#only been awake for 45 minutes and shit was peaceful until he came home

[random0lover]

.

[danielxricciardo]

Prompts

1. "Hi, my ex just walked in. Would you hold my hand please?"

2. "I didn't expect to see you here."

3. "Have you seen this dog?"

4. “That mouth of yours, does it ever stop making noise”

5. “Seven minutes in heaven is for virgin teenagers”

6. “Slam that door one more time and I’ll shove my foot straight up your cute ass”

7. “Jesus! Knock next time would you”

8. “You have money go and get yourself a hoodie that’s not mine”

9. "I hate roses, I thought you knew"

10. "Do you think I am an angel? Ha"

11. "I wanted to sleep but someone decided to die"

12. "I can kill you right now, what are you talking about?"

13. "Hi, I am lost, can you come after me?"

14. "When I first saw you I wanted to date your best friend"

15. "I am so funny and you are just jealous"

16. "If I have to choose... no"

17. "Stop breathing like that!"

18. "I just did my nails"

19. "I'm the best driver în the world"

20. "Will you marry me?" "No"

21. "I think I broke my arm" "So?"

22. "I think I love you" "Thanks"

23. "My arms are lonely, don't you think?"

24. "Apparently we are dating"

25. “Well it’s kind of hard to move when you’re sitting on my lap”

26. "Those things you said yesterday, did you mean them?"

27. "If we elope, you think they'll kill us?"

28. "This is yours"

29. "You can’t just kiss me, laugh and then walk away."

30. "Are you using ass as a pillow?"

31." I find your lack of faith disturbing."

32. "And I took it personally"

33. "In here I am the boss"

34. "Oh, bite me!" "Where?"

35. "What will you do if we break up?"

36. "Where is my T-shit?"

37. "This is no time for sarcastic comments."  "There is always time for sarcastic comments."

38. "I’ll keep quiet, you won’t even know I’m here."

39. "The way you flirt is just awful"

40. "Don’t be fooled. I’m the epitome of mess."

41. " If you are on TV should I congratulate you?"

42. "And this, is why we can’t have nice things."

43. "That's what he said"

44. "I am scared of your boss"

45. "You should know, a lot of girls have a crush on me"

46. "Everyone is afraid of you"

47. "If I'm watching that movie one more time I'll lose my fucking mind!"

48. "I thought being on vacation will be stress free"

49. "My parents don't trust you"

50. "I don't think I should give my last name so easily"

51. “I really wish I could unsee that.”

52. “Who would’ve guessed we’d be sharing a room.”

53. “I feel like you have an unhealthy obsession with me.”

54. “Nah he’s fine, it’s the other one you really got to watch out for.”

55. “I have a suggestion.” “I’m not taking my clothes off so forget it.”

56. “You’re the genius, why don’t you tell me?”

57. “Have I ever told you your accent makes me swoon?” “Really?” “No.” He/she smiles. “ that’s why I’ve never told you.”

58. “I’m alive? How am I still alive?”

59. “You’re crazy! I love it!”

60. “Never have I ever is about to get a lot more interesting.”

61. “What did they do?” “Dude. They did the do.”

62. "You can’t keep pretending it didn’t happen, cause guess what? It did!"

63. "Well this is awkward."

64. "Im too sober for this."

65. "Im pregnant." "Wall done, Virgin Mary!"

66. " I want to protect you."

67. "Kill that spider and maybe I'll forgive you"

68. "I have no one to go to the wedding"

69. "Don’t you dare touch _______!"

70. "I thought you were dead!"

71. "This is, without a doubt, the stupidest plan you’ve ever had. Of course I’m in."

72. "Take care of you, please"

73. "If your best friend single?"

74. "Just remember, if we get caught, you’re deaf and I don’t speak English."

75. "Why does everyone assume we're a couple?"

76. "Im craving something sweet" "Are you pregnant or something?"

77. " What is the magic word?" "I'll kill you în your sleep"

78. "When I see you my knees get weak"

79. "Finally you're single. Can I take you on a date?"

80. " So, I guess you don’t do after hours?"

81. "I know what I'm doing, I've watched two whole seasons of Grey's Anatomy."

82. "I can't believe I'm stuck here with you right now."

83. "Okay, this did not go as I planned it in the shower."

84. "I'm not going to sit around and watch you destroy yourself."

85. "You were my best friend"

86. "You did what?"

87. "Can you just pretend to love me for a second!"

88. "You are enough"

89. "Take the shirt off"

90. "Your nickname is bitch"

91. "What do you want to watch?" "You"

92. "How could you ask me that?"

93. "Your mouth does this thing and I can't resist it"

94. "Are you allowed to drink?"

95. "I said Im done, leave me alone!"

96. "Don’t raise your fucking voice at me”

97. “Yeah, I remember the drill”

98. “Tell me again, slowly this time, why that dog is in my bed.”

99. “Gave you so much, but it wasn’t enough.”

100. “You and me, we were destined to fall apart.”

101. “No, you don’t know who you are until somebody breaks your heart.”

102. “I want to tell you everything. The words I never got to say the first time around.”

103. “It’s better to feel pain, than nothing at all.”

Song lyrics prompts

1. “It’s the little things about us, that I love so much.”

2. “Last night I told you I loved you // woke up blamed it on the vodka”

3. “It’s a better place since you came along”

4. “You make me love the things I hate  “

5. Just a paper sheet and half a cigarette are left in my hand

6. Your faith walks on broken glass

7. "And can you teach me how to dance real slow?"

8. "I'll throw away my faith, babe, just to keep you safe"

9. "One night, you won't forget the rest of your life"

10. "We only said goodbye with words"

11. "I'll try to give you love until the day you drop"

12. "I like the pretty boys with the bow tie"

13. "Lets get drunk forget what we did"

14. Your kisses lift me higher

15. When you're ready we can share the wine

16. "And if you don't love me now you will never love me again"

17. "Why'd you have to go and make things so complicated?"

18. "When there's nothing to lose and there's nothing to prove"

19. She's the kind of girl who only asks you over when its raining, just to make you lie there catching water dripping from the ceiling.

20. Now I understand, you're a human, and you got to lie, you're a man

21. The good and the bad times: we've been through them all.

22. Now I ain't educated but I sure ain't stupid

23. I grew up in the shoes they told me I could fill

24. It's hard to say that I'd rather stay awake when I'm asleep

25. A lover would just complicate my plans

26. And in the morning, i’ll be with you, but it will be a different kind

27. My heart is yours, it’s you that i hold on to

28. And with one kiss, you inspired a fire of devotion that lasts for twenty years

29. I let go of my claim on you, it’s a free world

30. I’m in my bed, and you’re not here and there’s no one to blame, but the drink in my wandering hands

31. Cause you gave me peace and i wasted it, I’m here to admit that you were my medicine

32. Oh, dear diary, i met a boy, he made my doll heart light up with joy. Oh, dear diary, we fell apart, welcome to the life of electra heart

33. For you, I would cross the line, I would waste my time, I would lose my mind

34. Is it really me you're missing?

35. Remember that night?

36. How many times can I break till I shatter?

37. As long as I breathe, I’ll call you my home

38. "You wouldn't know love if it crushed your fucking chest."

39. "When we scream our lips don't make a sound."

40. "Please don't let me sink, wrap your arms around me and carry me home."

41. "This hasn't torn us apart so nothing ever will."

42. "A long time ago we believed that we were united."

43. "I miss the person that you were but I don't miss you."

44. "If home is where the heart is, why do I feel so fucking heartless?"

45. "I can't live, I can't breathe with or without you just go away."

46. "I'm not afraid to die, I'm afraid I'll survive and have to watch you suffer."

47. "I wanna hold you high and steal your pain away."

48. "I'm not like you I just fuck up."

49. "All because of you I believe in angels, not the kind with wings, no not the kind with halos. The kind that bring you home when home becomes a strange place."

50. "I just want to go to sleep and never wake up again."

51. “I wish people liked me more.”

52. “How could I ever love someone else?”

53. “I guess you’re getting everything you want.”

54. “She probably gives you butterflies.”

55. “I hope that you’re okay.”

56. “I defended you to all my friends.”

57. “I never cared about what they say, only care about me and you” 

58. “Either way i’m gonna lose, so i’m just gonna keep on loving you”

59. “You know i’m bad at communication, it’s the hardest thing for me to do”

60. “Iwas your lover, i was your friend, now I’m only just someone you call when it’s late enough to forget”

61. “It’s fucked up but it’s true that i love you like i do”

62. “Well we both had nights waking up in strangers beds but i don’t wanna, don't wanna, i don’t wanna give up yet”

63. “Tell me I’ve got it wrong somehow.”

64. “I’m begging for you to take my hand.”

65. “I can’t make it go away by making you the villain.”

66. “He feels like home.”

67. “I’d be breaking all my rules to see you.”

68. “But I know you’re not scared of anything at all.”

69. “When can I come back?”

70. “I’m ready to owe you anything”

71. “I’ll always look best in your head”

72. “I know you know it’s wrong, but I’m ready”

73. “All I ever want is breaking me apart.”

74. “Let's talk sweetly like all our love is false.”

75. “You put a fire in my heart, painted blood on my stars, gave me faith.”

76. “I wanna meet your girlfriend, she sounds nice.”

77. “How is kissing me so wrong?“

78. “Can’t you see that I’m already yours?”

79. “I’ve been losing track of the romantic sh*t I’m tryna say but basically I love you"

80. “I don’t wanna be your friend, I wanna kiss your lips, I wanna kiss you until I lose my breath”

81. “I apologize for all your tears, I wish I could be different but I’m still growing up into the one you can call your love” 

82. “I’m out of my head, of my heart, of my mind cause you can run but you can’t hide, I’m gonna make you mine”

83. "I never loved someone the way that I love you"

84. "It's the way that you know what I thought I knew, it's the beat that my heart skips when I'm with you"

85. "I hope she gettin' better sex, hope she ain't fakin' it like I did, babe"

86. “I know we’re young and people change and we may never feel the same”

87. “I can’t change the world, but maybe I’ll change your mind”

88. "You don't own me. Don't tie me down 'cause I'd never stay."

89. "Leave everything that is worth a single cent and just take me instead."

90. "And then I got you off your knees, put you right back on your feet, just so you can take advantage of me."

91. "Hey, I can't let you go with nobody. Cause I love you, baby."

92. "Tell me that it wasn't my fault and that I was enough for you."

93. "We were good at faking forever, I get it, whatever."

94. "Cause you had your chance and you blew it. Yeah, you ripped it up and you chewed it."

95. "Well, I'm too busy for your business. Go find a girl who wants to listen."

96. "Stop looking at me with those eyes, like I could disappear and you wouldn't care why."

97. "Oh, we could do whatever you want, but boy, don't go falling in love, you can't stay with me, all you'll ever have is one day with me"

98. "I pray the medication slow me down, but that shit doesn't work when you're around"

99. "Told her that I loved her once and now she'd kill for me"

100. "What the tell were we? Tell me we weren't just friends"

Who I write for

Formula 1

Daniel Ricciardo

Lewis Hamilton

Max Verstappen

Charles Leclerc

Esteban Ocon

Carlos Sainz

Lando Norris

Lance Stroll

Sebastian Vettel

Mick Schumacher

Pierre Gasly

George Russel

Football

Erling Haaland

Jadon Sancho

Giovanni Reyna

Jude Bellingham

Julian Brandt

Marco Reus

Roman Bürki

Emre Can

Mats Hummels

Leon Goretzka

Joshua Kimmich

Kai Havertz

Mason Mount

Christian Pulisici

Ben Chilwell

Gerard Pique 

João Félix

Ianis Hagi

Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain

Trent Alexander-Arnold

Virgil van Dijk

Jens Petter Hauge

Martin Ødegaard

Alexander Sørloth

[persephonesinfernos]

it’s too early for this shit | oneshot.

summary: bucky and (y/n) are a couple for some time now but they do not live together yet. one night (y/n) cannot sleep so she decided to head to bucky’s to sleep next to him.

pairing: bucky barnes x reader.

word count: 1312.

author’s note: fluff for all of you.

masterlist.

3 am and another night went without a night of good sleep. (Y/N) has spent many nights wide awake lying in her bed, tossing around and changing positions every two minutes but none of that seemed to help her fall asleep. Despite all the hours she spent training at her dance studio and how exhausted she was, not even those days (Y/N) could sleep.

Maybe it was the fact that she got used to sleeping next to Bucky or it was simply that she worried too much about his well-being when he was away on a mission but (Y/N) didn’t have any clue and those long and sleeplessness nights began to take a toll on her.

Bucky should’ve been back from his mission today, probably at his loft. (Y/N) took a chance and got up searching for a hoodie and a pair of trainers so she could leave for her boyfriend’s loft.  A 45-minute drive but, what were 45 minutes driving after spending many days with insomnia? If (Y/N) was right and Bucky has, indeed, come back, she will be sleeping peacefully tonight.

When she finally reached Bucky’s door she opened it with her emergency key and right at the moment she stepped in, she was able to smell the aroma of the grey-eyed man. (Y/N) let out a sigh of relief she did even not she was holding back while driving down there. Slowly and without making too much noise, (Y/N) got closer to Bucky’s bedroom.

Buck was sleeping placidly, his face showing nothing but relief and peace. Something that started to happen when he and (Y/N) shared the nights in each other arms, but mostly it was because Buck had been able to share his deepest and most terrifying fears and nightmares with the dancer. She got Bucky to feel normal, to feel loved again.

(Y/N) went and sat at the edge of the bed observing Bucky while she ran her fingers throw his dark hair. The only thing in her mind was how lucky she was and how deeply she had fallen for the ex-assassin.

Bucky tossed around in his sleep and finally opened his eyes slowly, first thing in his sight was (Y/N)’s smile.

“What are you doing here? It’s 4 am! You’re safe? Has something happened?” Bucky asked with worry, sitting quickly in his bed and staring intensely at (Y/N).

“Nothing’s wrong Buck, go back to sleep” (Y/N) said letting out a giggle. “It’s just that… I couldn’t sleep and… Well, I missed you so much. That’s why I am here darling.” (Y/N) smiled sheepishly as she felt her cheeks becoming red as tomatoes. Bucky still had that effect over her, as if she was 15 again and the cute guy from her high school would flirt with her between classes.

“You drove 45 minutes just because you weren’t able to sleep?” Bucky asked incredulously. “You’re killing me or at least you’ll do one day of these, you know that, right doll? Come in baby girl” He said patting the space next to him in the bed.

(Y/N) got into the bed, her face facing his. She was finally home, she was able to breathe again, to close her eyes and rest.

Resting her head in Bucky’s chest, (Y/N) took a deep breath letting her mind got intoxicated by Bucky’s aroma while he kissed the top of her head and making her drifted to sleep. And at that moment, in between being asleep and awake, she smiled and whispered “You smell like home, you are my home Bucky Barnes.”  

Bucky woke up with (Y/N) in his arms, not being able to wipe out that stupid smile on his face. (Y/N) was always able to make him smile but last night, when she said that he was her home something changed. He made a decision and time was running out.

He got up and got dressed, making sure that his girlfriend was still asleep and comfortable. When he was done, he got out of the loft with only one idea in his mind.

When (Y/N) woke up Buck was not right beside her, he was staring at her from the floor, his body leaning to the side of the bed. Something he did often and that she found creepy but he found adorable.

“Morning baby girl” Bucky spoke softly. “I just wanna tell you that… Oh boy, I don’t know how to explain it” He let out a nervous giggle.

(Y/N) did not get what was going on, she was still asleep and Buck was talking so fast and in a non-coherent way, at least for her and her ability to not be a person until she drank two or three cups of coffee.

“Last night… When you came all the way here just to be by my side because you couldn’t sleep and I held you in my arms I realized something (Y/N)”.

“What? What’re you talking about? What time is it?” (Y/N) questioned, her voice was a soft plea since it was still too early for her.

“I love you, I love you so much that sometimes it gets harder to breathe. Sometimes my chest aches when I know you’re not sleeping next to me that night. I want it to be over, I want you every night next to me, on my bed (Y/N), every night from now on. I want to be able to see you sleep, especially when you are so worn out that you occupy most of the bed or when you drool all over the pillow” Bucky said breathless but smirking looking down at his feet. God, he was so nervous and didn’t even know if he was making any sense. “I want you here, no no, I need you here. Every day, every hour, 24/7. So I know you’re safe, so I can see you, so I can breathe you baby girl.”

(Y/N) looked at Bucky with a confused expression on her face. What was he talking about? It didn’t matter, it was too early for that shit. Bucky seemed way too nervous to even thinking clearly so she needed to get back to sleep.

“Bucky, it’s too early for this shit”. (Y/N) said between yawns as she turned around to keep on sleeping.

Bucky’s heart stopped for a second. Did he do something wrong? He thought that his proposal was clear; could it be that (Y/N) didn’t want to spend her days next to him? Without saying anything else, he started to get up to leave the room.

In that very same moment (Y/N) turned around, eyes wide open, she has realized what all this was about. “Tell me you weren’t proposing Barnes, tell me that that was not what you meant”.

Bucky just looked at her with no clue about what to say. “Yes?” He said while he pulled out a ring from his pocket.

“No, no, no, no, no, why? Bucky, please.” (Y/N) couldn’t believe it, she just blew this moment. She almost started to cry when she realized how stupid she was, how stupid her brain was to not wake up at the same time as her body.

“It’s okay (Y/N), I get it. I really do, it is not what you want right now. Can we just forget this has happened?” Bucky smiled sadly at (Y/N).

“¡NO!” (Y/N) screamed jumping out of the bed. “I do not want to forget it” She answered more calmly this time. “I do not want to forget because I want all of that too Buck. How stupid I am? Just wanting to sleep while you were saying all those amazing things?” She laughed nervously.

Bucky smiled, letting (Y/N) came closer to him and hugging her as close as possible.

“So, is that a yes?”

“Yes, I do you idiot” (Y/N) answered as she kissed her now fiancée.

[chancelloramidala]

Staring at the Sun ➤ Evan Buckley

Chapter Seven: Confessions from a Robot Heart

warnings: vague mentions of childhood trauma, sex, drinking, smoking

masterlist.

After the long day she had, all Marceline wanted was to rest. Having Eddie back in her life and working with her was a pleasant surprise. Since Ollie’s death, the two of them have exchanged weekly emails just to keep up with one another. But then those weekly emails and occasional Skype calls turned monthly and eventually, yearly. It wasn't because Marceline or Eddie didn’t want to keep in touch or anything, but their lives just got more complicated to the point where they sort of forgot to call back or reply to that message/text/email.

And now, with Eddie working with the 118, it meant that he would be around more often, and Marceline wanted to make sure that she was there for him. She didn’t know a lot about his situation with the mother of Christopher… Shannon, was it? Only that she wasn’t in the picture right now and it was just the two Diaz boys.

She made a mental note while she showered to introduce Eddie and Christopher to Nicolette and Gemma at some point. The four of them would get along swimmingly.

Marceline then changed into a pair of grey sweatpants and a white tank top after stepping out of the shower. Her hair, as long and thick as it was, would take ages to dry so she just left it in a bun as she wandered into the kitchen to make herself some tea.

She popped open a window as she waited for the kettle to boil. Then she quickly escaped to her room, opening her underwear drawer and taking a pack of cigarettes that was taped to the bottom. Marceline has been trying to quit smoking, and it’s been an on and off kind of thing. She’s able to put off the need to smoke daily and channel her cravings for nicotine into physical activity like kickboxing, martial arts, yoga, and yes, sex.

And Nicolette hated it when she smoked, mainly because of the horrible smell that would linger afterward and how bad it was for Marceline’s health. So she tried to smoke when she really really had to, outside the apartment or at least through the window if she didn’t want to step outside.

But Marceline gave herself a pass for today, it was stressful as fuck and she just needed some sort of release.

Nic was at work, yet another night shift and Gemma was at a sleepover with one of her school friends, so Marceline was left alone in the Pierce-Bishop home.

She lit one of the cigarettes with her blue lighter and moved towards the window, making sure that the cigarette was fully outside before leaning over. Marceline would then suck on one end, causing the smoke to fill her mouth before she would inhale some of it and then finally exhale, puffs of smoke escaping her lips. The anxiety that once engulfed her dwindled in these moments when she inhaled and exhaled, causing a sense of peace to wash over her.

She continued to do this a few times until her cig was short enough to throw away.

Drawings that Gemma made were scattered along the kitchen counter she was leaning against, some of them stuck on the blank areas on the fridge. Marceline smiled fondly at them, glad to see that the seven-year-old was improving on her skills, she thinks. She tilted her head to the side as she tried to decipher one of the drawings, made with pink and blue markers. The lines were thick and thin, shapes scattered the white pages and if Marceline was going, to be honest, she had absolutely no clue what this drawing was.

Whatever, if Gemma asked she’d just smile and nod and say how she liked the colors. (Like, usual.)

As she sipped her passionflower tea after crushing her bud into the ashtray she disguised as a plant holder and threw away the evidence. Then she wandered towards her bedroom, kicking away the clutter on the floor with her foot before plopping down onto her bed.

A small sigh escaped Marceline’s lips as she rubbed a hand over her face and leaned against the headboard. Her shift today was a mess the more she thought about it and she just wished that she could forget about it.

Buck, god, she hated how her mind always wandered to that man. He had such a tight grip around her heart and didn’t even know about it. And maybe his oblivious knowledge was a blessing in disguise because he wouldn’t know how much everything he said or acted to her would affect her.

“I’m just saying! You only act all… human-like with Nicolette or Gemma. When you’re here with us, you’re this robot.”

She could remember how easily those words escaped his lips and how quickly she felt those words stab into her heart. Marceline knew that she wasn’t the most… normal person on her team because she didn’t actively make the first move to touch someone or talk to them, and how her voice was usually void of emotion and how seriously she always looked… but to know that’s how people saw her, how Buck saw her just hurt.

Marceline has lived a life where there were always people who never approved of how she was, namely her parents but that’s a whole other story to get into for next time. In short, her mother wanted her to be the ideal proper young lady who kept her mouth shut when something rubbed her the wrong way. A proper lady who knew how to use all of the formal etiquettes of the dining room, who knew how to get a man and become a person Marceline had no intention of being.

So she learned to brush off those comments after leaving home and kept living her life the way she wanted to and not depend on other people’s opinions of her.

But there were times where some opinions mattered to her.

Her first impression of Evan Buckley wasn’t the most... positive of things. Marceline Pierce thought he was a cocky son of a bitch who was here as a firefighter for the thrill of the uniform. And yeah, those things were very true when it came to Buck’s personality but that was just surface-level shit. There was more to Buck than an overzealous, reckless young man who talked way too much about his sex life.

Deep down, Evan Buckley is severely insecure about himself and puts on the false facade of macho confidence to hide that. He has a heart of gold that he wears proudly on his sleeve. He would do anything he could to save as many people as he could on the job, even if it would put his own life in danger.

Marceline first realized she was in love with Buck when she actively sought out to be in his presence. She’d make sure that she was sitting nearby when he talked with Hen or Chimney about some sort of menial fact that he researched the hell out of. Even if it was kind of secondhand, she liked to be around Buck, feeling that his infectious smile and energy deep into her bones.

And usually, Marceline likes to be alone and in her own little space.

The second time was when she memorized how he took his coffee and made him a cup before he came into work. A splash of creamer and two teaspoons of sugar.

The third time was whenever she looked at him and felt her whole body fill head to toe with butterflies.

And since then, Marceline Pierce has been fucked with anything pertaining to Evan Buckley.

As Marceline let sleep envelop her in a warm hug, she could only think about how much of a robot she was to those around her and started to wonder if they shared Buck’s idea of her.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

One moment Marceline was asleep—not dreaming because it’s been ages since she’s actually dreamt about anything—and the next she was awake with loud banging coming from the front door. She groaned and threw both of her hands up in the air, cursing whatever beings were above. Then she turned her head to look at the clock next to her bed, 8:45 a.m.

“What the hell?” She grumbled, mentally calculating how she only got like five hours of sleep. As much as she wanted to curl back into her slumber, the knocking didn’t stop and it was an incessant noise she loathed.

So she sluggishly got to her feet, a chill of cool air coming over her, causing a shiver to run down her back. The elastic that once held her hair together in a bun disappeared in her sleep, and she didn’t bother trying to look for it. Whoever had the nerve to wake her up after an exhausting shift would just have to deal with her long brown hair sticking all over the place.

As Marceline left her room, she wrapped her arms around herself, the cool morning air coming at full force from the open window she forgot to close. She mumbled profanities under her breath as she walked over and shut it before heading towards the door, not even bothering to check through the peephole when she flung it open.

“What?” she half-snarled and looked up to see the last person she wanted to see.

Evan Fucking Buckley stood there, face full of shock and his knuckles raised as if he was going to knock again. “Uh—“ He lowered his arm back down into his side as a sheepish grin fell on his lips.

“...You’re this robot…”

Marceline’s stare hardened, her lips pressing into a thin line to hide the surprise off of her face. “No.” she shook her head and was about to slam the door shut when something stopped it. She looked down, finding that Buck had wedged his foot in between the door and the frame.

“Wait, Marceline, please don’t.” he pleaded, his blue eyes shining as his hand slipped through to help hold the door open.

“I’m too tired for this shit, Buckley.” she exasperated, closing her eyes for a moment to pinch the bridge of her nose to push down to the well of emotions that fluttered in her chest.

“That’s okay,” Buck quickly said and gently pushed the door back open to little resistance from the other woman. “You can just listen,”

Marceline’s heterochromatic eyes flew across his chiseled face, seeing the desperation that was widespread over each line and patch of skin and bit into her inner cheek. “You have five minutes,”

Then she opened the door, turning around, and walked into the kitchen, grabbing the pack of cigarettes she left there from last night. Marceline didn’t even bother opening a window when she lit her cig, her hand tense and fingers stiff as she pressed it against her lips.

She watched as Buck slowly entered the apartment and shut the door behind him. He nervously looked around, his hands shoved into his jacket pockets as Marceline stared him down, leaning against the kitchen countertop as she blew her smoke downwards and nibbled on her cigarette, trying to suck out as much nicotine as possible to contain all of her stress.

“Four minutes and fifty-three seconds, Buckley.” she snapped at him, annoyed at how he was just standing there with his stupid hands in his stupid pockets while nibbling on his stupid lower lip.

“I’m sorry… okay?” he exhaled shakily before slowly looking at her. “What I said yesterday was me at full assholery.” she continued to stare at him, all emotion devoid from her face as she continued to smoke, her stiff fingers clenching around her cig. “I should never have said you, Marceline. I’m sorry for hurting your feelings.”

Marceline couldn’t help but let out a cynical laugh before crushing half her cigarette into the ashtray. “Surprised to find out that robots can have feelings?”

Buck winced. “Not my finest moment,”

“No, it wasn’t,” she said sharply before turning around to open the window because Nic would kill her if the smoke smell lingered on the furniture.

“Look,” he sighed and when she turned back around he was walking over, his hands splayed against the island counter. “I know I was a dick, okay? I said I was sorry but I feel like you’re angrier about this for no reason.”

Marceline snorted and rolled her green and brown eyes. “No reason? You don’t see the problem as to why I’m pissed ’cos you called me a goddamn robot?!” her voice was progressively getting louder with each word and her hands were clenched into fists by her side.

“Robots aren’t bad! They’re cool,” Buck lamely tried to defend himself as he felt himself shrink under Marceline’s sharpened gaze.

“You called me a machine. Something that doesn’t consider the feelings of other people. Something that lacks empathy and sympathy. Something that can go without imagination, consciousness, free will, complex emotions, meaning, and a fucking purpose.” Marceline didn’t know at what point she started to cry, but she felt some wetness gather on her cheeks and that there was an ugly sob lodged into her throat.

Buck instantly started to feel a thousand percent worse. “Marceline—“ he tried to step forward, feeling the need to comfort the woman in front of him.

She wiped her eyes with the back of her shaking hands and stepped back, pushing herself against the counter despite the edge digging into her back. “I-I’m… I’m not a… thing,” she whispered with a shake of her head as the hate-filled voice of her mother shot into her head. “I-I have my own thoughts, I empathize and sympathize… I have meaning and purpose… I have feelings.” She hung her head to look at her feet as she sniffled. “I have so many fucking feelings, Buck. So many it’s suffocating to have them.”

“I know, I’m sorry, I should never have—“

“—Just because I don’t exhibit any of those human attributes around you in the way society deems as normal doesn’t mean I don’t have them.”

Buck clamped his mouth shut and frowned, looking away from her. He fucked up, bad.

Still, silence and tension-filled the cold morning air, with both Marceline and Buck turning away from one another to compose their thoughts and themselves.

“And with Eddie— he was in the same boot camp as my childhood friend, who’s practically my brother Ollie. He told me himself that he died in that convoy that got Eddie his Silver Star, and he’s been checking up on me since then. I’ve known Eddie for a long time so that’s why I acted so… human-like when he arrived.” she explained, remembering that Buck had asked yesterday.

Yup, Buck thought to himself, I’m a colossal idiot.

“I have this… tendency to act like I don’t care about anything, I know that. I’d like to blame my parents for drilling that into my head, but we don’t nearly have enough time to unpack all of that,” she said softly with a short chuckle, earning Buck’s attention as he slowly brought his blue eyes to her green and brown ones. “I’ve learned to only care about a select amount of people. And I…” she sucked in a deep breath as the nagged part of her brain screamed, “You’re one of those people, Buck.”

Buck’s brows knit together in confusion. What?

“I’ve… cared about you for a long time, you might not see it but I do. I care about what you talk about… what you’re interested in… how you see me.” Marceline admitted, her heart slamming against her rib cage to the point she thought he could hear it.

He felt like he was missing something crucial that Marceline wasn’t saying. Not that he had any right to ask for the entire truth, but the words she selected… didn’t seem right.

“You—“ he frowned as he tilted his head to the side to get a better look at her and crossed his arms over his chest. “You care about me?”

Marceline inhaled sharply. Now or never, Pierce. “I… I guess care isn’t the… right word.” she pushed herself off of the counter and stared directly into Buck’s eyes, her entire body simultaneously feeling on as if she was inside an inferno and dunked in ice water. “I’m in love with you, Evan.”

Buck felt all the air in his lungs disappear “W… What?”

“Look, I’m not confessing my love for you for any kind of payment.” Marceline tore her eyes away from Buck’s so she could take a breather. “I just… I needed to tell you. You deserve that much.”

“I—“ he didn’t know how to respond to that. The only people who’ve ever told him that they love him were his parents and Maddie, and even then he didn’t really believe them. No romantic relationship he had ever lasted long enough for either of them to say the L-word. “Is that why you took those bullets for me?”

“Yes,” she replied without any hesitation. “And I would do it again for anyone I love that much,”

Buck’s eyes were as big as saucers at this point, feeling very overwhelmed with this new information. “You love—? I’m sorry, I need—“

Marceline shook her head. “It’s fine, I get it. I jumped this all on you, and- and oh shit, you’re still with Abby.” She stammered out and rubbed her hands against her face to suppress a groan. “Fuck, I’m sorry Buck I didn’t—”

“I should go,” Buck said as his feet brought him to the front door, his mind swirling with loud thoughts.

Love? Someone loves me? Do I love Abby? Yes, I do love Abby, of course, I do. But… Does Abby love me back?

“Yeah,” she nodded and cast him a desperate glance. “Wait, Buck?” His hand halted from turning the doorknob and remained silent. Marceline took that as her cue to go on, “I want you to know that I don’t expect anything else from you after this. We can continue being colleagues and nothing more. You deserve to know that someone loves you like really loves you.” Unlike Abby whose been gone for months...

“I…” he paused and pursed his lips into a thin line as he slowly turned around. “Mars, I need time… to-to you know, process all of this.”

“I know, Buck, I know,” she sighed softly. “But, if you want to talk, you know where I am,”

All Buck could do was nod, unable to trust what he could say before he left. Marceline watched him leave with a heavy heart and sobbed into her hands.

Nicolette and Gemma came home later that day to Marceline holed up in her room with half a bottle of rum by her bedside.

@skyslowalking @beelarson @rcvenscycle @whatdoesntkillyoumakesyoustrange for u besties <3

˚ ༘✶ ⋆｡˚ ⁀➷ AUTHOR’S NOTE: lol so that happened, huh

nicolette's story

[spaceskam]

another part of my kid fic universe for @zuluoscarecho ❤️️

warning: mentions of past abuse and deportation

“I spy with my little eye something... brown.”

"Um... Alex's hair?"

"No! His hair is black!"

"Definitely brown.

"Let's say both," Alex chimed in, smiling easily as he listened to Michael and Isaac play their billionth round of I Spy as they made their way to Texas to pick up Isaac's things from his Tía Ellie’s house. 

It took a bit more negotiating that expected. Turns out, she’d never directly witnessed Isaac actively using his telekinesis, but she’d been getting suspicious that there was something off about him. She loved him, she’d said, but she was no longer comfortable housing him. She’d been getting in contact with a social worker and Isaac had overheard which led to him hunting down Michael in hopes he’d be a safe place to go. Alex had to take over the phone call at that point.

“Okay, okay,” Michael agreed, humming as he looked around for something brown. His hand was locked with Alex’s, resting on the center console of Alex’s truck. Alex gave his hand a soft squeeze. “My hair?”

Isaac erupted into unprecedented giggles, “Not everything is hair!”

“Well, shit, I don’t know what else comes in brown, dude, the tree trunks?” Michael asked, smile getting wider by the second.

Isaac had only been staying with them for a week so far, but he got comfortable fast. They’d set up his room and he would be starting school that following Monday, so it was clear he had no reason to not get comfortable. Besides, he and Michael had little telekinesis lessons and that seemed to help a lot at making him feel safe there. Alex made sure to add a little more to that safety by working on making sure Daniella had a constant, trustworthy line of communication to talk to Isaac every day. So far it’d been a little rocky, but he was working the little bit of magic he could manage.

He was determined to be a good father figure.

“No,” Isaac said.

“Okay, I give up, what is it?” Michael said.

“My hair.”

Michael laughed and turned in his seat to face him, looking some where in between impressed and baffled.

“You totally tried to throw me off course.”

“Duh.”

“You hear that, Alex? We’ve got a fuckin’ trickster in our backseat,” Michael said, huffing a laugh as he settled back into his seat, “He’s gonna outsmart us all.”

“Wouldn’t shock me,” Alex agreed, pulling his hand to his lips and pressing a kiss to his knuckles. His heart felt so full in a way he couldn’t quite articulate. Michael leaned over and kissed his cheek for extra measure.

“Me neither,” he agreed, looking back to Isaac when he pulled away, “How’d you do in school, by the way? Forgot to ask.”

“Good,” Isaac said, shrugging, “As and Bs.”

“Trying or not trying?” Michael clarified. There was a few seconds of silence and Alex could picture the distinct, guilty grin on his face that mirrored his father’s. “Well, I always say if they know you’re better than them without even trying then you’re doing something right.”

“Okay, no, that’s a horrible lesson,” Alex butted in. Michael scoffed in disagreement as Isaac just let out a soft laugh. 

Isaac hadn’t really struggled to understand the fact that two men could be together (another thing they had to thank Daniella for) but it had been an adjustment for all of them and they had a conversation about the barest definition of Michael’s sexuality to nip any complicated questions in the bud. That had been preceeded by a talk with Danielle herself who said ‘that would explain a lot, good for you’. 

In times of banter, though, he happily sided with whoever he felt could make the situation funnier.

“Yeah, Mr. Michael, bad lesson.”

“This whole teaming up against me thing is not gonna fly. You both seem to forget I could throw everything with my brain,” Michael said, more pouty than serious and only getting more laughter from the boy in the back seat, “And stop calling me mister, it makes me feel old.”

“You are old,” Alex told him. Michael stuck his tongue out at him, but didn’t argue. They hadn’t quite had the whole alien conversation yet. That felt like more a month milestone or something.

The rest of the drive to Texas went like that, conversation and jokes and listening to music. It took about three songs to realize that Daniella seemed to have only one flaw in raising Isaac and it was his lack of music taste. Alex put on Panic! to educate him.

Around the two and a half hour mark, Isaac had passed out against the window and Michael was laying over the center console to put his head on Alex’s shoulder. It was quiet and peaceful and so damn domestic that Alex could almost imagine they were taking a family trip to Disney World.

“I love you,” Michael whispered for no reason, fueling his little fantasy even more.

"I love you too.”

They arrived outside Ellie’s house around 1PM. The neighborhood wasn’t the greatest thing in the world, but it was nice enough. Lawns were manicured, kids were playing outside, people were walking their dogs. The fact that Daniella had been successful enough to have a house in a neighborhood like that and still got deported was a quick reality check Alex didn’t enjoy.

“Wake up, bud,” Michael said, reaching into the backseat to gently shake Isaac awake. It took him a minute but he rubbed his eyes and slowly came back to life.

They all climbed out of the truck and walked towards the front door. It opened before they could even knock, a small, white, blonde lady on the other side. By looks alone, it was difficult to tell how old she was--she could’ve been 23 or she could’ve been 45.

“Ellie?” Alex clarified.

“Yes, Sir,” she said, eyes landing on Isaac as he hid behind Michael, “Hey, Isaac. You scared me running off like that. I’m glad you’re okay.”

His small hands clutched Michael’s, hanging off him slightly. Michael didn’t seem to mind.

“We’re just here to grab his things or anything you managed to keep from Daniella’s house. We’ll keep it until she’s able to come back,” Alex said. Considering Michael had personal reasons for disliking this woman, it seemed best that Alex took over.

“Right. Everything I could save is in the guest room,” Ellie explained, moving out of the way to let them in, “Could I get you guys coffee? Water? Anything?”

“We’re okay, thank you,” Alex said.

She led them to the small room that Isaac had slept in when he was there, nearly every square inch of the room covered in things. Most of it was small trinkets and personal items and Alex considered that maybe he should’ve asked if he needed more boxes.

“I’ll go get you some newspaper to wrap some of it up,” Ellie said, quickly walking out of view.

“I... I was not expecting this,” Alex said carefully, looking around the room before looking to Isaac. He was still clinging onto Michael, looking either scared or embarrassed or both. Alex managed a warm smile. “It’s okay, I’m not mad. Just surprised, ‘s all.”

Slowly, they began making trips to the truck. Alex had a few boxes and they filled them with newspaper-wrapped trinkets and mugs, handling them all with care. Then they got to the other stuff like his clothes, some of Daniella’s clothes, multiple sheet sets, curtains, a quilt Daniella made from his baby clothes. Then they got his books, toys, etc. It was just a lot. It had the entire backseat full and the trunk not too far off. It took three hours.

“You sure you don’t want anything? I can make lunch,” Ellie suggested. Alex politely declined.

“We’ll pick up something on the way home. Thank you, though, for taking care of him for so long,” Alex said. She nodded, but grabbed his arm to keep him in place after Michael and Isaac said their goodbyes and headed to the truck. “Is something wrong?” 

“Be careful with him,” she said, voice hushed even though they weren’t in ear shot, “There’s something off about that boy. Daniella hid it well, but once you have him in your house... Things start happening.”

“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” Alex said, again trying his best to be polite. She knew enough, they didn’t need her discovering more. 

“Just be careful,” she said sincerely, “I tried bringing him to church but--”

“Thank you for watching him, but we’re good now,” Alex cut her off, not really wanting to hear more. He knew she hadn’t done what Michael’s religious foster family had, but how much longer until she had? That was just something he could keep to himself.

Alex made his way back to the truck where Michael and Isaac were already waiting for him, both silent and probably for two entirely different reasons. So, Alex suggested food.

They ate in silence as well as they started their drive back to Roswell. Isaac looked drained which was probably his main reason for silence, but Michael looked out of it. 

By the time they started driving through long stretches of empty desert, Isaac was sound asleep in the backseat. It was when the sun started going down, though, that Michael couldn’t keep it in anymore.

“You okay?” Alex asked softly, squeezing his hand as he heard his breathing slowly begin to escalate. He looked over at him and saw that his bottom lip was quivering and his eyebrows were drawn taut, everything showing that he was trying to not cry mixed with his breathing becoming more and more erratic. A quick look in the backseat proved that Isaac was still asleep.

So Alex pulled over into the desert.

He got out of the driver’s seat and went over to the passenger side, all but pulling Michael out of the truck. He broke down as Alex pressed him into the door, trying to hold his face and get him to calm down.

“Hey, what’s going on? What happened?” Alex asked softly, hands on his cheeks. He hated seeing him like this, yet loved that he was being so open with his feelings. It was a strange juxtaposition.

“After the house he grew up in was foreclosed, but before they had people go in and clean it out, he’d break in to get his and his mom’s things. They wouldn’t let him go in and get his shit after they took his mother, Alex. He had to break in,” Michael admitted, choking on a sob as he recounted it and meeting Alex’s forehead with his own. Alex frowned and that secondhand sadness seeped into his veins. “He shouldn’t have had to do that.”

“No, he shouldn’t have,” Alex agreed softly, weaving his fingers into his hair, “That’s fucked.”

“I feel so guilty,” Michael admitted, “I-I should’ve known about him. I should’ve been easier to reach, should’ve been the first person they called when they needed somewhere for him to stay.”

“How could you? Daniella didn’t tell you,” Alex assured him, “Which, honestly, was probably good for both of you. He didn’t need to get to know you when you were at your lowest.”

Michael sniffled, seeming torn on whether he could agree or not. Alex just continued to do his best at soothing him.

“But it doesn’t matter. We can’t change what happened. He found you, that’s all that matters.”

“God, I can’t... He was so close to ending up like me,” he said, clutching Alex’s shoulders, “I don’t want him going through that shit.”

“And he won’t, okay?” Alex promised, “He’s got us and we’re not going to let that happen.”

“Never let any of that happen,” Michael insisted, “He’s gonna have a good life.”

“Yeah, he is. He’s already got a ton of people who love him and want him,” Alex assured him, “We just need to make sure he knows that.” Michael sniffled and nodded his head. “You’re wanted too, by the way.”

Michael huffed a laugh, “It’s not about me.”

“Kinda is,” Alex said, “And that’s okay. It’s okay to be scared of what might happen to someone else and want better for them. That gives you a drive to be better for yourself.”

Michael breathed steadily a few times and Alex carefully dried his face, grounding each other easily. Alex moved just enough to kiss his forehead and Michael relaxed a little more. 

“Sorry,” he said once he calmed down. Alex shook his head.

“Don’t apologize. It’s okay to cry and be sad,” he whispered, “It’s okay to be scared.”

Michael managed a smile and he whispered, “Have I told you I love you lately?”

“Yeah,” Alex said, “But I still like hearing it.”

“I love you.”

“I love you too.”

They met in the middle for a soft kiss that led to another that led to another before they slowly stopped. As easy as it would be to let it turn into something else, the truck was still running and they had a sleeping 10 year old in the backseat.

“You’re gonna be a great dad, Michael.”

“So are you,” he said, his hands sliding up to his neck before he pulled him into a hug, “You’re already great.”

They held each other for a moment before deciding it was okay to let go and climbing back into the truck. Michael leaned back over the center console to lay his head on Alex’s shoulder and wrapped his arms around his bicep. 

Alex really started planning that trip to Disney World.

[valdez-and-the-argo-crew]

God!Percy fic ch. 5

Previous chapter: https://valdez-and-the-argo-crew.tumblr.com/post/616320304875175936/god-percy-fic-ch-45

Two sons of the sea

Alone on a quest

That line made sense. It was actually the most understandable thing I’d ever heard an Oracle say. I looked over at Jamie, who was currently fast asleep. He was handling the quest pretty well.

To return escaped spirits

To the cold hands of death

The part about escaped spirits made sense as well. The Arai were the escaped spirits, and I assume the underworld is what the second line was talking about.

For better or worse

One choice changes all

I’ll take vague descriptions for 500. I make about a million choices a minute, and one of them is supposed to change everything?? That’s comforting.

He will bring peace to Olympus

Or be the cause of its fall.

And to top it off, I might kill the gods...again.

It’s been two days of straight traveling, but Jamie and I finally have reached a point where we believe we can intercept the Arai.

Which means we can finally get off this train we’ve been on.

I turn to Jamie, and shake him gently on the shoulder.

“Hey bud. Rise and shine, let’s go kill some things.”

He sat up and stretched, rubbing his eyes. I didn’t need any godly powers to be able to tell he was not at all awake. I almost felt bad about Jamie being here on the quest. He’s 6, he deserves to be building sandcastles and riding Pegasi, not saving the world.

“Are we there yet...?” He asked, narrowly avoiding another yawn.

“Yeah. Now come on. We need to get off the train.” I tugged his arm gently, but that was somehow counterproductive. He passed out once again, leaving me with no other choice.

I stepped off the train with my brother on my back, holding both of our bags. I have to admit, it was nice. It made me miss mortality. Ever since I became a god, I’ve been...detached. Emotions and connections were hazy and inconsistent, and at times, I found myself wondering why I’d spent years building up relationships.

But just carrying Jamie grounded me. So I let myself smile as I walked out of the train station and immediately into somebody I hadn’t seen standing in my way

“Shit my bad I didn’t see— Nico?” I paused to look at the boy in front of me.

“Percy?” He tilted his head to one side— a habit he had when he was confused. “What in Hades are you doing out here?”

“Uhh...believe it or not I’m on a quest.” I laughed a bit.

“You? But you’re...y’know...a god? What’re you on a quest for?”

“It’s beyond me. But apparently I might destroy Olympus again so...I got that going for me.” I laughed again and adjusted my weight. A sleeping 6 year old gets heavy quickly, even for a god.

“who’s the kid? He’s not...like...” Nico trailed off, looking between Jamie and me.

“Like what...?” I said before it struck me. “Oh gods no. No no no, he’s my brother. Another Poseidon kid. His name is Jamie.”

Nico smiles a bit. “Alright then. So...where are you headed? Because I have a feeling we’re both here for the same reason.”

“The Arai?” Nico nodded. “Well...I was thinking first we just find some place to crash and get organized, but seeing as Jamie here has been out like a light for hours, I’d say he’s well rested. So...” I shrugged. “I guess we go after them?”

“Yeah...I guess,” Nico looked at Jamie again. “He seems too young to be on such an intense quest, is he doing okay?”

I saw the look in Nico’s eyes and I knew what he was afraid of. Ever since Bianca, he’d been wary of quests, especially when younger children were involved.

“It’s been surprisingly mundane. Not one monster attack.” I said, to which Nico raised an eyebrow.

“Not one? Weird.” A pause settled over the two of us as I shifted my weight to keep Jamie supported on my back.

“Well...you two come with me, I can lead you to where the Arai are.”

I followed him out of the train station and through the quiet suburbs of the town we were in. We kept walking and walking until we came across a deserted park area, and I could feel the Arai nearby.

Now, I’d like to say I’m not as stupid as some people make me out to be, but looking back on these next a few moments...definitely makes the list of top 10 stupidest things I’ve done.

“Percy...”

I glanced around. “What?”

Nico looked up at me. “Hm?”

“Did you say something?” I asked, still looking around.

“No?” Nico said, with a raised eyebrow.

“Oh...I could’ve sword I heard...” I trailed off, shaking my head. “Never mind.”

“Listen to me Percy...”

And my big mistake...is that I did.

Using my Awesome And Useful Godly Powers, I split my conscious. I know, impressive, right?

Part of me stayed walking with Nico, carrying Jamie who was still out cold, but the other part of me slipped away, still looking around for the voice.

“Are you listening...?”

“Who are you?” I said aloud, now able to look all around. “What do you want from me?”

“We don’t want anything Percy. We want to protect you.”

“First of all, I’m a god so...good luck. And secondly, I don’t talk to disembodied voices. Sorry, gotta go.” I took a few steps forward, only to be cut off buy something appearing in my path.

My body reacted on instinct, jumping back and pulling Riptide into action. What had appeared in front of me looked exactly like a fury, and I can’t say I’m particularly fond of furies.

But upon closer inspection, it wasn’t a fury at all. Wrinkled features, bat-like wings and brass talons, not to mention the glowing red eyes...this wasn’t something I’ve ever encountered. Not in this plane of existence, at least. But something lit up in the back of my mind. A hazy memory...

“Who are you.” I pointed Riptide right at her, hoping to pry some useful information from her.

“You know who we are,” she said, as more creatures looking just like her appeared around her. “And we’re here to tell you that you don’t have to kill us again.”

“Again? I’ve never...” wait. I thought about it. I could remember...something. Like a memory that never happened, but would’ve in a different timeline. I could recall...Tartarus. Annabeth and I...she was...blind, and I was in pain...

It struck me. “You’re the Arai. And if things had played out differently, I would’ve killed you years ago.”

The Arai laughed, which sounded rather like an asthmatic dog wheezing. “He does remember.”

“You still haven’t told me what you’re trying to talk to me about. I could just kill you now, and the quest would be over.” I eyed each of the hags in front of me. “You have 10 seconds to talk before I dice you.”

“If you kill us, you’ll suffer every death you’ve ever bestowed. But it doesn’t have to be like that.” One of them stepped forward. “You chose immortality, but what you don’t know...is how much more powerful you could be. More than Hades, more than your father...” she took another step closer. “More powerful than Zeus.”

I lowered Riptide. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Zeus has been in charge for too long. What has he ever done for you? He gave you godhood and confined you to your silly camp. He forbid your dear old daddy from being there while you grew up. He let neglected half-bloods raise Kronos, and forced you to save him.” She was circling around me now. “You can prove you’re a worthy god, not one to be stuck on camp duty. Don’t you want that, Percy?”

“Oh shut up.” I swung riptide right through her chest, causing her to dissolve into a flurry of gold dust.

A fountain of pain erupted from my gut. Riptide clattered to the ground as I toppled over, putting my hand to the pain. Golden Ichor flowed though my fingers from the wound that had appeared. One word came to my mind. ‘Minotaur’. My wound was right where I’d stabbed the Minotaur all those years ago, right outside of camp.

My vision swam as I reached out for my sword. I closed my hand around it and swung at the nearest Arai I could reach. It wasn’t enough though. She simply screeched in pain.

“You can be strong Percy. Chiron has nothing more for you. That silly camp of yours is not built for someone with as much potential as you.”

“You talk too much,” I said, struggling as I got to my feet. “I’m not going to turn my back on anyone. Camp is my home.”

I suddenly felt the presence of water. I looked to my left to find a sprinkler in the ground next to me, which gave me an idea.

I willed the sprinkler to explode, allowing me access to the waterlines. Raising my hand slowly, the water began to form a small ball between me and the remaining Arai.

“Percy!” Came a voice in the distance. Nico was running towards me, Jamie following close behind.

I kept my focus on the water as it grew bigger and bigger. I used it to engulf the three hags in front of me. They gasped for air as they slowly started to drown in the water.

“Percy! Oh gods what happened to you. Jamie stay back.” Nico said, running towards me, but I showed him off.

“I got this, Nico it’s fine.” I kept my eyes strained on the spirits in front of me. Another one exploded into dust in the water. I lost my balance as my skin turned searing hot. I couldn’t focus anymore as burns crept up the sides of my arms. Mount St. Helens... the explosion.

I lost control of the water, letting the two remaining Arai fall to the ground. Another one died on impact with the ground.

I couldn’t breathe.

Somewhere to my right Nico was running toward me but I couldn’t focus on that. I started coughing, gasping for air, but I couldn’t get it. What is it what did I kill?

Sounds became muted as I started coughing more violently. I think Nico was calling me. I think Jamie was too.

What the hell did I kill? My vision doubled as I couldn’t get oxygen. I’m a god this...this shouldn’t be killing me... why...

I felt Nico shaking me. His voice sounded so far away.

“Percy! Percy are you okay? Percy what’s going on!” He shook me violently.

Oh gods... I’m drowning...

I coughed more and this time I was coughing up sea water. How? I’m the son of Poseidon, I can’t...I can’t drown...I’m not supposed to drown...

The boar. Ares...the lightning bolt situation... I’m drowning like I drowned Ares’ boar.

“Jamie!” I heard Nico say. “I know I’m asking a lot but take my sword. You have to kill that last Arai.”

And that’s when I lost consciousness.

[noccalula-writes]

I wrote a long-ass essay about the entire experience with my father, as it was happening, because that’s how I cope with shit. 

CW: parental death, discussions of abuse, medical situations, dying. 

(7/4/2019)

It’s Thursday. The hospice nurses don’t think he’ll die tonight and I don’t either, but his breathing pattern is beginning to change. The rattling of the gathering fluids at the back of his mouth. The way he sleeps with his mouth hanging fully open, a much further drop than the way he’d nod off in his chair or on the couch, open enough to drool and snore but not the near-scream affectation of his jaw hanging loosely that I’ve been seeing since we arrived here yesterday by ambulance.

His jaundice is returning, albeit more subtly than it was before. Sometimes he sleeps deep. Sometimes his eyebrows move, knitting and raising and fluctuating like he’s in the middle of a very important conversation with someone who just isn’t getting the message. For some reason, I keep thinking he’s talking to his own father. I hope he is. I hope it’s a good conversation.

But his breathing becomes erratic and the emaciated curve of his chest starts to heave a little or goes too still for too long and then rises harshly, and I hold my own breath while I wait to see if his is coming back.

I want to be here when he dies. I will be here when he dies.

***

I had booked a flight on Sunday for 7:45 pm. I made it out the other side of the TSA checkpoint when I got the text that American Airlines had canceled my flight.

I called and explained the direness of the situation, and the best they could offer was 7am the next morning.

Monday morning, I flew into Charlotte NC with a 36 minute layover, just enough to let me pee and refill my water bottle and make it to the gate with less than an hour’s wait til boarding.

No sooner had I sat down than American Airlines sent out yet another text. “Your flight has been cancelled.” I was five and a half hours away from Jacksonville as a straight shot. The next flight they could put me on was at 2:45 that afternoon. The nurses had been encouraging me to come down due to my father’s rapid deterioration – I spent the entire transit up until that point only mildly afraid that he would die before I would arrive.

There in North Carolina? I was terrified.

I called, talked to yet another sympathetic courtesy clerk who could do nothing for me, talked to a far less courteous clerk at the actual airport desk, tried to see if they could just get me a rental car instead. I could either sit for a six hour layover or I could get a car and make it to Jax half an hour before my flight would leave.

Nothing.

I did not have the money to fly here – a dear friend bought my ticket – and I do not have the money to fly back. I’ll work that out after. I definitely did not have the money for my own rental car.

Finally, I went back to the courtesy desk, cried to the older gentleman behind the computer, and how quickly his face changed when I said my father was dying told me he too knew what it meant to need to get home now, now, now.

He handed me a comp ticket for a 1:11 flight that no one else had even brought up with me and told me I had to run if I was going to make it across the airport in time to board.

***

Yesterday morning, he had the last period of real lucidity, unreplicated since we arrived and began comfort-care treatment.

His main doctor came into the ICU and explained to both him and me, freshly awakened by the sound of her pulling his curtain, father and daughter both bleary-eyed but alert and trying to look focused at the importance of the situation.

“There is really nothing else we can do,” she offered with empathy, looking more at me than at him. I don’t blame her for that. It must be harder to look him in the eyes and tell him he’s at the end of the road. We both nod grimly and I ask him, just to be sure, if he understands what she’s saying.

The day before, he slept through my consultations with his kidney doctor and his oncologist and through the group meeting (myself, both half sisters, their mother) with palliative care specialists but naturally was awake when hospice came. The word ‘hospice’ knocked the breath out of him, his left hand searching feebly along the side of his hospital bed, trying to hold on to the edge like he was cresting a daunting roller coaster.

I was crouching to his right, trying to stay eye-level instead of looming over him. I think he reached for my hand. Maybe I reached first. All I know is I took his hand and he squeezed mine.

He asked for a day to consider it, and when that patch of lucidity was gone in twenty minutes, so was his consideration.

That next morning, however, with his lovely doctor standing over us both while I rested my arm and chin on the bedrail beside him, like were co-conspirators instead of a distant father and daughter with a contentious relationship whose power dynamic was about to shift considerably, there was no question of the conversation we were having.

“Do you understand why we need to do this?” I asked him after explaining that we were out of other options. My Great Aunt Jane couldn’t handle home care, even with me present, and he would never get a moment’s peace with her hovering and micromanaging. The hospital was at the end of their ability to care for him, and any measures taken to sustain his life were only delaying the inevitable.

I don’t know if he fully understood that last part, but he nodded, looking away.

I waited for a moment, summoning my courage.

“You understand this is metastatic cancer, right?”

Another nod.

Another moment of gathering courage.

“Your oncologist told me you’ve known about this since last year…” I was cautious, careful not to make him feel judged though I knew it might be a moot point, “Do you remember that?”

He paused, taking assessment, his eyes moving slowly across the ceiling as he pulled through his own memory to find the answer.

“No,” he said slowly, “I don’t… but I must have known.”

***

I arrived on Monday afternoon, my cousin bringing me straight from the airport to the hospital.

I slept on the small sofa in his hospital room both Monday and Tuesday nights. I only left for an hour on Tuesday to meet a close friend at a restaurant right on the other side of the business park from the hospital, a quick catch up to eat and get some take out for Tara.

When I start to worry that I’m doing this because I need to feel like The Goodest Daughter, like I’ve somehow exceeded everyone else’s efforts by miles, I remind myself that I’m still putting chapstick on him, rubbing lotion onto his feet, helping the nurses turn and hold him to change his diaper, enduring the vilest of shit (that systems-are-shutting-down feces is no joke), making sure his dentures are clean and his goatee is free of food despite the fact that he’s called me Tara more than once.

***

My father and I have barely spoken in the last several years.

Nobody seems to suspect that.

***

I’ve been trying to journal but it’s difficult to keep up with considering how tired I am – writing by hand is still a beautiful pastime but I’m at the point where my memory goes so quickly that if I’m not in front of a keyboard, I lose whatever nice prose I thought I had going.

I know from a self-care perspective that I should probably leave a little more often. Go for a walk around the property at a more leisurely pace than my panic-stricken power walk – big body, short little legs, shitty shoes means my legs have been killing me since the day I had to hoof it across the Charlotte airport all the way until I got back from my quick Target trip today, four days later. But I can’t.

The idea of him being alone and afraid makes me feel sick.

But he’s calm now. He’s been calm since we arrived at hospice yesterday afternoon, after I rode in the ambulance beside him that took us from his 8th-floor ICU suite to the Hadlow hospice center on Sunbeam Road, a road only slightly off the path that I rode with my father so many times. We’ve definitely driven down it before together, though, and I can’t stop thinking about time, about how eight years ago today he put “happy 4th, love ya” on my facebook wall and within three years of that we were so strained we barely spoke, existed somewhere not quite yet arriving at estrangement but somewhere further away from familiarity.

***

I’m working very hard to not let that anger I carried for him all the way up until the phone call came on Saturday that he was dying get transmuted into guilt. Of course, it’s happened to some degree, that much I couldn’t fight off – but I’m trying to remember that this anger isn’t the dysfunction of a spoiled kid who couldn’t quit butting heads with her father, but someone who tried very hard to build a relationship that never took, who eventually decided to take her hand off the burner because eventually she stopped accepting pain as a trade-in for affection.

One of the things that has emerged the clearest to me during this transition between ICU to hospice, between periodic lucidity and near constant sleep, is how different a relationship to him Tara has had than Alina or I had. Alina has always carried the bitterness of feeling unfavored atop the conflict that close proximity built between them – she spent the first 7 years of her life with him constantly, traded off every other week after that. She’s angry at him for things that he did or said, for how he chose to shape her life from that vantage point. I spent two months of every summer with him and every Christmas and birthday as they fall during the same winter break from school. I was a part-time visitor in the life he had with both of them; I came and lived in his life, on his terms.

Her anger comes from a sense of entitlement. Mine comes from an ever-present ache of abandonment. Alina has always resented him for what he did when he was there; I resented him for not being there to begin with. I ached for a relationship with my father. I called him sporadically – far apart enough that it wouldn’t cramp his distant style, but close enough that we could maintain a steady narrative of what my life was like (always mine, almost never his – my father was as cagey and distant with me as I often was with other people). The rivers of bad blood between his longtime girlfriend and all 3 of his daughters made matters worse; she was the sort of woman who never made it past high-school level social skills and let pain and depression turn her cruel and callous, and once their relationship was over my father very openly blamed her for the strain between him and his daughters.

I once countered to him that he had made the decision to not step in and stop her. To me, it was more his fault than hers. She was awful but he was complacent with it.

Never being able to consolidate world views in general atop my feelings of having been abandoned to my grief after my mother’s death in a house that felt more like a prison (I once left a cup of water unemptied in the sink and came home to find he had dumped it all over my bed – another time, I arrived home to find my dresser from Alabama pluming up smoke from the burn pile in the back yard without so much as a word to me, because he said he saw spiders in it) made it incredibly difficult to stitch the distance between us closed. I started leaving at 5am to go to my boyfriend’s house before school and have breakfast with his family (or, more often, sneak in and either go back to sleep or have sex). I begged to move out, to leave and go stay at my great aunt’s house instead, and he resisted me only until his girlfriend needed my bedroom for her kids when they visited. Then, I was allowed to leave.

He kept all of my social security survivor’s checks. I only saw the very last one. I worked at McDonald’s to pay for my own gas (I inherited my mother’s car, a 1990 Cutlass Cierra, when she died) and insurance, and I bought my own food as well so his girlfriend didn’t get upset when I ate at the house.

He judged my mother mightily for her mistakes and while my sexuality didn’t seem to hang him up too much – he nearly choked on chicken when I told him I had been dating a girl, but he recovered quickly with a shrug and a “well… shit happens” – and my defensiveness of her put us at odds with each other again. I tried to call and set up dinner dates or ask him to come see whatever new apartment my girlfriend and I were living in. He visited one once and then never again. I brought over a pizza to hang out with him one night and within thirty minutes, Cynthia called me to tell me that one of our cats had died. Spending time together got harder to arrange, and the more he seemed indifferent to how hard I was trying to forge a relationship, the more I resented him for it.

My calls went unanswered. Seeing him required going out of my way, every time. He rarely met me halfway, almost never if it required real effort on his part.

By the time Cyn and I moved to Pensacola, we had been living less than 10 minutes away from one another and had seen each other less than 5 times in a year.

By the time we moved to Columbus, Ohio, I didn’t even tell him we were going. It didn’t seem to matter.

***

The jaundice and edema have returned by Friday morning. His breathing is becoming more and more erratic. Morphine and Ativan are coming in through a subcutaneous port because he no longer wakes up to swallow.

I have to fight the urge to try to wake him, make him take a sip of water for his parched tongue. His mouth stays wide open all of the time now. I gently rub chapstick over his lips a few times a day so they don’t crack, but the corners of his mouth are bruising from the constant tension.

I am letting him die. We are letting him die. It feels like a failure somehow, even though I know I would absolutely encourage literally anyone else to do exactly what I am doing now in exactly this situation.

***

When I was 12 years old, I played my first live show.

My father brought me onstage at the bar where he played lead guitar in the house band, a vast waste of his natural talent, and had me sing Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” while he accompanied me. We drilled it night after night in his studio apartment during the summer that he split from Alina and Tara’s mother. We worked on Tom Petty’s “Breakdown” but there was something to “Time After Time” that we both really loved – I had only recently gotten very good with pitch control and my young voice was still high and soft, able to curl over the notes gently. Now I sing with the base of my chest and what I suspect are several vocal nodes, my voice getting weak quickly but frankly it suits my style.

I was shaking, I remember very clearly wanting to throw up, but my father beamed at me from his post on the barstool beside me and started to play.

Years later, my Italian macho-typical misogynist of a father would come to the local women’s center where I worked as a victim advocate for a sexual assault response team and play in our courtyard during our survivor event in April. He played an Ani DiFranco song and I sang.

***

Time is a swallowed bomb, waiting. You pay for the whole seat but you only use the edge.  

***

On Friday night, they’re saying less than 24 hours. His breathing has changed again, growing labored and strange.

I almost have a panic attack when I have to go to the funeral home to sign papers for a cremation and fill out what of his death certificate I can remember.

Tara is staying beside him. Alina joined us for a while today, all three of us sitting and holding his hands, petting his leg while we listened to his favorite Splendor album and sang “Yeah, Whatever” to him. Hospice brought his lunch; he doesn’t eat or take water anymore. We stole his cookie and split it and talked to him about how good it was, teasing the way he always teased us. We reminisced, talked about the past and our mistakes. We all cried. We all laughed. It was as good a moment as we’d had together in a long, long time.

He didn’t wake up, but we were holding his hands. We were keeping him safe.

***

I sing to him when we’re alone – his favorite Bonnie Raitt songs. Time After Time, of course. When I try singing Warren Zevon’s “Keep Me In Your Heart For A While,” I only make it to the second stanza before I can’t go on.

“When you get up in the morning and you see that crazy sun, keep me in your heart for a while; there’s a train leaving nightly called When All Is Said And Done, keep me in your heart for a while.”

I asked him for guitar lessons once. He tried to teach me a G chord, told me to keep it simple.

“With your voice, you won’t need to learn much,” he said, and I was so overjoyed for the compliment that I’ve never forgotten it.

***

My dear friend Diana comes in to see him, despite having only known him through me.

He would hate this, I think, but I need her to be there, if only for a few minutes.

We met at the abortion clinic we both worked at; she became my boss within two months of my starting and we’ve been close ever since. When she goes to leave, she addresses my father, coming to put her hand gently on his.

“Mister Vance, if I don’t see you again, safe travels.”

I don’t know where he’s going. If there is somewhere, though, it’s going to have so much music. He’s going to be playing his heart out, saying everything his pride never let him say with notes and bars.  

Once, back in college, he called me and said nothing, setting the phone beside him on the couch while he absolutely nailed the Eruption solo from Van Halen’s cover of “Girl You Really Got Me Now.”

I have never thought of him as a good father. I have always thought of him as an incredible musician.

***

Back on Sunday, when I knew I would be flying out due to the severity of the situation, I told the nurse to tell Dad I was coming.

I didn’t think he was lucid enough to understand much of anything anyone said, but I missed a call from the hospital by margins of seconds. In an absolute tizzy over what might have been on the other end, I called back.

My father answered, his voice barely a hoarse whisper, his focus obscured by so much morphine.

“Dad? Is that you?”

“Bre?”

“Dad?”

“Bre?”

“Yeah, Dad, it’s Bre.”

His voice broke. “Oh, my baby girl.”

I felt my heart fall out of my ribs and drop down the staircase I fell down the year before and cracked my tailbone, shattered a tooth. I sat down on the stairs. I had been so worried he wouldn’t want to see me, that I’d get there and the ice coating would crawl back over our relationship and I’d have rushed down for little more than maybe a chance to say hello.

“Are you really coming?” he asked, over and over, like a child afraid of the answer being ‘no.’

***

On Saturday, he’s gasping for breath like a fish on a deck. It’s terrifying for me and Tara, who sit on either side of him wide-eyed and panic stricken, waiting for the higher dose of morphine to kick in. It’s violent to watch, but thankfully it starts to subside by that night.

The fear dissipates from the room, but we don’t forget the experience.

***

I show the night nurse pictures of my father with his long dark hair, his brown-tan skin, his brilliant green eyes. I show her pictures of him just two short years ago, round-faced and charming in his straw fedora as he played his guitar, blissfully unaware of all the shitty connotations of fedoras nowadays. She marvels at how handsome he is, how happy he looks holding a guitar. I tell her he’s a really good carpenter but he’s a much better musician, raised by a father who was notoriously talented as well. My father lit up onstage, not as towering as a front man but as the ever-present lead guitarist, just quirky and fun enough to draw your eye from the main microphone but practical, decades of practice and honed skill turning him into the kind of perfectionist he resented in his father.

The lead singer of the last band he played for comes to see him for the third time since Monday. He’s the kind of man who has a natural charm about him, a comfort with being the center of attention that most of us can’t cultivate. He’s sincere in his grief about my father, but he’s also the kind of person who acts as though it’s never dawned on him that not everything he does will come with applause. He performs a very dramatic one man show of his grief when it’s just him and my sister; when I’m here he holds court with his memories and talks about throwing back whiskey with my father at the bar they played at.

“He always said the doctor said it was okay!”

I fight back irritation when I respond, “The doctor absolutely did not say it was okay, he had liver damage.” It’s not this man’s fault my father took big gambles with his health and his addictions. It’s not his fault that my father has always loved a good time. It’s certainly not his fault my father lied about his condition to most people to avoid having to talk about it.

He makes open-ended statements designed to make us ask him questions about himself. Neither one of us do. This seems to bother him. It occurs to me that after a lifetime of being handsome and musically inclined, he might just be expressing himself the only way he knows how – from a vantage point where the world ends at the end of his nose.

Later, when his wife comes, it’s a complete 180. She is calm and warm and immediate, built small and slight like my mother, and between that and her unabashed Mom vibes I’m instantly glad that this virtual stranger is in the room. We watch my father struggle to breathe and she puts her hand on my back, one hand on mine on his, and for a second I shut my eyes and let myself cry – not the way I want to cry, I haven’t found the softest spot to rip that one open from yet, but quietly. If I keep my eyes closed, it feels like my mother is beside me. I can’t think of a not-weird way to tell her I’m grateful for that, so I don’t.

***

Tara and I hold vigil all day on Sunday. His lungs are full of fluid and his face is going grey. His breaths are gentle and small but he sounds like a coffee maker, an observation I make after waking from a catnap in the bay window.

It’s just the three of us and a Law & Order SVU marathon. Dad’s come to like police procedurals in his old age.

We put up a statement on Facebook asking people to send their well wishes via text and phone calls, that we are running out of road and we’d like to focus mostly on spending the last hours or days with him. Alina doesn’t show. She’s been present but sporadically, unable to bear the full weight of the reality of the situation perhaps or too distracted by her own personal demons. I wonder, of the three of us, which daughter will be the one living with the most regret. It’s probably between me and Alina.

When Tara finally goes home for the evening, the nurse comes back to check on him again. Between his blood pressure and his gentle, rattling breaths, he could easily go tonight or go into the morning.

I text my cousin and refer to my father as Captain Refuses-To-Die. She laughs. I feel guilty. She points out that no one would be laughing more than my father. I feel better.

On this, likely the last night we’ll ever have together, I read to him from the book I’ve brought from home (Dessa Wander’s My Own Devices, nonfiction essays that are beautiful and poignant), put Chicago PD on mute and play him Jeff Buckley. I read aloud from the chapter in which Dessa filmed the music video for “Sound The Bells”, and the ending lines crush me all over again: “Some places you need to go, even a chestful of air is too much cargo. Some places you can only go empty.”

I tell him, for the hundredth time, that it’s okay to go if he needs to. His blood pressure is lower and the rattling breaths are a sign we’re growing closer, but he’s still warm to the touch all over. If he’s mottling, we can’t see it. There’s gray in his face again but he reacts to the oral swab of moisturizer to keep his mouth from drying out by furrowing his brows, almost turning away but not quite. The nurses aren’t sure what to make of it. One of these literal angels asks me if I’ve tried telling him it’s okay to go – I tell her that might be what’s holding him up, because now that it was someone else’s idea, he’s just not going to do it.

I hear him in my ear sometimes. Quit rushin’ me. I’ll go when I want and not a moment sooner. Sit down.

We listen to three different versions of Buckley’s Hallelujah – instrumental while I read to him, live, and studio. We move on to the rest of the Grace album.

I’m afraid to go to the bathroom or take a shower when it’s just me and him, so convinced he’ll wait until the second the door clicks shut and then take his opportunity to slip away unnoticed, robbing me of the moment where I get to hold his hand and put some symmetry to our relationship. After all, he was there when I came into the world, purple and defiantly refusing to breathe until suddenly I sucked in air and began to scream. He saw me come in; I vow to at least be here when he goes out. I want to hold his hand the whole time, but if in all his wittiness he decides to kick while I’m half-sleeping on the World’s Okayest Cot, just being in the room will have to be enough.

***

When Alina arrived at my great aunt’s and found him on the floor, slumped against his bed bleeding and unable to get up, he told her he had become addicted to oxycodone since nothing else was helping for the pain. He told her he was done, that he was tired of being sick and tired of fighting.

Despite this, he’s still hanging on. I don’t think he wants to go. He’s only 61 years old. It seems far away to me now the way my mother’s 39 years seemed when I was 16, but now I am 32 and 39 gets more horrible and tragic every day. My father was the life of the party between his sense of humor and relentless flirting and I can only assume that on some base level, he’s not ready for the party to stop yet.

His fingers stopped searching for the fret board days ago. His eyes don’t move behind the lids anymore, and the shadows and bruises around them are coming in fierce. The Haldol is doing nothing to stop the secretions and he’s still in full brew mode, death rattle on all day long. It’s terrifying at first but after a while it’s just a rumble, just a purr. There are moments when Tara and I are perched in our respective chairs on either side of him, eyes turned to the TV or our phones, and this is… ‘fine’ isn’t really the word, but mundane. Just a thing we’re all doing. Boring, even. And then I glance at the bed and see my emaciated, sunken-faced father gurgling through yet another breath and it takes my own away how very not okay it all is.

He’d hate this, is the only thing I can keep thinking. He would hate all of this.

***

There’s a train leaving nightly called ‘When All Is Said and Done.’

Keep me in your heart for a while.

I love him with every ounce of my being. I’m so angry for all the time we missed. I’m so sad that he didn’t let me love him more.

***

It’s Thursday, again. The last few days have been a blur so emotionally exhausting I haven’t had the presence of mind to put pen to paper in any capacity.

When he’ll die is anyone’s guess. For a while yesterday his breathing changed so drastically, came in short little hiccups, that the PRN was sure he was breathing his last. Then, like nothing had ever transpired, he was back to the soft, shallow breaths of before, the rattling having disappeared within a day of its arrival. He started having spells yesterday where he exhales so hard that it engages his vocal cords, making a groan or soft moan like a zombie in a horror film; this terrified the shit out of Tara and me so badly that we grabbed the nurse. His eyes tried to open. It was incredibly upsetting.

The nurse explained that these were reflexive, the deep sighs were him fighting his own heart’s slowing down on some basal level. He’s been unconscious for an entire week now – the eyes opening are a reflex, not intentional and not a sign of any sort of awareness behind the lids.

When they opened after he was cleaned, they had rolled all the way up into his head, leaving nothing but a sliver of white, making me feel sick to my stomach. I knew dying wasn’t elegant and beautiful the way the movies would have you believe, but this is taking so very, very long and it’s so very, very awful.

It’s been a week without water now, so at some point something will have to give.

Tara has spent every day right next to me, sometimes holding his other hand, sometimes napping in the armchair while I nap on my cot. It’s often the two of us in comfortable silence for long stretches or cracking jokes over whatever is on tv. We share his trays when they come in – sometimes the worker slips us a second tray specifically for Tara – or she runs to grab lunch. We tried going out together a few times but no results; he would be exactly as we left him upon our return. Whatever he’s holding on for, he’s holding on with both hands.

I watch his pulse pound in the veins in his neck. I can see his heartbeat through the emaciation of his ribs. I wish to god this was a Death With Dignity state. I wish to god the end would just come gently for him already, and then I feel like a monster for wishing that. How do you want someone you love to die? How do you want them to stay and suffer? Damned if I do, fucked if I don’t.

I play him Joe Bonamassa, more Jeff Buckley, Bonnie Raitt, Bon Iver, Eva Cassidy, Warren Zevon. I sing every song he ever asked me to sing for him, even the ones he chastised me for singing too loudly for him to hear the radio. I hum when I can’t muster the energy to sing, which is increasingly often at this point.

I’m a ghost wandering the hospice halls. The staff greets me by first name and I know most of theirs now – Lisa, who is a literal angel, sent in a dining room cart loaded with sandwiches and chips when a big storm hit yesterday, thinking Tara and I wouldn’t likely go out to get dinner. Gloria dutifully checks on me and my dad and Tara. Jasmine, Victoria, Tinkey, Dolores, the cleaning lady named Cynthia (my wife’s name) is a particular comfort, going out of her way to talk to me every time she comes in to sweep.

The guilt is palpable. I miss my wife and my dog and my apartment; sleeping on this cot has triggered my already flared vestibular disorder and I am so dizzy I worry I’ll fall over at least once a day. I eat what I can when I can but my diet is garbage. I often forget to eat. I’m making it a point to drink as much water as I physically can without getting sick as it helps my headaches.

But I haven’t cried in what feels like days. I can’t anymore. I talk about the increasingly mottling on his fingers, his toes, his ears like it’s a matter-of-fact conversation about the weather. The sound of his sighs and groans still make my heart catch in my throat every time but I’m going numb to the rest. We’re just kind of trapped here in limbo between being able to care for him, which we no longer can, and being able to mourn him and grieve, which we cannot yet do. It feels like torture. I mentally calculate out how much therapy I’m going to need to get out the other side of this. I watch more cop procedurals than I’ve watched in years and hate every last one of them unless Olivia Benson is in them (except Criminal Minds, which I have a complicated relationship with but Tara and I both share a deep abiding love of Spencer Reid, so.)

I want to go home. I feel like dog shit for wanting to go home. I can’t leave him. Not like this. I don’t know how to ask for help but I feel like I’m drowning.

***

The only slices of time where I feel like I can breathe is when Tara and I run to Target for no good reason or when I’m in the shower late in the evening. At first I was too afraid to so much as use the bathroom, scared he would slip off the second I left the room in one final act of independence to prove once and for all that he didn’t need anybody else’s input or help.

Dad’s hospice room has a huge walk-in shower built to accommodate a sitting toilet for those who are still resisting the sponge bath with all their might. Dad was unable to walk for the three days he was in the ICU, much less now, so I drag the entire rig of pvc and toilet seat out into the bathroom proper and enjoy a shower with enough space to comfortably fit three people. In my apartment back home, we haven’t had a functional shower in months; the whole set up fell out of the wall, leaving us only with our very deep and very beautiful porcelain tub. It’s hard to complain about such a tub but the reality is that cup baths get tiring very quickly when you’re disabled and getting into and out of that gorgeous porcelain tank is real work.

This shower comes equipped with safety rails, which at the ripe old age of 32 send my chronically ill self into pure joy. I find reasons to stay in the shower longer than I normally would, water conscious as I try to be. My legs haven’t been so shaven so frequently since I was a teenager. I don’t always have the energy to slip off and stand in hot water for twenty minutes at a time but when I do I try to take advantage; we don’t know when he’s going to decide he’s had enough and I’ll be quickly packing our things into all these Zaxby’s carryout bags I keep hoarding.

***

At some point, this has begun to feel deliberate. Am I locked in one final battle of wills with my father? Is he testing my mettle – and Tara’s, for that matter – to make sure we’ve got the stones to follow up on our promises?

My father made a lot of promises he didn’t honor. Whether they haunted him or if he just forgot is anybody’s guess.

***

I’m on the lanai near my father’s room when I noticed a few people going in and out of the room. I tell my aunt Sharon, “If he slipped off while I was outside on the phone, I swear to god.” He hasn’t, but we’re close; they’ve repositioned him to try to help things move along. The doctor tells me the mottling has moved quickly up his legs and that we’re looking at hours now, maybe even sooner.

His eyes are partially open again. I grimace and close them gently. I remember my mothers’ open eyes, dead for hours when I found her, and it’s something that sixteen years of road between that moment and now have never been able to rub free from my memory. I wonder what about this will haunt me in specificity – the whole experience, sure, but the little things. If I’ll smell someone wearing his nurse practitioner’s perfume and it’ll send me straight into fight or flight. If I’ll be so consumed by my grief that I can’t eat but the second I can I find I can never eat trail mix again. If something will slip just under the edge of my self awareness and then one day I’ll be crying in the aisle at Kroger for no reason.

Bronze nail polish, unexpected splashes of Daffodil yellow, and “Girl You Really Got Me Now” stop me in my tracks in regards to my mother, but she was part of my life every single day. This man laying in this hospital bed is undoubtedly someone I love so much it makes my chest hurt to think of, but not much in my day to day life will change when he is gone – he wasn’t a part of it, hadn’t been for years.

A storm is rolling in. I call my sister.

***

He dies at 10:40 on July 11th.

Tara is asleep on the cot on one side of him, I’m sitting in the armchair on the other, listening to him breathe and texting my wife. Chicago PD is on because of course it is. I get a strange prickle of discomfort and pause, realizing that I no longer hear the heaving of his breath.

At that exact moment, my sister wakes for no reason and goes into the bathroom, passing me as I quickly come around the bed to look at my father’s face in the blue tv light, his eyes slit just barely open. His chest unmoving. The thrum of his heartbeat, so visible for so many days, stilled. I pressed two fingers to his neck, fought the urge to recoil, and pressed the call button to the nurse’s station.

We get an hour and a half with him before the funeral home arrives at nearly 1 am. With my mother, my shock and fear kept me from being able to go anywhere near her body after I dropped her when I tried to turn her over. My criminology studies made me slightly more comfortable around the dead but that quick recoil didn’t leave me and before long I was doubly nursing a burgeoning drinking problem and a crippling fear of death. I’ve done the reading. I’ve pushed myself past my comfort zone. When my beloved dogs died in 2015 and 2017, I spent time with them before burying them myself in the backyard of my aunt’s home.

When the doctor backs out of the door gracefully, quietly, I press my ear to my father’s chest and hear nothing. I put my arm over both of his. I let myself sob into his still, unmoving shoulder and I remember for a moment how he held me in my bedroom at his house the day I moved in, when my mother’s death was suddenly too real to stand under the weight off. How he let me lean fully into him and slid down to the floor with me, let me sob until I was too sore to keep crying, how for that one blessed moment he was the father I needed at exactly the moment I needed him. 

They come to take him. The funeral home worker watches me with a soft expression as I dip down one last time and tell him, “On to the next adventure. Thank you for everything. I love you, Dad. Goodbye.”

***

I love you, Dad.

Goodbye.

***

I think I’m going to feel better but really, I’m just tired. Bone-deep tired. A tired I can’t put a name to. I want to go home and be held by my wife more than I want anything in the world. I spend the day with my sisters, alternating between being mostly-okay and having my breath snatched from me by how not-okay I am. Alina submits herself back to rehab to return on Monday. We make plans to go through his things, together, in September, when I’ve returned for a wedding. It feels okay-ish, and then it feels less okay, and then it’s so awful I can’t wrap my head around it.

And it will continue to be awful. I know that. But it will gradually become less awful, the edges rubbing down until it doesn’t cut me every time I brush against it. It will always be awful. But it will turn into a shape of awful that I can breathe around.

I take stock of what I’ve got left in my hands now that my watch has ended. I went from “my father is not in my life” to “my father is dying and I am caring for him in his final days after a lifetime of his antiseptic behavior to my attempts at building emotional bridges with him” to “my father is dead” in the space of about 13 days. There was no time. It all happened too fast.

On my last day in Florida, I drag both of my exhausted sisters to the beach. Alina sleeps on a towel. Tara and I wade out into the ocean, and I let the salt water of my sweat and my tears remind me how we all came from the sea, how we all return to the earth, and how one day this planet will keep spinning without me, regardless of whether I’ve left a list of things undone or not.

I don’t scream. I don’t cry. I just float for a while. 

[sorryidosedoff]

Coming back-chapter II (Tom Holland x Original character story)

It all happened so fast. Anna called 112, the ambulance arrived shortly. The neighbor who, thank god was a doctor made sure they were alive at least until the ambulance came. In the ambulance car was Liza. Austin had still been sleeping and was left to sleep with the neighbor babysitting him. Anna drove her car to the hospital. She fought back the tears successfully; she didn’t want to be the second Fray to get in a car accident. Actually she’d be the third Fray, the first being her father.

She ran and found her mother quickly. Both in tears, hugging each other waited for hours for word from the doctors. Tom had bombarded Anna with messages and calls.  She went to the bathroom and she decided to reply to them.

What happened Anna, please call me. – delivered 4:45 PM

Asdfghjk I can still hear your scream. – delivered 4:57 PM

How am I going to do this fucking interview? – delivered 5:04 PM

Please Anna please respond – delivered 5:31 PM

How do I go on with the fucking day? – delivered 5:38 PM

I’m packing, I can’t stop fidgeting. – delivered 5:51 PM

She looked at the time – 5:57 PM. She rang Tom. He answered after just the 1st ring.

“What happened?!”-Anna fake chuckled and began explaining the whole situation. –“Jesus fucking Christ. How are they now?” “Yeah that’s the thing. They still haven’t told us shit. And I’m shit and my mom is shit. She barely kept herself after dad; I don’t know how she’s going to react if Ethan dies. I don’t know if I’m going to keep it together. I’m alone and I just fucking need to punch something.”-the tears started to roll and Tom could hear her weeping. He had to be there for her, fast.

“Mom, is there a sooner flight for London?”-his mom quickly contacted Tom’s agent. “What?”-Anna heard what Tom had asked.-“What are you doing?” “You’re not alone, and soon I’ll be there too. But I need you to have hope, please. Soon you’ll have me to cry on.”-Anna smiled. “I can’t thank you enough. At the same time I don’t want you to do it, but I don’t want to stop you either.” “There’s a plane in an hour. I hope we’re going to make it. Apparently my agent took care of it all. I have to go now. I’ll be there as fast as I can. Bye Anna.” “Thank you Tom. Goodbye.”- What did she do to deserve a friend like him? He was wonderful, truly wonderful. If her calculations were correct, Tom was going to be there at 5AM.

She walked to her mother. She was sitting on the ground looking straight ahead. Her face was blank.

Anna put her hand on her mother’s shoulder.

“What is it?”-she sat next to her. “The doctor came. Apparently your brother had been high on cocaine. If what he said was accurate, he’s been using for 4 months already.”-Anna arched her neck, her head hitting the wall. –“They’re both in recovery now. Soon we’ll be able to stay with them.” “Did Olivia’s parents come?” “Yeah, they’re getting coffee.” “Do you want some?” “If you’re up to it, sure. Here, get yourself one as well.”-Liza gave her daughter money and kissed her on the forehead.

There had been a coffee shop just next door of the hospital and so Anna headed for it.

Why Ethan, why. I guess I wasn’t a good enough sister to you.

Anna continued her walk, continuously blaming herself for her brother’s addiction. It was her way of coping. It wasn’t healthy. She did the same after her father. She’d think: If I came with as he asked, maybe he’d still be alive; maybe if we walked to the pizza place he’d still be alive; maybe if I didn’t beg for pizza he’d still be alive; maybe if I just went out with Marge that night he’d still be alive. These are the thoughts that drove her to suicide 2 years ago. Thankfully Ethan saved her. If only I was there the same way he was for me.

A cup of black coffee and a cappuccino were in Anna’s hands as she walked to her mother.

“We can see Ethan now.”-Liza said and they entered Ethan’s recovery room. Ethan had been really bruised and had a broken arm. It could have been worse – Anna thought. She sat on the chair on the right side sipping on her cappuccino. Liza sat on a chair near the left side of the bed.

Anna pulled her phone out of her pocket. Penelope and Marge had sent her a couple of messages.

-A picture of Penelope and Marge in front of a sunset- Wish you were here Anna. We miss you – delivered 6:27 PM

Apparently we’re coming back earlier than expected. – delivered 6:42 PM

Either way it’s boring without you here. – delivered 6:43 PM

We’re coming back on the 18th – delivered 6:44 PM

We can’t wait to see you. – delivered 6:47 PM

She didn’t reply. She was happy to have them back sooner but she couldn’t bring herself to respond in any way.

She opened Tom’s conversation and wrote him.

Apparently my brother had a cocaine addiction. I couldn’t save my brother from it, but he could save me from taking my life. I’m feeling amazing.

Anna scrolled through her social media not knowing what else to do. While watching a video on YouTube she fell asleep. Liza threw a blanket over her daughter, if only she could fall asleep like her. At about 12AM Liza had drifted away as well.

03:48 AM. Anna awoke from her sleep. She looked for her phone. Tom had sent her messages.

Please don’t blame yourself Anna, please. Not again. It’s not your fault, it never is. – delivered 08:14 PM

We’re arriving probably at 5 AM – delivered 00:01 AM

If you are awake then, could you give us a ride? – delivered 00:04 AM

If you feel up to it, that is. – delivered 00:04 AM

At least I get to drive. Driving was her favorite pastime. After her father died except for dancing is what she did most. Alone, a long road and the radio on was all she needed some nights. If her mom sent her to the store, she’d go to the one on the opposite end of the town. But she loved it. It gave her peace. Secretly some drives she hoped she’d get in a car accident and die quickly. Her suicidal thoughts never left her.

She plugged her to the radio and listened to a mix of songs starting with Where Is My Mind. She couldn’t stop listening to the song. It was just too good. Outside it had started raining, like an instinct Anna turned down the music. Anna had been a depressed girl that had suicidal thoughts and previous issues with self harm but these times when her family needed her she cared for herself; not for her sake, but for theirs. The ride continued, the songs continued playing; they were the reason Anna hadn’t broke down yet. Singing along to the music is what calmed her. The ride had been an hour long, for the time being she stopped herself from blaming herself and thought of the songs playing instead. She parked her car and entered the airport. 04:24 AM – read the clock. Anna asked a flight attendant when the flight from London would be arriving. The attendant answered that they were landing down as they spoke. Anna felt a hunger so she took to the nearby bakery and got herself a mediocre salty croissant. She missed the croissants from France. Her favorite holidays were in France, she loved the cuisine, the people everything. Anna’s phone rang. It was Tom.

“Hey, where are you?”-asked Tom. “I’m in the waiting area, I’m eating a croissant. Did you get your luggage?”-she said taking a bite from the croissant. “We’re coming to you. How are you?”-he asked worried for his friend. “I’m fine, I’m hungry. And this croissant is shitty. I miss France.” “Yeah, me too. I’m coming down the escalator, I think I see you.” “Oh wait.”-Anna stood up and walked closer to the escalator, croissant in hand.-“Okay I see you.”-Anna smiled and she could see her best friend and Nicola smiling to her. The mother and son came off of the escalator and Tom ran to Anna. He hugged her and took her in his arms, spinning them both as they hugged.

“Oh my god I’ve missed you.”-said Tom, both of them couldn’t stop smiling. A tear or two came down from Anna’s eyes. “Oh you have no idea.”-Anna kissed Tom on the forehead and cheek and let go from the hug to hug Nicola as well. Anna took Nicola’s suitcase and led them toward the exit where she had left her car. The three got in. “I’m going to take you home so you can settle down and I’ll go back to the hospital.”-Tom had been sitting next to her and looked at her somewhat confused. “Anna I’m coming with you. No argument there.”-Anna half-smiled. “Drive me home, I’ll take care of the suitcases and see your dad then we’ll both come to the hospital.”-said Nicola. Anna nodded and so she drove Nicola home. The ride was 45 minutes long and for all that time Tom and Nicola didn’t stop talking, they were doing everything they could to keep Anna in a good mood. They weren’t failing but they weren’t successful either. Anna got to Tom’s house. “Tell your mom I’ll be there shortly.”-Anna nodded. “Mom, kiss Tessa for me.”-said Tom. “Look Tom you should go home too.” “Anna, I told you I’m not leaving your side.”-they both smiled and so Anna continued driving. Tom put Red Hot Chili Peppers on and they sat in silence. The two sat in a comfortable silence where both of them felt good. Singing along to the songs of their newest album, Anna felt a glimmer of happiness. She got her best friend back.

[the-xfiles-is-bisexual]

Doughnuts and Starbucks?

So, I have something that I need to get off of my chest, but I feel like it’s easier to do if I present it as a story, instead of just writing an account of events. Read it if you want, just be warned that it is about sexual assault. 

It was an uncommonly humid night on the 15th of September, though I don’t remember thinking much of it as the time. Outside of my window, and down a flight, I could hear the sounds of somebody talking.  If I had been older than I was, I would have done something more than I did, but I did nothing more than close my window and go back to watching the film that was playing on the television. I didn’t pass a thought that the voice came from my family’s backyard. 

On the film, a woman was exploring an abandoned house that was haunted by some sort of demon, and finds herself to be possessed by it. I found it funny, my suspension of disbelief broken by the comical, nature of the demon’s appearance, due to the older nature of the movie. 

My room soon became hot again, so I cracked my window a bit again, listening to see if they were still outside. Satisfied by hearing nobody, I opened the window all of the way, and sat back down, enjoying the warm breeze coming into the room. 

There was a knock at the front door. My parents always told me that I wasn’t allowed to answer the front door, but I wasn’t keen on listening to them when they weren’t home.  There was a second set of knocks. I got up and went downstairs to the door, when they knocked a third time. I opened the door ajar, peeking out to see nobody outside. I locked the door, and made my way back up to my room. Now unnerved, I switched off the television set, no longer in the mood for a scary movie. 

Silence now filled the house. 

This time, the knocking grew louder with each time, growing more and more forceful. I made my way to my parent’s room, with a window over;looking the street. I sat down next to the window sill in the dark, waiting to see who would come away from my door. From downstairs, I could hear the telephone ringing. 

I kept my eye on the street, backing out of the room, before turning and hurrying downstairs. The darkened entryway looming large on my mind as I walked past it, making me fear turning my back on it. I picked up the phone, and put the handset to my ear. On the other end, I could hear the sound of someone hanging up.  

Again, a pounding at the door.  After three sharp raps, the phone rings again. I quickly picked it up again, and again they hung up. I put down the phone, and ran back upstairs to sit by my parent’s window again. 

Across the street, on the curb, sat a man who was middle aged that I could not recognize, staring absentmindedly at my family’s front door. I crawled out of the room, and once I was sure that I had cleared his line of possible sight, I stood up and ran into my room to grab the camera that I had gotten for my birthday last year.  While I had only just seen him, I could already feel like he only bore me ill will. Looking down the lens, I focused on him, and clicked the shutter. A bright light filled the room, bouncing back off of the inside of the window. I had forgotten to remove the flashcube. 

I dropped the camera out of fright, and hid down below the edge of the window.  Peeking back down on the street, the man now looked directly up at me, now smiling. 

I threw the blinds closed, and ran for my desk to fetch my father’s work phone number. I ran down the stairs for the phone, and slipped and fell in the dark entryway. 

I felt up the wall for a light switch, and flicked it on; revealing the hardwood floor coated in a bright red, blood.  I tried to let out a scream of terror, but it was higher than my voice could go, resulting in just the choking sound of air escaping from my throat. 

I could hear the heavy thump of footsteps on the floor above me, approaching the top of the stairs. Above me, coming down the stairs, is a figure draped in my blue bed sheet, with a horrifying bloody splotch decorating the center. They made their way towards me. I tried to crawl backwards towards the door, my hands slipping out from under me in the blood, still unable to cry. The figure kept towards me, backing me up against the door, and knelt down by my side. Despite the gory scene, and the night of terror I endured, this figure did not feel to be an evil one. I reached out to it’s face, moving to reveal their face, but they grabbed my wrist, stopping me. 

The figure’s voice was neither masculine, nor was it feminine. All of these years later I can not remember what it sounded like, but- as odd as it might sound- I am now comforted thinking of the figure. ‘My Bloody Ghost’, as I would come to call them. 

My Savior.

They sat down alongside me, and reached out to stroke my hair, filling me with a warm feeling of calmness. They told me not to be afraid, for everything that happened this night was nothing more than a dream. I told them that I wanted to wake up now, and they told me no. But they would stay there with me, until it would be safe for me too wake up. I obliged the bloody spirit. I don’t know why, but in this dream, I lay my head down in their lap, allowing them to run their fingers through my hair. We sat there, in peacefulness, as minutes flowed into what felt like hours. 

Soon, they leaned over and gently whispered into my ear that their job was done, and it was time for me too wake up. That was the last time I would ever see my bloody ghost. 

-

I awake, with my eyes still closed, reaching out to roll that same sky blue bed sheet the figure wore in between my fingers. I was a 15 year old boy who had come out to his parents as gay only a month prior. I was still a little over six months away from starting puberty; the latest out of my entire friend group, the source of much ridicule. But all of that was far from my mind, as I was still thinking about the warmth of my ghost. My lovely, bloodied ghost. 

I acutely became aware of a new sensation that I never felt before, an indescribably pain radiating from my lower abdomen. I opened my eyes, and too my horror; found that my sheet was bloodied. 

I threw back my blanket, to see my legs cased in drying blood, causing the sheet to stick to my legs. The painful sensation only grew with each moment, and it soon became too painful to be sitting down. The blood had come, from me. 

I had no idea what to do.

I was frozen.

That sight, and that sensation of the deepest pain that I had ever known to this day, should have been enough to make any child wail to the heavens. But I didn’t make a sound. not a peep. And I don’t know why. 

I checked the time, and saw that it was still early; my parents wouldn’t wake up for nearly two hours. Tears now starting to well in my eyes, as I was on the verge of having my very first panic attack. My sister had been moved to live with our grandparents in California earlier that year. 

I was alone. 

I decided that I needed to shower. 

I fought to get up, peeling the sheet off of my legs, and I became aware that my pajama pants were across the room, by my closed bedroom door.  Up until that morning, I had slept with my door all of the way open every night of my life, due to an overwhelming fear of the dark. I even kept a heavy dictionary propping the door open so that the wind couldn’t accidentally blow it closed.

A dictionary that now sat atop my bookshelf.

From that night on, I would have a fear of sleeping with my bedroom door open. 

I opened the door, and stepped out into the hallway, pulling the door closed behind me, wishing to God that I could lock it. I was deathly afraid of my parent’s seeing the mess of my bed. Because I had no idea how I would explain it to them. because I had no idea what happened. I had no memory between dinner and waking up. 

I went into the bathroom, turned on the fan, and hesitantly locked the bathroom door, another first. I undressed and got into the shower. The water stung at me like bites. Shit. I forgot a timer. One of the rules of the house was that I was allowed to shower for no longer than 15 minutes, unless I wanted for my dad to yell at me for wasting hot water. I laid down on my side on the bath floor, and completely broke down. I cried, and cried, and cried. The water ran from hot, to warm, and to cold, but I still did not get up. The whole time I cried, I made sure not to sob any louder than the bathroom fan, for fear that if my mom or dad did wake up, they would hear and demand to know what was wrong.  I felt a guilt that I could not describe, and one that I could not find the source for.

By the time I dried my eyes, and dressed into clean clothes, nearly 45 minutes had passed. I needed to figure out a way to deal with my ‘mess.’ I couldn’t wash my sheets, because my Dad was the only one allowed to do the laundry per his rule. Not even mom was allowed to work the machine. 

I stood in front of my door, and took a deep breath, trying to prepare myself for what lay on the other side of the door. I opened my door, and I found a sight that caught my breath in my throat.

My bedding had been stripped.

I couldn’t breath, it felt like I was choking. 

I closed my door, and snuck downstairs, careful to avoid the steps I knew would creak.

I entered the laundry room. The washing machine was whirring. It sounded almost angry. I opened the lid to see my blanket, and bright blue bed sheet spinning

around,

and around

and around.

I shut the lid, and left the room, closing the door behind me. I stood there, staring at the ground in front of me, trying my best to comprehend what had been happening to me. My still developing brain, unsuccessfully trying it’s best to make heads or tails, telling me that what I saw wasn’t true. It just couldn’t be. It wouldn’t be until a few months ago, when I brought up this ‘mysterious event’ to my therapist, and she sat my down and explained what I had just described to her. My dad had always told me that ‘that’ can’t happen to boys.

But in the meantime, I stood there, watching the floor. My dad came out of the kitchen, and asked me what was wrong, startling me. 

I didn’t know how to answer his question, my words caught in the back of my throat. He smiled at me, unsettling me in the same way that the man across the street in my dream had.

“What are your thoughts on doughnuts and Starbucks? For breakfast?” He asked, but I didn’t know what too say. I was having more trouble than I ever had in my life trying to find the courage to form a word, but all I could muster was a half-hearted nod. I stared into his eyes, and a lump began to form in my throat, I was a 15 year old boy who was deathly afraid of his father for reasons he could not yet explain. He pulled me in for a hug, and kissed me on the mouth. He then told me to put on my shoes while he got his wallet and keys. 

[dammitadolfnomorecake]

When Levi's alarm went off in the morning, Eren really didn't want to move. Curling closer to Levi, he ignored the fact that his erection was trapped somewhat awkwardly between them. It wasn't like Levi ever said anything about it anyway. Nuzzling his alpha's chest, Eren sighed softly as Levi's arms wrapped around him

"Mmmm, morning Eren"

"Shhhh. Sleeping"

"Unfortunately you sound different when you're talking in your sleep, so I know you're awake down there"

Eren shook his head before pausing

"I talk in my sleep?"

"Yeah. You talk about how you should do more housework, and..."

Groaning to cut Levi's sentence off, the alpha pressed a kiss to the top of his head

"Come on, we need to get up"

"I don't want to"

"I gathered that... but you're the one who said you were going to school today"

"I lied. It's not like I'm all that smart anyway"

"Eren, you know I hate it when you talk like that"

"It doesn't mean it isn't true"

The thought of seeing both the principal and Armin, had kept him up half the night, meaning he'd made himself thoroughly depressed as he played all the different scenarios over and over

"Come on"

Moving to sit up beneath him, Eren made no effort to move from Levi's side. Pushing him away, Levi might have meant nothing harsh by it, but it still hurt his omega. He desperately needed some form of comfort, but Levi was seemingly oblivious or just not caring

"Eren"

"Fine. Whatever"

Climbing away from Levi, Eren didn't look back as he headed to the bathroom. He could smell his own sadness and smell his arousal, but Levi would rather push him away and get on with the day than enjoy a few more minutes together.

Dressing while Levi was in the shower, Eren gathered his school things up for his Friday classes and left home before Levi got out the shower. Leaving his phone home, he was angry at himself for how he acted, and didn't want to risk upsetting Levi while in such a sooky mood. Levi was just being Levi and he needed to accept that. Because of his haste to leave so soon, he had over an hour and a half to waste before school started and no idea what he wanted to do. It wasn't like he was feeling listless, and if he had to describe it, he'd say restless though that wasn't really it either. He wanted to run and scream and sleep all at the same time. So instead of catching the bus, he walked the 45 plus minutes to school. It was the first time since the accident that he'd walked that far and his muscles were definitely swearing at him over it, but the exhaustion actually felt good... until it didn't and his hips began to throb like when they first had him walking in physio. Arriving to find the front doors to the school already unlocked, Eren headed straight for the office. Since leaving home his mood must have shifted in a dozen different directions, but now he was just tired and mad... the perfect combination to face the devil with so early in the morning.

Even though there was no one else around, Eren still had to wait before the principal would finally see him. Limping heavily, he made his way into the man's office

"Eren"

Sighing deeply Eren took a seat, the way the man said his name told him he was evidently to blame

"You must have some idea why I wanted to talk to you?"

"Because someone graffitied my locker?"

"So that wasn't you?"

God. If the man could be any stupider, he'd be a teaspoon

"Yes. It was totally me. I totally enjoy having my private life put up like that, and I totally enjoy the money my alpha gives me"

It actually seemed like the man believed his sarcastic tone, or at least the look on his face did

"No. It wasn't me, but by the looks of it you've already decided it was"

"Eren, I'm trying to understand here. We take acts of property destruction very seriously here"

"And you don't take someone putting a razor in my locker serious? Or the condoms or the notes. No. You don't take any of that seriously, do you?"

He should probably stop talking...

"So that didn't belong to you?"

"Seriously? No. It wasn't mine. None of that shit was mine. And for the record, I don't know who did it, only that I've been copping shit this last week because I'm an omega, and you all only give a fuck now because it lead to this"

Sighing deeply the principal pinched the bridge of his nose

"You need to settle down Eren. I'm sure it hasn't been all that bad"

"If it wasn't that bad then none of this would have happened!"

"And you did nothing to bring this upon yourself?"

"If my alpha giving me a kiss goodbye counts as doing something wrong, then yes"

"You have to realise its very hard for alpha's..."

"No. You have to realise you are completely out of touch with your students and you are a moron if you think telling me off is going to change anything"

"Eren, you're on dangerously thin ice here"

"Really? Because I'm sure the education department would love to know about your behaviour and what has been happening at this school"

Growling at him, Eren had finally hit the nerve he was looking for. Biting down the smirk that threatened to appear, Eren grabbed his bag

"Good luck finding out whoever did it, and if it happens again, I really will go to your bosses over this. All I want is to go to class and do my damn work in peace"

Rising to his feet, he left before his big mouth could spew out anymore bullshit. He had no idea where all that had come from, but he did feel better after having a go at the man that was so much like his father and he was quietly sure Levi would have been proud.

Taking his seat in the empty science room, Eren pulled out his chemistry book and laid his head against it. The coolness of the book felt wonderful against his warm face, and he was very nearly asleep when the bell finally ran. Trying to pull himself together, he sat back with a small yawn. Walking had been a horrible idea, and no doubt what he was feeling now was karma for leaving things with Levi in limbo

"Eren?"

Looking up to find Mikasa staring down at him, he was confused as to why his friend hadn't just taken her seat

"Hi Mikasa, what's up?"

"Levi dropped off your phone for you"

Taking the phone, Eren felt even shittier about sneaking out

"Thanks. I left it at home"

"I notice. He said to tell you to call him if things don't go well"

"It's a bit late for that. Thanks for giving it to me..."

Mikasa bit her lip for a moment, but the teacher walked into the classroom and behind her was Armin. Coming over to take his seat, Armin was still ignoring him by the looks of it.

It was about halfway through the lesson when Armin was called to the principals office over the PA. Eren's first thought was "he hoped nothing was wrong with Armin's grandfather", and it didn't even occur to him that it might be related to the locker incident at all. When the lesson ended without Armin coming back, Mikasa gathered Armin's things for him

"Eren, do you know what Armin got called up for?"

"I have no idea... I just hope it's not his grandfather"

Mikasa nodded

"Me too. You know, I never thought he'd be called to the principals office"

"Neither did I. I thought we'd go our whole school lives without hearing that"

Gathering his own things up, Eren followed Mikasa out into the hall

"Do you think I should just hold onto his things?"

"Probably. I don't think he'd be happy if you gave them to me"

It didn't matter anyway. Looking past Mikasa, Eren watched as Armin came towards them.

Taking his bag from Mikasa, Armin didn't say anything to either of them. Instead fixing them with a cold glare. Naturally Mikasa wasn't about to be glared at for no good reason

"Is everything alright?"

Armin snorted

"Why don't you ask Eren?"

Eren had no idea and shook his head

"Don't look at me..."

"Oh shut up! Stop with the act"

It wasn't an act

"Armin, I have no idea what you are on about"

"You told the principal I graffitied your locker!"

"Armin"

Slapping him hard across the face, Armin's whole form was shaking as he glared up at him

"I don't know what your fucking problem is, but you have been a total arsehole since you presented!"

"You're the one who's been an arsehole!"

"I haven't even done anything! I've been trying to fucking avoid you!"

"Right! Yeah, so that's why you lied and said I did it"

"I didn't say anything like that! I told him none of that shit was mine and that I didn't know who did it!"

"Liar!"

Stepping between them, Mikasa pushed Armin back

"You're taking his side?!"

"I'm not taking anyone's side, but I really don't think Eren would be petty enough to blame it on you"

"Why not! He's been playing the victim for months now! Oh look at me, I was in accident, give me attention!"

"That's bullshit! Yes I was in a fucking accident! And you have no idea what I've been going through!"

"No, because you've been running around and lying and making everyone depressed! Because that's what you do Eren! You suck the happiness out of people and you ruin them!"

"How the fuck do I do that?! I don't even see any of you outside of school! I've been trying to keep my private life fucking private because you have no idea what I'm going through!"

"There you go again! Guess what Eren, you aren't the only one here who's an omega!"

[hisvault]

For my tenth anniversary the wife and I decided to go to Ireland.  This pleased me beyond belief.  I have been to some great places but for what ever reason never thought that I would find myself in Ireland.  Yet here we go.  We got some pretty good deals so far, the flight was booked round trip through Aer Lingus, and we got a small studio apartment using Home Away.  All in all we have only spent 2800 bucks so far and we took care of the two biggest items.  Are expectations are high, but our itinerary is low.  We are going to relax and take it all in.  The main goal is to go and enjoy the people, the pubs, and mainly the scenery.  We are only a few days away from setting off onto our journey, and I couldn’t be more excited.

Day #1 Pre Trip (Friday)

The pre-trip excitement and jitters have begun, more so for the wife then me.  She has made many statements that don’t seem all that logical or maybe I just don’t get it.  All of a sudden there is zero time, even though we leave on Sunday, and everything needs to be cleaned as if the damn Pope is coming over.  The biggest thing is that she wants to clean weird shit all of a sudden like “Do you think we should mop the ceiling”, or “Eww, HONEY WE SHOULD PROBABLY DUST THE INSIDE OF THE FRIDGE BEFORE WE LEAVE”, WTF.  I try to remind her that there will be no one here for a week, and trust me the cat doesn’t give a shit what the house looks like.  The other things that need to be accomplished fall in very different categories such as needing to get haircuts, shaving all of my body hair off, getting her toe nails done, shopping for more clothes, checking the weather in Ireland every 15 minutes, searching our closet for 30-60 minutes as if new clothes will magically appear each time we re-enter this den of outdated cloth.  While I begin to pack I will be reminded over and over again that I shouldn’t take that and pack this, and constantly asked will this fit in your bag.  Oh the joys of travel.

9:00 AM

Showers are complete, the wife and my oldest are headed to the mall soon to purchase a shit ton of items that will only be worn once.  They will eat a crazy good lunch, and I am sure that when she gets home she will only pack half the things she bought.  Me I am off to find barber to cut my hair, not just any barber though it has to be one the can cut my hair so it doesn’t burn my wife’s eyes when she gazes at me.  This has been an ongoing battle.  I usually don’t get to caught up in it, I pick the first place I see and get it cut.  I remind you that I have been overseas a lot and have had some wild people cut my hair.  My favorite was a gay Filipino with long nails that would sing Christina Aguilera’s “DIRTY” while cutting my hair, and this took place in Riyadh Saudi Arabia.  Yes a gay Filipino hair stylist in the middle of Saudi Arabia.  Dude was good though.

11:35 AM

Back from my hair cut.  The girls are still shopping.  I take this valuable time to wonder around the house and just think about all the things I should be doing.

12:55 PM

Fuck I got shit to do!

1:00 PM

Cold Beer?

1:05 PM

Well I guess I better Mop.

8:25 PM

The puppy has gotten a bath at PETCO, more laundry is in, and I believe the wife is a bottle deep on some white wine.  Me, well I have had a couple more summer ales.  Time to relax and enjoy the night.  I think I have been asked to vacuum the lawn tomorrow.

Day #2 Pre-Trip (Saturday)

8:30 AM

The wife is up and ready to leave so that she can get her hair done.  Most mornings it takes what feels like 47 and half hours for her to get ready in the morning.  Since she is trying a new hair dresser it took 20 minutes to get ready.  Where is this motivation every other day.  I have been told that her hair will take up to 3 hours.  Holy shit, 3 hours!  That’s insane.  For what ever reason the woman that is normally  the most impatience person I know, all of a sudden has the patience of  a Buddhist Monk.  Crazy,  is 0930 to early for a drink?

9:33 AM

So I didn’t grab a drink, but I did start the laundry.  I am beginning to feel like she has a master plan where I do all the cleaning while she runs around.

10:38 AM

I cut the grass one last time for this week.  Started some more laundry and now have become anxious about my pancreas.  Three weeks ago I had Pancreatitis which was by far the most painful thing I have ever felt.  It was like a tiny dwarf made of razor blades was doing laps in my stomach and back.  So fast forward I had three beers yesterday and now I think I have awaken the beast again.  Probably all in my head.

1:56 PM

I went and tried to pick up my dry cleaning and it wasn’t ready.  I hate when that happens.  I am going to start prepping a beef brisket for tomorrow, I just want it to marinate over night.  Going to jump up early to cook it.  The family requested it, and I shall deliver.  Although I wont be able to enjoy it to much because of the law fat anti pancreatitis diet I am on.  FUCK YOU PANCREAS.

5:00 PM

Bags are pretty much packed. The wife’s hair looks great, yet she still hasn’t noticed mine at all.  Off to pick up my dry cleaning again, it better be done.

5:15 PM

God dammit the place is closed.

6:00 PM

I am sitting on my couch my stomach continue to act funny, what the hell.

7:18 PM

We have successfully died Easter eggs.  This was the cleanest it has ever been, no dye anywhere.

Day #3 (Sunday Easter and the Day we travel)

3:00 AM

I wake to smoke the brisket, nothing like getting the smoker ready at 3am.  That smell is good at all hours of the day.  The best part was is that it was quiet, almost tranquil and bliss.  This is because everyone else was still asleep.

7:00 AM

My peace is broken by children searching for the for Easter baskets.  They look like junkies who were just given clues to where drugs may be stored.

8:30 AM

Final touch up cleaning and then it’s off to the outlaws, I mean in-laws. No really they are the greatest people ever.

12:30 PM

Kids are dropped off, we give a quick hello and goodbye all in one breath and it’s off to Ireland.

1:45 PM

We still had to drop the dog off.  At this point I am beginning to fade, 3am was a bit early.  Time to suck it up and head to the airport.

2:50 PM

Chickies and Petes for a beer and some grub, the pre flight meal.  This isn’t the Easter meal I was looking for but who cares I am heading to Ireland.  Side note I haven’t pooped in two days.  I know that this isn’t relevant but it’s frustrating and I had to get it out.

4:10 PM

Frontier Airlines just held a jelly bean contest, you know the one where you have to guess the amount of Jelly Beans in the jar.  Kinda weird, at least they didn’t beat anyone up, or hold a fight club for seat upgrades.

DUBLIN DAY 1 – Hell yeah.

7:15 AM Dublin is 5 hours ahead Thee Time Traveler is in the FUTURE.

I awake from my slumber, we are landing soon and I am juiced.  The wife not so much, she didn’t sleep well on the plane.

9:30 AM

Gary our driver has picked us at the airport, friendly gentleman and gives us a brief on the way over for some things to do today.  He pulls up in front of a boarded up  home and says “alright we are here”, Funny Gary, we    are actually staying a next door.  The place is small but comfy, and has everything we need for the week.  We just can’t seem to figure out the stupid outlet deal, so many prongs.

10:00 AM

We walk down to the grocery store and pick up eggs, tea, Doritos, and water.  You know the basics.

Times will be omitted from this point forward  (They begin to get a bit blurry)

We left the apartment to begin touring Dublin.  The weather was damp, which I am guessing this is what most days are like.  If you could imagine it’s kind of like a damp basement all over the place, a little wet, little cold, and pretty grey.  You wouldn’t be able to tell this from the people though because it’s like the sun is always shinning for them.

Our first stop would be a local pub called Kavanagh’s Pub just down the street from us.  The Bartender was an awesome women named Rose who was well traveled and offered a wealth of information for places for us to go and see.  The rest of the pub was filled with older men wearing scally caps or duckbill, drinking Guinness and reading the paper.  For the first pub to pick it was exactly what we thought it would be like.  Rose knew each person that came through the door.  We sat and chatted for a bit said our goodbyes for the day and off we went to see what Dublin had in store for us.

Dublin was still celebrating Easter and the Easter Rising Rebellion of 1916.  Most shops were closed along the way but there were festivities going on throughout the city.    The first one we went to was a place suggested by Gary the Driver and Rose the barkeep called Smithfield Square.  The square was blocked off for various tents to do things, food trucks abound, and a concert stage on the far end.  We walked around checked out a few things and decided to grab a bite to eat.   Dublin is very westernized so it has a familiar feel when it comes to the eateries, the place we chose was called  Oscars Cafe and Bar. The wife got a veggie burger with chips (French fries), I got a normal burger and chips, both were delicious.  She drank a glass of wine and I drank a Galway Hooker.  This was not a real Hooker it’s the name of the beer, stay with me people.  We finished up and off we went to see more of Dublin.

Ken a local at Kavanagh’s suggested St. Stephens Green, much like Smithfield Square there would be festivities, family oriented activities and a concert.   The park was amazing and packed full of families enjoying the day.  We walked around the park for a bit until the wife got home sick seeing all of the families with their kids.  I have to admit I felt it a bit as well.   So the only way to solve this problem is to head of to another Pub.

When we were searching for St. Stephens green we passed a few pubs along the way, yet ne stuck out to us and that was Brazen Head Pub.  This is the Oldest Pub in Ireland, opening in 1198.  Unreal I know, it’s almost hard to wrap your head around how old some of the things are here, manly because the U.S only became independent in 1776.  The Pub was hundreds of years older then that.  We found to stools at the bar pulled up and ordered two Jameson and Ginger Ales.  Looking around the history of the bars patrons were all over the walls.  Dollars bills from all over the world were taped and tacked to the walls along with patches from first responders, military, and law enforcement groups from all over the world.  The bartender, whose name was Gary, offered up some great advice on more places to go and see.  He laid out a tour that would show us the history of the 1916 Easter rebellion.

We finished our drinks grab the map provided by Gary and took off towards wear we were staying.  At this point of the day we had walked a few miles already and were beginning to tire out.  We got back to one of the main streets near our studio apartment and stopped in at a pub called L. Mulligans Grocer L. Mulligan Grocer.  This would be the final pub of the night, but maybe one of the best.  We sat at the bar and struck up a  conversation with Harry the English bartender.  Nikki would nickname him Harry the Prince.  It was at this point when we were trying to finish our drinks we realized how tired we were getting, I could have fallen asleep right at the bar, so we finished up and headed back towards the apartment, not before we stopped and picked up a bottle of Captain Morgan and some diet Cokes.  Gotta have a night cap right.

We stumbled into the room tired and slightly drunk and tried to map out the next day while having another drink.  Neither one of us at this point could understand the other one so we decided to call it night.  It was only 6pm at this point.  Hey don’t judge us, we were jet lagged and drunk, and tired from walking around the city.  We laid down and fell asleep before our heads hit the pillows.

2 HOURS LATER we sprung from our sleep, I don’t know who woke first but we were up thinking that we had slept through the night.  NOPE, we couldn’t have been more wrong it was only 8pm.  We only discovered this after stumbling around the room in search of our phones to check the date and time.  It looked like the scene from Stepbrothers when they were sleep walking around the house.  Nikki yells to me that it’s still the same day and only 8pm.  I don’t believe her at this point and continue to look at my phone with one eye open and look of WTF on my face.  After checking the time 38 different ways, we went back to bed.  Hopefully tomorrow will be go just as good.

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Day 2 DUBLIN – What did we get ourselves into

We laid in bed until about 9 am.  I decided to get up have some tea, and write down some notes from the previous day.  As I am sitting there smiling and reflecting on the previous day, could smell a slight hint of pee.  Sorry for adding this but I found it funny.  In my drunken state the night before I had attempted to use the bathroom, I guess I didn’t get him all the way out before I started and got a little on the front.  Men you know this has happened at some point in your adult lives, women I don’t know what to say I am disgusting.

After making the wife some eggs and tea we decided to start our day off the same way we did the previous day and that was by going to Kavanagh’s and seeing Rose to have a pint.  The wife has adopted Rose as our Irish mother by this point.  She seemed almost to excited to see us and gave a plate a various chesses and some chutney to spread on them along with some soda bread.  If you don’t know what chutney is look it up, go by some, and enjoy, your welcome.  We finished our drinks, through down some cheese and headed off to the Jameson Tour in Smithfield Square.

I have been to Kentucky and done the bourbon trail tours, which are excellent tours.  Now the Jameson tour isn’t anything like the Makers Mark tour, but more like the Evan Williams tour on bourbon row in downtown Kentucky.  I don’t want to diminish the Jameson tour though, because it was excellent.  Our tour guide for the day was Lawrence a Californian relocated to Dublin.  They give you a wonderful brief on the history of John Jameson, and how much the distiller meant to Dublin.  At the end of the tour you get to conduct a tasting, equally excellent.  The facility is amazing and the tour is just long enough.  Once the tour was complete we sat at their bar and had a couple of drinks.  Jameson is no longer distilled at that location, but you still get a wonderful experience.

We left Jameson and headed towards St. Michans Church where we wanted to go and see the crypts below the church.  The have a short St. Michans tour were they take you below to see ancient bodies that have been amazingly preserved over time.  the crypt’s temperature never changes, and the limestone rocks, and methane coming from the gerund keep the bodies in amazing shape.  The oldest one we saw was nearly 800 years old.   Crazy right. Pictures couldn’t really be taken down there because it was considered a sacred place, and the tombs that were still technically in use no light could be shown in the room.  This added to the eerie fill that the crypt held.  I did manage to touch and old skull sitting on the floor.  Nikki made me use hand sanitizer almost immediately after I told her.  The history above and below the grounds of Dublin are fascinating.

After we were down playing with the dead we headed off to a pub.  I mean come on guys we are in Dublin, I believe it is illegal if you don’t drink while you are here.  The Pub we went to was called O’Sheas Merchant.  We sat down and talked to a lovely lady named Caroline.   She looked to young to be a grandmother but went on to tell us about her son in Australia, and the 2 year old grandson that she missed dearly.  We talked about this while we had drinks and ordered lunch.  Nikki went with the fish and chips (as a reminder those are French fries), I ordered a sandwhich called the Dubliner, it was a smaller panini with beef, and cheese, also it came with a side salad and chips.  Both meals were delicious, especially the fish, awesome grub and an awesome pub.  We finished up there and decided that we would go see Christ Church Cathedral.

I highly Suggest the tour of Christ Church Cathedral.  When you enter this place you are immediately shot back into time.   The church was founded in 1030, yeah 1030 not like that morning but the year.  Pay for the tour also, you could conduct a self tour but you won’t be able to go to the bell house and ring the bells.  This place gets older and older.  The tour guide gives you some amazing history, and tour of the church, the bell house, and the crypt.  The crypt isn’t as creepy as the one at St. Michans but has some amazing artifacts.  The weirdest of which was the cat and the rat mummy’s that had gotten stuck in an organ which were found in the 1850’s. You will need to be mindful of the stair case that leads to the bell tower and the doors as well.  The seem to have been built for children, if you are a man of average height it’s going to be a tight fit.  Once the tour ended we were off to go pub hopping.  MMMM Drinky Time.

We decided at this point that it was time to do some pub hopping around Dublin and the first pace we went to was called Peadar Kearneys Pub, named after the man who wrote the national anthem for Ireland, so we were told, I will have to fact check that one.  I googled it, it’s him.  We ordered a coupe drinks and began talking a man we named drunk Sean.  He talked about a couple of other pubs that he knew where we could hear some Diddly Day Music.  We kept talking and when he found out we were from Delaware he screamed the “THE FIRST STATE” and he said to quote him on it, so there Drunk Sean your quoted.  We left Kearney’s and found a bar called The Auld Dubliner, which was a great little bar with a guy playing some music.  Awesome little place, and the beer was flowing.  We had one a piece and left to find anther pub.  The next stop was going to the trendy Temple Bar.  It was packed, a great atmosphere but almost overwhelming with the amount of people in there.  Plus not as sociable as the smaller off street pubs, but we still sat and had some beers, and Nikki was onto Captain and Cokes by this point.  After drinking there we left and found a place that Drunk Sean suggested called The Old Storehouse.  This place was great, and also had live music.  The solo artist was playing some classic irish tunes, and the place was very much alive.  We sat at the bar and almost immediately struck up a conversation with a unique older fella.  I heard him say his name was Tim, Nikki thinks it was Ken, so he is now TIMKEN.  TIMKEN was an older fella with Phil Donahue hair, no top teeth except for the right K9, a sport jacket, and bow tie.  He had a heavy accent, and proclaimed to know Drunk Sean.  This was not a shock.  Nikki kept leaning back more and more as he spoke, I would later find out that his breath had some history also, it was bad.  So after finishing our drinks and ending our conversation with TIMEKEN we headed off again to find another pub.  It really isn’t hard to find them here they are everywhere, you can’t drink at all of them.  NO WAY NOT NEVER.  The next place was called Bad Bobs, which like The Temple Bar was packed full of patrons.  We found a spot in the back of the bar sat down and orderd drinks.  Nikki struck up conversation with Peter, Johnny, and Rob, three bartenders working that night.  What we did find was that the drink prices in this part of town began to get higher as the night went on.  This will be a little confusing, but TEMPLE BAR is an area as well as a bar also.  So in the TEMPLE BAR area the bars attract a lot more tourists and the prices seem to flow as fast as the beer.  We finished our drinks there and headed of to some local pubs near the apartment.

Along the way Nikki decided that Facebook live was going to be her new addiction, but she isn’t that great at it.  For anyone that saw it, I am sure it was hilarious, after re watching it I laughed probably as much as you all did.  This continued on even when we reached L. Mullgans, we sat down and talked to Prince Harry, Gary, and Steven.  Yes there are a lot of Gary’s in Dublin, this was the third one we met at this point.  It was getting late and we traveled a ton again today, so if was off to one more pub and then back to the apartment. We hit Tommy O’Gara’s but didn’t stay long.  We knew we were well on our way to time traveling so it was time to roll.

We stopped in at Tesco’s, the local supermarket, grabbed a pizza, Captain Morgan, and some other junk for the room.  When we got back I made drinks and a pizza.  We ate it like caveman and threw Doritos down our necks like someone was trying to steal them.  I then began to Time Travel so telling you anything else would be just made up stuff at this point.  Day 2 in Dublin, awesome.

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DAY 3 in Dubiln – The Chance Meeting

WTF is that noise!!!!! Oh it’s my goddamn alarm on my phone going off like a bomb in my head.  I jump up and turn it off with my eyes closed.  What I would have seen if my eyes were open was the full glass of Captain and Coke that I was about to spill completely into Nikki’s purse.  Yup one swift hand movement and this drunk Ninja just emptied that glass of amazing into her purse.  She jumped out of bed like the damn thing was on fire and emptied the contents in like two movements.  I stood there dumbfounded by my actions.  We cleaned it out, set it out to dry, and back to bed to we went.

We would late wake and begin our day.  We figured out a strategy for the things we wanted to see and off we went.  We stopped at Cowtown Cafe to get a little breakfast to fuel up for the long walk ahead.  We walked for what felt like ever trying to find The Kilmainham Gaol, which is an old prison and suggested by many as one of the best tourist attractions around.  We finally arrived after walking about and hour only to discover that the next tour wasn’t going to be for another five hours.  So we bought tickets for the next day and off we went.

Across the street was the Modern Art Museum that cut through the area we were in and expedited our walk.  The grounds of the Modern Art Museum are an amazing sight to see and offer some tranquility in the city.  This was a nice and peacful walk, the kind you don’t say much and just hold hands and enjoy.  It was nice to share this moment with the love of my life.  We just walked quietly taking in the sights, and enjoying each others company.  We never made it inside the Museum, only because we aren’t big art fans, but also because we were headed to the Guinness Storehouse.

We arrived at the Guinness Storehouse to take the tour, learn about the history and brewing process for Guinness.  This, much like the tour of Jameson,  was awesome and you get a free pint of Beer.  We decided to get our beers at the Gravity bar at the top of the Guinness Storehouse.  One of the best views, if not the best view, in all of Dublin.  The bar offers a 360 Degree view of the city which you can see for miles, and it’s nice to just take it all in.  Plus we were tired as hell from all the walking over the last three days, so it was nice to sit a moment and enjoy the views.

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Once we finished our pints we muscled up and headed to the Dublin Castle.  This is located in the City and is almost hidden, you turn down street just up from Peadar Kearney’s and there it is.  We went in and did the self tour where you get to see the state rooms, maybe next time we will do the full tour, but we were getting tired and hungry so we wanted to start heading back towards the apartment in Stoneybatter.  The full tour would have taken more than and hour and we didn’t want to spend that time, so we started moving again.

We casually moved through the city up and down different streets working our way back to home base.  We had passed through Jameson and into Smithfield Square tired and only thinking of grabbing something to eat and relaxing.  We got almost to the end of the square when a gentleman passed in front of me that looked all to familiar.  I have told my wife many times over that timing is a funny thing, and in this case ten seconds later or earlier and I would have missed this chance meeting.  So this man walks passed me and I don’t see his face at first but the back of his head, and his gate is a bit different.  I knew almost right away what I was looking at, my wife on the other hand had no idea and may have thought that I was having stroke, nope I was looking at the Champ and my chance meeting was about to occur.  I tell the wife “hey thats the champ Conor McGregor“, in her really cute voice she sates ‘who”, I said the champ the biggest fighter in the world right now, at which she says ‘OK”.  So like a hippo chasing a cheetah, I follow after the man and sure enough it’s the man himself.  He looked like he didn’t want to take the photo at first but was gracious enough to do so, and I appreciated that.  He turned smiled and took the photo.  We didn’t think or even count on seeing the man but there he was, and the chance meeting happened.  My wife took the photo blasted it to social media, of course after googling who he was, and I guess that makes if official since it’s now on Facebook.

Well back on the path to food, we landed ourselves at L. Mulligans again to grab a bite to eat and enjoy another drink.  We were almost walking hunched over at this point with our backs, knees, and feet hurting from all the miles we have been logging walking around town.  It was nice to get out of the misty rain that had been falling for most of the day and relax for a few moments.  We order Scotch Eggs, and Bison burgers.  Awesome, and I highly suggest them, not because I have taken a liking to L. Mulligans but because they were really good.  We drank a couple of Jameson and Gingers and headed out, last stop was going to be the grocery store for some more Captain Morgan so we could go to the room relax, and have a nightcap.  I let the wife read this story so far and got the thumbs up for some minor editing but many for her approval, as my chief editor I need to run things past here just to make sure I haven’t said to much or to  little.  Well time to enjoy some alone time.  See you tomorrow.

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Day 4 in Dublin – The Last Dance

Our First stop for the day was to be the Kilmainham Gaol, a hostirical prison that held many of the more famous political prisoners during the Easter Rising Rebellion, The War of Independence, and the Civil war for Ireland.  If you want a get a quick lesson in Irish history this is the tour to take.  Plus the jail has a few creepy aspects to it.  We walked back through the Modern Art Museum one more time, there is an amazing Garden on the grounds that is absolutely elegant to walk through.  If you have the chance I highly recommend seeing the parks and gardens throughout the city.  Phoenix Park is massive but beautiful, St. Stephens Green as well, and the gardens at the Art Museum are all well worth the time.  Your eyes will thank you.

The rest of the day was filled with walking around Dublin doing a little shopping and just taking in the sights one last time.  Along our way back we stopped at Jameson for one last Jameson and Ginger, and a little shopping.  We continued to walk back until we hit L. Mulligans to fill up another glass or two.  We left Mulligans headed to the grocer and grabbed some wine and pizza so that we could head back to the apartment and start packing.  So there we were eating Tangy Cheese Doritios, waiting on a shitty 4 cheese pizza, and drinking some wine.  It was a great moment though we got to sit, drink, and reminisce about the week we just had.  There is nothing better than reflecting on the time you just had and knowing that you had it with not just your wife but your best friend.  We had a blast and will truley miss Ireland.  It will surely always bring a smile to our faces.

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Day 5 Dublin – Departure day

Up bright an early so that we could clean all twenty square feet of the apartment we were in.  We also had to pack, which took all of ten minutes.  It is amazing how slow time seems to move when it’s finally time to go home.  Gary the driver was waiting out front patiently for us.  The drive was quick yet quiet as passed through the streets of Dublin.   I won’t bore you with us sitting at the airport playing on our phones waiting for our flight.  Just know that if you ever want to take a vacation over the pound I would suggest starting with Ireland.  No shit right, but honestly the beer is great and the people are even better.

See you in the Future – Thee Time Traveler

Links below are some of the services that we used and recommend.

Aer Lingus

Aer Lingus Airline – The plane was excellent and the service on the plane was great.  Prices were very competitive, and best of all it was a comfortable flight.

Home Away – Greats vacations Places

We found our place on Home Away, we love this site.

Glencourt Apartments

The apartment that we stayed in was great.  If you are looking for a similar experience talk to Liam Travers.  dublinvacations@gmail.com

I can’t say enough about Liam and the resources that he provided.  The room had everything we needed, and the suggestions he left us were spot on.

For a list of the bars that we went to check out my story on DOW ( The Ireland Edition) coming this week on Hisvault.com

Ireland “Home of Great Beer and Even Better People” For my tenth anniversary the wife and I decided to go to Ireland.  This pleased me beyond belief. 

[precious-boring-life-blog]

Whirlwind of Fuckery.

😈Today is Tuesday. Saturday was the last day I wrote, if I'm not mistaken. What all has happened? Hmm.. Let me think. Tons of bullshit with that older man. Promises not kept. Lies that I KNOW are being told, but don't dare go in with full-blown accusations, because he has money.. & since I'm on a run, I always need dope. Whatever. He left me hanging all day yesterday while I kept stringing Chris along all day & he kept stringing HIS dude along all day... Finally, after getting dropped off at 10 AM, receiving a promise he'd return at 1 o'clock and we would go & get a bag... Then proceeding to wait ALL day while being fed some bullshit... I finally mustered up some mojo & formulated a plan to get my own shit. Had to create a huge Smorgasbord of a lie to convince my dad out of $40 for dinner & a movie with NA people. Yeah.... I'm bottom-of-the-barrel terrible & although that rhyme sounded cool, it's not meant to be lighthearted. For some reason when I wrote that down about my dad, I feel super awful & ashamed all of a sudden. Honestly, I fucking should, too. My parents have sacrificed so much to try and save me from my addiction to heroin & I have thrown it down the drain AGAIN. I don't know how they haven't caught on or kicked me out yet. My mom has asked me multiple times & all except once, several weeks ago, it's something I always deny. Still.... Can't help but wonder... A part of me feels like they have got to fucking know. I had Chris pick me up last night around 6, & the timing was perfect. I needed to leave before 6:30 and be gone until at least 11. Problem solved. We went back to his house, I smoked my whole sack up quick despite a weak willed promise to myself I'd save a LITTLE bit for the morning. Blazed a bowl & a joint of this weed also procured from this older man. Then we fell asleep on his bed until tapping on the ajoined bathroom window from the porch woke us up - it was just Abraham returning home from work in Royal City. I came home & passed the fuck out from midnight until basically 11 AM. I did wake up once around 6, managed to stumble out into the kitchen while my dad was sitting at his computer & bum a smoke from him. After several long drags, I smashed the smelly, cancerous slave-driver of a product face first into the glass ashtray on the stove ; small round and clear with a psychedelic heart painted in the center, it was a gift from my mother. I shuffle back to my bedroom shut the door dive back into warm covers turn a pill bottle over into my palm, two little hot pink ovals pop em into my mouth and away to sleep I go. Benadryl only works like that (for inducing sleep) whenever I'm high. While sober it didn't have that effect. Weird, whatever... Unimportant! Really, though, none of what I've written on this blog so far is important. Just the loaded ramblings of a 25 year old on-going, off-again junkie loser without a future, destined to die probably living in this same fucking room. When I finally woke up again, 5 hours after popping those allergy meds in hopes of them doing exactly what they actually did (sleeeeep💗) I hung out around the house with my Ma. A&E has started showing a trailer advertising the February 20th premiere of the new & FINAL season of a show we binge-watched on Netflix together & fell in love with... Sooo that means Netflix added new episodes of Bates Motel! We watched at least 6-7 episodes I think. Old guy hit me up saying he wanted to buy a sack; had $100. He didn't want to go pick anyone up other than me (which was a problem) because Chris wasn't answering & Kayleigh is in jail, poor thing. After bullshitting with Andy Packard for a bit on when his dude was going to pick him up & then meet us... I wasn't sure if I believed that was really going to happen, so I decided to take a chance. Instructed Romeo to swoop me and drive me up past the car wash. Had him park further back then normal, and decided to try my luck knocking on the bathroom window of the Naab house. BOOM. IT WORKED. I'M IN. Fucker was sleeping all day. I had just seen him the night before (he dropped me off just after 11) but apparently he didn't didn't go to bed until 9 o'clock this morning. Anyways. He called his dude. I told my ride / ATM to wait over at the gas station (GOD I'M AN ASSHOLE) and while waiting Packard called me ten times cause guys dude was in the way, I made up some story we got pulled over on the other side of town & "homeboy" got arrested on a warrant outta Kittitas County. The little Mexican teenager Chris goes through showed up (we heard his car crunching over snow & ice out in the driveway) so my buddy ran out, and minutes later returned with a nice hefty chunk of some super-fire, or as fire as it gets around these podunk parts. I smoked two pieces with him, as a peace offering for waking him up, broke off some more and put it in a second baggie hidden stealthily away in my right sock, and called my ride to swoop me back up. We get to his house, do all of the bag (aside from what I had hidden) and talk about my plan to get off this shit using subs - subs he got from his coworker that are waiting in his locker at work... Subs that he is supposed to be bringing me shortly after his shift ends at 7 AM Wednesday morning. This morning. Today. I hope to God he comes through with those. I worry, because while he HAS done alot for me he has also been pretty flaky on a couple occasions. I've actuality been sitting on a message in my FB inbox from him that I need to reply to NOW (not purposefully avoiding it, I just honestly keep forgetting) so he stays engaged and it's still thinking about me (so I can get those subs here in the next 6 hours). Very important. Pause all of this ; I'm going to reply to him now. OH, but I cleaned out my tooter less than a minute ago & it was funky full, for all variables considered... So honestly I'm gonna hit this real quick & THEN reply. &&&&& I'M BAAAAACK. 😈💗😐 So I'm back. One more hit real quick. Smoking my last cig for the night. Oh boy... I told myself I'd be going to bed early tonight; it's now closing in on 3 AM. I have to be awake at a quarter to seven (6:45- DON'T FORGET TO SET AN ALARM, DUMMY) to meet J. Romeo for those subs when he gets off work. Please, good lord, PLEASE... Let him come through. Please, please, pleeeease. 🙏 Soon as I finish this little blurb of a blog.... Well, what was supposed to be a quick daily check in / drug-a-log... I skipped the last 2 days since Saturday so this entry turned into more of an amphetamine-fueled nonsensical novel HAH! (If a statement could ever perfectly describe my style of writing... That would be it 😂) but as soon as I'm done with this cigarette, I have to be done with this entry. Then, I'm going to brush my teeth, put Neosporin on my face (which I picked to hell and back this evening...sad day) and try to pee one last time... Then I'm crawling into bed, setting a 15-minute timer, and doing a Stream of Consciousness exercise (S.O.C.). Basically the concept is just to set a timer and do not stop writing until the bell. Sense doesn't need to be made nor does punctuation really need to be used. The idea is just to spill your guts, your heart, your soul, out onto the pages. Free your mind from the hamster wheel of worry and thought by expelling it onto the empty lines of a journal. Cigarette is done. Think I might just do the rest of that bag right now... Fuuck it. One last hurrah; thirty dollar chunk of fuego and a few pages of chicken-scratch prose. Debating... Debating... I'm already pretty high... I don't know if he will come through for SURE with those subs... If he doesn't, & I smoked this all tonight, I'm screwed. I'm screwed either way without em, whether I smoke now or not... Totally irrelevant. If he does, I will be so relieved. I will be able to get off this shit, finally... After TWO FUCKING MONTHS. WHAT HAPPENED? WHERE DID THE TIME GO? HOW THE FUCK DID I END UP HERE? Why on earth did I decide to go back out? I don't want to live like this anymore... Please Goddess, hear my cry & help me. Please let him come through with those Suboxone, that is my one and only hope.