me we had a new doctor in town - figured it was worth a shot to see if you were out here tonight.”

They rounded a shooting gallery game and she saw him, sprawled out on the grass and face covered in blood. That would be the patient, she assumed. Blood flowed from a gash on his forehead, slicking his face and neck like something out of a slasher flick. He was conscious, sputtering and spitting blood from his mouth as he tried to talk to the man that was holding his head and shoulders in his lap. Y/N was at his side in a second.

“How did this happen?” she questioned, all business.

“Uh, he fell, hit his head on one of the stakes holding up the tents,” the man holding her patient’s head spoke up.

Lie. A very obvious one, but fine. Without sparing the other man a glance, Y/N leaned forward over the bleeding man’s face.

“Sir, can you hear me? I’m a doctor, I’m going to have a look at this cut, alright?”

“ ‘kay,” he mumbled, nodding. The blood around his lips was starting to dry and crack.

Y/N glanced around, looking for something to stop the bleeding. With no other options, she unwrapped the denim shirt from her waist and pressed it to the man’s forehead, using both hands to increase the pressure. She turned to the man who had come to find her, hovering nearby and chewing his lip.

“I’ll need something to clean this with. Just warm water is fine if you can find it. Once I clean the blood off we’ll see if he needs stitches.” Nodding once, he disappeared into the crowd once again. Y/N turned back to her patient, lifting the shirt lightly to examine the bleeding.

“Sure bleeds like a bitch, don’t it?”

She actually jumped when the other man spoke - she had paid no attention to him, other than noting that he was holding his friend's head. She looked up. You’ve got to be fucking kidding me-

“We keep meeting in weird ways,” Bucky smiled ruefully at her from under his baseball cap. She blinked. Turned back to the matter at hand.

“I’d say this is a little different than shopping for brownie mix,” Y/N muttered. Who did he think he was, acting like this was some kind of meet-cute? And after the way he acted in the grocery store?

“You’re telling me,” he chuckled. His laugh jostled his friend’s head and shoulders a bit and the man groaned.

“Buck, stop flirtin’,” he said, exasperated. “You’re distracting the doctor.”

“Believe me, I’m the furthest thing from distracted.” Y/N rolled her eyes.

Bucky looked like he was about to say more, but then their other friend returned with water, towels, and a small first aid kit. They were helpful and followed her instructions while she cleaned the wound and wiped the rest of the man’s face - he was nearly as handsome as Bucky under all that blood, with a straight nose and sharp square jaw. She used a little disinfectant around the area and chewed her lip as she examined the edges of the cut.

“It looks like you’ll need stitches, Mr…?”

“Rogers. Steve Rogers.” His voice sounded a bit better after they had given him a sip of water.

“Alright, Steve. Let me unpack the kit here and see if we have a needle,” she nodded, reaching back and flipping the first aid kit open in her lap. Whoever packed the kit must have been a nurse or paramedic of some kind, because they had thankfully included a suture needle and surgical thread. She snapped on a pair of gloves and opened the sterile plastic packet containing the needle. “Sorry, I don’t think I have an anesthetic.”

“It’s alright, doc,” he sighed. “I think the Army might be ashamed of me if I can’t handle a few stitches.”

“He’s had plenty of stitches before - hell, he’s had more than anybody I know,” Bucky piped up. “He can handle it.”

“Thanks a lot, jerk,” Steve scoffed.

“You’re welcome, asshole.”

“Y’all wanna shut up and let the doctor do her job or what?” the other man, Sam, she had learned, glared at them both.

“Alright,” Y/N took a breath and threaded her needle. “If you need to bite something or squeeze something do it, just stay still.”

Steve was a model patient, he didn’t even flinch as the needle tugged the tear in his skin closed, though he hissed through his teeth and clenched his fist down on Bucky’s hand. Sam crouched down next to them and watched intently, but stayed quiet. They watched her work, hands steady and efficient. Y/N enjoyed the focus that came with her work - she blocked out the fair rides and the screaming children and country music. Her vision closed in on the needle and the skin, carefully weaving and tying the wound closed.

When she finished and cut the thread, she sat back on her heels and sighed, shoulders slumping. “Okay, Mr. Rogers. I think you’ll live.”

Steve smiled a crooked, all-American grin. “You’re a miracle worker, doc.”

“Hardly,” she scoffed. “Just faster than an ambulance. And actually, if you really did hit your head on a metal stake, I think I ought to check for a concussion.”

Bucky and Sam helped tug him to his feet so she could check his coordination and shine her phone flashlight at his pupils. He insisted his head didn’t hurt or feel dizzy, so she cleared him, though they did let the paramedics have a look when they finally arrived.

A few minutes later she was standing to the side, arms crossed, as she watched the ambulance pull away. She felt more than heard his heavy-booted steps come up beside her, but she didn’t turn to look.

“You did a great job, doc,” Bucky offered, trying to catch her eye.

“Thank you.”

“Lucky you were here.”

“It wasn’t a deep wound, he would’ve been fine waiting for the ambulance.”

“Still.” He took a half step forward, into her eye line and she turned to face him fully. His expression was full of something she couldn’t quite make out - hope? Admiration? Gratitude? Bucky’s eyes roamed her face, unwilling or unable to move away. The longer she held his gaze, the more she felt that something unspoken was passing between them, something she couldn’t articulate. But it was too much, whatever it was.

Y/N took a step backward, breaking eye contact as she glanced towards Steve and Sam, sitting at a picnic table 20 feet away.

“Keep an eye out for your friends. Wouldn’t want them to keep falling on sharp objects,” she said, continuing to back away from Bucky. He shifted his feet as if he wanted to follow, but decided against it. Without giving him a chance to speak, she turned on her heel and left.

Caleb spotted her first when she was back in sight of their table. He tugged on his mother’s arm and pointed; Charlotte visibly melted in relief when Y/N met her eyes and waved.

“We were worried you’d been kidnapped or something!” Charlotte half-joked as she approached. Y/N grimaced, realizing she had left their things out in the open - thank god it looked like nothing was stolen.

“I’m so sorry, there was an emergency, a man had fallen and cut his head,” Y/N rushed to explain, noticing Charlotte’s eyes dart down to her dress. Y/N’s eyes followed. “...and clearly, there was a lot of blood.”

“Jesus. It’s a good thing they found you, huh?”

“I guess so,” Y/N shrugged lamely.

“Who was it? Did you catch a name?”

“He said Steve Rogers?” She didn’t quite catch Charlotte’s eyes widening as she continued. “His friend was there, Bucky Barnes. He’s my neighbor across the street.”

Charlotte’s face looked pinched and she had a white-knuckled grip on Caleb’s shoulder, but she managed a pained smile.

“Oh. Well I guess you��ll be wanting to head home and get into some clean clothes?” Her words were strained. “We had a great time tonight, see you Monday!” And then she was practically dragging Caleb away at a clipped pace, just slow enough to seem sane.

What the fuck is going on in this town?

[pentanguine]

30) What does Genderqueer mean to you?

I love the word genderqueer because of its expansiveness. It lets me say what I am, not just what I’m not, but it doesn’t pin me down with precise, rigid language that ends up becoming prescriptive rather than descriptive. It lets me define myself without being defined, thereby satisfying my neurotic impulse to put everything into categories and my visceral aversion to be being oversimplified and palatable.

And it’s about so much more than gender, too. It’s about the worldview that comes out of my being (gender)queer, and the political ideals that I want to do a better job living up to. It’s about fucking with gender expression and gender narratives, like the “right” way to be trans. It’s absolutely a choice to identify this way, and that’s why I love it, because I know that anyone else who identifies as genderqueer in 2020 has deliberately chosen it in favor of nonbinary (or at least alongside it), and they’re my kind of people.

Nonbinary doesn’t appeal to me as much because it’s very…empty, I think, and clinical. It just says what you’re not, and it says it neatly in prefixes and suffixes that look organized and polite on drop-down menus. And in an ideal world, everyone would be nonbinary, wouldn’t they? Not in the sense that we’d destroy gender (gender is important to many people, including me), but in the sense that “man” and “woman” would just be two random genders amongst a whole nebulous cloud of them, and there’d be no binary to exist inside of anyway.

I think I’ve probably talked about this before in several of the other questions, but when I say that my identity is weird and unresolved, I mean that being weird and unresolved is my identity. I don’t feel like I’m moving closer toward an ultimate truth; I don’t think there’s an ultimate truth to uncover anyway, and even if there were I wouldn’t want to find it. I want to be at peace in the lack of resolution. Everything in life is composed of certainties and uncertainties, and I think I’m fine with my gender being an uncertainty. Genderqueer is a way of pointing to the uncertainty and claiming it as my gender without having to explain something inexplicable.  

Basically, I refuse to be made to cohere. It seems like everything always coheres with gender; in the end, everything’s always a category and there are qualifications and boxes to tick and linked chains of traits that you can follow, inevitably, toward order and cohesion. I don’t want any of my traits to imply any of my other traits. I don’t want people to look at my body and think woman; I don’t want people to hear they/them and think neutrality; I don’t want people to look at my masculine clothes and think power. I don’t want people to immediately Know what I am.

I do feel like I leaned pretty hard into the transmasc angle with these questions, which makes me feel a little over-explicated, but I wanted to, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Transmasculine is something that I am! It’s a word that makes me feel comfortable with all the nuances of myself, and more fully able to be otherwise contradicting and queer. It’s a word I want to be proud of and open about identifying with! As an afab person who is not physically transitioning, masculinity is what I have to work to get people to acknowledge in me, and claiming that on my own terms is very personally meaningful.

(As an aside, something that I never got around to mentioning any other place is that I’m a boy! Not male or a man, just a boy: boy as in “relating queerly to time,” boy as in “masculinity that holds no power,” boy as kind of a playful queer affectation. Maybe I’m an agender boy??* It’s something that I made up off the top of my head and am totally winging here.)

All of that being said, though, I’m still genderqueer, as in a mess, as in outside of gender, as in genderfucked, as in invert, as in weird and ideologically disturbing and no more a man than I am a woman. My gender is something that I get to create and name, and I choose to be queer.

 *I did not actually make up the idea of being an agender boy**, and I’m not saying this person did either, but they’re at least one of the other people who got there before me

**also I’m not actually agender?? I definitely have a gender, but I just always feel compelled to add “agender” before the “boy” for some reason. I guess because the way I use boy I don’t actually mean it as a gender. Like, my gender is queer and then boy is just something else I am, like I’m a Capricorn and a bookworm.

[sunriserose1023]

Unexpected (8)

WORD COUNT: 4402 WARNINGS FOR THE SERIES:  THIS IS AN AU; unplanned pregnancy, pregnancy symptoms, language, angst, fluff, sexual content, flashbacks, medical descriptions/procedures, emotional crap; more warnings will be added as the series progresses.

Masterlist Read this series on Ao3 HERE.

The One With All the Cards on the Table

Steve unlocked his office door and set the books he was carrying on his desk. He laid his hands on it, bending over and letting out a breath. He closed his eyes, fingers curling as he pressed down on the top of the desk.

He hated this.

He straightened and moved his hands, rubbing them together as he stared at the framed diplomas on the wall. There was a knock at his door and he glanced back, giving Sharon a smile when she poked her head in.

“Hey.” “Hey back. Plans tonight?”

Steve shook his head.

“You?”

She smiled, leaning against the doorframe.

“There’s a girl in the economics department that asked if I wanted to meet for drinks.” “The blonde?” “Redhead.”

Steve smiled.

“That’s great!” “You know, I don’t think I could have even made one friend if it hadn’t been for you carting me everywhere and introducing me to everyone.”

Steve shook his head.

“I think you would have been fine on your own. I just … gave you a little push.”

Sharon smiled again, crossing her arms over her chest.

“Are you still keeping up the tutoring today?”

Steve sighed and shrugged.

“I’m not sure. I …”

He shook his head as he let his sentence trail off and Sharon spoke softly.

“You know you’ve got to talk to her.”

Steve sighed again.

“I know. It’s just …” “Yeah, I know. It’s complicated.”

He shook his head, reaching a hand up to rub at the back of his neck. He turned back towards her, he and Sharon exchanging a frown when a heated exchange could be heard down the hall.

“Is he down there?” “Sir, you can’t—“ “Watch me.”

Steve’s brows furrowed.

“Bucky?”

Steve and Sharon stepped into the hall, Steve’s eyebrows raising when he saw an irate Bucky stomping towards him. Steve subtly stepped in front of Sharon, shaking his head.

“Buck, what—“ “It would be in your best interest, Rogers, to keep your damn mouth shut. What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Steve blinked and Sharon tapped his shoulder, whispering to him.

“I’m gonna go.”

She stepped away and slipped into her office and Steve shook his head as Bucky invaded his personal space. Steve took a step back, but Bucky was right there with him. Steve stepped into his office and rounded the desk, leaning back when Bucky slammed his hands on top of it.

“Buck, what the hell?!” “I know you got some brains, college boy, but you sure as fuck aren’t using them, are you?”

Steve blinked, and Bucky shook his head.

“You’re a fucking idiot.” “Where is this coming from?”

Bucky shook his head again, one hand rubbing his stubbled chin. He let out a breath, then turned to Steve, a finger pointing towards the hallway.

“That chick. Sharon?”

Steve nodded, and Bucky went on, dropping his hand to his side.

“I’m sure she’s real nice. She’s cute. I’m sure she’s smart. But Steve. Come on.” “What?”

Bucky licked his lips before he spoke.

“She’s cool with the fact that your heart belongs to someone else?”

Steve rolled his eyes.

“That’s what this is about?” “No, it’s the fact that the sun’s shining today and it’s kind of pissing me off. Yeah, dumbass! This is about you and Y/N and how it’s time for you to get your head out of your ass.”

Steve sat in his chair, moving some papers around.

“There’s nothing with me and Y/N.” “Nothing’s gonna be a pretty big something in six more months.” “It’s a little more than six months.” “No, it’s actually right at.”

Steve looked up at Bucky.

“I guess as the father of the child, you’d know, huh? Oh, wait.”

Bucky smiled, sucking on his tongue.

“If you’re looking for a fight, Stevie, you’re barking up the right tree. I’m dying to rearrange those perfect teeth of yours.” “What the fuck is your real problem? That I haven’t been taking Y/N’s calls?” “That you’re parading women around her and ignoring her when she’s carrying your baby, you stupid fucker! You’re hurting her, you dumb bastard, and because she lives with me, I have to deal with the fallout. So yeah, I’ve got a problem with that. Lifelong friends or not, I’m not going to stand aside anymore while you treat a woman we both love in very different ways like shit.”

Steve set his jaw. It had been years since he and Bucky had gotten physical with their fights, but it sounded like a damn good idea right then.

“So we’re just ignoring how that woman, the one who’s carrying my baby, went on a date with another man?” “Christ, Steve, that was two weeks ago. She’s tried to talk to you since then, but you won’t answer your goddamn phone!”

He knew what a dick move it was, but he just couldn’t handle it. He couldn’t stand to talk to her, mainly because of the ache it caused in his heart. He leaned back in his chair, eyes moving to the calendar under the clock on the wall. He saw the little green heart in the corner of today’s date and he frowned.

“Buck, what’s the date?” “Are you kidding me?” “Just tell me.”

Bucky glanced at his watch, answering the question.

“I’m going to see you at the appointment in two weeks, right?

Steve flashed a smile, leaning back and tapping the calendar on the wall, where a green heart marked the day.

“I wouldn’t miss it.”

Steve blinked, eyes going to the watch on his wrist.

“Fuck. Fuck.” “Steve?”

Steve pushed a hand through his hair, dragging the other down his face. He stood up from the chair, pushing Bucky out of the way as he walked to the door, then started jogging down the hall, leaving a confused Bucky in his wake.

You sat on the edge of the exam table, dressed in the stupid paper gown, watching your toes as your feet dangled. You decided that tomorrow you’d talk Pepper into getting a pedicure, and you were already debating colors.

You let out a breath as you looked around, wondering why in God’s name you were thinking of mixing sour cream and onion chips with spaghetti and meatballs when the door opened.

“Miss Potts, so sorry to have kept you waiting.”

You smiled.

“No worries. They said you were finishing up a delivery.” “Babies have no sense of time, I’m afraid. Or decency, when their doctor has a full clinic booked.”

You gave a soft laugh and shook the hand Dr. Barton offered. He sat on the rolling stool and opened your chart.

“Any problems since the last time we saw each other?” “Other than many more food aversions, no.”

He smiled, making a note.

“Still tired?” “Yes. My boobs are still sore—more so, if I’m being honest. I’m still super emotional, too.” “Hormone surges.”

You nodded, and Clint was quiet for a moment before he spoke softly, eyes cast down at your chart.

“I did notice that your blood pressure is a little elevated today.” “Yeah, that’s what the nurse said.” “It’s not too bad, but it is higher than last time you were here. Out of range for you personally, according to your chart.”

You nodded again, and he lifted his eyes to yours.

“Is everything okay?”

You blinked, meeting his eyes. After a beat, you smiled.

“Yeah. Yeah, everything’s fine.”

He slowly nodded, and you could just tell that he didn’t believe you. You couldn’t help yourself as your face fell and tears gathered in your eyes. He grabbed a few tissues from the box on the counter and passed them to you. You nodded your thanks, pressing a tissue to your eyes as he spoke.

“I couldn’t help but notice that you’re here alone today.”

You nodded and sniffed, looking down at your hands.

“Yeah, I … I messed that up pretty good.” “I’m sorry.”

You nodded again, wiping the tears from your face. Clint rolled closer to you, forcing you to meet his kind eyes.

“I don’t know the situation, and I don’t need to. What I do need to tell you is that stress is not good right now. Not for you and definitely not for the baby. I know that’s much easier said than done, but … you’ve got to try.” “I know. I’m sorry.” “Hey, you don’t need to be sorry.”

He gave you a soft smile.

“This is a trying time, and it’s not necessarily going to be easy. Your hormones are going to be all over the place for the next few months, which is going to make you feel like you’ve been taken over by an alien invasion or something. Which is not too far off the mark, but…”

You gave a soft laugh and he went on.

“You’ve got to have a support system in place. Even if you can do this by yourself, you don’t have to. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. Let people help you.”

You nodded. He turned back to your chart and you sighed.

“I do have a … question, I guess.” “Give it to me.”

You smiled, then went on.

“The other night, I was up kind of late and I wasn’t doing anything strenuous. Just standing at the window and walking around. But I got this pain, and it … scared me.” “What kind of pain?”

You met his eyes.

“Was it sharp, stabbing? Burning?”

You shook your head.

“No, it was … kind of like a cramp.” “Do you normally have cramps with your periods?”

You shrugged your shoulders.

“Sometimes. Not too bad.” “Is that what your pain felt like?” “Yeah. It was quick, but noticeable.” “Any other symptoms with it? Any bleeding or spotting?”

You shook your head and Clint nodded.

“Pregnancy is a weird, magical time. No two women have the same experience. Aches and pains are kind of normal, I’m afraid. Now if the cramps were constant, never letting up, there would be a problem. If you spot a little, that’s normal, too. But if you’re soaking a pad or passing clots, then that’s a problem and you need to visit an ER and get checked out.”

You slowly nodded and Clint motioned with his head.

“Anytime you want to call and ask a question, feel free. Those nurses make good money to listen to patients like you.”

You smiled, giving a nod.

“Thank you.” “No problem. Now, you’re about twelve weeks along?”

You nodded.

“Me and my little lime.”

Clint smiled.

“Found an app, didn’t you?”

You gave a laugh, nodding your head. Clint kept smiling, shaking his head fondly.

“Slide down to the end of the table and let’s get the fun stuff out of the way.” “You and I have very different definitions of ‘fun.’”

Clint laughed, rolling back to grab a pair of gloves from the box as you slid down and put your feet in the stirrups. He gently placed his hands on your knees to spread them apart when there was a knock at the door. You both looked that way, then at each other. Clint shook his head, but when another knock sounded, he rolled away from you on the stool and stood up.

“Usually the nurses don’t bother when I’m in the room with a patient, but sometimes…”

You nodded, maneuvering the paper coverings around. Clint opened the door and poked his head out, leaning back in after a few seconds.

“Um… Miss Potts, it’s for you.” “What?”

You sat up, eyes widening when Steve stepped into the room. He pointed to you, blue eyes blazing.

“We need to talk.”

You blinked, shaking your head once.

“We can talk later.” “Oh, I don’t think so.” “Well, I do. I’ve kind of got a … situation going here.”

Clint cleared his throat and stepped forward.

“I can come back. I’ve got other patients.”

You shook your head.

“No, you can come finish. He can wait in the lobby.” “The hell I can.”

Your mouth dropped open.

“Excuse me?” “Where the hell do you get off? Were you just not going to tell me or any of us that you were here?”

You blinked again, speaking slowly and deliberately, with a tiny bit of venom in your tone.

“You don’t answer my calls anymore. What was I supposed to do? You want me to call your office? Because I did and they said you were at lunch with your girlfriend!” “Really, I’ve got a quick patient across the hall and I’ll be right back.”

You shook your head.

“No, this …”

You motioned between you and Steve, glaring at him.

“... can wait. I’m ready to be … less al fresco over here.”

Clint snorted, trying to cover it with a cough when Steve shook his head.

“I think this has waited long enough.” “Oh, really? Since your girlfriend’s not around, now you want to talk to me? Now you can acknowledge my presence?” “I’ll just be—“

You pointed at Clint.

“Don’t move!”

You looked back to Steve, narrowing your eyes, tone dripping with venom this time.

“I have got more important things to think about than your pitiful ego, you ass. This can wait until after the appointment is done. Or you can just leave now and go back to ignoring me like our new normal.”

When the snick of the door closing seemed to echo through the room, you and Steve both looked to find Clint had left. You let out a groan, letting your feet fall from the stirrups as you waved a hand.

“See what you did?” “What I did? You just—“

You lifted a hand when Steve started pacing.

“First off, if we’re doing this, you’ve got to stay up by my head.”

He looked at you with a confused look on his face and you rolled your eyes, motioning to the lower part of your body. Steve glanced that way, seeing the paper coverings, then closed his eyes. He shook his head before making his way to stand near your head. When he didn’t say anything, you took it as a sign to start the conversation.

“What did I do?”

He glanced your way and you shook your head, staring down at your hands.

“You said it was fine for me to go, I went, and you cut me out. What happened?”

When he didn’t answer, you turned your head to look at him, seeing a muscle twitch in his jaw as he clenched his teeth. After a brief silence, he spit out the words.

“You shouldn’t have gone.” “Seriously?” “Yeah, seriously!”

He started slowly pacing again and you shifted on the table.

“Head, Steve.”

He turned to walk back by your head and you twisted to look at him.

“So you told me to go but you didn’t mean it?” “Who in their right mind would mean it?” “How was I supposed to know that?! I can’t read your mind!” “You know me, Y/N!”

He started pacing again.

“You’ve got to know I didn’t really mean it.” “How was I supposed to know that when you were telling me the complete opposite?” “You just were.”

You rolled your eyes, hands clenching on your paper covers as you motioned for him to step away from your torso. He rolled his eyes, but moved back towards your head. He sighed.

“It killed me. I thought you would see that, that you’d see right through me and call me out on it.” “Steve, I’m not a mind reader.” “But you are! When it comes to me, you always have been.”

You blinked, and he shook his head as he started to pace again.

“I never have to ask you for anything. You always just give me what I need. But you … you don’t need me the same way.” “Oh, but I do need you, Steve.”

He stopped pacing to look at you.

“I need you to stay by my head!”

He blew out a breath, grabbing Clint’s rolling stool and bringing it by your head, then sitting on it. He held out his hands and you nodded.

“Thank you.”

He crossed his arms over his chest, and you shook your head.

“So … you were mad at me because I didn’t read your mind that you telling me to go meant for me not to go?”

He blew out a breath, letting his arms fall.

“No.” “Then what, Steve? Because I’ve been racking my brain trying to think of what I did wrong, and—“ “I saw you.”

You blinked, and he spoke again, just as softly.

“I saw you and him outside your building. I saw the kiss.”

You slowly closed your eyes, lying back on the table. Steve stared at his hands as he talked.

“I saw the way he looked at you and … I don’t know. When I saw you kiss him, I just … it’s like everything in me just … ‘died’ sounds too dramatic, but…”

He looked up, eyes meeting yours, his narrowing at the tears in yours. You gave a shake of your head.

“You idiot.”

You said it with such affection that Steve wasn’t the least bit offended. He rolled closer to you and you shook your head again.

“When he kissed me is when I knew what a huge mistake I’d made.”

He just blinked and you shrugged.

“I guess I realized then that I didn’t want to be kissed by him.” “Who did you want to be kissed by?”

You swallowed, looking up at the ceiling.

“It doesn’t matter anymore.” “Yes it does.” “Steve—“ “Y/N.”

He stood up, walking to where he was hovering over you as you looked up at him. You gave a shake of your head and whispered.

“You’ve got a girlfriend.” “No, I don’t.”

You tilted your head, cocking one eyebrow.

“So Sharon was your imaginary friend?” “Just a friend.” “If you’re going to use that lame-ass excuse, at least—“ “She’s gay, Y/N.”

You went still as he spoke again.

“She just moved here and she didn’t know anyone. She asked if I could introduce her to people and I took her for coffee to get to know her better, to see who I thought she might jive with. When I saw you in the coffee shop and saw the look on your face, it … I don’t know. It gave me the idea to use her to make you think she was my girlfriend.”

You blinked at him, then shook your head.

“That was a shitty thing to do.” “I know. Sharon said that, too.” “You really hurt me, Steve.” “I know. And I’m so sorry for that.”

You sighed, staring up at the ceiling.

“We’re a mess.”

Steve gave a soft laugh.

“Tell me about it.” “We can’t do this, Steve. We can’t have a baby together and hurt each other like this.” “I know.”

You closed your eyes, taking in a shaky breath and letting it out slowly.

“We just need to forget anything ever happened and go back to being friends.” “Just friends with a baby?”

You nodded. Steve was quiet, until you rolled your head to look at him. He pursed his lips, then shook his head.

“I can’t do that.” “What do you mean?” “Exactly what I said. I can’t do that.” “Why not?” “Because every time I close my eyes, I see you sleeping on my chest. I see the way you kept your eyes closed when I kissed you, even seconds after we pulled apart. I see your hair fanned out over that pillow and I hear the soft way you said my name when I made you come.”

Your eyes widened, and he moved to hover over you again, one thick arm on either side of your head.

“I remember the way your body felt under my hands and god, Y/N. I want to feel it again. I want to feel your lips on mine, on … other places.”

Your cheeks were on fire, but you couldn’t look away from him, watching the way his eyes focused on your lips before meeting yours.

“All I can think of is how we made this baby and how badly I want to do it again.” “Steve.”

Your voice was barely a whisper, and his dropped deeper as he continued.

“I see you the way you were sleeping when I left and I want to see that every night.”

Your eyes widened as he shook his head.

“But I don’t want to leave again. I want to be there with you or have you there with me every second of every day. I want to touch you—God, do I— but I want to get to know you more than I do right now. I want to see you early in the mornings and late in the middle of the night. I want to talk to you and hear you laugh and I want to hold your hand.”

He gave a hard shake of his head as he straightened, reaching for your hand and lacing his fingers through yours.

“I don’t want you kissing other men.” “Why not?” “Because I want you kissing me.”

You gave a sharp exhale and he met your eyes.

“I know the timing is fucked, but I … I want to be with you. And I … Y/N, I’m all in. I’m putting all the cards on the table. This baby, marriage, more babies, I’m putting it all out there. Maybe that scares you. It scares me. But at the same time, it doesn’t.”

Steve shook his head.

“It’s scary as hell, but it feels right. I’m so sorry that I hurt you. I’ll spend every day of the rest of my life trying to make that up to you, if you’ll let me. But I can’t just be your friend, Y/N. Not now. Not anymore.”

You stared at him, feeling the heavy warmth of his hand as he held tightly to yours. You let his words sink in, and while they did scare you, you had to admit … it did feel right. You blinked and licked your lips, then looked up at him.

“Come here.”

He leaned in and you shook your head.

“Closer.”

He leaned in further and a smile came to your lips, voice barely a whisper.

“Closer.”

Steve leaned in so close your noses were almost touching. Your eyes danced over his face, from his plump lips to his eyes, as his eyes did the same to you. When your eyes met, you stared into his burning blue before leaning up and closing the gap between you, pressing your lips against his.

He kept his eyes on you, until he shifted his lips against yours and you had to close your eyes. His tongue slid between your lips as his free hand moved to cradle your cheek, while honest-to-God tingles broke out over your body.

He pulled away when a soft knock sounded at the door, resting his forehead on yours, his voice hoarse.

“Come in.”

Clint poked his head in the door and you smiled.

“Is this still hostile territory or do we have an all clear?”

You gave a soft laugh as Steve glanced at Clint.

“The coast is clear, Doc.”

Clint nodded as he stepped into the room, doing a crappy job of trying to hide the smile on his face.

“You guys think we can finish this appointment now?”

You and Steve both nodded, staring at each other instead of the Doctor. Clint snorted, shaking his head and muttering under his breath, a smile on his face as he washed his hands, then slid a pair of gloves on. You repositioned yourself with your feet back in the stirrups, smiling when Steve took your hand and held it against his chest, gently carding his fingers through your hair as he stood with his back to Clint and his eyes on you.

Bucky yawned as he walked out of his room, rubbing an eye and scratching at his chest. He came to a stop in the middle of the living room when he saw Steve in the kitchen. Bucky frowned, watching Steve drink from a glass of orange juice.

“What are doing here?”

Steve shrugged.

“Stealing some of your orange juice.” “How’d you know it was mine?” “Because Y/N hates orange juice unless it’s in a cocktail, and since that’s not happening for a while…”

Bucky nodded, making a face.

“And where the hell’s your shirt?”

Steve shrugged again.

“Got hot.”

Bucky rolled his eyes, walking towards the bathroom. He stopped again, turning to face Steve, hands moving to his hips.

“You know, you never come over here. Not since you left me to go live with Peggy. Why are you here now?”

Steve shrugged again, finishing his orange juice.

“Pepper’s door was locked and since they got that weird new alarm system, I decided to break in here.”

Bucky shook his head, rubbing his eyes again.

“It’s too early for this shit.”

Bucky stepped into the bathroom and shut the door behind him. Steve almost deflated, exhaling in a relieved rush, rubbing a hand over his face. He quickly searched through the cabinets, cursing under his breath when he heard the toilet flush and the faucet turn on. The door opened and Bucky stepped out, mouth already working.

“Another thing. It is barely six. The damn sun isn’t even up yet. What the hell are you doing here at ass o’clock in the morning? And don’t tell me some bullshit about ‘morning jogs’ or whatever.”

Steve went to open his mouth, but your door opened. You stood there, hair tousled, body relaxed, a sleepy look on your face.

“Steve, can you get me some … water?”

You stopped when you saw Bucky, pressing your lips together. Bucky looked from you to Steve, saw the way both of you just sort of shrugged. Bucky blinked, then shook his head as he sighed.

“Hey, Stevie?” “Yeah.” “Found your shirt.”

You looked down, smoothing a hand over Steve’s white t-shirt, the one you’d gathered up off the floor and pulled on. Bucky made his way back towards his room, muttering under his breath before he closed the door behind him.

“‘Bout damn time.”

TAGS:  @star-spangled-man-with-a-plan, @captain-rogers-beard, @captain-s-rogers, @alexfayer, @rhiisnotawitch, @janeyboo, @zlixlle, @aurorasinger, @katielu-blog, @sandlee44, @iamwarrenspeace, @sebbystanlover-vk, @sofipatey, @poemfreak306, @teainaukgarden, @godhateskyleigh, @kaylaphantomhive, @vivalaplutonium, @katecupcakekate, @thatgirl-xx-thatgirl, @renalilo, @astrid345, @theonelittleone, @sebbytrash, @bionic-buckyb, @dudahmautner, @allyp1023, @nerdgirljen, @ashrod98, @rednamrahc, @ghostly-balloon-collector, @theplaidshirtmadness, @pagan-geek-girl-4-life, @itzmegaaaaaaan, @tumariposaroja, @thefanficfaerie, @wintersoldierswhore, @nerdy-bookworm-1998, @nuvoleincielo, @unapologeticallymimi, @shhhs3cret, @sea040561, @reginaphalange2403, @theunofficialduke, @mizzzpink, @iamthemaskhewears, @girl-next-door-writes, @authoressskr

[ellynneversweet]

Ok, so I’ve finished Normal People and I have ... thoughts. Mostly about whether it succeeds or fails as a text, and what the relative metrics are by which success should be judged (it’s succeeded in getting me to think about it, for sure). This got long and a bit ranty, and does discuss the mental illness aspects of the book, so I’ve put it below the cut. Spoilers etc.

I haven’t watched the show or read any of Sally Rooney’s other books (book?) or reviews yet, because I wanted to get down what I took away from the book by itself, rather than what other people thought about it. I did see the headline of like, one review that seemed to think it was all about capitalism, which struck me as a significant stretch as a primary theme, but hey. My take was that it was primarily concerned with (many and various) degrees of mental illness and unwellness experienced by various characters, the causes and effects thereof, etc etc, and it’s really because of that that I don’t know whether or not I actually liked the book.

Ultimately I think my ambivalence comes comes down to how the narration is structured, and the way Rooney doesn’t at any point step in explicitly prompt the audience in one direction or another.

So what took me a hot minute to realise was that the book’s written in a very close third person narration, alternating between Connell and Marianne’s perspectives.The thing is, however, that this close third person isn’t immediately obvious, because Rooney subverts the whole ‘show don’t tell’ advice. There’s a lot of phrasing given as ‘she felt good’ ‘he felt anxious’ ‘then they had sex’ etc.  The most personal aspects of the plot are constantly elided with this flat, clinical, definitive language that sounds almost like a witness statement in a criminal case. That’s especially the case with Marianne, who disassociates a lot, and slightly less so with Connell, who’s anxious, but the flat description is pretty present throughout. There are moments when the narrative dips into describing sensation, but that seems to occur only with regards to things that are irrelevant and impersonal, like drinking a glass of (insert carbonated beverage here), or feeling the breeze from an air conditioner. The book is all about this very intimate, arguably co-dependant and unhealthy relationship between these two intermittently sexually involved characters, so the aforementioned flatness struck me as an odd choice initially.

However. There’s two things that this does. The first, and IMO more significant, is that is creates an illusion of the narrative voice as omniscient and impartial, rather than biased and unreliable as it actually is. The seeming authority of the definitive statements in the narrative is emphasised by the stock filler phrases that the each of the dual protagonists uses in direct dialogue, and which inevitably mean the opposite of what’s actually said — in the case of Marianne we get ‘okay’ (I disagree but I want this conversation to end) and ‘I don’t know’ (i believe this to be profoundly true but it makes me unhappy), and in the case of Connell we get ‘obviously’ (I’m not sure at all, what do you think?). So the upshot of this is that especially in the earlier parts of the novel the audience is led into thinking the description of a particular plot point is what objectively happened, rather than the biased viewpoint of one of two people who keep talking past each other (I’m thinking particularly of the part in which Connell moves home because he can’t make rent, and each of them was waiting for the other to propose his moving into her flat instead).

So it is really interesting on that level of language structure. I do feel that the section headings (‘two weeks later,’ ‘six months later,’ ‘five minutes later’) were a bit of a red herring — especially towards the climax of the book, when things became violent, I was frankly expecting it to take a schlocky turn towards one or both of the main characters being maimed or killed in a domestic violence and/or drunk driving accident, à la Jodi Piccoult.

It didn’t, which was a relief, but I didn’t subsequently find the ending satisfying, and I think that’s because the way that it ended — a breakup that’s not really a breakup, just a breather — felt like something that had occurred at least three or four times already in the text. It’s always tricky to write a satisfying ending when all the main characters are alive and young and (presumably) going to continue their lives. Why stop the narrative here, rather than there? I think for that sort of ending to work, a story does need to feel like it’s shifting into a different stage of the characters’ lives, one that can be inferred, however dimly, but is distinct enough from the part described in the text to form a natural break. This didn’t feel like a break from what had gone before. It felt like a groove in an emotional cycle that had already been repeated, that had been shown as being repeated, that gave every sign of being repeated again and again, forever and ever amen.

This leads into the part where I talk about what I didn’t like, fyi, and fair warning, mostly what I didn’t like was the characterisation of Marianne. Sorry if she’s your fave.

So Marianne gets the last word of the narrative, in which she thinks about how ‘they’ve [Marianne and Connell] been so good for each other’. And i would argue two things, which is that 1) unreliable narrator or not, this being the last part of the text gives weight to this being read as a true statement 2) this is, uh, pretty clearly not the case. Marianne’s still fundamentally the same, teetering on the edge of self-destruction, and Connell is still anxious (and being made more so by Marianne’s reaction to his small successes).

Now, neither character is perfect. They’re also not bad people -- but they are struggling people who use maladaptive coping strategies and don’t ever really appear to move past those.

At first glance, on a scale of quantifying unhappiness, Marianne gets the raw end of the stick. She’s a character who’s sympathetic and pitiable, because she starts out as the smart, bullied kid who turns out to have an abusive home life and who is brutally dumped by her first boyfriend. So far, so sad. Connell, by contrast, is much less upfront about the things that cause him trouble (although they’re very much there) and has the initial upper hand. Connell also comes off as much more self-aware than Marianne — the part where he’s lying on the floor in a post-shower depression slump reminds me of that piece that goes around tumblr occasionally, about lying on the floor sobbing about the state of the world, and simultaneously noticing that the last time you painted, you didn’t do a good job with the brushwork in the corner you’re looking at, and thinking about how you should re-do it once you finish crying.

But the thing I can’t get my head around with Marianne is how Rooney feels about her, and it boils down to this: what level of awareness and intentionality is Rooney operating at when writing about Marianne’s mental health arc? Does Rooney agree with Marianne’s self-assessment of herself as ‘better’ and ‘normal’ (ie still acting in more or less the same way as she did throughout the text, but no longer a subject of gossip) at the end of the book, or does she not?

As I mentioned, I haven’t seen the adaptation, but I’ve seen a gif or two, and what struck me as I was reading was that the way that Marianne is described as looking (and styled in the show) is reminiscent of the pop-culture caricature of Sylvia Plath — increasingly thin, indie-fashionista, bangs, statement lipstick, weird but precociously brilliant, magnetic, male muse and male victim, mentally ill in a way that is complex but always sexy and sexualised (of course she developed a cute, posh eating disorder that involved eating half an expensive sugary pastry and a sugarless black coffee every day. Of course she did).

Basically, what I want to know is, is Marianne someone Rooney wrote based on that image of Plath, or is Marianne someone cosplaying as that image of Plath, whom Rooney is consciously deconstructing?

See, I think writing Marianne as someone (possibly unintentionally) cosplaying Plath is interesting. The myth of the hot, damaged girl is pretty pervasive (Harley Quinn, the suicide girls, etc etc) and writing Marianne as a character who has legitimate issues that she has trouble facing, who then instead focuses her self-awareness into this trope of ‘acceptably damaged’ has potential. I feel like there’s an opportunity there to examine the line between struggling with a mental illness vs self-consciously performing that struggle in a way that’s socially acceptable, which is a topic that suits the period when the novel’s set.

Unfortunately though, I think Rooney is probably buying into that myth rather than  examining it, because the fact that no-one, in a book that starts in 2011 ever sits Marianne down and goes, ‘yes, I get that people have told you you’re mentally unwell as a tactic to bully you, and that was shitty, but you pretty clearly have a raging case of ptsd which is NOT YOUR FAULT, please accept some help’ — that is frankly hard to believe. Not Connell who seeks out therapy and takes some dubiously successful medication? Not Joanna, who is by all accounts well adjusted and who makes a point of caring in a friendship where she’s doing a lot the heavy lifting? Not Lorraine, parent of the decade? Not some random teacher or professor, looking out for an obviously promising student?  Really, no one?

Marianne is supposedly brilliant and a tireless researcher, but she apparently never becomes aware of the possibility that there might be ways to process her past experiences in a way that would allow her some measure of peace. Never wants it, even in the worst of times. Never ceases to wallow in her own unhappiness. And it’s relevant, I think, that in the period of the novel where Marianne is (kind of) happy, when she’s making a success of things at uni, the focus of the book is on how she’s making Connell jealous by dating an abusive man. The closes she comes to self-awareness is recognising her proclivity to seek out unhealthy relationships and decide to lean into that, in what is consistently the least unhealthy romantic relationship she has. That feels like a cop-out.

Like, I’m not suggesting that every story that features mental illness as a theme needs to show recovery. That’s, unfortunately, not always the case. Some people never get better. Some people can’t bring themselves to believe in the possibility of getting better. It’s not even the case that recovery is a straight line, when it happens. I know that. I’ve seen people I care about it struggle with a whole range of problems, I’ve struggled myself. But this felt like 13 Reasons Why for adults, like depression-porn, and I just...am a bit angry, I think, that I can’t tell if that was the intention, it that wasn’t the intention but was the outcome, or if that’s just my take and I’ve misread the thing entirely.

Obviously people can write whatever they want in fiction, but I do think that when you’re dealing with a topic that has impacted a lot of people, that’s been poorly handed in fiction in the past, you do have a responsibility to treat it sensitive and thoughtfully, and not glamorise something that is ultimately destructive under the guise of ‘this is interesting and cool, and a good way to treat yourself and others, actually.’ And I don’t know if that’s the case here.

[inanawesomewave]

IT IS DOUBLE PLEASURE TO DECEIVE THE DECEIVER

Today I want to talk about what happens when the antisocial personality disordered service with complex care needs and behavioural issues -- ah fuck it -- the sociopath, finds out they have been lied to.  What’s your normal reaction when someone you trust and/or love comes at you with a lie? It may take you a while to figure it out, or maybe they’re a bad liar or have lied to you before and you can watch the lie play out as it comes out of their mouth, and a normal reaction would be anger, sadness, despair, all of those things. So what would you do in the wake of that lie? If you were healthy and strong, you might confront it in a controlled way. No matter how strong you are, you may behave irrationally, you may become suspicious or go into paranoia overdrive, perhaps you’ll find yourself becoming increasingly sarcastic or mean, you might just burst into tears, and all of those are normal reactions when you find you’ve been lied to. But today I want to talk about what I think might be the antisocial reaction to lies.  When I’m lied to, there will always be a part of me that feels wounded and in pain, if the person lying to me is someone i’ve let into my life and my mind. Yes, it’s true, we feel pain. I probably won’t know the name of the pain I’m feeling, and when this lack of emotional connection to myself happens, I react with -- yep, you guessed it -- rage. That’s my default setting. I’ve been told in the past, “what you’re experiencing is despair”, “it’s probably because you feel so insignificant”, “it makes sense that right now you would be going through a sense of unease”, or whatever, and when it’s pointed out to me, I can sometimes grab onto that description and root around in my psyche to see if that was a correct assessment, and if it is, I can latch onto it somewhat. But anger is what happens to antisocials who experience alexithymia (an inability to identify or explain one’s own emotions). Like this: 

I often need someone to tell me what they think I’m feeling, and then, if it starts to make sense, I’ll assume that’s what’s what. I’m not the kind of sociopath who will brag about how little I like to hear about other people’s emotions, because really, I love hearing about people’s emotional worlds. Yes, perhaps I despise the assumption that it’s my job to feel on behalf of someone else, that being a good person isn’t so much tied in helping someone with a problem as it is feeling that problem, but listening to how people process their emotions is useful to me, and also kind of fascinating. If you’ve heard that sociopaths have no feelings, what’s perhaps more accurate is we don’t know we have feelings.  So, we lash out. Anger is the most deregulated emotion in antisocial personality disorder, and I believe that’s because it’s our real emotions that are deregulated, but rage and hostility is the other mask we wear, the most pervading one, the one that we have even convinced ourselves with.  So, when experiencing a lie, we’ll get angry.  But it doesn’t end there.  Antisocial personality disorder comes with many choices. I once likened it to living in a constant click-and-point video game, and I stand by that. In moments of violent conflict or threat you might see a glass bottle on the ground and quick as lightening your brain will light the thing up and you’ll run through the options: do I want to pick up this bottle? Do I want to use it as a weapon? Do I want to hide it and come back to it? Do I want to leave it and scan the room to see what else is here? And, in times of interpersonal conflict, something rather more abstract, you may experience anger, and the angry part of your brain will light up (🎵hello amygdala my old friend🎵 ) and your rationale (if we can ever really have that) will say: what do I want to do with this anger? Do I want to direct it to the threat? Do I want to harm them with it? Do I want to pretend it isn’t there? Do I want to hide it and come back to it? Do I want to leave it and scan my brain to see what else is here? But then there comes the big one -- do I want to accept the truth of this anger? Do I want to display it?  Do I want to play the game? 

When you are used to anger being your default setting, you learn lots of different ways to express it, and whilst the explosive kind of “FUCK YOU AND FUCK EVERYTHING YOU STAND FOR” is what we’d most likely think of when thinking of what rage looks like, there’s many ways it can come through, and the example I gave here of reacting to a lie I think is a good place to start when talking about this. Because anger isn’t always fireworks. A lot of the time, it’s silence. Amusement. Catharsis. Comedy. It’s like we have to take the “generic bad” feeling, reroute it to anger, and let it come back out as something else. It’s like, when it comes to our feelings, we have taken a sentence, run it through Google translate into a foreign language, taken that foreign language and put it back through Google translate again, and try to make something of the broken English we’ve come back with. 

You’re trying to humiliate me and now I am angry lie. My angry lie is that I think you’re a bad person. I think you’re selfish. I have never liked you. This is hilarious to me. I deserve better than this...  I deserve better than this is the biggest lie we tell when we’re lied to, because deep down, we don’t think we deserve better than this at all. If antisocial personality disorder has its roots in deeply embedded cynicism, pessimism, isolation and trauma, then every single mask we wear is one of ultimate power, control, self-assuredness and confidence. I deserve better than this can never be true, because that would require empathy, and our lack of empathy is most evident when it comes to talking about ourselves. If we don’t know the names of our feelings, we cannot empathise with them.  So what’s the next step? You know the old saying, “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me”? When you have a lowered ability to experience remorse and guilt, no propensity to feelings of regret, shame doesn’t come into it. I’m not ashamed I let myself be lied to. I’m... what’s the word? What’s the name of this? Oh right, that’s it. I’m angry. But I did the shouting, kicking off, the big display of ego when I was fooled the first time. The second time, the lie lights up in my head: do I want to pick up this lie? Do I want to confront this lie? Do I want to pretend it isn’t there? Do I want to leave it there for a second whilst I scan whatever else is going on, for example: does the liar seem to also be sad, confused, misunderstood, are they nervous? Playing with their hair, looking off in different directions, are they shaking or babbling or misdirecting? And what do I want to do with that? Do I want to tell them my suspicions? And just what is this? Why are these things lighting up? Is it a game? Is this a game?! Can I win it?! And this is why Machiavelli once famously said, “it is double pleasure to deceive the deceiver”, and this is why Machiavellianism forms part of the Dark Triad of psychopathy. Because it’s abnormal to see a lie as a game, it’s clinically weird, psychologically speaking, it’s crazy cuckoo. Why would anyone watch someone lie and feel a sense of relief washing over them (in an awesome wave)? Why would anyone in their right mind see a lie happen, and then wonder for how long the rally of lies can go back and forth, to see who will break first, to take the liar and lie to them so hard they’ll regret ever lying to you? As I outlined at the beginning of this blog, there are normal reactions to lies and even the explosive and distressed ones are normal. What’s abnormal is the willingness and even eagerness to throw oneself into the pit and get right into it. Because people with antisocial personality disorder are always seeking out conflict. Even when we’re evolved, doing better these days, in therapy, writing a blog -- we don’t like the things you don’t like, and nobody likes being lied to. The motivation, however, to not come back fighting and transform the sadness into rage and the rage into a comedy that only amuses ourselves is antisocial. It’s an unwillingness and/or inability to read the social situation, and it’s cynicism distilled. It doesn’t matter who, it doesn’t matter when. We believe that everyone is capable, more than capable, of badness, deceit, immorality and sadism, and what drives our utter lack of faith in humanity is the lie that people tell themselves to prove they would never display those traits. When someone shows their hand, a good person without a diagnosis, it’s double pleasure. It’s the pleasure of overcoming whatever pain you almost felt, and the exquisite pleasure of finally having your worst fears confirmed. Because after all, if it really is a dog-eat-dog world, as evidenced by someone else’s deceitfulness, then chaos can thrive. And, being justified, it doesn’t need to hide behind a mask. And it’s hard to trust a liar again. Our personalities are built around distrust, so the best we can hope for is to feel/not feel that way, and make it work for us. That’s what ASPD is. That’s who we are. And for you, the thought that people are fundamentally bad and self-serving might be a terrifying prospect, so it would make sense you’d want to protect yourself from that. But for us, that thought is what protects us, and it protects us in more ways than you know. 

[bts-svt-mx]

Maid For You (Part 6) Taehyung x Reader (M)

Author: bts-svt-mx

Taehyung x Reader

Rating: Fluff, angst, very very slight smut, mention of family death

Tags: Enemies to Lovers AU, slight smut, Idol! Taehyung, Taehyung x Reader, Jungkook x Reader, Hoseok, mentions of other members

Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 (M), 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13

Word Count: 5,100

Description: Wanting to get out of your parents house and experience what the world had to offer is way more expensive than people tell you it will be. So when your glamorous “manager to the stars” cousin Hoseok hooks you up with a  job as the live-in maid for a hillside, massive mansion, you feel as though life might actually be looking up. That is until the mansion’s absentee high profile celebrity owner surprises you by moving back in leaving you to wonder if this mansion is big enough for you and his huge ego. 

Previously...

This time you’re sure you hear it. You would know that voice and that tone anywhere but you hoped that maybe just maybe he wasn’t talking to you. You don’t see the source of the yell so you turn your gaze once more back to Jungkook and lean in again before-

“Y/N!”

Ah, shit.

Chapter 6:

As if parting the red sea, the crowd separates in front of you to let the pink and blonde haired drunk burst through. The scene only gains a few looks of confusion from party goers, which is surprising. For the most part, everyone still continues on with their own dancing. Does Taehyung normally have outbursts like this during his parties?

Seeing as majority of the crowd was someone famous or related to a famous person in some way, it would make sense that none of them thought a celebrity yelling was out of the ordinary.

Taehyung comes charging his way through the pathway made for him making a beeline towards you and Jungkook. His right foot catches on something, making him stumble a little bit over his own feet as he gets closer to you. You don’t know whether to laugh or run away from the crazed looking, clearly drunk pop star.

“Where did it go?!” His voice booms once again making you turn away back into Jungkook’s embrace as you start to pull him the opposite direction. If he didn’t see you, you could just slip away with Jungkook and-

“Y/N, WHERE DID IT GO?” Groaning, you’re ripped away from Jungkook’s hold by Taehyung’s strong force. His grasp didn’t really hurt but it was enough to fully separate you from Jungkook.

Well obviously you’re not going to be taking Jungkook back to your room any time soon.

This could have been your night. You could have finally really let loose and actually might have even got some with Jungkook. But of course, Taehyung had to ruin it just like he ruined so many other things for you in the short time you’ve known him.

Something seems off with him tonight as your eyes meet each others’. Seriously, what is up with this kid? Face to face with Taehyung, he searches for any kind of recognition in your features. Anything to show him that you remember who he even is.

You’re about to ask Taehyung what the hell he’s talking about when you notice his anger morph into panic and his eyes turning glossy with tears.  

The strong grip on your arm finally loosens. “You have to help me, Y/N.. I- I can’t find it..”

He’s close enough to you now where he doesn’t have to shout over the music and he brings his hand to his forehead wiping away some non-existent sweat. Crazy as he might seem right now, he still manages to look hot.  How is that even possible?

But never mind that. What was he talking about? Find what?

This was a different Taehyung than any version of him you’ve known previously. He actually seemed sincere in his worry and desperation to find whatever he had lost.

Something in his face and his body language sobered you up. One minute you were getting down and dirty with Jungkook on the dance floor about to take him back to your room, the next you’re met with your distraught... Boss? Landlord? Supervisor? Well, whatever the hell he was, he was practically having a conniption in front of you.

“Taehyung, what do you mean? Where did what go? Is.. this a joke?” You swear if this was another one of those stupid, sick jokes he likes to make you were going to punch him repeatedly in his pretty little face.

“The rooster! Y/N, I can’t find it!” On the verge of hyperventilation, Taehyung runs a shaky hand through his hair, looking side to side as if he’s accusing everyone in this whole mansion of theft. “I just- I saw it earlier today and now I can’t find it. Y/n I need that rooster. It’s... It’s all I have left,”

All he has left? It seemed like he was either about to have a panic attack or was currently having one and it made you actually kind of worried for him. Before you know it, your mothering instincts kick in as you reach out your hand and caress his arm, offering slow strokes of comfort. If Taehyung realizes that you’re touching him, willingly touching him for the first time ever, he makes no move of acknowledging it. But he doesn’t move away from your touch either.

The alcohol was still making things a little fuzzy but you rack your brain for what he means. Rooster? Like an actual live rooster? Or was it-

Then it hits you.

You turn back towards Jungkook who’s frozen in place with probably the biggest blue balls in history. With one hand still on Taehyung’s arm to make sure he doesn’t run away from you like a lost child, you give Jungkook a sympathetic look and try to shout over the music. “I’m so sorry! Call me!”

You take Jungkook’s nod and small smile as confirmation before hauling the drunken Taehyung out of the main party area towards your wing of the mansion. Pulling him by his shirt as you hear his muffled sobs from behind you. God, why are celebrities so dramatic?

It takes you a good 10 minutes, but finally you’re back to the entrance of the guest wing. The security men look mildly alarmed at the fact that you are basically dragging a miserable Taehyung back to your room but you give them a slight smile and mouth another apology before you step inside the wing and come to a stop outside of your bedroom door.

You had locked the door to your actual bedroom for extra safety from the raging party outside so you fish out the key to your door from your bra where you had kept it safely hidden. Surprisingly, Taehyung doesn’t eye you or your chest like he normally would have even though it’s right in front him and you’re literally sticking your hand into your bra.

His eyes are just trained to the floor, his mouth twisted into a childlike frown, and you think you see another tear fall onto the marble below your feet.

He must be really messed up over this to not be trying to make some sexual comment to you or even look at you for that matter. You sort of missed the cocky and rude Taehyung you were used to now that this broken down, drunk version of him was standing next to you.

Enough of this. You grab Taehyung by the shoulders and shake him, forcing him to look up. His puppy dog, bloodshot eyes look back at you, making your heart flip in a weird way you’ve never felt for him before.

“Taehyung I need you to calm down and sober up. I moved the rooster into my room. I just-” You search his face looking for something, though you’re not quite sure what you’re looking for. But you realize he’s stopped crying and his eyes soften quite a bit while looking into yours.  “I’ve seen the way you’ve looked at it and with all of the parties... I just didn’t want anyone to break it.”

The rest of his features seem to relax a little bit but he still looks hesitant as though he thinks you might be playing a trick on him. “I know I set up those rules that you can’t come into my room, but I’ll take you in there just this one time so you can see that the rooster is there. Plus, I think you need to sit down and drink a glass of water or something. You’re kind of a mess.” You eye his disheveled blonde/pink hair and tear stained cheeks. He’s never shown himself to be such a mess in front of you before. Always put together looking like a freshly showered runway model. It’s a stark contrast to the messy boy in front of you now.

“In more ways than one.” You say as you chuckle a little. Even Taehyung smiles weakly at that,  slowly nodding his head in agreement and wiping his face as he waits patiently for you to unlock your door. Wow, Taehyung actually finding you funny? He must really be out of it.

The door easily swings open revealing your room before the two of you. Your room is completely the opposite to Taehyung’s not only in terms of size, but also in that the style of the room actually fits the look of the home as opposed to Taehyung’s dark, woody, lion’s den.

You never really cared too much for the style of the home now that you think of it. It was most definitely beautiful, but a little bit too clinical and sterile, like a very modern doctor’s office. You preferred the wooded and comforting look of Taehyung’s room. But it was your home and so you did what you could to make it that way. Hanging up some of your own decorations and even painting the white walls a little bit with the skills you had learned in your painting class. Of course you had asked Hoseok for permission before you knew Taehyung was the owner of the mansion.

Taehyung slowly enters the room behind you, looking around at what belongings you have placed in there to make this room more your home. You move to your closet, trying to ignore the blush that creeps up at the fact that you definitely did not clean up in here before you left to go to the party.  Clothes and other items were scattered on the floor and there was literally a light pink lacey bra hanging from your vanity that Taehyung was standing right next to at this very moment.

You were the maid so one would expect your room to be clean, but all of your cleaning efforts were spent on the rest of the mansion and no one really came in here anyway so the only reason to keep it clean was for yourself. In fact, the only visitor had been Hodu and now, evidently, Taehyung.

Most of the shelves in your massive closet were empty since you really didn’t own too many clothes. But as of this afternoon, one of those previously empty shelves now held the rooster in question.

Carefully, you lift the cool ceramic off the shelf and take in its ugly red and olive colors and intricate patterns. It doesn’t seem to be anything too expensive. Hand painted, maybe something you could buy for $30-40 at a flea market. Nothing compared to the hundreds of thousand dollar artworks throughout this home. So why did it matter so much to him?

The first day you met Taehyung, a lot of things happened, but while he was antagonizing you in the kitchen, you happened to notice his weird affinity for the rooster that held its position next to the sleek knife rack on the counter. From time to time in the weeks following that incident, you had caught Taehyung looking at it a couple of times. It was the only thing in the house that you had seen Taehyung clean himself. Never his dirty plates or scuff marks on the tile, no, that was my job to do that. He would only ever clean that rooster.

It never made sense to you, but you made a subconscious note to self over the time you had spent living in his house that the rooster meant something to him. So you cleaned around it, never touching it or moving it until you realized how crazy the weekly parties were and had found a few small broken things around the mansion, not wanting the rooster to share the same fate.

As you emerge from your closet you find Taehyung sitting on the foot of your bed, his head resting downwards on his hands clearly still a little bit stressed. A small sigh and a pang of sadness flows through you. The sight of him looking so defeated shouldn’t have been affecting you in any way. Especially when the boy had been nothing but mean and degrading towards you pretty much since the moment you met. But your days of loving Taehyung “the Idol” brought back the feeling of wanting to protect him. Wanting to make him feel better.

And well, he hadn’t said anything rude to you tonight. Yet.

“Taehyung?” You call out softly, not really knowing how to get his attention but not wanting to startle him in his fragile state. His gaze instantly flicks up to you then to the ceramic rooster in your hands. His eyes widen so far, it’s as if he’s looking at his most prized possession in the entire world.

The bed creaks and you almost back up out of instinct as he rushes towards you to take the rooster gently from your hold.

Immediately, Taehyung takes the head off of the rooster, which doubles as the top to the ceramic jar and to your surprise, his long fingers pull out a note.

A handwritten note from the looks of it. On slightly brown tinted paper and neatly folded in half. The paper looked a little worn, like the note on it was written a while ago, but it was still in good condition.

Upon seeing the note, Taehyung’s whole body goes slack, the tension slipping away from him all at once. He looks so weak and if he falls over there’s no doubt the rooster will shatter, defeating the whole point of this little trip to your room.

So you react in a second, shooting your hand out to catch his arm to make sure he doesn’t just straight up topple over. You’re really going to have to take care of him all night, huh?

You lead his heavy body that’s still clutching the rooster and note back over to the foot of your bed, guiding him to sit him back down.

“Stay there, I’ll be right back,” You command, placing your hands out in front of you in a ‘stay’ motion like you would with a dog.

Taehyung’s drunkenness is still very apparent, and you’re afraid to leave him unsupervised for longer than a few minutes so you rush quickly to the mini kitchen in your wing outside of your bedroom ignoring the security men this time, grab a glass of ice water, and step back into your room. You trade him the glass of water for the rooster and set the ceramic bird on the desk across from the bed.

Thankfully Taehyung begins to chug down the water you handed him with the note still clutched in his other hand. He better not throw up on your bed or you’ll be billing him tomorrow morning for damage to your room and for your babysitting activities for the last 20 minutes.

The only sound in the room is Taehyung’s loud gulping. Drinking his water like he’s been stranded in the desert for two days.

Well, where do you go from here? Taehyung ruined your chances with Jungkook tonight. And it’s already almost 3:00 am anyways so there’s really no use in going back out to the party when it should be winding down within the next hour or so.

It’s been a long night and truthfully, you really just wanted to go to sleep and wallow in your bad luck with guys. But how do you kick someone out who basically just had an emotional breakdown in front of you?

You don’t, that’s the answer.

So you just sit there awkwardly, with the distant light sound of party music still playing in the great hall. A reminder of why you are here alone together in your room in the first place.

You really want to ask him what the rooster and the note meant. The question had been burning in your mind since the first time you saw him take extra care of it.

You couldn’t help it, you have always been and always will be a nosy person. But Taehyung didn’t seem to reveal too much about his personal life.

Alright, so you just gotta make small talk. You know how to do that right? Just bring up the weather or some random thing like that and hope it leads you to a real conversation where maybe you can find something in common. Anything would be better than this silence.

But before you can stop yourself, the real question that’s been on the tip of your tongue slips out. “So what’s the big deal about the rooster?”

Immediately you wince and squeeze your eyes tight in regret. Oh god, why did you ask that? Who were you to pry into his emotional breakdown? Especially when this is the first time you have had an interaction with him that didn’t involve some kind of insult.

You were an over sharer for sure and usually weren’t afraid to talk about your own life, but Taehyung had never revealed anything remotely personal to you and to be quite frank, you still didn’t really even know him. What your relationship was.. It definitely wasn’t friends.. You weren’t sure if you were even acquaintances at this point.

Taehyung doesn’t make any moves in reaction to your question. He just keeps staring at the almost empty glass of water you gave him in his right hand with the note still in his left.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pry,” You let out quickly, training your eyes to the floor. Ugh, you wish you weren’t in this room with him. You wish you could just run away and not talk about this incident ever again. Maybe he wouldn’t remember this tomorrow judging by how drunk he was just a half an hour earlier. But there wasn’t anywhere for you to go now.

Taehyung drinks the last of the water and sets the glass down on the floor in between you two. You fully expect him to just get up and leave now. Just walk right out with his rooster without so much as a thank you like he normally would have before this weird incident had ever started.

But that’s not what he does.

“It isn’t so much about the rooster as it is about the letter.” His low voice surprises you and causes you to flinch once again.

Is.. Is he actually answering you?

“It’s the last memory I have of my grandmother,” His gaze is still on the paper but he continues on with his words slowly.  

“She practically raised me, supported me, took me to school and singing lessons. And after I got famous, she stood by my side keeping me grounded. She was my number one fan.” A fond smile flashes across his face and his shoulders relax like he’s finally letting go of whatever stress he had bottled up. His words come out slow, like he’s trying to figure out the right way to explain himself.

“Growing up, my parents had to work full time. At times, they even had to work 2 or 3 jobs to provide for me, my brother, and my sister. I love them to death of course, but it was my grandmother who was always there every step of the way. She was old though, and she got sick frequently. Eventually her body just, gave out on her... She passed away at the beginning of this year...” The emotion in his words was raw and the way his voice broke at some points made it seem like he was trying to hold back his tears.

It was like you weren’t even there. Like you were watching a movie unfold right in front of you and you were the only person who bought a ticket.  

And your heart ached. For Taehyung and his grandmother, yes, but also for your own grandmother, who had passed away just a couple of months ago right after you moved into the mansion. What you wouldn’t give to see her smile one last time. To feel her arms around you in her weak, but somehow still strong hugs.

You wanted to apologize to him for some reason, to tell him that you knew the feeling of great loss similar to his.

But you didn’t get the chance to express your condolences to him, as Taehyung’s voice started again abruptly. With a grunt from clearing his throat and a slight sniffle he moved on in his story.

“And then there was the house fire. Almost all of her things gone in an instant. And with it, all of our memories we made together. Everything gone except for this ugly rooster she planned on giving me for my 24th birthday,” Taehyung finally looks up and you follow his gaze to look at the rooster on the desk in front of you. “It was an inside joke between us. It wasn’t anything fancy, nothing extravagant like some presents people feel obligated to give me.

“With a lifestyle like mine where I can buy anything I could ever want, presents are difficult to buy for me. Usually I tell people to not even bother. But she still tried to give me a gift for my birthday every year, and for my 24th she had settled on this dumb, god awful looking rooster we came across at a flea market many years ago.” Taehyung laughs a little bit at the memory.

“She had given it to my parents to give to me one of the last times she got sick. I think she knew her time was coming.” His long, skinny fingers fiddle with the note in his hand. “I didn’t know about the letter inside until after she passed. And since I knew she wanted to give this to me on my 24th birthday, I made a vow to her at her funeral to not to read the letter until then. I keep it in the rooster to keep it safe and to remind me of my promise to her.”

Taehyung rises from his spot and heads over to place the note back in the body of the rooster and places the top back in its original position.  His sudden movement takes you out of your focus on his story. You were entranced. By his smooth, rich voice uttering every word but also by the fact that you couldn’t believe he was telling you so much about himself. It was a miracle that he was sitting there with you, a girl he supposedly dislikes very much, explaining a very personal story willingly.

All you wanted to hear was more of his experiences, troubles, highs, lows, just stories about his life. To say Taehyung was a mystery would be an understatement, and his story about his grandma seemed to be just the beginning of whatever he has hidden underneath his cool facade. It was weird that he would chose now to be so open with you, but honestly, you were really glad he was. 

Suddenly, worry fills you that if you even move an inch, it would spook him into stopping his narrative. So you stay as still as you can, head only moving to follow his form around the room as he talked.

“And when I thought it was gone..” He continues, sitting back down next to you at the foot of your bed, but closer this time. Close enough where the whole right side of his body was flush against your left.  

“I don’t know, I-I freaked out. I just kept thinking, I’ll never get to read that letter she wrote to me. My only existing, living memory of her was gone and I couldn’t fulfill my promise I had made to her.”

Finally, after 15 minutes of Taehyung avoiding your gaze, his eyes now fall on you once again. The chocolate brown orbs seeming hesitant and a little bit afraid.  “What good am I if I can’t keep a simple promise to the person I loved the most? What good is my word? What kind of person would I be? I couldn’t live without reading it. Without seeing her handwriting one more time and reading her words. I would never forgive myself if I lost it.”

He pauses for a moment, looking back down at his twiddling thumbs on his lap. “And worse, I feel like she would never forgive me.”

His last words get caught in his throat and you don’t know if it was the sadness in his eyes or the events of the night that made you do it but you arms were suddenly wrapped tightly around Taehyung’s lean torso, your face pressed into his neck so close you could feel his heart rate skyrocket.

The hug is tense at first. Clearly because Taehyung is just as surprised as you are that your gangly arms are suddenly attached to him with no intention of letting go. He’s frozen in place and if you could see his face right now, you’re sure it would be an expression of shock painting his handsome features.

But you could care less about what he wants right now because he needs this hug. You need this hug.

What he had just told you… That kind of emotion. It drains you if you keep it in. It weighs you down more and more until you’re stuck with a pocket full of rocks, drowning at the bottom of the ocean. And it was evident by how he looked at you earlier, that he was waiting for you to judge him, or call him out for being weak in some way. He had probably never told this to anyone before.

“Of course she would forgive you, Taehyung. Family will always forgive you,” And while you don’t know if that’s true or not, your words seem to be the flame that melts Taehyung’s frozen body as he finally relaxes into you. Well, as much as he can seeing as you’re twisted in a weird way from your positioning sitting on the foot of the bed.

He pulls you tighter into the embrace with both of arms firmly wrapped around you. And it’s actually… Nice. Yeah, this is nice.

You stay like that for while. Just holding each other. His head in the crook of your neck, yours in his too. You can feel his pulse gradually starts to slow and he smells so familiar. Like he did on the first day you met him and like his room the day he tried to gift you that stupid costume. But this time his lavender, woody cologne didn’t intimidate you. It comforted you.  

Your hand comes up to absentmindedly caress the back of his head. “I’m sorry for your loss Taehyung. I really am. I’m sure she would be very proud of the man you are today.”

At your words, Taehyung pulls back a little, loosening his hold on you slightly to come face to face with you. He’s so close, closer to you than he’s ever been before. You can feel his breath on your lips and can see the warmth in his chocolate brown eyes looking back at you as though he had never actually truly seen you before.

As they scan your face, his eyes flicker down to your lips and panic sets in as you realize what he’s about to do. You can sense it in the air. Feel it in the way his hands start to fall into the curve of you waist.

He tilts his head closer and his eyes flutter closed just as the ghost of his lips barely touch yours.

Oh no, oh god. Were you ready for this? Taehyung might not be as drunk as he was earlier, and you might feel sober now but you had been drinking too.

What if this was just some pity kiss? What if he was only doing this because you were actually being nice to each other for once?

The emotions between you two were so high right now, it was hard to tell if any of this was real, or if any of this would actually mean something after tonight.

Taehyung had finally opened up to you. And he had actually shared something with you that he had to trust you would keep to yourself. You had reached a new level of trust in your weird little relationship. The wall between the two of you was finally beginning to break down and now you might ruin the potential to actually have a good relationship with Taehyung for what? A kiss? And who knows where that would lead from there.

You were more than just a one night stand with Taehyung. You both deserved more than a drunken hookup.

No. You couldn’t do this. Not to him and definitely not to yourself.

Out of reflex, your leg shoots out in front of you coming into direct contact with the water glass Taehyung had set down a few minutes prior causing it to topple, over colliding with the marble floor. The clanking of the glass echoes through the room.

As if a spell had suddenly been broken, the two of you shoot apart to opposite sides of the bed away from the source of the crash. You had been so occupied with Taehyung’s story, and yours and his emotions that you forgot he put that stupid glass in between you two earlier.

But you were thankful for it nonetheless because it snapped both of you out of the haze you were in, putting you back into perspective of where you were and why you were here and the many, many reasons not to kiss him.

Taehyung clears his throat and stands up quickly, picking up the cup from next to his feet. “Umm, sorry. I should- I should go,”

He sets the glass down on the desk and grabs the rooster carefully. “It’s been a long night and it’s late.”  

“Yeah, no. You’re right,” Your voice sounds calm and nonchalant but your brain keeps yelling No! Stay! Stay! “I should probably go to bed anyways. I’ve got a lot of cleaning up to do tomorrow,”

At your words, Taehyung’s brow raises in confusion as though he forgot there was a raging party outside and you were the one to have to clean it all up. His blonde/pink hair moves in front of his eyes as he nods his head in understanding.

“Right, I’ll leave you to it then... Goodnight, Y/N.” The door to your room creaks slightly as he opens it and slips halfway out before turning to you once again. His eyes land directly on yours for the last time. “And, thank you,”

You nod your head slightly and try to ignore that stupid feeling blooming once again inside of you. “You’re welcome, Taehyung,”

With the rooster safely in his arms, the door to your room shuts behind him.

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