#mixed method study

[notastupidurl]

Promoting this again! We have surpassed our goal (thank you all so much!) and now we're trying to get at least 20 more participants. Every participant will be entered in a raffle to win one of 10 $50 Amazon gift cards!

https://alvernia.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_2m19korI5kKlTU2

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Blurb from the original post:

Hi everyone!

My name is Rachel (she/they), I'm a master's student in the third year of my clinical counseling program at Alvernia University, as well as a queer masters-level therapist at the Counseling Collective in PA. My professor, Dr. Anthony Vajda, and I are conducting a a study titled "Weight Bias and its Occlusion of Gender Identity Development in Transgender Individuals" and we’re looking for folks to participate!

If you are currently 18 years old or older, identify as transgender or under the transgender umbrella, and are willing to share your opinions about weight stigma and transgender-related topics, you qualify!

If you agree to participate, you will take the survey, which takes 10-15 minutes to complete. All information collected from this survey is anonymous and will be treated as strictly confidential. Your name will not appear on this survey. All participants will be entered into a raffle to win one of many $50 Amazon gift cards!

Your participation would be greatly appreciated and crucial, as it would provide invaluable insights into transgender identity development, weight bias and stigma, and their impact on mental health.

Thank you very much for your time and consideration!

[muninnhuginn]

Ngl definitely thinking back to the cartoon-making chapter now we know that Twilight doesn't realise studying/pursuit of knowledge can be fun. No wonder the cartoon he made sucked. He was approaching it purely from the educational angle with zero idea of the entertainment aspect that makes edutainment programming effective.

It's not that he was really bad at writing the fun parts. He plain didn't realise there were meant to be any in the first place for it to work.

Copying the aesthetics with no understanding of what was underneath.

[amyoffline]

i’m so intrigued by this video essay you keep mentioning, i’ll be expecting a link as soon as it’s available !

it will be a while!!!! but i do plan to talk about it and document its creation as i make progress (i.e., "this video was made in consultation with tumblr"). in the past couple months, a few folks in my department who recently entered candidacy are asking me for advice on their scoping/systematic/meta-analytic/lit reviews because apparently that's my best skill lmao???? so the script will absolutely get written. maybe i'll film after the holidays? upload around the end of the tour?

here's a snip of my zotero references collection so far, if anyone has an institutional email and feels like reading some research! they say "no one reads your dissertation/thesis except your committee" - incorrect. i will read your dissertation as well, assuming i have enough technical and/or subject matter expertise to follow along and the topic interests me

[melancholic-pigeon]

Okay this is the *actual* last comment, for real, but I just found out Spider is now smearing me as a convert and accusing me of being involved with drama I was not involved with because he mistakenly attributed my apologies for his public temper tantrum as being about something unrelated.

THIS IS A FALSE ACCUSATION and I do not appreciate having yet another bit of fake malicious intent falsely ascribed to my actions and* attributing a completely unrelated attack to me.

Also, it's very sad and disappointing whenever a Jew gets mad at a convert because something else is going on in the Jew's life and the convert happens to be in the splash zone and the Jew falls over backwards to smear the convert and invalidate her faith.

Just....the childish aggression is making me so, so sad and disappointed, from someone I used to think very highly of, who is now lying about me and publicly smearing me with false accusations based on a conflict he started because he misinterpreted something I said and I went out of my way to give him the benefit of the doubt when trying to clear up the mistake HE MADE that led him to decide bullying and attacking me for three fucking days was appropriate and okay and that I'm the bad guy for saying it's wildly unprofessional to behave like this in public to a former customer face.

Sorry, but facts, reality, linear time and the truth of what I actually said and did are on my side here, and I will not stand for being smeared and attacked and shat all over because I had the gall to try to kindly resolve his uncalled for, unjustified temper tantrum.

I am also not sorry that I left a side note in the tags that it was also unacceptable for HIM to drag his daughter into a stupid internet slapfight based on his own reading comprehension failure. Because it was and is unacceptable, and she needs to hear that message from someone.

End of story. Keep digging that hole as long as you like, Spider. It's not helping your case and is continuing to make you look progressively worse and more unreasonable, and the only person you have to blame is yourself.

*revised for clarity

[glowettee]

✧˖° studying without suffering: how to actually enjoy learning (yes, it’s possible)

✧˖° let’s talk.

hey angels, it's mindy!

most people treat studying like a punishment. something to be endured, not enjoyed. it’s that thing you force yourself to do, like taking bitter medicine or running a mile in gym class. but what if that’s the reason you struggle with it?

the secret? you were never meant to hate learning.

somewhere along the way, school made it boring. maybe you had teachers who sucked the fun out of it. maybe you associate studying with stress, deadlines, and exhaustion. but learning is supposed to be exciting. when you actually enjoy it, everything changes. you focus longer, retain more, and (ironically) spend less time studying because your brain actually absorbs the information.

so, let’s fix it. let’s make studying something you want to do instead of something you suffer through.

✧˖° ➼ step 1: detach learning from school

(school & learning are not the same thing. stop letting school ruin your curiosity.)

the first mindset shift? realize that school does not own learning.

➼ school is about structure, deadlines, and tests. it’s designed to measure performance. ➼ learning is about curiosity, deep thinking, and exploration. it’s designed to expand your mind. and help you grow as a person.

if you’ve only ever studied because you had to, your brain associates it with pressure. break that pattern. find something outside of school that you actually like learning about. philosophy, psychology, art history, neuroscience, fashion design, whatever makes you curious.

even if it’s unrelated to your classes, it rewires your brain to see learning as an intrinsic activity, not just an obligation. once you enjoy learning in general, you can transfer that energy back into your studies.

✧˖° ➼ step 2: romanticize the process (but actually make it feel good)

("romanticizing studying" doesn’t mean just buying cute stationery. let’s go deeper.)

sensory association is everything. your brain links experiences to the way they feel physically. so if studying feels uncomfortable, you’ll avoid it. the solution? make it a luxurious experience for your senses.

✧ visuals → clean, minimalist desk, soft lighting, aesthetic study materials ✧ sound → rain sounds, classical piano, lo-fi beats (music that enhances focus) ✧ touch → cozy blankets, warm tea, smooth pens gliding over paper ✧ scent → vanilla candles, fresh coffee, the pages of an old book

this isn’t just about aesthetics. it’s neuroscience. when studying feels pleasurable, your brain stops resisting it.

✧˖° ➼ step 3: use high-dopamine study techniques

(forcing yourself to study the “normal” way is why you hate it.)

some study methods are literally designed to be boring. ditch them.

instead, try:

➼ blurting method: instead of passively reading, close your book and write down everything you remember. then check what you missed. (way more engaging than just re-reading notes.) ➼ dual-coding: mix visuals with text. draw tiny sketches next to your notes. turn concepts into mind maps. watch a video explaining a topic right after reading about it. ➼ pomodoro stacking: instead of the typical 25-minute study sprints, customize it. (ex: 50 min deep focus + 10 min break with an actual reward.) ➼ interleaving technique: mix subjects instead of block studying. it forces your brain to stay engaged.

stop making studying harder than it needs to be. find what works for you, and your brain will stop fighting it.

✧˖° ➼ step 4: make studying social (but in a smart way)

(because you’re not supposed to do this alone.)

studying alone for hours? miserable. but studying with others who are just as serious as you? instant motivation boost.

but instead of chaotic group study sessions where no one gets anything done, try:

✧ parallel studying: hop on facetime or join a study livestream. silent, focused, but together. ✧ teaching method: explain concepts to a friend. if you can teach it, you truly understand it. ✧ study accountability: check in with someone daily. send each other your study goals, no excuses.

even just knowing someone else is studying at the same time can trick your brain into feeling more engaged.

✧˖° ➼ step 5: shift your identity

("i hate studying" isn’t a personality trait. it’s a mindset problem.)

if you keep saying “i hate studying,” your brain will never enjoy it. change the narrative.

➼ instead of “i suck at studying,” try → “i’m learning how to study in a way that works for me.” ➼ instead of ���i can’t focus,” try → “i’m training my brain to focus longer every day.” ➼ instead of “i don’t feel like it,” try → “i’m someone who gets things done, whether i feel like it or not.”

become the type of person who enjoys learning. once that becomes your identity, everything else follows.

✧˖° ➼ step 6: create emotional attachment to your goals

motivation dies when your goals feel distant and impersonal. if you’re studying just because you “have to,” it’s easy to procrastinate. but if you link it to something deeply personal, it becomes non-negotiable.

try this: visualize your future self. imagine the version of you who already achieved everything you want. who is she? what does she do? how does she study?

then, make it emotional. ✧ if you dream of getting into your dream school, print pictures of it. make a vision board. ✧ if you want financial freedom, imagine the luxury of never stressing over money. ✧ if you want to be respected in your field, remind yourself that your knowledge is your power.

when you make studying personal, it stops being a chore. it becomes a commitment.

✧˖° ➼ step 7: stop making everything harder than it needs to be

(struggling doesn’t mean you’re working harder. it just means you’re struggling.)

too many people study inefficiently because they think suffering = productivity. but studying smarter is always better than studying longer.

some ways to make it easier on yourself: ➼ use study apps → quizlet, pomdoro apps for focus, notion for organization ➼ summarize like you’re texting a friend → rewrite notes in your own words, no unnecessary fluff ➼ study in “levels” → don’t jump straight into deep studying. warm up with light review, then increase intensity ➼ take advantage of spaced repetition → stop cramming, your brain retains more when you review over time

efficiency = less stress, better results. don’t work harder than necessary.

✧˖° ➼ step 8: replace toxic productivity with high-performance habits

studying 10 hours in one night ≠ academic excellence. true high-achievers prioritize sustainability.

➼ quit glorifying exhaustion. taking breaks improves focus. it’s not laziness. ➼ learn when to walk away. if you’re zoning out, step away. 10 minutes of real focus > 2 hours of fake studying. ➼ protect your sleep. all-nighters don’t make you hardcore, they make you ineffective. your brain processes info while you sleep.

the goal isn’t to study the longest. it’s to study in a way that keeps your mind sharp and focused.

✧˖° ➼ step 9: master the “dopamine pull” method

instead of forcing motivation, use dopamine to your advantage.

➼ habit stacking → pair studying with something enjoyable (ex: study while drinking your favorite matcha) ➼ mini rewards → after finishing a chapter, reward yourself with something small but satisfying ➼ gamification → track progress like a video game. every completed task = a “level up”

your brain loves dopamine. give it reasons to associate studying with good feelings.

✧˖° ➼ step 10: let go of perfectionism (but keep high standards)

perfectionism leads to procrastination and burnout. instead of striving for flawless, aim for consistent excellence.

✧ done is better than perfect. stop rewriting notes 5 times. ✧ progress is the goal. each study session should move you forward, even if it’s small. ✧ your worth is not your grades. strive for success, but don’t let school define you.

when you release perfectionism, you actually start achieving more. keep your standards high, but don’t let them paralyze you.

✧˖° mindy’s personal tips

(things that helped me romanticize studying & actually make it enjoyable:)

➼ set a 5-minute timer. just start. most of the time, your brain stops resisting once you begin. ➼ don’t let study guilt ruin your breaks. rest is productive. ➼ have a “study fit.” i swear, dressing up just a little makes a difference. ➼ invest in one high-quality pen. something that glides effortlessly. small detail, huge difference. ➼ study in cafés, libraries, parks. switch locations to keep it interesting. ➼ make it ✧ cozy ✧. fuzzy socks, oversized sweaters, soft blankets. your comfort matters.

✧˖° homework: rewire your study experience

➼ for one of your study sessions this week, try at least two of the techniques above. ➼ write a short journal entry: how do you want to feel while studying? how can you make that happen? ➼ change just one thing about your study setup that makes it more enjoyable.

then come back & tell me. did studying feel better? (you can always message me or send me an ask in my inbox)

[blood-smiles]

𝐈’𝐃 𝐋𝐄𝐓 𝐈𝐓 𝐀𝐋𝐋 𝐁𝐔𝐑𝐍

𝐘𝐀𝐍𝐃𝐄𝐑𝐄! 𝐒𝐎𝐋𝐃𝐈𝐄𝐑 𝐗 𝐅! 𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐃𝐄𝐑 . MDNI . gore . blood brought up very often. sexual assault attempt towards reader (not by yandere) . wounds

જ⁀➴ Your legs burned, limbs clearly unprepared as you sprinted out into the field like a wild gazelle. You hadn’t even begun to work, all you could feel was the sting in your chest, your heart brimming with adrenaline.

Your heart thundered in your ears, you could feel the vibrations of the organ in the right of your chest. Sweat dribbled down your back, mixing with the rain sprinkling from above, bullets zipped past your form just narrowly missing you by a silk thread.

You didn’t know where you were running to, you just were. You were quick and lithe, not a single bullet or stray piece of debris grazed you.

You slid to a stop, the muddy ground underneath your combat boots squelching under your weight. A man, clearly a soldier, judging by his camo uniform and badge, clutched his side while crying out in pain, he kicked his feet on the ground in a way to try and release some of the pain.

He got mud and rainwater all over you but that wasn’t important, you had to help this man, somehow. You studied his wound with the focus of a scholar, features taut with anxiety and the slightest hint of foreboding.

This was the hardest part of your job. Not the blood and bodily fluids, not the close monitoring of wounds, not the procedure but this— Knowing that the decision of letting this man live was in your hands, that a single mistake could send this man to his early grave.

You applied pressure with a cloth you had in tucked in your cargo pockets, your palm firmly pressing against the gaping hole in his side. 

You watched how the once white fabric turned a murky scarlet color, warmth seeped underneath your palm and soaked your hands.

“Don’t worry. You’re safe, you’re going to be okay.” You reassured the injured fellow, making sure to keep a calm, even tone of voice. 

You seemed sure and collected on the outside, like you had everything coldly calculated, almost as if you had already saved this man.

But the truth was far from it. You were a nervous wreck inside, tears pricked your vision, your throat burned and closed in with the need to weep for this man. Your knees were shaking even though you weren’t the one in pain, you allowed him to softly place his hand on your forearm.

“Please stay awake, I need you to stay awake.” You implored, your mind working like a tiny machine, an encyclopedia of methods and practices you had done in the past opening inside your brain.

You carefully planned your next action, his hand tightened on your arm, his dirty nails digging into your skin as he gave a weak cry, you pinched your eyebrows together in deep confusion.

“Sir. Sir? What’s happening?” You asked frantically, finally, panic seeping into your tone. He mouthed something, his whole body shuddering as he tried to muster the last of his strength to point at something behind you.

You read his bloody lips.

‘BEHIND YOU.’

You didn’t even have time to blink, because as soon as you opened your mouth to speak to the soldier, he was already dead.

BANG!

A bullet was planted between his brows, from

how loud the gun sounded it was like someone had shot him almost face to face.

Warm blood sprayed across your face, someone was behind you. Someone was behind you. Someone was behind you.

You breathed in, but you couldn’t move. There was nowhere to go anymore. You were stuck between the sword and the wall. Cornered like a lamb at the mercy of a vicious wolf.

The tears you had been battling against drained out your eyes, and as soon as the first salty droplet could hit the ground a boisterous sound filled your ears.

Before you could formulate your last words pain ripped through you endlessly, with no warning or hesitation. It shot you in the side, you could feel the foreign capsule burying itself in your guts.

The metal felt hot, god. It felt so hot. It felt like you were forced to touch boiling iron, but you weren’t allowed to pull away. There was nowhere way to escape the scalding heat of the bullet because it was inside you.

You had never screamed so loudly in your life, you hit the ground with an ear splitting wail, you curled in on yourself next to the deceased soldier. 

 IthurtsIthurtsIthurtsIthurtsIthurtsIthurts IthurtsIthurtsIthurtsIthurtsIthurtsIthurts IthurtsIthurtsIthurtsIthurtsIthurtsIthurts IthurtsIthurtsIthurtsIthurtsIthurtsIthurts IthurtsIthurtsIthurtsIthurtsIthurtsIthurts

You let out a choked sob, something between a cry of pain and a scream. 

A grand man chuckled at your pain, you could see the vague outline of his body out of the corner of your eye. He was large, built like a ravenous wolf, his teeth were bared, sharp and crooked like daggers as he bent down beside you.

His cold hands took a careless grip on your ankles, a new feeling arose, fear. Raw, primal fear. 

His grip was so tight and hurtful that he might have shattered your bones without even noticing— But it wasn’t like he even cared.

What was he going to do to you? You screamed and kicked in desperation, his hands creeped higher up to your knees.

Were you going to die like this? Why? What did you do wrong? You did everything they told you to.

Why me? Why me? Why me? Why me?

Tears didn’t stop, the dam behind your eyes broke. The walls of the well had ruptured, it held years upon years of hate and suffering, and now that it had burst a tidal wave, one with the height of a tsunami had left nothing in its wake.

Your throat felt stuffed with rocks, your vocal cords strained inside you, clawing at the ground, soil settling underneath your nails.

You had tried to fight, you really did but blood was starting to settle in a pool underneath you. Your hair had chunks of dirt and blood, your skin had small cuts and was debauched by debris and flesh that wasn’t yours.

The clouds had parted, a single beam of light pushing through the skies and falling on the burly figure of a soldier with hair as golden as the sun.

Was that an angel? Was he here for you?

Peace at last, why did you feel peace? As soon as you caught a glimpse of those cold, steel blue eyes you felt.. free.

The fight inside had left you.

Like you could rest, maybe it was the blood loss getting to you. The ground underneath suddenly felt warm and comfortable, like the dreamiest of beds, the ones filled with swan feathers that only royals had the luxury of using.

Your eyes fluttered closed, a soft exhale leaving your lips. Blood and rainwater soaked your clothing, you lost consciousness with a small smile.

It was a blessing that you had closed your eyes, because at the least that had protected you from the carnage and absolute inhumane cruelty that would exhibited in front of your unconscious body.

The so called angel was no divine being, but the infamous lieutenant who had his sights set on you, perhaps too closely.

He didn’t hesitate to take the other man from his throat, his thick fingers wrapped around the rugged man’s neck, his nails dug into the thick muscles like the teeth of a bear trap.

The separation of meat from muscle was quick and brutal, Marcelle’s hand ripped the man’s throat out like tearing fat from a chicken leg. It was a disgusting show of force and power, and it was all done for some girl.

Marcelle’s chest heaved, pure rage ran through his veins like adrenaline, his nose was scrunched up like a rabid bear’s would. Someone had hurt you, the light to his darkness, the moon among so many stars.

They tried to tear you from his arms, tried to take advantage of your weak build and gentle heart.

Hate wasn’t an adequate word for what he really felt, it was an understatement of what was going through his twisted head.

The wolf-like man’s larynx dropped on the floor with a wet splat, blood rushed out of the exposed maw that once used to be his throat.

Marcelle was nowhere done with him though. 

A tactical knife strapped on his thigh was dislodged, then driven into the wolf’s stomach, the blonde pressed the blade so tight against his flesh that the peritoneum had been torn apart like a bag of candy on the hallow’s eve.

Guts spilled everywhere, slimy sausage shaped innards were the first to go, unfurling from his stomach like climbing rope.

Everything dropped down at his feet, contaminated filth mixed with blood and mud. Marcelle scoffed at how easy it was to kill this one, it wasn’t a big show of strength to pull this guy apart like tender teriyaki.

The mangled one lost his balance, falling onto his knees while choking on carmine, it sprayed everywhere along with chunks of meat, or what was left of it.

The blonde bear grabbed the disfigured man by his hair, then pressed a dirty boot onto the small of his back. He yanked with vigor at the other’s scalp while maintaining hard pressure on his back.

Then a sick crack came from the crumpled’s spine, his eyes rolled to the back of his head, swollen with blood and severed capillaries.

His spine had been severed in two, cleanly snapped like a toothpick.

The man bent backwards in the fashion of an arc, the cadaver looked like it was doing gymnastics, but really his body was so greatly damaged that his spine couldn’t maintain his weight, he was bent at such an unnatural extent it hurt just by looking at  him.

Marcelle kicked away the body and its innards, sending what was of a man into a puddle, leaving his organs and blood to mingle with the water.

He saw you, curled up like a kitten. But blood streamed out your side like a river, it wouldn’t stop, he panicked.

He dropped beside you, picking you up with the gentleness of what could only be compared to picking up an injured baby bird. He touched your face with the delicate touch of a feather, your face was dirty, streaked with dirt and crimson. 

He pressed his ear against your chest, the soft thump of your heart whispering that you had limited time.

His breath caught in his throat.

He was taught to never cry. That a man should never cry in the presence of anyone, but in this moment, this miserable and unfortunate situation he could do no less than weep.

All he could see was the tiny smile on your lips, your precious visage ruined by destruction of war. You didn’t stop bleeding, you can’t stop. His eyes watered, for the first time in decades he allowed himself to shed a tear.

“No.. No— You can’t.. You won’t leave me!” He yelled to your unconscious form, his dirtied hand grasping your limp one. He squeezed tightly, hoping that if he gripped hard enough you would react, that those pretty (e/c) eyes would look up at him one last time.

His distress was heard, a group of young soldiers trotted over to him, finding their great lieutenant distraught over the soon to be corpse of a nurse.

He hugged the body close to his chest, trying to share warmth to the wounded girl, his chin rested over her head, his thick fingers smoothing over her filthy hair, they weren’t sure if he was trying to soothe the injured woman or himself.

They came up to him, touching his shoulder and trying to reach the nurse in his arms. He didn’t take well to that.

He snapped at them, snarling like a furious bear protecting his young. He clawed at them, finding a discarded gun somewhere, it shook in his hands as he aimed at them. His finger looped into the trigger, only to hear a click.

Blank.

Blank.

Blank.

The gun was empty of bullets, so he took the next alternative, the only thing he knew to do, fight with his fists.

There was no one that could go up against him, they knew that Marcelle could divorce their head from their shoulders clean.

“You are not going to take her.” He rasped, putting himself between you and the men. Now they all looked like enemies, like big red training targets with white swirls. 

The cadets glanced at each other, just barely noticing the lifeless bodies surrounding the blonde and the wounded girl in his arms.

“Holy shit..” one of them murmured as he looked around, Marcelle had gone berserk, especially on this man at his feet, completely disemboweled— Where was his throat? 

He stared at the human remains on the floor, feeling the urge to vomit his stomach out right here and there.

A new voice pushed through, the head nurse shouldered men away as she jogged towards the pair of bloodied lovers.

“Look. I don’t care who you are or what your rank is—“ she began, walking towards Marcelle with no fear whatsoever.

“But that girl is going to die if you keep hoarding her like an aggressive mutt!” She yelled, beads of sweat collecting on her brow, she plowed through the mud and dirt just to make it to you.

Marcelle stared at her with a vacant look in his eyes, he didn’t have it in him to touch a woman with intent of harm.

His grip tightened as she approached, water dripped now his face, sweat and rain soaked his uniform. He wasn’t about to let her tug you away, over his dead body.

She tried to pull you away, her hands gripping your forearms as hard as she could but Marcelle’s hold was unrelenting and soon she would have to call herself defeated in the strength game.

“Fine. You can carry her.” She said with an edge to her voice, she took the collar of her uniform in her hands and pulled him up how a dog would pick up a puppy by its scruff.

“But she is going to to live and you are going to take her back now.” She demanded it like his first drill sergeant, he listened to that one order, he slowly ascended from the ground and followed the nurse.

He stared at your face the whole way he walked, his finger curved gently, his pad brushing away your hair behind your ear.

You’re going to be okay, you’re going to live.

His jaw tensed as a new wave of emotions ran over him, he couldn’t break down, not yet. He had to be strong for you.

He gently pressed his forehead against yours, his palm gently residing over your chest, feeling the soft thump of your heart under his hand.

He didn’t remember clearly when but he got ushered out of a room, he woke up in a sterile area surrounded by other people in what seemed to be a waiting room.

He vaguely recalled that he had to be restrained by four men, he got stabbed with a tranquilizer and that’s when everything went dark.

Where were you? His heart picked up in his chest, what had happened? Were you alive?

With a sudden movement he got up from his seat, a clipboard fell from his lap onto the ground. It held only a blank paper, with a single room number in it written in blue ink.

Marcelle had never ran faster in his life, he didn’t know or care how many people he knocked down as he sprinted through the halls. Nurses and doctors turned their heads at breakneck speeds as he zipped past them like a wild animal.

He opened your room door with a bang, sweat gathered on his forehead and his body burned, there you rested.

You, covered in bandages, body clean of dirt and blood, your hair looking soft like nothing had ever touched it. Soft morning light entered through the window, you glowed under the sun like a white dove.

You were hooked up to a monitor, constant beeping telling him you were still alive, it seemed you were breathing on your own, judging by the way your chest slowly rose and fell.

He was filthy with grime and sweat, he could never touch you, afraid he would taint you he stood back. He wanted nothing more than to touch your face, to see your smile again.

It wasn’t long until he was unceremoniously kicked out your room by your main caregiver. 

Marcelle came back the day after, and the day after and the days following that. He kneeled beside your bed like a puppy nudging his owner’s hand with its muzzle.

His hand gently held yours, he placed it over his head, on his cheek, just to feel your touch again. Just to feel the way your fingers would run through his hair again, to feel your fingers curing his wounds again.

He weeped more in that hospital than he had cried in his whole life. He was sure that he would drown in his own tears if he kept it up, he missed you so much, he wouldn’t leave your side for a moment.

There were times he would refuse to leave your room at all, security was forced to tranquilize him and at one point threatened to place a restraining order if he didn’t abide by their rules.

Then that day came, he sat by your bed, holding your hand to his heart, praying to whatever was up there to bring his baby back to him. 

He had never been a faithful man, but if that’s what it took to make you wake up, he would pray all day, everyday no matter the hour or situation.

The slightest twitch from your fingers made him jump, a glimmer in his grey eyes showed that he had hope. He stared at your hand, waiting for that little movement to come back.

Your eyelids moved, your facial muscles twitched, Marcelle stood from his chair abruptly, the furniture scratching the floor and making an unpleasant screech.

You opened your eyes, your beautiful (e/c) hues flitted around the room with confusion, the grogginess of consciousness filling you again.

You looked through your blurry memories, it felt like looking through frosted glass but you remembered a few things, the one that stood out to you most was the blonde angel.

There he was again. 

Why was he crying? You wondered, trying to sit up only to give up when the pain was too unbearable, the man pushed you back down, scolding you and forcing you back into the bed.

You recognized him, your first patient ever. Marcelle.

Just when you were about to speak he basically pounced, he hugged you like you would disappear in that moment. He felt warm and comfortable, you could barely bring your hands to wrap around him.

His shoulders shook with silent sobs, he couldn’t stop crying again, but this time it wasn’t out of sorrow but happiness.

You were back. You were alive and in his arms.

He pulled away, looking you in the face as if this was all a dream, he touched your every feature, trying to re assure himself that this was no fantasy.

“I love you.” Were the first words he said when you woke up, that might have sent you to another coma in that moment.

The blood from your wound had rushed up to your cheeks, you searched his face for any trace of a joke but then remembered.

Marcelle doesn’t do jokes.

He kissed your hand softly, tears still streaming down his cheeks. He couldn’t kiss you yet, you were healing and could catch sicknesses especially quickly.

So he would wait, wait until you were ready.

“I think.. I love you too.” You shyly smiled, fingers trembling with embarrassment.

To Marcelle, waiting would prove to be more difficult than he thought.

[thepencilnerd]

A Lesson In Fear Extinction | part I

pairing: professor!Jack Abbot x f!psych phd student reader summary: You’re a senior doctoral student in the clinical department, burned out and emotionally barricaded, just trying to finish your final few years when Jack Abbot—trauma researcher, new committee member, and unexpectedly perceptive—starts seeing through you in ways you didn’t anticipate wc: 11.9k content/warnings: academic!AU, slow burn (takes places over 3 years lbffr), frat boys being gross + depictions of unwanted male attention/verbal harassment, academic power dynamics, emotional repression, discussions of mental health, mutual pining, hurt/comfort, angst, so much yearning, canon divergence, no explicit smut (yet/tbd but still 18+ MDNI, i will fight u) a/n: this started as a slow-burn AU and spiraled into a study in mutual repression, avoidant-attachment, and me trying to resolve my personal baggage through writing ~yet again~ p.s. indubitably inspired by @hotelraleigh and their incredible mohan x abbot fic (and all of their fics that live in my head rent free, tyvm) i hope you stay tuned for part II (coming soon, pinky promise) ^-^

The first thing you learn about Dr. Jack Abbot is that he hates small talk. That, and that he has a death glare potent enough to silence even the most self-important faculty members in the psych department.

The second thing you learn is that he runs his office like a bunker—door usually half-shut, always a little too cold, shelves lined with books no one's touched in decades. You step inside for your first meeting, and it feels like entering a war room.

"You’re early," he says, without looking up from the annotated manuscript he’s scribbling on.

"It's the first day of the school year."

"Same difference."

You take a seat, balancing your laptop on your knees. Your fingers hover over the keyboard, unsure if you should even bother.

Dr. Abbot finally glances up. Hazel eyes, sharp behind silver-framed glasses. "Let’s make this easy. Tell me what you’re working on and what you want from me."

You hesitate. Not because you don’t know. You’ve been rehearsing this on the walk over. You just hadn’t planned on him cutting through the pleasantries quite so fast.

"I’m running a mixed methods study on affective forecasting errors in anxiety and depression. Lab-based mood induction, longitudinal survey follow-up, and semi-structured interviews. I'm trying to map discrepancies between predicted and experienced affect and how that mismatch contributes to maladaptive emotion regulation patterns over time."

A beat.

"So you're testing whether people with anxiety and depression are bad at predicting their own feelings."

You blink. "Yes."

"Good. Start with that next time."

You bite the tip of your tongue. Roll the flesh between your teeth to ground yourself. There is no next time, you want to say. You’re only meeting with him once, to get sign-off on your committee. He wasn’t your first choice. Wasn't even your second. But your advisor's on sabbatical, and the other quantitative faculty are already overbooked.

Dr. Abbot leans back in his chair, examining you. "You’re primary is Robby, right?"

"Technically, yes."

He hums, not bothering to hide the skepticism. "And you want me on your committee because...?"

"Because you published that meta-analysis on PTSD and chronic stress. Your work on cumulative trauma exposure and dysregulated affect dovetails with mine on stress-related trajectories for internalizing disorders and comorbidity. I thought you might actually get what I’m trying to do."

His brow lifts, just slightly. "You did your homework."

"Well, I’m asking you for feedback on a dissertation that will probably make me break down countless times before it's done. Figured I should know what I was getting into."

Dr. Abbot's mouth twitches. You wouldn’t call it a smile, exactly. But it’s something.

"Alright," he says, flipping open a calendar. "Let’s see if we can find a time next week to go over your proposal draft."

You arch a brow. "You’ll do it?"

"You came in prepared. And you didn’t waste my time—as much as the other fourth years. That gets you further than you’d think around here."

You nod, heart thudding. Not because you’re nervous.

Because you have the weirdest feeling that Jack Abbot just became your biggest academic problem—and your most unexpected ally.

You see him again the next day. Robby was enjoying his last remaining few weeks of paternity leave and graciously asked Jack to sub for his foundations of clinical psychology course. Jack preferred the word coerced but was silenced by a text message with a photo of a child attached. The baby was cute enough to warrant blackmail. 

He barely got through the door intact: balancing a coffee cup between his teeth, cradling a half-closed laptop under one arm, and wrangling the straps of a clearly ancient backpack. His limp is more pronounced today. The small cohort watches him with a mix of curiosity and vague alarm.

You’re in the front row, laptop open before he even gets to the podium.

Jack drops everything onto the lectern with a heavy exhale, then glances around. His eyes catch on you and pause—not recognition yet, just flicker. Then he turns back to plug in his laptop.

You don’t expect to see him again two days later, striding into the 200-level general psych class you TA. The room’s already three-quarters of the way full when he walks in, and it takes him a moment before he does a brief double-take in your direction.

You return your attention to your notes. Jack stares.

"Small world."

"Nice to see you too, Dr. Abbot."

He sighs. "Why am I not surprised."

"Because the annual stipend increase doesn't adjust for inflation, I'm desperate, and there aren't enough grants given the current state of events?"

Jack mutters something under his breath about cosmic punishment and unfolds the syllabus from his coat pocket like it personally betrayed him.

When he finally settles at the front—coffee in one hand, laptop balancing precariously on the desk—you catch him bending and straightening his knee just under the edge of the table, jaw set tight. It’s subtle. Anyone else might miss it. But you’ve been watching.

You say nothing. 

A few students linger with questions—mostly undergrads eager to impress, notebooks clutched to their chests, rattling off textbook jargon in shaky voices. Jack humors them, mostly. Nods here, clarification there. But his eyes flick to you more than once.

You take your time with the stack of late enrollment passes. He’s still watching when you sling your tote over one shoulder and head for the door.

Probably off to the lab. Or your cubicle in the main psych building. Wherever fourth years disappear to when they aren’t shadowing faculty or training underqualified and overzealous research assistants on data collection procedures.

Jack shifts his weight onto his good leg and half-listens to the sophomore with the over-highlighted textbook.

His eyes stay on you when you walk out.

You make it three steps past the stairwell before the sound of your name stops you. It’s not loud—more like a clipped murmur through the general noise of backpacks zipping and chairs scraping—but it cuts straight through.

You turn back.

Jack’s still at the front, the stragglers now filtering out behind him. He doesn’t wave. Doesn’t beckon. Just meets your gaze like he already knows you’ll wait. You do.

He makes his way toward you slowly, favoring one leg. The closer he gets, the more you notice—the way his hand tightens on the strap of his backpack, the exhausted pull at his brow. He’s not masking as well today.

"Thanks for not saying anything," he says when he stops beside you.

You shrug. "Didn’t seem like you needed an audience."

Jack huffs a laugh, dry and faintly surprised. "Most people mean well, but—"

"They hover," you finish. "Or overcompensate. Or say something weird and then try to walk it back."

"Exactly."

You both stand there for a beat too long, campus noise shifting around you like a slow tide.

"I was heading to the coffee shop," you say finally. "Did you want anything?"

Jack tilts his head. "Bribery?"

"Positive reinforcement." The words trail behind a small grin. 

He shakes his head, mouth twitching. "Probably had enough caffeine for the day."

The corner of your lip curls higher. "As if there's such a thing."

That earns you a half-huff, half-scoff—just enough to let you believe you might have amused him.

"Well," you say, taking a step backward, "I’ve got three more RAs to train and one very stubborn loop to fix. See you around, Dr. Abbot."

"Good luck," he says, voice low but steady. "Don’t let the building eat you alive."

The next time he sees you, it’s after 10 p.m. on a Thursday.

You hadn’t planned on staying that late. But the dinosaur of a computer kept crashing, two of your participants no-showed, and by the time you’d salvaged the afternoon’s data to pull, it was easier to crash on the grad lounge couch than face the lone commute back to your apartment.

You must’ve fallen asleep halfway through reading feedback from your committee—curled up with your legs splayed over the edge of the couch and laptop perched on the cheap coffee table. The hall is mostly dark when Jack walks past. He’s heading toward the parking lot when he stops, mid-step.

For a moment, he just stands there, taking in the sight of you tucked awkwardly into yourself. You look comfortable in your oversized hoodie, if not for the highlighter cap still tucked between your fingers and mouth parted in a silent snore. 

He doesn’t say anything. Just watches you breathe for a few seconds longer than necessary.

Then, maybe with more curiosity than concern, he raps his knuckles gently against the doorframe. Once. Twice. Three times for good measure. 

No response.

Jack steps inside and calls out, voice pitched low but insistent. "This is not a sustainable sleep schedule, you know."

You stir—just barely. A vague groan escapes your lips as you shift and swat clumsily in the direction of the noise. "Just five more minutes... need to run reliability analyses..."

Jack chuckles, genuine and surprised.

He leans against the wall, watching you with no urgency to leave. "Dreaming about data cleaning. Impressive."

You make a small, unintelligible noise and swat again, this time with a little more conviction. Jack snorts.

After a moment, he sighs. Then carefully crosses the room, picks up the crumpled throw blanket from the floor, and drapes it over you without ceremony.

He flicks off the overheads and closes the door behind him with a quiet click. The hallway hums with fluorescent buzz as he limps toward the parking lot, shoulders tucked in against the chill.

A few weeks into the semester, the rhythm settles—lecture, discussion, grading, rinse and repeat. But today, something shifts.

You’re stacking quizzes at the front of the general psych lecture hall when Jack catches movement out of the corner of his eye. Two male students—frat-adjacent, all oversized hoodies and entitled swagger—approach your desk.

Jack looks up from his laptop. His expression doesn’t shift, but something in his posture does—a subtle, perceptible freeze. He watches from where he’s still packing up—hand paused on his laptop case, jaw tight, eyes narrowing just slightly as he takes in the dynamic. There’s a flicker of tension behind his glasses, a pause that says: if you needed him, he’d step in.

They swagger up with the kind of smirks you’ve seen too many times before—overconfident, under-read, and powered by too many YouTube clips of alpha male podcasts.

"Yo, TA—what’s up?" one says, leaning far too close to your desk. "Was gonna ask something about the exam, but figured I’d shoot my shot first. You free later? Coffee on me."

His friend elbows him like he’s a comedic genius. "Yeah, like maybe we could pick your brain about, like, how to get into grad school. You probably have all the insider tricks, right?"

You don’t even blink.

"Sure," you say sweetly. "I’d love to review your application materials. Bring your CV, your transcript, three letters of rec, and proof that you’ve read the Title IX policy in full. Bonus points if you can make it through a meeting without quoting Andrew Tate—or I’ll assume you’re trying to get yourself suspended." 

They stare. You smile.

One laughs uncertainly. The other mutters something about how "damn, okay," and both slink away.

Jack’s jaw works once. Then relaxes.

You glance up, like you knew he’d been watching.

"Well handled," he says, voice low as he steps beside you.

You offer a nonchalant shrug. "First years are getting bolder."

"Bold is one word for it."

You hand him a stack of leftover forms. "Relax, Dr. Abbot. I’ve survived undergrads before. I’ll survive again."

Jack gives a small, amused grunt. Then, after a beat: "You can call me Jack."

You glance up, brow raised. 

"Feels a little formal to keep pretending we’re strangers.

You don’t say anything right away. Just nod once, almost imperceptibly, then go back to gathering your things.

He doesn’t push it.

It’s raining hard enough to rattle the windows.

You’re having what your cohort half-jokingly calls a "good brain day"—sentences coming easy, theory clicking into place, citations at your fingertips. You barely notice the weather.

Jack glances up from your chapter draft as you launch into a point about predictive error and affective flattening. He doesn't interrupt. His eyes follow how you pace—one hand gesturing, the other holding your annotated copy, words sharp and certain.

Eventually, you pause mid-thought and glance at him.

He's already looking at you. 

Your hand flies up to cover your mouth. "Shit. I'm sorry—"

Jack shakes his head, lips twitching at the corners. "Don’t apologize. That was… brilliant."

You blink at him, the compliment stalling your momentum. The automatic response bubbles up fast—some joke to deflect, to downplay. You don't say it. Not this time.

Still, your fingers tighten slightly on the edge of the desk. "I don't know about brilliant..."

Jack doesn’t look away. "I do."

The silence stretches—not awkward, exactly, but thick. His gaze doesn’t waver, and it holds something steady and burning behind it.

You glance down at your annotated draft. The silence stays between you like a taut wire.

Jack doesn’t fill it. Just waits—gaze unwavering, as if giving you time to come to your own conclusion. No pressure, no indulgent smile. Just a quiet, grounded certainty that settles between you like weight.

Eventually, you exhale. The tension loosens—not completely, but enough to keep going.

"Okay," you murmur, almost to yourself.

Jack nods once, slowly. Then gestures at your printed draft. "Let’s talk about your integration of mindfulness in the discussion section. I’ve got a few thoughts."

Ethics is the last class of the week. The room's heating is inconsistent, the lights too bright, and Jack doesn’t know how the hell he ended up covering for Frank Langdon. Probably the same way he got stuck with Foundations and General Psych: Robby. The department’s too damn small and apparently everyone with a baby gets to vanish into thin air.

He steps into the room ten minutes early, coffee already lukewarm, and makes a half-hearted attempt to adjust the podium screen. The first few students trickle in, then more. He flips through the lecture slides, barely registering them.

And then he sees you.

You’re near the back, chatting with someone Jack doesn’t recognize. Another grad student by the look of him—slouched posture, soft jaw, navy sweater. The guy’s grinning like he thinks he’s charming. He leans in a little too close to your chair. Says something Jack can’t hear.

Jack tells himself he’s only looking because the guy seems familiar. Maybe someone from Walsh’s lab. Or Garcia’s. 

You laugh at something—light, genuine.

Jack tries not to react.

Navy Sweater says something else, more animated now. He gestures to your laptop. Points to something. You nudge his hand away with a grin and say something back that makes him blush.

Jack flips the page on his lecture notes without reading a word.

You’re still smiling when you finally glance up toward the podium.

Your eyes meet.

Jack doesn’t look away. But he doesn’t smile either.

The guy beside you says something else. You nod politely.

But you’re not looking at him anymore.

The next time you're in Jack’s office, the air feels different—autumn sharp outside, but warm in here.

He notices things. Not all at once, but cumulatively.

Your hair’s longer now. It’s subtle, but the ends graze your jaw in a way they hadn’t before. You’ve started wearing darker shades—amber, forest green, burgundy—instead of the lighter neutrals from early fall. Small changes. Seasonal shifts.

He doesn’t say anything about any of that.

But then he sees it.

A faint smudge of something high on your neck, near the curve of your jaw.

"Rough night?" he asks, lightly. The tone’s casual, but his eyes stay there a second too long.

You look up, blinking. Then seem to realize. "Oh. No, it’s—nothing."

He raises an eyebrow, just once. Doesn’t press.

What you don’t say: you went on a date last night. Your first real date since your second year. Navy Sweater—Isaac—had been sweet. Patient. Social psych, so he talked about group dynamics and interdependence theory instead of clinical cases. A refreshing change from your usual context. He’d been pining for you since orientation. You finally gave him a chance.

You’re not sure yet if it was a mistake.

Jack doesn’t ask again. He just shifts his attention back to your printed draft, flipping a page without comment.

But you can feel it—that subtle change in the room. Like something under the surface has started to stir.

Jack doesn’t speak again for the rest of the meeting, at least not about anything that isn’t your manuscript. But the temperature between you has shifted, unmistakable even in silence.

His feedback is sharp, incisive, and you take it all in—but your focus tugs sideways more than once.

You start to notice little things. The way his hands move when he talks—precise, economical, almost always with a pen twirling between his fingers. The way he reads with his whole posture—leaned in slightly, brows furrowed, lips moving just barely like he’s tasting the cadence of each sentence. How he always wears button-downs, sleeves pushed up to the elbows, like he’s never quite comfortable in them.

You catch the faint scruff at his jawline, the flecks of gray you hadn’t seen before in the fluorescent classroom light. The quiet groan of his office chair as he shifts to get more comfortable—though he never quite does. The occasional tap of his fingers against the desk when he’s thinking. The way his eyes track you when you pace, like he’s cataloging your rhythm.

When he leans in to gesture at a line in your text, you’re aware of his proximity in a way you hadn’t been before. The warmth that radiates off him. The way his breath hitches just slightly before he speaks.

When you ask a clarifying question, he meets your eyes and holds the gaze a fraction too long.

It shouldn’t mean anything. It probably doesn’t.

Still, when you pack up to leave, you don’t rush. Neither does he.

He walks you to the door, stops just short of it.

"Good luck with the coding," he says.

You nod. "Thanks. See you next week."

He hesitates, then nods once more. "Yeah. Next week."

And when you leave his office, the echo of that pause follows you down the hall.

At home, Jack goes through the same routine he always does. He hangs up his coat. Places his keys in the ceramic dish by the door. Fills the kettle. Rinses a clean mug from the rack without thinking—habit, even if it’s just for himself.

Then he sits down on the edge of the couch and unbuckles the prosthetic from his leg with practiced efficiency. He leans forward, slow and deliberate, and cleans the area with a soft cloth, checking the skin for signs of irritation before applying a thin layer of ointment. Only then does he begin to massage the tender spot where his leg ends, pressing the heel of his palm just enough to release tension. The ache is dull tonight, but persistent. It always is when the weather shifts.

He doesn’t turn on the TV. When he buckles it back on and gets up again, he moves around his apartment quietly, the limp less noticeable this time around.

While the water heats, he scrolls through emails on his phone—most from admin, flagged with false urgency. A few unread messages from students, one from a journal editor asking for another reviewer on a manuscript that costs too much to publish open access. He deletes half, archives another third. Wonders when it became so easy to ignore what used to feel so important.

The kettle whistles. He pours the water over the tea bag and sets it down, not bothering with the stack of essays he meant to look at hours ago.

He doesn’t touch them.

Not yet.

Tonight, his rhythm is off.

Instead, he looks over your latest draft after dinner, meaning only to skim. He finds himself rereading the same paragraph three times, mind somewhere else entirely. Your words, your phrasing, your comments in the margins—he's memorizing them. Not intentionally. It just happens.

Later, brushing his teeth, Jack thinks of how you’d looked that afternoon: eyes sharp, expression animated, tucked into a wool sweater the color of cinnamon. Hair falling forward when you tilted your head to listen, then swept back with one distracted hand. A little ink smudged on your finger. The edge of a smile you didn’t know you were wearing.

He wonders if you know how often you pace when you’re deep in thought. How your whole posture changes when something clicks—like your bones remember before your voice does. How you gesture with the same hand you write with, sometimes forgetting you’re holding a pen at all.

He tells himself it’s just professional attentiveness. That he’s tuned into all his students this way. That noticing you in detail is part of his job.

But it’s a lie. And the truth has started to settle into his bones.

He closes his laptop, shuts off the light.

He dreams in fragments—lecture notes and old conference halls, the scent of rain-soaked leaves, the sound of your voice mid-sentence. The ghost of a laugh.

He doesn’t remember the shape of the dream when he wakes.

Only the warmth that lingers in its place.

Across town, you’re on another date with Isaac.

He’s funny tonight—quick with dry quips, gentler than you'd expected. He walks you to a small café far from campus, one you’ve driven by a dozen times but never tried. He orders chai with oat milk. You get the pumpkin spice out of spite.

"Pumpkin spice, really?" he teases. "Living the stereotype."

"It’s autumn," you shoot back. "Let me have one basic pleasure."

You talk about everything but your dissertation—TV shows, childhood pets, the worst advice you’ve ever received from an advisor. Inevitably, you steer the conversation into something about work. It's a habit you seem to remember having since your earliest academic days, and one you don't see yourself breaking free from anytime soon.

"My undergrad advisor once told me I’d never get into grad school unless I stopped sounding ‘so West Coast.’ Still not sure what that means."

Isaac laughs. "Mine told me to pick a research topic ‘I wouldn’t mind reading about for the rest of my life.’ As if anyone wants to read their own lit review twice."

You laugh—genuine, belly-deep. Isaac flushes with pride and takes a long sip of his chai, eyes bright.

It's easy with him, you think. Talking, breathing, being. You lean back in your chair, cup warm between your palms, and realize you should feel more present than you do.

He’s exactly what you thought you needed. Different. Outside your orbit. Not tangled up in diagnoses or a department that feels more like a pressure cooker every day.

But still, your mind drifts. Not far. Just enough.

Back to the way Jack had looked at you earlier that day. The pause before he spoke. The silence that wasn’t quite silence.

You can’t put your finger on it. You don’t want to.

Isaac reaches across the table to brush his fingers against yours. You let him.

And yet.

You catch yourself glancing toward the door as he brushes your fingers. Just once. Barely perceptible. A flicker of something unformed tugging at the edge of your attention.

Not for any reason you can name. Not because anything happened. But because something did—quiet and slow and not easily undone.

You remember the way his brow furrowed as he read your chapter, the steadiness in his voice when he called your argument brilliant, the way he looked at you like the room had narrowed down to a single point.

Isaac is sweet. Funny. Steady. You should be here.

But your mind keeps slipping sideways.

And Jack Abbot—stubborn, sharp, unreadable Jack—is suddenly everywhere. In the cadence of a sentence you revise, where you hear his voice in your head asking, 'Why this framework? Why now?' In the questions you don’t ask Isaac because you already know how Jack would answer them—precise, cutting, but never unkind. In the sudden, irritating way you want someone to challenge you just a little more. To push back, to poke holes, to see if your argument still stands.

You find yourself wondering what he’s doing tonight. If he’s at home, pacing through a quiet, single-family home too large for his own company. If he’s reading someone else’s manuscript with the same intensity. If he ever thinks about the way you looked that afternoon, how you paced his office with fire in your voice and a red pen tucked behind your ear.

You think about the hitch in his breath when you leaned in. The way he’d watched you leave, that pause at the door.

And then Isaac says something—soft, thoughtful—and it takes you a second too long to register it. You nod, distracted, and reach for your drink again.

But your mind is already elsewhere.

Still with someone else.

You take another sip of your drink. Smile at Isaac. Let the moment pass.

But even then, even here—Jack is in the room.

You don’t see Jack again until the following Thursday. It’s raining hard again—something about mid-semester always seems to come with the weather—and the psych building smells like wet paper and overworked radiators.

You’re in the hallway, hunched over a Tupperware of leftover lentils and trying to catch up on grading, when his door creaks open across the hall. You glance up reflexively.

He’s standing there, brow furrowed, papers in hand. He spots you. Freezes.

For a moment, neither of you says anything. The hallway is quiet, just the hum of fluorescents and the distant murmur of a class in session. Then:

"Grading?" he asks, voice lower than usual—quiet, but unmistakably curious.

You lift your fork, deadpan. "Don’t sound so jealous."

Jack’s mouth twitches—almost a smile. A pause, then: "You’re in Langdon’s office hours slot, right?"

"Only if I bring snacks," you quip, referring to the way Frank Langdon always lets the TA with snacks cut the line—a running joke in the department.

Jack raises his coffee like a toast. "Then I’ll keep walking." A dry little truce. An unspoken I’ll stay out of your way—unless you want me to stay.

You watch him disappear down the hallway, his limp slightly more pronounced than usual. And you find yourself thinking—about how many times you’ve noticed that, and how many times he’s never once drawn attention to it.

Your spoon scrapes the bottom of the container. You try to return to grading.

You don’t get much done.

Later that afternoon, you’re back in the general psych lecture hall, perched on the side of the desk with your TA notes while Jack clicks through the day’s slides. It’s the second time he’s teaching this unit and he’s not even pretending to follow the script. You know him well enough now to catch the subtle shifts—when he goes off-book, lets the theory breathe.

He doesn’t look at you while he lectures, but you can tell when he’s aware of you. The slight change in cadence, the way his eyes flick toward the front row where you sometimes sit, sometimes stand.

Today’s lecture is on conditioning. Classical, operant, extinction.

At one point, Jack pauses at the podium. He’s talking about fear responses—conditioned reactions, the body’s anticipatory wiring, what it takes to unlearn a threat. You’ve heard this part a dozen times in college and a dozen more in grad school. You’ve written about it. You've published on it. 

But when he says, "Fear isn’t erased. It’s overwritten," his eyes flick toward you—just for a second.

And your heart trips a little. Not in a dramatic, cinematic way—more like a misstep in rhythm, a skipped beat in a song you thought you knew by heart. Your breath catches for half a second, and you feel the heat rush to the tips of your ears.

It’s absurd, maybe. Definitely. But the tone of his voice when he said it—that measured, worn certainty—lands somewhere deep inside you. Not clinical. Not abstract. It feels like he’s speaking to something unspoken, to a part of you you've tried to keep quiet.

You shift your weight, pretending to re-stack a paper that doesn’t need re-stacking, pulse louder than it should be in your ears.

From your seat on the edge of the desk, you can see the way he gestures with his hand, slow and spare, like every movement costs something. The way he leans on his good leg. The way the muscles in his forearm flex as he flips to the next slide, still speaking, still teaching—none of this showing on his face.

Your eyes keep drifting back.

And he doesn’t look at you again. Not for the rest of the lecture.

But you feel the weight of that glance long after the class ends.

You stay after class, mostly to gather the quiz sheets and handouts. A few students linger, asking Jack questions about the exam. You hear him shift into that firm-but-generous tone he uses with undergrads, the kind that makes them think he’s colder than he is. Efficient. Clear.

When the last student finally packs up and leaves the room, Jack straightens. His eyes find you, soft but unreadable.

"Good lecture," you say.

He hums. "Not bad for a recycled deck."

You hand him the stack of forms. "You made it your own."

His thumb brushes over the edge of the papers. "So did you."

You don’t ask what he means. But the quiet between you feels different than it did at the start of the semester.

The room is mostly empty. Just the two of you. You're caught somewhere between impulse and caution. Approach and avoidance. There's a pull in your chest, low and slow, that makes you want to linger a second longer. To say something else. To ask about the lecture, or the line he looked at you during, or the kind of day he's had. But your voice sticks.

Instead, you shift again, adjust your grip on the papers in your hands, and let it all stay unsaid. But Jack’s already turned back toward the podium, gathering his things.

He doesn’t look up right away. Just slides his laptop into its case with more force than necessary, his jaw set tight. He’s annoyed with himself. The kind of annoyance that comes from knowing he missed something—not a moment, exactly, but the shadow of one. An opening. And he let it pass.

There was a question in your eyes. Or maybe not a question—maybe a dare. Maybe just the start of one. And he didn’t rise to meet it.

He tells himself that’s good. That’s safe. That’s professional.

But it doesn’t feel like a win.

His hand pauses on the zipper. He breathes out through his nose, not quite a sigh. Then glances toward the door.

You’re already gone.

You let the moment pass.

But you feel it. Like something just under the surface, waiting for another breach in the routine.

It happens late one evening, entirely by accident.

You’re in your office, door mostly closed, light still on. You meant to leave hours ago—meant to finish your email and call it—but the combination of caffeine and a dataset that refused to make sense kept you tethered to your desk.

Jack’s on his way out of the building when he hears it: a muffled sound from behind a half-open door just across the hallway from his own. He pauses, backtracks, and realizes for the first time exactly where your office is.

He hears it again—a quiet sniffle, then a low, barely-there laugh like you’re trying to brush it off.

He knocks.

You don’t answer.

"Hey," he says, voice just loud enough to carry but still gentle. "You alright?"

The sound of your chair creaking. A breath caught in your throat.

"Shit—Jack." You swipe at your face automatically, the name out before you think about it.

He steps just inside, not crossing the threshold. "Didn’t mean to scare you."

You shake your head, still blinking fast. "No, I just—burned out. Hit a wall. It’s fine. Nothing serious. Just… one of those days." You try for a joke.

Jack’s eyes sweep the room. The state of your desk. The way your sweater sleeves are pulled down over your hands. He shifts his weight.

There’s a long pause. Then he says, softer, "Can I—?"

You furrow your brows for a moment before nodding.

He steps in and leaves the door slightly cracked open behind him. He remains by the edge of your desk, a respectful distance between you. His presence is quiet but steady, and he doesn't pry with questions.

You exhale slowly, suddenly aware of the sting behind your eyes and how tight your shoulders have been all day. You look down, embarrassed, and when you reach for a tissue, your hand grazes his by accident.

You both freeze.

It’s nothing, really. A brush of skin. But it lands like something else. Not unwelcome. Not forgotten.

Jack doesn’t pull away. But he doesn’t linger, either.

Jack doesn’t move at first. He watches you for a moment longer, the quiet in the room settling unevenly.

"You sure you’re alright?" he asks, voice low, unreadable.

You nod, quick. "Yeah. I’m fine."

It comes too fast. Reflexive. But it lands the way you want it to—firm, closed.

Jack nods slowly. He doesn’t push. "Okay."

He steps back, finally. "Just—don’t stay too late, alright?"

You offer a smaller nod.

He hesitates again. Then turns and slips out without another word.

Your office feels warmer once he’s gone.

And your breath feels just a little easier.

Jack makes his way down the hallway toward the faculty lounge with the intention of grabbing a fresh coffee before his office hours. He passes a few students loitering in the corridor—chatter, laughter, the usual.

But then he hears your voice. Quiet, edged. Just outside the lecture hall.

"Isaac, I’m not having this conversation again. Not here."

Jack slows. Doesn’t stop, but slows and finds a small nook just shy of the corner. 

"I just don’t get why you won’t answer a simple question," Isaac says. "Are you seeing someone else or not?"

There’s a pause. Jack glances down at the coffee in his hand and debates turning around.

But then he hears your exhale—sharp, frustrated. "No. I’m not."

Isaac huffs. "Then what is this? You’re always somewhere else—even when we’re out, even on weekends. It’s like your head’s in another fucking dimension."

Jack feels the hairs on his neck stand up. He sees you standing with your back half-turned to Isaac, arms crossed tightly over your chest. Isaac’s face is flushed, his voice a little too loud for the setting. Your posture is still—too still.

Jack doesn’t step in. Not yet. He stays just out of sight, near the hallway alcove. Close enough to hear. Close enough to watch.

You draw in a long breath. When you speak, your voice is level, cold. "I just don’t think I’m in the right place to be in a relationship right now."

Isaac’s expression shifts—confused, hurt.

Jack watches the edge of your profile. How your shoulders lock into place. How your eyes go distant, like you’re powering down every soft part of yourself.

He doesn’t breathe.

Then someone laughs down the hallway, and the moment breaks. Isaac looks over his shoulder, distracted for half a beat, then turns back to you with something sharp in his eyes.

"You’re not even trying," he says, voice low but biting. "I’m giving you everything I’ve got, and you’re... somewhere else. Always."

You stiffen. Jack stays hidden, tension rippling down his spine.

"I know..." you say, voice tight. "I'm sorry. I really am. But this isn’t working."

Isaac’s face contorts. "Seriously? That’s it?"

You shake your head. "You deserve someone who’s fully here. Who wants the same things you do. I’m not that person right now."

He opens his mouth to say something, but your eyes have already gone cold. Guarded. Clinical.

"I don't want to whip out the 'it's not you it's me bullshit'," you continue, each word deliberate. "But this isn’t about you doing something wrong. It’s me. I can’t give more than I’ve already given."

Jack watches the shift in your posture—how you shut it all down, protect the last open pieces of yourself. He recognizes it because he’s done the same.

"I'm sorry." The words are genuine. "You deserve better." Your eyes don't betray you. For a moment, though, your expression softens. You look at Isaac like a kicked dog, like you wish you could offer something kinder. But then it’s gone. Your eyes go cold again, your voice a blade dulled only by exhaustion.

Then someone laughs again down the hallway, closer this time, and the moment scatters. Jack moves past without a word. Doesn’t look at you directly.

But he sees you.

And he doesn’t forget what he saw.

As he passes, you glance up. Your eyes meet.

Only for a second.

Then he’s gone.

Isaac doesn’t notice.

Time passes. You're back in Jack's office for your regular one-on-one—but something is different.

You sit a little straighter. Speak a little quieter. The bright curiosity you usually carry in your voice has hardened, now precise ,restrained. Not icy, but guarded. Pulled taut.

You’re not trying to be unreadable, but you can feel yourself defaulting. Drawing the boundaries back up.

Jack notices.

He doesn’t say anything, but you catch the slight narrowing of his gaze as he listens.

You’d gone all in on this program, this career—your research, your ambitions, your carefully calculated goals. Isaac was the first time you'd tried letting something else in. A possibility. A softness.

And it crashed. Of course it did.

Because that’s what you do. That’s the pattern. You’re excellent at control, planning, systems, at hypothesis testing and case management. But when it comes to anything outside the academic orbit—connection, trust, letting someone see the jagged pieces under the polish—you flinch. You fail.

And you’ve learned not to let that show. Not anymore.

At one point, you trail off mid-sentence. Jack doesn’t fill the silence.

You clear your throat. Try again.

There’s something steadier in his quiet today. You finally finish your point and glance up. His expression is neutral, but his gaze is… undivided.

"Are you okay?"

It catches you off guard. You blink once, not expecting the question, not from him, not here.

You start to nod. Then pause. Your throat feels tight for a second.

"Yeah," you say. "I’m fine."

Jack doesn’t look away. He holds your gaze a moment longer. Not pressing. Not interrogating. Just there.

"You should know better than to lie to a psychologist."

It’s almost a joke. Almost. Just enough curve at the corner of your mouth to soften it. You let out a breath—half a laugh, half a sigh. "Guess I need to reassess my baseline."

Jack leans forward slightly. Then, without saying anything, reaches over and closes your laptop. Slides it just out of reach on the desk.

You open your mouth to protest.

Jack cuts in, quiet but firm. "You need to turn your brain off before it short circuits."

You blink. He continues, gentler this time. "Just for a few minutes. You don’t have to push through every wall. Sometimes it’s okay to sit still. Breathe. Be a human being."

You look down at your hands, fingers curled around a pen you hadn’t realized you were still holding. There’s a long pause before you speak.

"I don’t know how to do that," you admit, voice barely above a whisper.

Jack doesn’t say anything at first. He lets the silence settle. "Start small," he says. "We’re not built to stay in fight-or-flight forever."

The words land heavier than you expect. You stare down at your hands, your knuckles paling against the pressure of your grip. Your breath stutters on the way out.

Jack doesn’t move, but his presence feels closer somehow—like the room has contracted around the two of you, warm and steady.

You set the pen down slowly. Swallow. Your eyes burn, but nothing falls.

Your jaw shifts. Just a fraction.

You don’t say anything at first.

Jack doesn’t either. But he doesn’t look away.

After a beat, he says—careful, quiet—"You want to talk about it?"

You hesitate, eyes fixed on a crease in your jeans. "No."

He waits. "I think you do."

You laugh under your breath. It’s not funny. "This how you talk to all of your clients?"

He doesn't bite.

"You don’t let up, do you?" You're only half-serious.

"I do," he pauses. "When it matters. Just not when my mentee is sitting in front of me looking like the world’s pressing down on their ribcage."

That makes you flinch. Not visibly, not to most. But he sees it. Of course he does. He’s trained to.

You look at your hands. He's not going to let this go so you might as well bite the bullet. "I'm not great at the whole... letting people in thing."

Jack doesn’t respond. Just shifts his weight slightly in his chair—almost imperceptibly. A silent invitation.

Your voice stays quiet. Measured. "I usually just throw myself into work. It’s easier. It’s something I can control."

Still, he says nothing.

You pick at the seam of your sleeve. "Other stuff... it gets messy. Too unpredictable. People are unpredictable."

Jack’s gaze never wavers. He doesn’t push. But the absence of interruption is its own kind of presence—steady, open.

Your lips twitch in a faint, humorless smile. "I know that’s ironic coming from someone studying emotion regulation."

He finally says, softly, "Sometimes the people who study it hardest are the ones trying to figure it out for themselves."

That makes your eyes flick up. His expression is calm. Receptive. No judgment. No smile, either. Just… presence.

You look down again. Your voice even softer now. "I don’t know how to do it. Not really."

Jack doesn’t interrupt. Just shifts, barely, like bracing.

And somehow, that makes you keep going.

"Grad school’s easier. Career’s easier. I can plan. I can control. Everything else just…" You trail off. Shrug, a flicker of helplessness.

He’s still watching you. The way he does when he’s listening hard, like there’s a string between you and he’s waiting to see if you’ll keep tugging it.

"I thought maybe..." You press your lips together. "I thought I could do it. Let someone in. Be a person. A twenty-nine year old, for fuck's sake." Your hands come up to your face. "But it just reminded me why I don’t."

You draw a slow breath. Something in your chest cracks. Not a collapse—just a fault line giving way.

Jack just stares.

Then, slowly, he leans back—not away, but into the quiet. He folds his hands in his lap, thumb tracing a familiar line over his knuckle. A practitioner’s stillness. A kind of careful permission.

"You know," he says, voice low, "when I first started in trauma research, I thought if I understood it well enough, I could outsmart it. Like if I had the right frameworks, if I mapped the pathways right, it wouldn’t touch me."

You glance up.

He exhales through his nose—dry, but not bitter. "Turns out, knowing the symptoms doesn’t stop you from living them. Doesn’t stop the body from remembering."

He doesn’t specify. Doesn’t have to.

His eyes flick to yours. "But you don’t have to be fluent in trust to start learning it. You don’t have to be good at it yet. You just have to let someone sit with you in the silence."

You study him. The sharpness of his jaw, the quiet behind his glasses, the wear in his voice that doesn’t make it weaker.

Your throat tightens, but you don’t speak.

He doesn’t need you to.

He just stays there—anchored. Steady. Unmoving.

Like he's not waiting for you to come undone.

He's waiting for you to believe you don’t have to.

It's Friday night. You’re walking a participant through the start of a lab assessment—part of the longitudinal stress and memory protocol you’ve spent the last year fine-tuning. The task itself is simple enough: a series of conditioned images, paired with soft tones. But you watch the participant's pulse rise on the screen. Notice the minute shift in posture, the tension in their jaw.

You pause. Slow things down.

"Remember," you say gently, "we’re looking at how your body responds when it doesn’t need to anymore. The point isn’t to trick you—it’s to see what happens when the threat isn’t real. When it’s safe."

The participant nods, still uneasy.

You don’t blame them.

Later, the metaphor clings to you like static from laundry fresh out of the dryer. Fear extinction: the process of unlearning what once kept you alive. Or something close to it.

You think of what Jack said. What he didn’t say. The silence he offered like a landing strip.

It replays in your head more than you'd like to admit—the dim warmth of his office, the soft click of your laptop closing, the unexpected steadiness in his voice. No clinical jargon. No agenda. Just space. Permission.

You remember the way he folded his hands. The faint scuff on the corner of his desk. The way he didn’t fill the air with reassurances or advice. Just stayed quiet until the quiet felt less like drowning and more like floating.

And it had made something in your chest stutter—because you'd spent years studying fear responses, coding reactivity curves and salience windows, mapping out prediction error pathways and understanding affect labeling.

But none of your models accounted for the way someone simply sitting with you could ease the grip of it.

Maybe, you think now, as you log the participant's final response, this is what fear extinction looks like outside of a lab setting. Not just reducing reactivity to a blue square or a sharp tone.

But learning—relearning—how it feels to let another person in and survive it.

Maybe Jack wasn’t offering a solution.

Maybe he was offering proof.

Is this what it looked like in practice? Not just in a scanner or a skin conductance chart—but in the quiet, everyday choice of showing up? Staying? 

Perhaps the data is secondary and this is the experiment.

And maybe, just maybe, you’re already in the middle of it.

The new semester begins in a blur of syllabi updates and shuffled office assignments. It's your final year before internship—a fact that looms and hums in the background like a lamp you can't turn off. You’re no longer the quiet, watchful second-year—you’ve published, you've taught, you've survived.

But you’re also exhausted. You’ve become adept at wearing competence like armor.

Jack is teaching an elective course this semester—Epigenetics of Trauma. You're enrolled in it—a course you didn’t technically need, but couldn’t resist for reasons you cared not to admit. 

When you pass him in the hallway—coffee in one hand, a paper balanced on his clipboard—he stops.

"Did you hear the department finally updated the HVAC?" he asks, and it’s not really about the HVAC.

You nod, a wry smile tugging at your mouth. "Barely. Still feels like a sauna most days."

Jack gestures to your cardigan. "And yet you persist."

You grin. It’s a tiny thing. But it stays.

Later that week, he pokes his head into your office between student meetings.

"You’re on the panel for the trauma symposium, right?"

The one you were flying to at the end of October—thanks to Robby, who had playfully threatened to submit your name himself if you didn’t volunteer. He’d needed someone to piggyback off of, he’d said, and who better than his best grad student—who was also swamped with grant deadlines, dissertation chapters, and a growing list of internship applications. You’d rolled your eyes and said yes, of course, because that’s what you did. And maybe because a part of you liked the challenge, academic mascochism and validation and all. 

You nod. "Talk and discussion."

He steps farther in. "If you’re open to it—I’d like to sit in."

You glance up. "You’ve already read the draft."

Jack smiles. "Doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to hear it out loud."

You lean back slightly, watching him. "You going to grill me from the audience and be that one guy?"

Jack raises an eyebrow, amused. "Wouldn’t dream of it."

You hum. "Mmhm."

But you’re smiling now. Just a little.

It’s not quite vulnerability. Not yet. But it’s a beginning. A reset. The next slow iteration in a long series of exposures. New responses. New learning. Acceptance in the face of uncertainty.

The only way fear ever learns to quiet down.

Robby’s already three beers in and trying to argue that Good Will Hunting is actually a terrible representation of therapy while Mel King—your cohort-mate in the developmental area, always mindful and reserved—defends its emotional core like it’s a thesis chapter she’s still revising in her head.

Mentored by John Shen, Mel studies peer rejection and emotional socialization in early childhood, and she talks about toddlers with the same reverence some people reserve for philosophers. Her dissertation focuses on how early experiences of exclusion and inclusion shape later prosocial behavior, and she can recite every milestone in the Denver Developmental Screening Test like scripture.

She’s known for respectful debates, non-caffeinated bursts of energy, and an uncanny ability to babysit and code data at the same time. The kind of person who shows up with a snack bag labeled for every child at a study visit—and still finds time to coordinate the department's annual "bring your child to work" day. She even makes time to join you and Samira on your Sunday morning farmers market walks, reusable tote slung over one shoulder, ready to talk about plum varieties and which stand has the best sourdough.

Samira Mohan, meanwhile, sits with her signature whiskey sour and a stack of color-coded notecards she pretends not to be working on. She’s in the clinical area too—mentored by Collins—and her work focuses on how minority stress intersects with emotion regulation in underserved populations. Her analyses are razor sharp and sometimes terrifying. Samira rarely speaks unless she knows her words will land precisely—measured, deliberate, the kind of sharp that cuts clean.

Although still in her early prospectus phase, choosing to propose in her fifth year rather than fourth, her dissertation is shaping into a cross-sectional and mixed-methods exploration of how racial and gender minority stressors compound across contexts—academic, familial, and romantic—and the specific emotion regulation repertoires that emerge as survival strategies.

Samira doesn’t stir the pot for fun; she does it when she sees complacency and feels compelled to light a fire under it. That’s the Samira everyone knows and you love—the one who will quietly dismantle your entire line of argument with one clinical observation and a deadpan stare. She does exactly that now, throwing in a quote from bell hooks with the sly smile of someone who knows she’s lit a fuse just to watch it burn. 

It’s a blur of overlapping conversations, familiar inside jokes, cheap spirits, and the particular cadence of a group that knows each other’s pressure points and proposal deadlines down to the day. For a moment you let yourself exist in it—in the din, in the messy affection of your academic family, in the safety you didn’t know you’d built, much less deserved. Samira’s halfway through a story about a disastrous clinical interview when she turns to you, parts her mouth to speak, and looks up behind you—

"So is this where all the cool kids hang out?"

You feel him before you see him—Jack’s presence like a low hum behind you, the soft waft of his cologne cutting through the ambient chatter. The light buzz of conversation has your senses dialed up, awareness prickling at the back of your neck. You don’t turn. You don’t have to.

Robby lets out a loud "whoohoo" as Jack joins the table, hauling him into a bro hug with the miraculously coordinated enthusiasm of someone riding high off departmental gossip. Jack rolls his eyes but doesn’t resist, letting Robby thump his back twice before extracting himself but instead of settling there, he leans down slightly, voice pitched just for you. “Is this seat taken?”

Robby at 12 o'clock, Heather to his left, then Samira, Mel, you, and John. The large circular table meant for twelve suddenly feels exponentially smaller. The tablecloth brushes your knees, heavy and starchy against your lap. You feel warmth creep up your cheeks—probably from the alcohol (definitely not from anything else)—and scoot over slightly closer to Mel, giving him room to squeeze in between you and John. You can feel the shift in the air, the proximity of his sleeve against yours, the silent knowledge that he's there now—anchored in your orbit.

He slides in beside you with a quiet murmur of thanks, the space between your arms barely more than a breath. The conversation continues, but the air feels a little different now.

He nods politely to Shen on his left, mutters something about being tricked into another committee, then glances your way—dry, amused, measured.

Always measured.

You feel Jack beside you—not just his sleeve brushing yours, but his presence, calm and dense as gravity. His knee bumps yours beneath the table once, lightly, maybe unintentional. Maybe not. The cologne still lingers faintly and you try to focus on what Samira is saying about peer-reviewed journals versus reviewer roulette, but it’s impossible to ignore the warmth radiating from his side, the way your skin registers it before your brain does. He's like a human crucible. You keep your gaze trained forward, sipping your drink a little too casually, pretending you don’t notice the way your heartbeat’s caught in your throat.

The charged air gives you a spike of bravery—fleeting, foolish, and just enough. Before you let the doubt creep into your veins, you nudge your knee toward Jack’s beneath the table, thankful for the tablecloth concealing the movement. You feel him exhale beside you—quiet, but unmistakable—and something inside you hums in response.

You feel Jack’s thigh tense against yours. The contact lingers, neither of you moving. Moments pass. Nothing happens.

So you cross your legs slowly, right over left, deliberately, letting the heel of your shoe graze his calf.

He stills.

The conversation around the table doesn’t pause, but you’re aware of every breath, every shift in weight beside you. The air between you tightens, stretched across the tension of everything unsaid.

Everyone else is occupied—Robby and Shen deep in conversation about conference logistics, Heather and Samira bickering over which of them was the worse TA, Mel nodding along and adding commentary between sips of cider. Jack sees the opening and seizes it.

He leans in, just slightly, until his shoulder brushes yours again—barely perceptible. "Subtle," he murmurs, voice pitched low, teasing.

You arch a brow, still facing forward. “I have no idea what you're talking.”

"Of course not," he says, dry. "Just sudden interest in the hem of the tablecloth, is it?"

You swirl your drink, letting the glass tilt in your fingers. "I’m a tactile learner. You know this."

He huffs a quiet breath—could almost be a laugh. "Must make data cleaning a thrilling experience."

"Only when R crashes mid-run." You angle your knee back toward his under the table, a soft bump like punctuation.

Jack tilts his head slightly, eyes flicking to yours. "Dangerous territory."

"Afraid of a little ambiguity, professor?"

His mouth twitches at the title. 

You sip slowly, buying time, letting the quiet between you stretch like a drawn breath. His thigh is still pressed against yours. Still unmoving. Still deliberate.

"You always like to push your luck this much?" you murmur, keeping your eyes trained on your drink.

Jack hums low. "Only when the risk feels... calculated."

You glance at him, the corner of your mouth twitching. "Bit of a reward sensitivity bias tonight, Dr. Abbot?"

He shrugs. "You’ve been unintentionally reinforcing bad behavior."

You smirk, but say nothing, letting the conversation around you swell again. Robby starts ranting about departmental politics, Heather counters with a story about a grant mix-up that almost ended in flames. You sip your drink, Samira taps her notecards absently against her palm.

The rest of the evening hums on, warm and loose around the edges. When it finally winds down—people slowly gathering coats, hugging their goodbyes—you rise with the group, still a little buzzed, still aware of Jack’s presence beside you like heat that never quite left your side.

Under the soft yellow glow of the dim lobby chandelier, everyone says their goodnights—laughing, tipsy, hugging, good vibes all around. Jack is the last to leave the circle, and as you turn toward the elevator, you glance over your shoulder at him. "See you tomorrow," you say. "Last day of the conference—only the most boring panels left."

Jack lifts a brow. "You wound me."

You grin. "I’m just saying—if you show up in sweats and a baseball cap for your presentation, I’ll pretend not to know you."

The elevator dings. The doors slide open. You step inside, leaning against the railing. Jack stays behind. 

"Goodnight," he says, eyes lingering. You nod, then turn, pressing the button for your floor. Just as the doors begin to glide shut, a hand slides into the narrow threshold—the border between hesitation and something else.

Palm flat against the seam. That sliver of metal and air.

He steps in slowly. Quiet. And presses the button for the same floor.

The doors slide shut behind him with a soft hiss.

Silence hums between you.

You don’t speak. Neither does he. But your awareness of each other sharpens—your breath shallow, his jaw tense. The elevator jolts into motion.

Jack shifts slightly, turning his body just enough to lean back against the railing—mirroring you. His arm grazes yours. Then the back of his hand brushes against your knuckles.

A spark—not metaphorical, not imagined—zips down your arm.

Neither of you pulls away.

You glance sideways.

He’s already looking at you.

Your eyes meet—held, quiet.

Not a word is exchanged. But something breaks—clean and sharp, like a snapped circuit. Long-simmering, unvoiced tension rising to the surface, clinging to the pause between heartbeats and motion-sensor lighting.

Jack leans in—not tentative, not teasing. Just close enough that his breath grazes your cheek. Your breath catches. His proximity feels like a fuse. He’s watching you—steady, unreadable. But you feel the pressure in the air shift, charged and thick.

"I don’t know what this is," you finally whisper. Your throat feels incredibly dry. A sharp juxtaposition to the state of your undergarments. 

Jack’s voice dips low. "I think we’ve both been trying not to look too closely."

Your chest tightens. His hand twitches by his side. Flexing. Gripping. Restraint unraveling. His breath shallows, matching yours—fast, hungry, starved of oxygen and logic. And then, like a spark to dry kindling, you thread your fingers through his.

Heat erupts between your palms, a jolt that hits your spine. You don’t flinch. You don’t pull away. You tighten your grip.

He exhales—shaky, like it’s cost him everything not to close the distance between your mouths. The electricity is unbearable, like a dam on the edge of collapse.

And still, neither of you move. Not quite yet.

But the air is thick with the promise: the next breach will not be small.

The elevator dings.

You both flinch—just barely.

The doors slide open.

You release his hand slowly, fingers slipping apart like sand through mesh, reluctant and slow but inevitable. Jack's hands stay in a slightly open grip. 

"I should..." you begin, breath catching. You clear your throat. "Goodnight, Jack."

Your voice is soft. Almost too soft.

Jack nods once. Doesn’t reach again. Doesn’t follow.

"Goodnight," he says. Low, warm. Weighted.

You step out. Don’t look back.

The doors begin to close.

You glance over your shoulder, once—just once.

Your eyes meet through the narrowing gap.

Then the doors seal shut, quiet as breath.

For now.

Contrary to Samira's reappraisal of you joining her for Friday night drinks, you begrudgingly allow her to drag you out of your cave. Just the two of you—girls’ night, no work talk allowed, and no saying "I need to work on my script" more than once. She makes you wear lip gloss and a top that could almost be considered reckless, and you down two tequila sodas before you even start to loosen your shoulders.

You’re halfway through your third drink when a pair of guys approaches—normal-looking, vaguely grad-school adjacent, maybe from public health or law school. Samira gives you a look that says seems safe enough, and you need this, and so you nod. You dance.

The one paired off with you is tall, not unpleasant. He asks before he touches you—his hand at your waist, then your hip, then lightly over your ribs. You nod, give consent. He smells like good cologne and something sugary, and he’s saying all the right things.

But something feels wrong.

You realize it halfway through the song, when his hand brushes the curve of your waist again, gentle and careful and... wrong. Too polite. Too other.

You think of the way Jack’s fingers had curled between yours. The heat of his palm against yours for a single minute in the elevator. The way he hadn’t touched you anywhere else—but it had felt like everything.

You close your eyes, trying to ground yourself. But you can’t stop comparing.

You’ve danced with this stranger for five whole minutes, and it hasn’t come close to the electricity of the sixty seconds you spent not speaking, not kissing, not touching anything else in the elevator with Jack.

It shouldn’t mean anything but it means everything. 

You step back, thanking the guy politely, claiming a bathroom break. He nods, not pushy, already scanning the room.

Samira follows a song change later. "You okay?"

You nod. Then shake your head. Then say, "I think I might be fucked."

Samira just hands you a tissue, already knowing. She looks understanding. Like she sees it, too—and she's not going to mock you for it.

"Yep," she says gently while fixing a stray baby hair by your ear. "Saw it the second Jack joined us for drinks that night." 

The night air feels cooler after the club, like the city is exhaling with you. You and Samira walk back toward the rideshare pickup, her arm looped loosely through yours.

You don’t say anything for a long moment. She doesn’t push.

"I don’t even know what it is," you murmur eventually. "I just know when that guy touched me, it felt like wearing someone else’s coat. Warm, sure, but not mine."

Samira hums in agreement. "Jack feels like your coat?"

"No," you sigh. Then, after a beat, quieter, "He feels like the one thing I forgot I was cold without."

She doesn’t say anything. Not right away. Just squeezes your hand. "So what’re you gonna do about it?"

"Scream. Cry. Have a pre-doctoral crisis," you say flatly.

Samira snorts. "So… Tuesday." You bite back a smile, shoving her shoulder lightly but appreciating the comedic diffusion nonetheless.

She exhales through her nose, gentler now. "If it’s any consolation, I see the way he looks at you."

Your eyes flick toward her. She continues, tone still soft, sincere. "Not just that night during drinks, but during your flash talk. I’ve never seen him that… emotive. It was like he was mesmerized. And even back during seminar last year, when he was filling in for Robby? Same thing. I remember thinking, damn, he listens to her like she’s rewriting gravity."

You should feel elated. Giddy. Instead, you bury your face in your hands and emit a sound that can only be described as a dying pterodactyl emitting its final screech. "I hate my fucking life." 

"It's going to be okay!" Samira tries to hide her laughter but it comes through anyway, making you laugh through teary eyes. "You will be okay." 

You shake your head back and forth, trying to make yourself dizzy in hopes that this was all a dream. 

"Who was it that said 'boys are temporary, education is forever?'" Samira all-but-sang. 

"Do not quote me right now, Mira," you groan, dragging the syllables like they physically pain you. "I am but a husk with a degree-in-progress."

The week that follows is both everything and nothing. You go to class. You show up to lab meetings. You present clean analyses and nod through questions from the new cohort of freshmen. You even draft two paragraphs of your discussion section. One of three discussion sections. It looks like functioning.

Since submitting the last batch of internship applications, your dissertation committee meetings have gone from once a week with each member to once every three. You'd already run all of your main studies, had all the data cleaned and collated, and even coded all of the analyses you intended on running. Now all that was left was the actual writing and compiling of it all for a neat, hundred-or-so-page manuscript that no one would read. 

It’s your first meeting with Jack since flying back from the conference.

In all honesty, you hadn’t given it much thought. Compartmentalization had become a survival strategy, not a skill. It helped you meet deadlines, finish your talk, submit your final batch of internship applications—all while pretending nothing in that elevator happened. At least not in any way that mattered.

Now, seated outside his office with your laptop open and your third coffee in hand, you realize too late: you never really prepared for this part. The after.

You hear the door open behind you. A familiar cadence of steps—steady but slightly uneven. You know that gait.

"Hey," Jack says, as calm and neutral as ever. Like you didn’t almost combust into each other two weeks ago.

You glance up. Smile tight. "Hey."

"Come in?"

You nod. Stand. Follow him inside.

The office is the same as it’s always been—overcrowded with books, one stack threatening to collapse near the filing cabinet. You sit in your usual chair. He sits in his. The silence is comfortable. Professional.

It shouldn’t feel like a loss.

Jack taps a few keys on his laptop. "You sent your methods revisions?"

"Yesterday," you say. "Just a few small clarifications."

He hums. Nods. Clicks something open.

You sip your coffee. Pretend the sting behind your ribs is just caffeine.

The moment stretches.

He finally speaks. "You look… tired."

You smile, faint and crooked. “It’s November.”

Jack lets out a quiet laugh. Then scrolls through the document, silent again.

But the air between you feels thinner now. Like something’s missing. Or maybe like something’s waiting.

He reads.

You watch him.

Not just glance. Not just notice. Watch.

Your coffee cools in your hands, untouched.

He doesn't ask why you weren't at the symposium he moderated. Or if you were running on caffeine and nerves from recent deadlines. And definitely not why you booked an earlier flight home from the conference.

You search his face like it might hold an answer—though you’re not entirely sure what the question is. Something about the last two weeks. The way he hasn’t said anything. The way you haven’t either. The way both of you pretended, remarkably well, that everything was the same.

But Jack’s expression doesn’t change. Not noticeably. He just skims the screen, fingers occasionally tapping his trackpad. The glow from his monitor traces the line of his jaw.

Still, you keep looking. Like maybe if you study him hard enough, you’ll find a hint of something there.

A crack. A tell. A memory.

But he stays unreadable.

Professional.

And you hate that it hurts.

It eats at you.

Why does it hurt?

You knew better than to let this happen. To let it get this far. This was never supposed to be anything other than professional, clinical, tidy. But somewhere between all the late-night edits and long silences, the boundaries started to blur like ink in water. 

You tell yourself to turn it off. That part in your brain responsible for—this—whatever it was. Romantic projection, limerence, foolishness. You’d diagnose it in a heartbeat if it weren’t your own.

You just need to get through this meeting. This last academic year. Then you'd be somewhere far away for internship, and then graduated. That’s all.

Then you could go back to pretending you’re fine. That everything was okay.

The entire time you’d been staring—not at Jack, not directly—but just past his shoulder, toward the bookshelves. Not really seeing them. Just trying to breathe.

Jack had already finished reading through your edits. He read them last night, actually—when your email came through far too late. He’d learned to stay up past his usual bedtime about two weeks into joining your committee.

But he wasn’t just reading. Not now.

He was watching. Noticing the subtle shifts in your brow, the tension at the corners of your mouth. You didn’t look at him, but he didn’t need you to.

Jack studied people for a living. He’d made a career out of it.

And right now, he was studying you.

You snap yourself out of it. A light head bobble. A few quick blinks. A swallow. "All done?" you ask, voice dry. Almost nonchalant, like you hadn’t been staring through him trying to excavate meaning.

Jack lifts an eyebrow, subtle, but nods. "Yeah. Looks solid."

You nod back. Like it’s just another meeting. Like that’s all it ever was.

Then you close your laptop a little too quickly. "I think I’m gonna head out early, I don’t feel great," you offer, keeping your tone breezy, eyes still somewhere over his shoulder.

Jack doesn’t call you on it. Not outright.

But he watches you too long. Like he’s flipping through every frame of this scene in real time, and none of it quite adds up.

"Alright," he says finally. Even. Quiet. "Feel better."

You nod again, already halfway to the door.

You don’t look back.

"Hey—" Jack’s voice catches, right as the door swings shut.

Your hand freezes on the handle.

You hesitate.

But you don’t turn around.

Just one breath.

Then you keep walking.

You make it halfway down the hall before you realize your hands are shaking.

Not much. Barely. Just enough that when you fish your phone out of your coat pocket to check the time, your thumb slips twice before you unlock the screen.

He’d called your name.

And maybe that wouldn’t mean anything—shouldn’t mean anything—except Jack Abbot isn’t the type to call out without a reason. You’ve worked with him long enough to know that. Observed him enough in clinical and classroom settings. Hell, you’ve studied men like him—hyper-controlled, slow to show their hand. You’d written an entire paper on the paradox of behavioral inhibition in high-functioning trauma survivors and then realized, two weeks into seminar, that the paragraph on defensive withdrawal could’ve been subtitled See: Jack Abbot, Case Study #1.

You’d meant to file that away and forget it.

You haven’t forgotten it.

And now you're walking fast, maybe too fast, through the undergrad psych wing like the answer might be waiting for you in your lab inbox or the fluorescence of your office.

You don’t stop until you’re behind a locked door with your laptop powered off and your hands braced on either side of your desk.

You breathe.

In through your nose. Out through your mouth.

Again.

Again.

Still—when you close your eyes, you see the look on his face.

That same unreadable stillness.

Like he wanted to say something else.

Like he knew something else. And maybe—maybe—you did too.

[strangererotica]

EXPLICIT CONTENT | MINORS DNI

Art the Clown x Reader smut | blood, cum play, choking, dubious consent, victim reader, vaginal fingering, rough oral (reader receiving) only read if comfortable consuming dark content

🤍🖤♥️ 🤍🖤♥️ 🤍🖤♥️ 🤍🖤♥️ 🤍🖤♥️ 🤍🖤♥️

The last things you should have remembered were the feel of his fingernails digging into your throat, the hot wash of his breath across your face. Your consciousness began to fade, the details of the world around you melting into an inky well of nothingness, of peace. Of Death. But just as you’d grown comfortable in the palm of eternity’s hand, it released you. Hell wouldn’t have you so soon, and neither would Death. Because despite your body’s weary yearnings, the Devil wasn’t finished playing with you yet…

Lurching back to consciousness, your eyes snapped open onto the clown. His black gaze, framed in stark white, carved through your skull like a rusted dagger. His sick smile, painted black, spread wider over his blood-spattered face. You shivered in his grip, his hands still wrapped around your throat, effortlessly pinning you in place against the bathroom wall. Without freeing you in the slightest, the clown removed one hand from your throat and let it drop to his side. He stared at you, unmoving, watching in silent amusement as you writhed under his grip.

Slowly, methodically, the clown dragged his lowered hand along your hip. His fingers played with the plump flesh there, pressing into the softness covering your bones. His touch was curious, experimental; he was studying you. With your back still fixed against the wall, you couldn’t drop your eyes to see what he was doing; but you felt everything. The clown’s hand dipped between your legs, his blood-slicked fingers nestling around the curves of your cunt. In a twisted act of betrayal, your body responded to his touch, your clit pulsing against the clown’s filthy touch.

His smile never wavered, and you found yourself unable to meet his eyes, knowing you’d see your own aroused, shameful expression mirrored in their dark reflection. He teased his fingers between your lips, gently spreading you. The crusted fabric of his gloves scratched just right against your clit, and you found yourself lightly humping at the friction, chasing the stimulation and hating yourself for it all at once. Without warning, he sank two fingers inside you, his eyebrows twitching in delight as you moaned in response. He continued to fuck you, one hand around your throat and the other inside you, till your legs were trembling against the wall he had you pinned against. Warm liquid dripped down your inner thighs, and whether it was blood or cum, you couldn’t have cared less. Growling weakly under the clown’s control, you allowed the sick, forbidden pleasure of his touch to guide you to climax. Bucking on top of his hand, you came with a guttural sob as he continued to hold your throat (and life) in the palm of one hand, and your cunt in the other.

He tore his fingers from inside you, enjoying the way you winced at the sting. Pulling you down by your throat, the clown had you on your knees in front of him. The sound of fabric tearing was followed immediately by a dull pressure filling your ears as the clown shoved his member between your lips. Your vision was blurry, a mix of black and white lurching together in front of you as the clown brutally took your throat for his own pleasure. That feeling of fading returned, consciousness dimming in your peripheral as he once again denied you oxygen. Your eyelids fluttered, gaze drifting upward and meeting his, drops of sweat and blood trickling down his forehead as he fucked you within an inch of life.

Ripping himself suddenly from your throat, the clown threw you onto your stomach. The cold tiled floor stung as your bruised, bare skin made hard contact with it. He ripped at the already-torn fabric of your tank top, exposing your back completely as he crouched over you. Thick, warm drops of semen spattered your skin, the clown panting softly as he relieved himself onto you. Moments later, you felt his fingers gliding over your back, manipulating his release into what felt like curves and shapes on your skin.

The clown rose to his feet over you, admiring his work. You heard him take a step backward, and looked discreetly to see what he was doing. Reaching for a large black garbage bag, the clown slid the knife he’d used to pierce your skin earlier inside it. You felt a rush of hope suddenly, seeing that he chose not to retrieve any new weapons from the bag. He tucked his cock back inside his clothes, the tear he’d made to fuck you visible in the front of his costume. He slung the bag over his shoulder, the metallic clinking of knives and god-knows-what-other kinds of weaponry sending a shiver down your spine, along with his cum growing cold on your back. With a final flash of his sick, wide grin, the clown waved goodbye and left the room.

You waited a good ten minutes to make sure he was really gone before you dared to move. Clutching the sink for support, you shakily lifted yourself upright, your thighs trembling as you willed yourself to stand. You reached for a towel from the dispenser, running it under some warm water and bringing it behind you to clean yourself up. But before you wiped away the cold, jellied cum from your back, you were able to clearly read what the clown had used his fingers to write in it: “A-R-T.”

[blasphemyandbackshots]

Blue Lock men and how they eat you out 👀

Rin Itoshi

methodical. merciless. unshakeable focus.

he stares up at you the entire time, eyes locked on yours like he’s studying your every reaction and learning what ruins you.

grips your thighs hard to keep you open and in place, ignoring your trembling as he sucks hard on your clit like he means to leave you sobbing.

drags the flat of his tongue up and down slow, building pressure like a silent threat before switching to quick, punishing flicks.

moans low into you when you beg, gets soaked in your slick and refuses to stop until you’re twitching.

“you’re not leaving this bed until I memorize every sound you make.”

Barou Shoei

possessive. messy. domineering.

buries his face in your pussy like he’s starving and you are the only thing that can feed him.

growls against you, tongue plunging inside before switching to sloppy, aggressive sucking like he’s marking you with every lick.

grabs your ass, pulls you harder into his mouth and grinds his face against you while whispering filth about how no one else gets to taste you like this.

hates when you try to squirm away, he’ll just manhandle you right back down.

“don’t run from it. you begged for this, remember?”

Bachira Meguru

playful. teasing. sweet but unhinged.

kisses your thighs and giggles between licks, talking to your pussy like it’s a person. “you miss me? yeah? I missed you too. ”

switches from kitten licks to filthy sucking without warning, just to see your back arch.

uses his tongue and fingers together, curling them up at just the right angle while he suckles your clit like a popsicle.

gets turned on by the taste, literally hums into you like you’re dessert and talks you through every orgasm.

“you make the prettiest noises when I suck on this sweet little pussy.”

Isagi Yoichi

attentive. passionate. praise-heavy.

starts soft with sweet kisses and slow tongue strokes. he worships your body.

constantly checks in, murmuring between licks. “that feel good, baby? want more?”

once you’re begging, his whole demeanor shifts. he grabs your hips and devours you with a mix of hunger and awe.

loves giving you multiple orgasms. he needs you to know how good he can make you feel.

“you taste so fucking good. look at you falling apart for me.”

Nagi Seishiro

lazy but dangerous. controlled chaos.

lies down and lets you sit on his face, but don’t let the laziness fool you, he’ll have you shaking in minutes.

uses long, deep licks and sucks on your clit like it’s second nature.

moans into your pussy because it turns him on too, his big hands squeezing your thighs like he wants you to stay there forever.

gets annoyed if you try to get off too soon. “mm, I’m not done yet…”

“you’re cute when you squirm. sit still. I’ll make it feel better.”

Reo Mikage

charming. obsessive. a little depraved.

goes down on you like it’s a full-course meal prepared just for him.

makes eye contact while his tongue circles your clit, deliberately slow. he wants you to watch him pleasure you.

talks to you while licking. “you’re dripping so much for me, baby… you like when I do this?”

will keep you overstimulated with fingers curling up inside and tongue working overtime. might even tie your hands just to tease.

“you don’t even have to ask. I’ll eat this pretty pussy every night if you let me.”

Kunigami Rensuke

gentle giant. respectful but filthy in private.

goes down on you with quiet reverence, like it’s sacred. big hands wrap around your thighs, spreading you slow, making sure you’re ready for his mouth.

at first, he kisses you like he’s making love to your pussy. sweet, steady strokes of his tongue that build until you’re whimpering.

once you’re shaking, though? he loses it. moaning against your clit, holding you down with brute strength, like he needs your orgasm.

always praises you. “so good for me… you taste so sweet… come on, baby, I’ve got you.”

“don’t be shy. let go for me. I can take it. I want to.”

Chigiri Hyoma

focused. passionate. lethally pretty.

loves watching your thighs tremble around his head. he looks up at you with those long lashes and smirks like he knows exactly how ruined you’re about to be.

skilled as hell with his tongue. graceful, rhythmic flicks against your clit while his fingers curl perfectly inside.

will drag it out just to hear you beg. “you’re close? you sure? mmm, I don’t think you’re quite there yet.”

afterwards, he lies between your thighs with a swollen mouth and flushed cheeks, smug as hell.

“god, you’re beautiful like this… keep moaning like that and I might never stop.”

[swtheartz]

“ LIKE STRAWBERRIES. ” — M. Grayson

Part one Info : Suggestive content, implied spit kink, healer reader, reader is lowk oblivious, slow burn

W / C : 2k A / N : found the PERFECT strawberry divider off of pinterest from a rentry source i lit need to find it again because it’s sooo cute??? like what. anyway here’s ur guys’ treat eat up

You’ve noticed that Mark lingers.

Not even from a distance, either. No. He has to be a fucking weirdo about it. As pretty as he is, because handsome simply isn’t enough to describe him, he isn’t that bright when it comes to you. There is nothing subtle about it. Sam notices. Rex notices. And of course, Stedman notices. Everyone. Notices.

Except for Invincible himself.

And it pisses you off. Because for someone like him, he could at least be more aware outside of combat. You knew he was a dork, but not even you believed it to be this bad—it’s almost embarrassing. No, scratch that, it is embarrassing. Mostly embarrassing for you. Because Mark Grayson simply never. stops. staring.

Especially now.

“You redecorated,” Mark notes, staring at the newer posters on the wall and a new vase with honeysuckle placed inside as he sits on the usual bed you demand he sits on, waiting to be healed. “It’s nice.”

“If you don’t shut the hell up and let me work.” You groan, staring at the samples you’ve been testing. It’s something you’ve been working on for some time, a little over two months now. After accidentally crying over one of your plants, and yes it was because you’d been too busy to water it, you’d realized that it wasn’t just your hands that could heal. For now. . . You were limiting the experiments to tears.

Finding out new ways to cry was getting tiring, though. And your eyes hurt. If Stedman realized what you were working on, he’d be elated; in his own weird and subtle way. A more efficient approach to healing had been found simply because you forgot to water a plant.

To be fair, they were your prettiest African violets that you simply refused to let go of. And you could proudly say they were now thriving.

“What are you working on?” Mark questions, peeking over your shoulder as you test the percentage of how much is necessary for effective healing. You paused for a second, thinking about the fact you had a test subject right there. One that would be more than willing.

Slowly, you set down the tiny cup that had your tears mixed in with water, leaning back into our swivel chair with as calm of an expression that you could muster—before looking up at him through your lashes.

“Mark,” you hum sweetly, immediately, his eyebrows furrow. You’ve been calling him by his full name for half a year, and that was only because he begged you to stop calling him by Invincible for three weeks straight. The confusion in his face made you tilt your head, blinking innocently.

“I need you to test something for me. Nothing life threatening, unfortunately, but it is important. And I would rather be roasted on a spit than have anyone else test it.”

“. . . I feel like you’re trying to poison me.”

“If I wanted to do that,” you smile, grabbing a cup with a higher potency, “I would have done it the second time around when you ended up here. Just drink this.”

Mark takes the cup from your hand, incredulous and curious all at the same time. It’s clear that he’s going over his options here, and he’d much rather die than let someone else be your lab rat, you know that much. A sigh leaves him as he drinks it, and he blinks.

“It’s just water.” He mumbles, confused. It must be tasteless, maybe a little salty, but probably not even noticeable. At first, you think it’s a failure, before he makes a noise and that new gash on his cheek mends itself back together, the bruise on his neck from basically being choked fades away in a matter of moments. Not as quick as your usual method, but still effective and efficient.

The result is satisfying. Though, you sit in your chair and think about how you should’ve given him a lower dose just to study it for a little longer. Regardless, it’s still the effect of you, and that is more than enough in your eyes. Just. . . You didn’t want to waste time trying to make yourself cry and mixing it with water, just to heal some wounds on heroes that could surely wait it out. Heal naturally.

“What was that?” He seems almost dazed, still confused, but somewhat fascinated.

“My tears mixed with some water.”

“Wha-? Your tears? I just drank your tears?”

“I’m gonna try spit next time you come here,” you say absentmindedly, writing something down so you can store away the data for later and even more research. You believe you gave him some that had twenty five percent? Something like that. It’s a rough estimate, but a little more practice and you’ll get something more accurate. No, you don’t notice the way Mark nearly chokes on air at your blunt statement, having to stop himself from making any more noise.

He doesn’t want to ask if you’re serious or not. Knowing you, you’d just stare blankly at him and tell him to figure it out, so instead, he slowly nods and sits back down, finally letting you work in silence as he spaced out.

The next time he does end up there, you decide it’s perfect to test your newer mixture. Arguably, it’d worked pretty good on another plant that you had sacrificed, even better than it did on your beloved violets. It was nothing but a fern, but the result was amazing.

You were excited to see the results on a human. Hell, the first time you’d felt actual excitement in forever. This was, for the first time in a long time, something new. Saliva was most definitely your limit in this little experiment of yours, however, and then you’d let Stedman know of your discoveries after.

After—you have your fun with your annoying fucking lab rat.

“Are you sure this is safe? You could, you know, always heal me the usual way?”

“Mark, are you saying I have a nasty mouth?” You stare at him, holding the small plastic cup in your hand. You’d had the decency to mix it in with water, the same as you did with your tears, and figured he wouldn’t even taste it. The way he softens up as you say his name is something you can’t miss. But it is something you can ignore.

He shakes his head and sighs, but still seems reluctant.

“If you don’t want to, you don’t have to. If my tears worked just fine, then I’m pretty sure this will too; this is just for confirmation at best.”

Mark stares for a few moments, before he ultimately takes the cup and stares at it. Now, usually, you can read him quite easily. He’s the type to have the worst poker face known to man, and you’re not quite used to the almost contemplative look on his face. It’s quiet for a few moments, before he drinks it.

Slowly.

Your nose scrunches at that, because whether or not he realizes it, he’s drinking it at what you consider a snail’s pace for no reason. Still, you say nothing, simply crossing your arms across your chest as he finishes. As you thought, the effect is much more immediate than it was with your tears. Quicker. Comparable to when you use your hands. A good result—hell, an even better result than you expected.

He takes a second, before shrugging. “Tastes like water.”

“It’s supposed to, dipshit.”

“Strawberries.”

“Yeah.”

“You were grocery shopping,” You glance between him and the random two pound container of strawberries he’d given you, dark red and ripe. “And decided that it’d be a good idea to get your coworker. . . Strawberries.”

Mark exhales, mask and goggles still on, yet you can tell he’s pouting.

“I would prefer it if you just called us friends.”

“We’re coworkers, Markus. And even calling us that is pushing it,” You roll your eyes, opening the container and staring at one of the larger, darker strawberries that looked just perfect enough to bite into. But you had some decorum. You were gonna go home, wash these, let them soak,  and try not to eat them in one sitting. You don’t like how well Mark has started to understand what your tastes were. Especially when you had made it such a point not to tell him anything.

“Mark. Just, for the love of whatever god is out there, call me Mark.”

“I condemn you, Grayson. I curse you.” The groan that leaves him at the fact he’s seemingly downgraded from his full first name back to last name nearly makes you crack a smile, but you refrain from doing so. Letting him know that you didn’t want him to perish in the slightest would make him want to be around more, and you needed to work, and you can’t work with a 5’11” man with pure muscle constantly in your personal space.

The GDA was swamping you with more patients, more frequent incidents, and now you feel like an office worker; which, as stupid as it sounds, is what you were trying to avoid by working here. What you hoped to avoid, because you were different. You were a goddamn healer.

The two of you stare at each other—at least, you’d like to believe it’s a staring contest. You can’t tell if he’s looking or not, but he sure can tell with the way you purposely hold eye contact, not even daring to look away. Like he deserved to be scolded for thinking about you when he saw some fruit.

“Would you have, I don’t know, preferred peaches or something?” Mark’s question is genuine, and he’s the one pinching the bridge of his nose this time, like a disappointed parent. You scowl at that. Again, you plop down in your swivel chair, glaring at him as you cross your legs.

He knows the answer to that. No, you wouldn’t have preferred peaches, even though you have a tendency to inhale any fruit placed in front of you. Strawberries were, frankly, put on a pedestal by you. It undeniably showed, and you didn’t like that one bit. You didn’t like being able to read. And while it isn’t your fault that he stubbornly refused to leave your side, refuses to stop analyzing and staring at you, you’re still upset.

“I want you out. I have work.”

“You always have work!”

“Of course I always have work, do you see what my job is?! You know what, I’m gonna feed these to your little brother in front of you, and then I’m gonna withhold him from you for the rest of the week.”

“His name is Oliver, memorize names. Please, just memorize names and use them,” he pleads, pulling his goggles and mask off with an exasperated noise.

“Oh, I know everyone’s names. And their birthdays, including yours.” You state bluntly, waving your pencil at him, “I just don’t care. I want you to know how stupid your hero name is, too.”

“To hell with you.”

“I cursed you first!”

Later on, Mark watches as Oliver eats the slice of strawberry shortcake you’d given him after the incident with the Mauler twins, which you’d given him in exchange for a promise that he’d listen to his older brother. He watches as Cecil takes you purposely out of earshot, watches the two of you argue, watches Cecil end the argument on his terms and walk away while you give a resigned shake of your head.

Later on, Mark can catch the scent of strawberries coming from your ward as you work late at night, and he smiles to himself. He remembers the taste of that diluted water you’d given him, uncaring for the healing factor of it.

He was more focused on the fact that you tasted like strawberries.

TAG LIST : @lxluvsmoney @koilikesthefishy @broicouldjustbuyyousomekombucha @tokoyamisstuff @pookiei-bookie @treeteaofversailles

[mochinomnoms]

Helllooooo, Hope you have a fab week this week and so excited for the posting schedule.

I was wondering if you had any head canons for courting Floyd vs Jade. They likely would have been taught the same things from mama and papa leech, but I would love to hear their take on it and how they differ in your mind

My personal headcanon is that Narissa Leech saw her future husband talking to some random merperson, saw red, and decided to kidnap him in jealousy.

Now. Normally. This would be extremely offputting to people, and that's putting it nicely. Normally. However, Bruno Leech was absolutely smitten with his future wife since he first saw her and often followed her like a lovesick puppy, which she thought was funny. So getting kidnapped was a dream come true for him, and to him was a result of Narissa finally accepting him.

Thus, the twins' idea of courting is a bit...skewed. Thankfully their grandmother has much more normal stories to tell about her experiences (she's utterly confused as to how and why her daughter and grandsons turned out so weird). Both of them take after one of their parents in similar, but ironically bit more mellow ways.

Floyd is a mix of his parents: he enjoys being chased and chasing after his crush. He wants to have fun, he wants to see them get riled up in every and anyway! Floyd does mix in a few more traditional courting stuff in, such as giving random trinkets he found that reminds him of his crush. He also enjoys any form of physical contact with them, whether squeezing them against his chest or throwing an arm around their shoulders. He is a more likely to confront them if he notices that someone else is flirting with his crush. While he won't kidnap then or really is even prone to jealousy like his mother, Floyd will very bluntly state "I'm already courtin' em, go find someone more your league little guppy." glowering until the other party has run off to turn back to his crush with a lazy grin and present them with another pretty rock he found.

Jade takes after their father more, not necessarily in his passivity, but in that sort of lovesick mindset. I might be biased due to my fic, but I like to think that once Jade falls, he falls hard. All he'd like to do is quietly and secretly follow after his crush and study them like he does his mushrooms. He wants to know them intimately far before they ever get together, he wants to know everything down to what sock they prefer to put on first so that he can mold himself to be the very best and most accommodating mate he can be. In his head, if he's perfect, fitting into his crush like a puzzle piece, then they too will have no choice but to fall for him back. However, Jade does inherit his mother's nasty jealous streak, and depending on the situation, may or may not be inclined to put his competition out of service.

Thanks to their grandmother's influence and chastising, their parents have pushed for the two to at least try and follow proper mer courting methods. It's just ironic that the more impulsive of the two will follow those naturally, while the other more "levelheaded" one is more likely to act like a mix of a school girl with a crush and a serial stalker.

[vesearlee]

──── 𝑺𝒖𝒓𝒑𝒓𝒊𝒔𝒆 𝑭𝒍𝒊𝒈𝒉𝒕

Normally, when Caleb had to make it up to you, he had methods he had perfected; made tried and true over the span of time that stretched from childhood to adulthood. Only, this time, an accomplice was thrown into the mix to sweeten the deal, and it swayed you in his favour faster than you could comprehend the sudden, unique side kick.

𝐏𝐀𝐈𝐑𝐈𝐍𝐆 ── Caleb x F!Reader 𝐖𝐎𝐑𝐃 𝐂𝐎𝐔𝐍𝐓 ── 1.1k 𝐓𝐀𝐆𝐒 ── Fluff, kissing, apologetic Caleb 𝐀𝐎𝟑 ── HERE 𝐀𝐔𝐓𝐇𝐎𝐑 𝐍𝐎𝐓𝐄 ── I saw a tiktok about a boyfriend bringing his girlfriend treats via a remote control car and went why not.

───  𝑳𝑨𝑫𝑺 𝑴𝒂𝒔𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒍𝒊𝒔𝒕  ───

It was a slow, albeit ordinary day in Skyhaven — the sunlight streaming through the floor to ceiling windows of Caleb’s living room brightened the room and dark accents to feel homely as you cosied up on the couch. A few blankets were piled in your lap and tucked underneath your fuzzy sock covered feet. The rustling sound of paper from your book was the only sound in the comfortable silence.

Your hoped-for company was tucked away in his study, pouring over a few documents sent to him that the Fleet classed as ‘urgent’ — the grumbled and muttered threats to his subordinates were enough to make you chuckle lightly. 

Caleb only went once your hands squeezed his broad shoulders and forcibly turned him towards his office space. “Sooner you get done with paperwork, sooner you can come cuddle, ‘kay?”

“But–” He started, a small pout playing at his bottom lip as he looked over at you — it turned into a smirk while he watched your valiant efforts to make him move.

“No buts!” you grunted, shoving between his shoulder blades so he would move faster. “I’ll be on the couch waiting for you. So, hurry up, Colonel.”

His heavy footsteps echoed off of the walls of his study, and you heard him groan quietly as he sat at the desk chair, before the wheels scuffed over the floor. And from your place on the couch, you could hear the slight huffs of annoyance that left his lips, no matter how stifled they were. 

While time passed, you contentedly watched the clouds go by, only occasionally distracted by the words on the pages of your book that lay flat and open in your lap.

So, when the sound of whirring gears and the robotic revs of a small engine reached your ears, you froze. 

It was a familiar sound — a remote, Spitfire plane Caleb and you built when you were younger sounded almost identical, the tinny sound and imaginary battles he played out for your immersion echoed over the years to the present. 

You glanced towards the hallway that led to the study, where Caleb should have been focusing on paperwork, nothing appeared amiss; no dancing shadows or the sound of slight shuffling from his clothes to reveal he was planning a surprise. 

Furrowing your brow, you turned back to the window and grabbed your book to delve right back in. 

It happened again, only this time, it was much closer than before. 

You jumped, and the blanket bunched up on your thighs while you moved to sit up and investigate the source, when you finally found it. “What the–”

A model plane, the exact same one that you both built together years ago, was rolling around on the rug with such enthusiasm you could have sworn the pilot was attempting to recreate the feat of making donuts with a three-wheeled aircraft. 

Behind the plane and trailing from the tail was a rope, and attached to the ends of the rope was a packet of sour candy. A sticky note in the shape of a heart was stuck onto the crinkling plastic with an apple sticker — the simple gesture made you arch a brow, and the words ‘for my girl’ stood out in red pen.

“Caleb!” you called, and the plane stopped moving. It sat facing away from you. “Are you–?”

The question was cut short by the sound of movement from the craft — it turned slowly around, its cargo now beside it. The small engine revved and the blade attached to the front spun with the sound. “Caleb?” you said quietly, bending to look closer at your robotic company. “Can you see me–?”

One loud rev was your answer, and the flaps on the wings moved up and down.

You grinned — somehow, Caleb had rigged a camera to the cockpit, and he was controlling it from his office. “And what’s this candy for?” Two revs this time, and the plane scooted over the rug to be by your feet. The spinning blade touched the very tip of your toe.

“Sorry, I don’t speak plane,” you laughed, staring down at the robot. “Maybe a certain pilot needs to come out of hiding, he can share the candy with me if he brings me some apple slices.”

The small plane whirred and hurtled backwards, and you tracked the movements as it pivoted and positively flew away, its little wheels somehow never leaving the ground. It disappeared around the corner of the hallway, no doubt headed straight back to the operator for its next mission. 

You settled back into the cushions of the couch, and you placed the blankets back over your lap to await the plane’s next landing. 

A few moments later, heavy, deliberate footsteps echoed down the hallway, until Caleb appeared around the corner with the plane right behind. This time, it had taken flight — Caleb’s hand swayed back and forth to simulate the swerves and tricks a fighter pilot could only accomplish. 

“Oh, there he is,” you teased. “Are you trying to make it up to me?”

“And if I was…” He continued forward, amethyst eyes darkened with playful tones of indigo. “What would you say?”

You hummed, and you shifted in place to face him, placing your elbow on the back of the couch and your chin on the palm of your hand. “If you were trying to make it up to me, I would say you’re only missing my apple slices.”

Caleb smirked. “Nothin’ else, huh?”

“Nope.” You grinned up at him as he came to a stop in front of you. “Well, if the Colonel has time for me now, I suppose I wouldn’t obje– Mmph!” Any further taunt you conjured was silenced by the feel of his lips on yours, and before you could reciprocate, he pulled back, his teeth only just letting go over your lower lip. 

Puffs of warm air fanned over your mouth, and you whispered against his lips: “That’s not fair.”

“Whatever you say, baby.” Caleb rose and glanced over his shoulder. “Oh, look.” The plane hovered behind his head for a second before it moved to the side to reveal a parcel fastened to its underside. A plate in the confines of what looked like an upside-down parachute, held the spoils of a few apples, sliced and plated to perfection. “It’s a mercy mission, see? My friend here softened the blow of my hasty return.”

Your hand reached for his wrist, and you yanked him forwards. “Wh–oa!” His tall frame collided with the couch cushions, and he landed with a grunt of surprise, sprawled against your side while the plane remained airborne. “Wha–?”

“Now you’ve made it up to me,” you stated proudly, smiling at his ruffled clothes and hair. “My big dummy.”

Caleb sighed and shook his head. “Where were we–? That’s right.” The remote to the wall-mounted television floated towards you. “Can’t spoil our show for you, can I?”

[probablyasocialecologist]

Hectare-for-hectare, we found that solar farms in the farm-rich East Anglian countryside that were managed with biodiversity in mind contained a greater number of bird species, and more birds overall, than surrounding cropland. During spring 2023, we used the breeding bird survey method to survey solar farms in the East Anglian fens that were under different management styles. These sites ranged from intensively managed solar farms, in which the grass surrounding panels is cut or grazed short throughout the year, with no hedgerows or small trees, to mixed-habitat solar farms where infrequent cutting or grazing has allowed wildflowers, trees and hedgerows to grow along boundary fences. For comparison, we also surveyed the surrounding farmland. We found that the number of birds on the mixed-habitat solar farms was typically twice that of the intensively managed sites, and three times higher than adjacent high-yielding cropland. The number of species on mixed-habitat solar farms was 2.5 times higher than both of the alternatives. Our study also showed that solar farms offer important habitat for a number of threatened bird species. In fact, birds such as yellowhammer, linnet, greenfinch and corn bunting, which are of particular concern to conservationists due to their declining national populations, were considerably more abundant on mixed-habitat solar farms. Perhaps our results aren’t that surprising. After all, the mixed-habitat solar farms we surveyed contained many of the features birds prefer (similar to nature-friendly farms in less intensively farmed areas). These features include hedgerows, which can offer berries to eat and crevices to shelter in, particularly for birds adapted to woodland habitats. The tall and diverse vegetation around the solar panels contains a variety of habitats, with insect prey or seeds for food. The intensively managed cropland and solar farms had none of these features. By providing the right habitat, birds have been naturally drawn to these solar farms in an area that sorely lacks it.

4 March 2025

[evercelle]

Hello! If you don't mind me asking, how do you achieve/keep the vibrancy of colors in your illustrations?

I've been studying your art a lot and your colors always stand out to me because blending and painting digitally tends to result in muddier colors (normally in trad painting yellow & blue would result in green but due to how art programs work, blending yellow & blue would just result in a more desaturated version of one of the colors overlaying on top of the other) so I was wondering if you have any tips or advice on how to avoid that :0

Hope you have a great day!

i tend to use one inking brush (ciro pen) for sketch/ink/paint, so i usually just flat color and then draw in shades at lighter opacity, then color pick where it overlaps with the base shade, paint over again, rinse repeat... like using a blending brush with more steps i guess lol

some art programs (csp and i think kritia, maybe??) have improved color mixing! i haven't messed with any options myself but i just tried mixing yellow + blue and it caught the green tones pretty well, both with the method i described + using the default oil paint brush. todays sample picture features loml venti:

i think i tend to use pretty desaturated colors as a whole with not a lot of varience throughout an entire piece, then i'll add something neon/saturated later as an accent, so i think that might help control the "muddy" feeling as well

time lapse from step 3 -> painting! idk if this is super helpful but i'm not sure how else to demonstrate my process short of streaming lol

i think it'd probably be helpful to study color theory too, because the way your eye perceives vibrancy of colors is greatly affected by the saturation and value of the adjacent colors you use...!!

[ashfae]

Edit on 5/2/2025: I have mixed feelings about aspects of this essay these days but have chosen to keep it up and pinned as I'm still happy with my analysis even if I'm furious at NG, who is mentioned several times. TW for that. Argh.

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

The thing about romance is, it makes a good story.

As soon as NG described season 2 as "quiet, gentle, romantic" I figured we'd be in for it, because as he's the first to point out, writers are liars. And the best way to deceive is with truth.

Season 2 is romantic. The trappings of romance are everywhere. Crowley tries to set up Nina and Maggie by trapping them under an awning during a rainstorm, a classic cinematic bonding technique. Aziraphale's chosen method comes from his beloved books: the ball, the dancing, appearing as a pair in public, hands held as you twirl gracefully with your heart thrilled and racing. If they can set up a sensational kiss that will unlock the happy ever after. They've lived on earth, they've studied the tropes, they know how romance works.

The problem is a story is only a story.

Nina and Maggie had the classic romantic setup completely by accident before Aziraphale and Crowley ever began trying to interfere with them. They get locked in Nina's coffeeshop. They can't escape or communicate with anyone else, they end up talking by candlelight because there's no electricity, Nina offers wine. Maggie mentions how she'd hoped for a chance to talk to Nina, and now here they are. It's every bit as much a standard as what Aziraphale and Crowley attempt to arrange. Blanket scenarios galore exist because of that starting point. We love that story. And there's nothing wrong with that.

But it's still only a story, it's not enough. Because once that moment of connection is over, however lovely it was, all the rest of the world comes flooding back in in the form of dozens of angry text messages. Nina's messy entrapping relationship hasn't magically gone away just because she and Maggie shared a romantic encounter.

And it's so tempting think oh well, that's easy. We'll just give them more romantic encounters and eventually those will overwhelm the rest of the baggage. Must do, because it'll make them fall in love, and once they realize they're in love that trumps all other considerations, right? So it'll be fine. Love Conquers All.

Neil also mentioned Pride and Prejudice.

Darcy knows he's in love early on and makes a disasterous proposal that shows that he has no understanding of Elizabeth's perspective, possibly hasn't even thought about it. They've been meeting in forest lanes for walks, conversing, had tete-a-tetes in the sitting room, danced at a ball. And while his turn of phrase isn't as flattering as he thinks, he's still offering her everything he thinks she wants and needs: affection, security, his good name, wealth, an escape from the embarrassments of her situation, the world. How can there be anything to object to? Why would anyone ever refuse so much of value?

Elizabeth quite rightly cuts him to pieces. He lashes back with a few hard truths of his own and they separate. During that separation, he thinks and he learns. He takes to heart the criticisms she offered, re-examines his assumptions, opens his eyes. Thinks about her perspective and how sometimes the only difference between pride and arrogance is where you're standing. He does the work. When they meet again he tries to demonstrate that he's learned--not in order to court her again (yet), but because the only real apology he can offer, the only one that would have weight, is to show that he's grown, he listened to her. He changed.

Elizabeth of course has her own journey, accepting that many of her own conclusions about Darcy were erroneous because they were formed without her having the full picture to hand, and once she's done that she has to apply it to her own situation as well. She loves her family, but they do place her at a disadvantage on a number of levels, leading eventually to full-out disaster as her younger sister carelessly ruins all of their reputations. It's hard to admit, it's mortifying, but Darcy was offering her a great deal she needs. His offer did have worth for all that she dismissed it as an insult. And as she learns to value his own character more highly, and then as she sees that he did listen to her even though she insulted him so thoroughly...well, she grows too. And when they do eventually come together it's not because of courting and balls. There's a big romantic gesture in his rescue of her sister but even that isn't why they'll get their happy ever after. It was just the catalyst for the conversation. They win because they've learned how to understand each other and how to communicate for the future. How they can strengthen and support each other, how to balance their strengths and weaknesses. The films leave them at the wedding, but the book shows a bit of their marriage too, and during it they keep learning from each other. Their relationship is held up as a superior love story for good reasons.

The end of season one was romantic too. Crowley stopped time rather than face a world where Aziraphale would never speak to him again, Aziraphale walked into hell to protect Crowley, they dined at the Ritz and toasted the world. But then they stopped. Sure they spent time together, talked, enjoyed each other's company. But if they were talking about important things would Crowley still be living in his car? They had a bit of respite but all that real world baggage that exists outside of the romantic moment hasn't been faced, none of it. Four or five years sounds like a long while but for beings who are quite literally older than the earth? That's just an intermission.

Nina's relationship ends, leaving her with a tangled mess; Maggie realises the sweet dream of love she's been longing for isn't as important as the real Nina. They talk. They plan. Nina will sort through her life, get closure, figure out what went wrong with Lindsay and what she wants from a relationship, learn how to ask for respect instead of just bending under her partner's demands. Maggie will support Nina the way Nina needs, which sometimes means helping her get oat milk for the shop and sometimes means giving her processing space. They're on the same page; they're going to do the work. That's why most likely they'll succeed. To quote one of my favourite fanfics: it's not happily ever after, but it's a chance. It's all going to be okay. (The Profane Comedy by Mussimm, who absolutely nailed this theme)

The romance is nice, it's lovely. We need it to keep ourselves going. To give ourselves the dreams that help us get through the days and nights. But it's not the relationship. It's not enough on its own. The wedding can be the grandest most beautiful ceremony ever with doves flying and sweeping music and bells ringing, but that doesn't guarantee the marriage will last.

Crowley and Aziraphale have had their romantic gestures, oodles of them. One wing raised to protect the other from falling stars, another from rain. Shared ground, shared interests, hands offered in friendship and held on a bus. They've tried to get to the same page, they really have. They just aren't there yet. The biggest most important things still haven't been talked about, and season 2 showed there are even more of those big important things than we'd realised.

The show paints Maggie as Aziraphale's foil and Nina as Crowley's, even to the point of Nina casually calling Maggie 'angel'. But Aziraphale's baggage is Nina's. The toxic relationship has to be processed and understood and closed, and it hasn't been, despite season one. Lindsay never really liked Nina very much, for all that they tried to keep her trapped; Heaven never really liked Aziraphale very much for all that he believed in it. They both let themselves be used. But Lindsay left Nina and went to their sister's, whereas now the head of Heaven has reached out to Aziraphale and said here, we can fix this, you can fix this, don't you want to fix this? Others are already writing about that and maybe I'll add to it later, not sure. And Crowley, like Maggie, has had a sweet dream that he has to set aside. Maybe he'll be able to pick it up again eventually, maybe not. But sometimes you offer support by buying oat milk or rescuing your beloved from the legions of hell, and sometimes you do it by standing back while they sort through their shit.

Quiet, gentle, romantic. It was.

But that's only part of the story. Now they have to do the work. They thought they had, but they were wrong, because there's so much they just hadn't touched yet and tried to cover over with relief and sleight of hand and alcohol and forgiveness. The apology dance doesn't mean much without showing that you listened and learned. They've faced so much trauma already and that should have been enough, we wanted it to be enough and so did they and it's such a blow for it to turn out that there's still more to do, that the baggage hasn't just gone away and can't be hidden under blankets or soothed with cocoa. The texts are still coming in and demanding answers.

But it'll be okay. It will. It's still a chance. And one that in the long run makes them better, builds something real that lasts.

The best stories, the ones that last longest and become classics, are the ones that don't end with the kiss under the awning or the blanket scenario or the wedding. They're the ones that heal us while the characters heal themselves. It's hard to accept that there's still more to do. Harder to imagine how it can possibly work out. And yes, bloody frustrating to wait and see.

And we'll get through that interim by telling even more stories. Because the story is never just a story. It's how we get through the work, it's what we tell ourselves so we can do the damn work. Stories are what we cling to and how we remind ourselves we're human and connect. A book is a person you can carry with you. We're not alone, none of us, stories connect us because we love them and see ourselves in them, which means we see each other.

Aziraphale's back up in Heaven to deal with his unfinished baggage; Crowley left his behind long ago and it's clearly going to come back and bite him in the arse however much he tries to go his own way. And they can't help each other with that. Not yet.

But they'll get there. So will we.

[glowettee]

✧ the elle woods study method: mindset makeover & foundation building ✧

hey lovelies! 💗

omg, i'm literally bursting with excitement to start this transformative series with you all! we're going to dive deep into actually studying like elle woods, and all her study methods. it's going to change your academic life. (while keeping you fabulous, obviously!)

let's start with the most crucial element - the elle woods mindset. you know how elle went from being underestimated at harvard to graduating with honors? that transformation began in her mind, and that's exactly where we're starting too!

the core principles of the elle woods mindset (get ready to take notes!):

unwavering self-belief: elle's iconic "what, like it's hard?" attitude wasn't just cute - it was crucial

authenticity as your superpower: your unique perspective is your strength

resilience through positivity: turning every "you can't" into "watch me"

strategic determination: working smarter, not just harder

maintaining your essence: success shouldn't mean losing yourself

let me break down how to actually build this mindset (because theory without practice is like a perfect outfit without accessories - incomplete!):

mindset foundation building: • start a daily confidence journal (pink, obviously!) • write three daily affirmations • document your wins, no matter how small • reflect on challenges and how you overcame them

goal setting the elle way: • dream big (harvard law big!) • break down major goals into mini-milestones • create realistic timelines • identify potential obstacles and plan solutions • celebrate every achievement (even the tiny ones!)

your personal success toolkit: • a dedicated study planner (color-coded, elle would approve) • positive affirmation cards • vision board (mix academic and personal goals) • progress tracking system • reward system for reaching milestones

practical assignments for this week:

yes, i'm giving you all homework, because what's a lesson without doing homework? <3

mindset makeover tasks: • create your confidence corner (a designated study space that makes you feel powerful) • write your personal academic manifesto • identify and challenge three limiting beliefs • create a morning power routine

organization prep: • get your study essentials (cute but functional!) • set up your planning system • create a semester overview • design your ideal weekly schedule

community building: • find your study buddies (your personal warner hunting club, but for academics!) • join study groups • set up accountability partnerships • create a support system

elle's journey wasn't about memorizing legal terms - it was about believing she belonged in those hallowed halls while wearing her signature pink. you deserve to feel that same confidence in your academic journey. <3

advanced tips for the overachievers (because why not be extra?):

record yourself giving pep talks for tough days

create a study aesthetic that energizes you

develop personal success rituals

build a playlist that makes you feel powerful

photograph your progress for motivation

coming up in this series:

time management secrets

memory techniques that actually work

note-taking methods that slay

exam preparation strategies

self-care routines for academic success

group study dynamics

presentation skills

stress management

celebration strategies

and more of course <3

remember: elle woods didn't just survive harvard - she thrived while being unapologetically herself. that's our goal too! you're not just going to study better; you're going to build an academic approach that celebrates who you are.

homework time (but make it fun):

create your academic vision board

write your semester goals

design your ideal study schedule

set up your success tracking system

prepare your study space

xoxo, mindy

p.s. don't forget to reblog and follow for the complete series! we're building our own little academic sorority here! <3