#or sorry you have ''alienated your sympathy and compassion'' for us

[katyspersonal]

I am feeling so ill. My mental pain keeps translating into physical one, like something that keeps poisoning me from within, and it can last from very morning to very evening at times. I wish I stopped being reminded of the backstabbing, of how much that person has been lying to us, and how she threw away her empathy and common sense in an instant, as soon as she got enticed with the prospect to feel like a """victim""". When everything was explained and even forgiven prior.

For a Christian, she sure is a terrible one, and really should pray to her God for forgiveness. Because that's sin of vanity if I've seen one. Her sorry pro-lifer ass that can't even use they/them pronouns because it is "not correct in English" and has been following Mico herself before he deactivated must be satisfied with people around with whom she has to censor her true opinions, I suppose? She had all context, she had explanation and apology, she faked having accepted that apology too, lied about not really caring about the "drama", faked patience and lied about always welcoming me back - only to latch at the first chance to backstab me and my friends she got. And the way she conveniently ignored how I took my words back, too.. I don't know what is WRONG with people who think that when a person that has been stalked and harassed for a year lashes out upon feeling threatened - they've shown their """true face""". Nobody is more alien to normal human emotions and reactions than Americans. I guess for them you are either physically incapable of anger, fear and fucking up OR you are a vile dangerous monster.

But the real question - what did she want to ACCOMPLISH? She didn't really feel like a star and gain sympathy like a victim of the """horrible mistreatment""" that me lashing out when she defended my STALKER was - that I also TOOK BACK. From my knowledge, she kept herself anonymous. And of course instantly blocked me, because like a coward she could not answer for her lies. She also lost other friends too - one HATES liars and hypocrites more than anything, another has similar emotional problems to mine so no longer feels safe, third straight up was harassed by that person as well.. "They are still lovely people" she says. And I am not a "lovely" person, of course. Because "lovely" people just smile and shrug off being stalked, harassed and talked untrue shit about for a year, I suppose? Because "lovely" people don't become clingy for someone defending them so loud and proud?

My only theory is that she just secretly harbored hatred towards me all along but was forcing the facade of patience and understanding, until one day finally came what looked like a good justification to drop it. But then why sending me all that emotional support when I fell for suicidal road back in spring? Why write at least two essays to Alfred-chan about her right to interact with me and about how I deserved kindness and compassion? Why acting flattered when I said I loved her (platonically) when in reality she was creeped out? Why bothering to explain me how she did not blame me and always would welcome me back in the blog? Following me for a decent time and all that interacting. Was feeling like a poor victim that fell under attack of the "monster" for like 5 minutes without even revealing her name to the world and losing more likeminded people worth it? Was it worth it? How? How mad you should be at someone for getting attached more than """acceptable""" and for lashing out before learning why you'd defend someone that harassed us, that you'd resort to backstabbing and break all your prior promises? She even told me stuff like "ratting someone out is very condemned in my culture and I'd never do that". Then what DID she do, when she showed the moment of weakness I had 40 days ago, to a deranged ableist that has been condoning harassment and canceling for hell knows how long and she could tell wished me harm?

I want to ask whether it was worth it, but clearly she didn't lose anything of value. One of those "but internet connections are not REAL uwu" people.

I so badly want to say that this is my fault for trusting someone who is not only American but also a Christian, double combination of hypocrite and all you know. Because I just want to find a reason. I want to know WHY, even if the answer is something as shallow as nationality and religion. But this is just not fair to people who are one or both of these things but have common sense to not lie and not be cut throats. I guess the real reason is that some people are just too easily enticed with the chance to feel like the "good" guys, to mark category of people that do not deserve any empathy, human bonds and understanding because they are "evil and dangerous". It is just easier. You feel justified to mistreat a certain category of people because they are "bad" - all while the criteria for why they're "bad" is growing progressively absurd. But this coming from a person that preached kindness and acceptance. Yet she sided with the people that punish me FOR having shown that kindness and acceptance to someone else, and never intend to stop. Why following Mico yourself, then?

I have no skill of forgiving people that do not feel remorse, I am not that kind of a person. It just hurts until I forget or find another thing to worry about. I don't know where to turn to, what superior power to pray to for faster healing from this, because betrayal like this is the worst thing you can do to me. It is fine to refuse to forgive someone's mental breakdown, but why not tell me off in private? Why run under the skirt of the person with bad faith that only supports neurodivergence in the form of being quirky about one's special interests and not for what problems it really brings? Does she really think it is victim's fault when they develop bad trust and abandonment issues upon a creepy stalker trying to ruin their life? The cunt would've doxxed me if they could only over the fact that I said I was gonna reblog from who I want - again, something she herself kept getting harassed over. So was that okay, then? She never meant her words, then, and only flexed her "I interact with who I want" for weird flex of herself as a hero, and not for our friends group?

Well, yes. It has to be that. Until she saw an opportunity to switch sides and find a more compelling "enemy" to stand against. The final punch in the gut is that she assumes my friends are okay with the betrayal either, just goes around as though nothing happened, as though having betrayed someone and still writing them down as vile and unremorceful even after they apologised to her two times was nothing. Yeah, why? If a person failed to meet her personal mark of forgiving, tolerating and shrugging off harassment - then they deserve to be backstabbing and thrown to those cultish ableists. That's her logic.

And I just want to vent all this in a sorry effort to remind myself: "See, she is so petty and callous that she doesn't deserve crying and hurting over! People like that are below you, Kat, just forget it and move on!" But in the end, I just can't stop asking myself why. She did not feel like that type of a person. My other mutual also said it was not expected, since she had that 'wise', thoughtful exterior all along and acted as though she was trustworthy. At this rate I was right in my accusation of her being brainwashed, I guess... The only thing I was wrong is the TIME when it happens.

[donnerpartyofone]

Not to be mean but people who don't feel love terrify me. Someone I really loved recently used me and threw me away then blankly said they didn't think I'd be that hurt by it when I was literally suicidal. So maybe just being honest up front rather than constantly pretending is better?? But I don't know.... Also like....I feel as if people have this sensationalized idea of what love and connection is supposed to be and when it's not exactly like a Disney movie they basically assign themselves as being totally emotionally and socially inept. Like, my loved ones annoy me but I couldn't possibly imagine not at least passively caring about the people in my life that contribute to my survival like even on a rational level it makes no sense to have ZERO response at all to that person possibly being harmed or going away. Even the sense of love you have for yourself and recognition of that, how can people not recognize that someone else also feels pain and suffers and that it does affect you even if you don't personally give a shit? Like, it affects you even in the basic design that people will think you're a shitty person if you don't even care in a rational sense or that you also might suffer under the justification? How can you function totally ignoring that each person deserves a right to life and happiness just like you do? Like idk this entire thing is just horrifying to me and makes no sense and I'm sorry if this seems like an ignorant response like I am ignorant bc I genuinely don't get it but I just wish people could feel emotions as deeply as I do and I wasn't just constantly suffering because people who don't love anyone but themselves want everyone to bend over backwards for them when they won't do it for anyone else -_- like yeah I'm sure parents also don't want to be nice all the time but they do anyway....just like everyone ever. That doesn't mean they don't love you.....it means they're human...and im sure the same is true about the kid in question....idk I guess im just a horrible person. I have to pretend to not be suffering when I feel extreme emotions so I just won't be convinced that pretending to care when you don't is worse than having to pretend not to care at all when you're exploding inside :/ idk.....I know I sound like an asshole sorry im not trying to argue I'm just throwing my two cents in where no one asked 😭💔

Sorry if I'm not reading you very well but I'm not sure if you are responding more to my description of the Reddit situation, or my description of my life.

If it's the latter, I think if you re-read my (now pinned) post you will find that I do experience compassion and sympathy and love for people, even for people I don't like; it's just that I have a really different emotional vocabulary than most people and it forces me to like translate myself all the time to make sure "normal" people feel cared for, and all I'm saying is that it makes me have to be very deliberate in my relationships where most people can just be reactive, it seems.

If it's the former, I don't really know what to tell you. Neither of us knows that person or what their whole context is. It seems to me that that person felt very conflicted and alienated by their lack of emotional access, which is pitiable. That person's parents are pitiable, too. Sounds like the Redditor has persisted in faking it, and was just venting their feelings on Reddit instead of taking it out on their family. What else can they do? Personally I feel sorry for anyone whose emotional dysfunction or deviation makes their relationship to the world hard. But you don't HAVE TO feel sorry for anyone, it's up to you and your philosophy.

One important fact is, you don't have to be involved with anyone you can't understand or sympathize with. I'm very sorry to hear you were abused. That's not fair and it shouldn't happen. It has happened to me too, and part of the reason is that my own emotional register is a little "weird" and I couldn't tell that someone was hurting me on purpose until it was too late, I thought we were just "having problems". That kind of thing sucks and no one deserves it. But the hope is that you learn from your experience and curate your company a little more safely. (NOT that it was your fault AT ALL, just that we can't control anything but our own choices) Hopefully we can move past obsessing over why people are assholes, or even evil, and gravitate toward healthier social situations in the future. If someone truly has no feelings or is sadistic, judging and worrying doesn't really improve that situation, frankly.

Finally I would pick on something that you noted about how self-love should provide a basis of comparison for how to treat others. That's actually kinda part of the problem, in my layperson's opinion. When I was in abuse situations, it eventually became clear that the abusive person is acting that way because they don't feel enough self-love--which is different from *acting selfish*. The abuser feels insufficient somehow, unlovable, and they're trying to get other people to "fix" their feelings for them. You know, my ex-boyfriend came at me with all this "I'm sad and wounded and only the love of a pure-hearted woman can fix me", and then when my freely-given love did NOT fix him, he decided everything about himself was my fault and I deserved every bad thing he did to me. I've had platonic friends like that too, who made their own happiness everyone else's responsibility and this allowed them to be total assholes to everyone. So like yeah, as cliche as it sounds, people who experience genuine self-love are usually NOT the same people who treat others poorly; assholes are very often turning dissatisfaction with themselves inside out, even though it may not look or feel that way to you and me.

But yeah if you're really just irked by the notion of sociopathy, where someone theoretically just feels nothing for others at all...there's just not too much you can do about that except try to stay away from them if at all possible.

[shit-scfandom-did]

so i have a few questions

1)i cannot understand how you ship k*ramel. their relationship was FILLED with toxicity. from mon-el failing over and over again to listen to what kara had to say to him basically telling her to give up being kara danvers. convincing her that "being supergirl and having you is enough” was absolutely horrible. karamel had their moments but overall it was toxic. then in s3 mon el was married and the whole point of season 3 was allowing them to move on. accepting the toxicity from s2 and pushing past that romanticized time. mon el was a better person by 3b but he was still married. even if mon el and imra did break up in the finale there’s no future for karamel. even during 5x13 kara went to ask on advice about lena. and when winn came to visit from the future not a word about him. she’s moved on and it just wouldn’t make sense for kara to end up with him.

2) how can you hate lena so so so much?? it’s been said over and over again that all she’s ever wanted to do is good. though she’s designed to be this morally grey character. she has FLAWS but that’s what makes her so good. she’s a victim of abuse and you can see her struggle with that especially in seasons 4 and 5. in 5 she definitely goes down a questionable path but how can you expect her not too? after being emotionally abused by her brother, betrayed by her family, andrea (this did happen before kara), and then eve. finding out that kara and EVERYONE she loves has betrayed her as well. I mean how could you not go mad?? and even when she “went mad” she was trying to rid humanity of PAIN. something she later realized was a necessary part of life. her hurt blinded her from reality and lex’s manipulation pushed her down further. she’s been hurt and broken so many times and while that’s not an excuse for what she’s done you have no sympathy for her and that I find appalling. lena has realized what she’s done is wrong, that she’s made mistakes, what she did to kara, and she will have to live with that isn’t that punishment enough? she’s apologized and is trying to make up for everything she’s done by saving the world (again). your unnecessary hate towards her infuriates me. cant you take a step back and see the whole picture?

3) why DONT you ship supercorp or accept the queerbaiting? (watch this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C2w2GBXd_Pg) They are the core relationship of the show while the danvers sisters are the heart. they’ve gone through so so much together and practically dated in early season 2. they love each other it’s just oh so apparent. i like to believe one of the reasons lena reacted so strongly in s5 is because she was in love with kara and she couldn’t handle the person she was in love with lying to her. and kara flew around the world to get lena’s favorite food!! if that’s not romantic idk what is. I feel like you’ve developed such a clouded view of supercorp that you need to take a step back and understand what lena is the love of kara’s life.

wow what a long message. im not here to hate. im here to inform & undertand. i get it. karamel had their moments and even MY perception of them might be a little cloudy. im not going to hate you for liking them. hell I even shipped them for a little! my brother thinks 3b mon el and kara would’ve been perfect but he understands that supercorp is just where the show is leading and he wants them to be endgame. but what I will hate is your hate. what’s the point of all this? this thread, this account is going to do NOTHING. so why bother? I debated sending this and I hope I’m not too harsh at times but I really wanna see what you say. I hope you can open your eyes to lena and supercorp. maybe even become a supercorp shipper yourself!

- thanks and supercorp endgame 💙❤️

First of all, if you want to discuss ships in the future send this type of anons to facepalming-since-chernobyl, this blog is not for this, but for gathering receipts.

1.I just ship it, I don’t get why you have to understand it. It’s shipping. But if you insist:

No, it was not filled with toxicity. Count me when he failed to listen to her when they were in a relationship. Secondly, he is not a dog, he has his brain, he is his own person. People don’t always do what others asked them to do. It’s not slavery.

He has NEVER said to her to give up being Kara Danvers. How did he exactly convince her? How can you read the scene that he convinced her that being supergirl and having him is erasing Kara Danvers? In this scene he supports anything SHE WANTS to do. Also, Kara Danvers doesn’t equal Kara being a reporter in CatCo. On that moment she had her blog. She change people’s live with it like a real reporter. She took the risk and met consequences of her actions aka being fired by Snapper. Also, remind me who told her to create a blog? With your logic Lena was erasing Kara Danvers too.

Friendly reminder that he was forced to the marriage to keep peace. Also, friendly reminder Imra and the Legion out him in this situation without telling him about her plans. She and Brainiac put him there, knowing exactly how much he loved Kara and how much she meant to him. Imra knew that, that’s why she asked him to stay and solve his feelings. She said if he had come back, she would have known he had no doubts. But he wanted to stay, that’s why they broke up. He came back because once again he sacrificed himself for the greater good, like a real hero. Maybe watch the Argo eps because they clearly show that no, it was no about moving on.

It was not accepting about so called toxicity. First of all, she already forgave him that he lied. Secondly, all of she was screaming in that scene, when she was infected with M’rynn’s powers, happened before they got together and it was already approached in the musical ep. Aka, this scene had no point.

There is no future for karamel because you say so?

Kara went to asked him, because she truly believed and trusted him and his judgment. And yes, she asked about Lena and what did he said? That Kara deserved the same compassion she gives others, something Lena never gave her. And sorry, I know all scs scream the 100 ep was about sc, but it was about Kara fully realizing she is not responsible for Lena’s horrible choices. That’s it. And friendly reminder she called her a villain in the last scene. Also, the ep showed than no matter what, Lena always ends screwing something, because she has too big ego, always knows better, doesn’t stand criticism and doesn’t trust anyone.

It doesn’t make sense for you. Suit yourself.

2.Her fans made me hate her :) Thanks to them and how they excuse her every horrible action, how they treat her as a victim, while she abuse everyone etc. I started to watch her more carefully. And well, she is a horrible, white, privileged capitalist, who plays god, judge, jury, has mommy issues and acts like typical Luthor while crying she is not one, while still using Luthors money and resources.

Yeah, many people want to make good and end doing evil things. Common people pay for their sins, she has never. Since allowing hostile Daxamite army to invade the Earth (also, her portal affected the other aliens who destroyed the NC), producing a device that could recofnize aliens without their consent (and it was used by Children of Liberty,)producing and lying about Kryptonite, trying to make people superpowered without any supervision, killing Adam during illegal experiment, supporting openly alienphobic president and in a way Agent Liberty, killing Lex and then blaming Kara and finally manipulating Kara for months, lying, gaslighting, yelling, making her steal Lex journal, trying to lobotomize her and tortured with kryptonite, hurting every way possible, physically and mentally. Working with mass murderer, enslaving 3 people (kidnapping Eve, without her consent putting AI into her mind, basically RAPING her brain and making her a puppet in her own body; enslaving end experimenting on Malefic and Russel – threatening to kill him to steal Andrea’s necklace) – none of it are flaws. It was horrible abuse and violating every human right and the fact some people excuse it is disgusting.

First of all, being victim of abuse doesn’t give you the rights to HURT other people. The fact I have to explain pains me. Secondly, what abuse exactly? Lillian didn’t love her? Lex kidnapped her? Said he was going to kill her? You know what? Winn HAD HORRIBLE past and he didn’t turn into a murderer. Mon-El was abused by his mother and never tortured Kara with Kryptonite. J’onn killed a lot of white martians but last time I checked he doesn’t feel good about it. Also, never said the things he has done were GOOD. See a difference?

Yeah, and all of it, still doesn’t give her the rights to torture people. Also, friendly reminder she lied to Supergirl about Kryptonite in s3, much before the whole drama. Remember how she destroyed the life of a girl that stole boyfriend in middle school? It clearly shows she always had THAT in her. Plus, sorry not sorry, if she wanted different life, outside her family she could have easily done that. She was in Star City, with Jack, doing her researches, making her career. And she threw it all away, because she WANTED to be a Luthor.

Plus, sorry not sorry, if you feel betrayed and hurt because your friend didn’t tell you something she didn’t OWE you, you go to therapy, not trying to lobotomize entire planet.

Mate, she wanted to lobotomizer entire humanity, without ANYONE’S consent, because SHE, one single Lena, felt hurt. This is playing a GOD. Nothing explains it.

Planning a cold ass revenge for months is not being blinded by feelings.

Once again, even if could argue about how many times she was broken, most of that was a white privileged life she chose herself but whatever, it still doesn’t excuse her. All of she has done should meet consequences. Paying for shit you have done, accepting it, fully realizing what you have done is a part of redemption. Still in s5 she didn’t even apologize to Kara. Because she still didn’t understand what she has done and doesn’t feel sorry about it.

Feel appalled as much as you want, because I’m not going to feel sorry for a white, privileged woman who has never paid for her actions and is basically a living avatar of the worst Karen you can imagine.

She realized Lex was using her horrible experiments (remember? She experimented on puppies too) to his own agenda, that’s why she went to Kara. That’s not grasping a thing. Mhm, if you call that an apology then suit yourself. She is not saving the world, she is helping once again other people fixing the shit she created.

Feel infuriated as much as you want, because I don’t care? Especially when it comes from a person who tells others to take a step back while being totally narrow minded about Mon-El and karamel.

3.Because actors, prodcuers, writers call SC a female friendship. Mel did that in her last interview. See whatever you want but maybe stop forcing people to ship a horribly abusive ship.

Well… no. Kara is the heart and soul of the Supergirl. Alex is her most important relationship. Lena is an important friend, who doesn’t deserve it yet, but we all know Kara is the Paragon of Hope so of course she is going to forgive her.

I know you people think sc dated because they breathed in one room, but in s2 Kara dated, had sex, kissed, cuddled and enjoyed her time with Mon-El.

Yeah, they love each other as friends. It was said more than once.

That’s your delusion, you are free to do it.

Kara done that to Alex too, so you are saying she is romantically in love with her sister or something? If bringing people food is romantic and damn, most of the people I know loves me, god.

No, lena is not Kara’s love of her life.

Cool, you are not going to hate me because I ship karamel, I’m touched.

Sorry that you are going to be super disappointed in the end of the show I guess.

You will hate my hate – what’s the point of it?

Once again, because I don’t think you understand the point of this blog or read the description – it’s gathering receipts of assholes who cross tag and hate on the actors. Maybe go and search #gross hate or #cast hate on this blog so you can see how amazing your fandom is. Have fun.

I would rather eat my own shit than starting shipping the victim of abuse with her abuser.

Thanks and no :)

[echo-of-sounds]

rejection sensitive dysphoria

How Aizawa, Toshi, Hizashi, and Gang Orca would support their s/o with rejection sensitive dysphoria.

Sorry if some of these are a little difficult to read. A lot of this is personal so I sort of prattled on. But I think I edited them down enough to make sense and read clearly.

Aizawa Shouta

Shouta struggles with a few of your ADHD symptoms, mainly clicking and tapping. He’s also growing and learning. He comforts you from sensitivities and learns to help with memory issues. But one thing that’ll throw him for a loop is rejection sensitive dysphoria. Handling people’s emotions, he isn’t that best at. Handling your self-accusations, nearly uncontrollable guilt, and alienation hurts, worries, confusions, and upsets him.

It’ll take a lot of practice on his part to understand what exactly RSD is and how it affects your thinking, behaviors, and feelings. It’s hard for him to grasp how him saying “Don’t do that” or how reading a nice, useful critique on your writing is enough to make you sob for ten minutes. Your train of thought just makes very little sense. It’s helping you. You should use the advice to improve your skills. But he doesn’t voice that. It won’t make you feel better.

While he is confused about your reasoning, he understands you’re hurting. That’s more than enough to make him sit down, hold you, and talk (which is difficult for him). After reading about RSD and gaining new insights, he prefers talking out what happened and what your thoughts/feelings were saying. It’s to guide you along a path of understanding the situation better in hopes it’ll calm you. He wasn’t disappointed. That was just your mind twisting the conversation. Now, that doesn’t stop the flooding emotions, but it’s reassuring to realize his disgust wasn’t real. He still loves you. He always will.

A behavior that puzzles him (i.e. worries him sick) is when you fluctuate between a social butter and a hermit. You try so hard to make someone like you so much, but then a week later, you’re completely isolating. You don’t respond to texts or calls. You don’t engage. You just turn dormant. It’s like you either need to be beloved or erased. There’s no in-between… 

And that makes Shouta feel as stuck as you. Though he hides it to an extent. He knows if he revealed annoyance at your withdrawal, that could very well make it worse. And since he isn’t that great at emotional subjects, his choice of words could make it seem like he’s mad at you when that’s not the case at all. His annoyance is at the emotions. They take you away from the world, from your friends and life and him. It’s upsetting. He’s hurt that you don’t partake in card games with friends or join him for dinner anymore.

After a while, he will have a brief outburst. Despite the anger, underneath the scowls and retorts, you can tell he just misses you. He’s your partner. You need to have some sort of involvement in the partnership. At the end of his blowout, he apologizes. And you should, too. It’s unfair for you to disengage for so long. He understands your emotions are difficult to handle, but he doesn’t deserve you neglecting him. It’s on both of you to work with each other and figure out the best way to cope.

Yagi Toshinori

Toshinori’s great with difficult emotions. Hero work’s given him plenty of practice. But he always has a soft spot for you and loathes how you berate and bully yourself. It’s not fair. Mistakes happen. Sometimes you mishear. You won’t always reach your goals, and that’s perfectly okay! It’s also okay to not be the best at everything. None of that means you’re a failure. Anytime he notices the brittle little switch flick on that revs up your thinking, he turns his focus to you.

Like when he drives you to your doctor’s appointment. But it was at one, not four. You disappointed yourself, made Toshi drive you for nothing, and took up his time and energy for fucking nothing. You failed. You’re a fuckup. It hurts. You don’t know why. It just hurts. It’s lonely. It’s overwhelming. You can’t describe the quality, nature, or aspect. You’re just scared and fragile and ashamed and inadequate and now tears are streaming down your face for absolutely no fucking reason and it won’t stop, it gets worse and worse and heavier and heavier and you just want to disappear.

Toshi gently pulls you to his chest. It doesn’t matter how ‘insignificant’ the reason is, he comforts you, softly reassuring he isn’t angry and you aren’t a screwup. You made a mistake. That’s it. There’s no consequence. No nothing. You two can go home and spend your time together, cuddling and kissing, instead of at a doctor’s office. You can fix the mistake later and all will be well.

The high standards you set for yourself upset him. It gives him anxiety. When you get your essay back, the one you spent uncountable hours on, and you only got a 91, he doesn’t understand why or want to see you cry. Out of one-hundred, that’s an amazing grade, especially on difficult subjects. He wishes you learn self-love and accept yourself- fumbles, slipups, and all. Because the minute you fail, since the standards are simply not achievable by anyone, you tongue-lash yourself to tears. You’re scared of failure. But that’s exactly what you set yourself up for with your thinking.

To help, he will read plenty about what he can do to support you. He knows it’s not all on him to fix. You work with your therapist and practice coping techniques. But he yearns to help. He always will. During the buildup of an emotional eruption, he talks with you, directing your mind towards self-compassion: self-kindness because you deserve warmth and sympathy from yourself, common humanity because everyone has flaws and faults, and mindfulness because you can have negative emotions without judging them or yourself.

Overall, Toshi is there to bolster and comfort you. If you need certain things explained or want company to an event, he’s right beside you. He wants you to love yourself as he does, completely. That includes your flaws and mistakes.

Yamada Hizashi

Hizashi’s very in tune with your feelings. The slightest change is often felt by him. It doesn’t matter if the criticism is real or perceived, he’s hugging you, drying your tears. You aren’t an idiot or annoying or inferior. You didn’t fail or disappoint. And he certainly isn’t mad or judging or rejecting you. He loves you dearly. The instant you withdraw because of his tone, words, or actions, he explains he isn’t angry, that he loves you just as much, if not more, than yesterday.

And whether or not the initiating scene was real, he reassures you that no matter how devastating, destructive the emotions are right now, they will pass. You will feel better. Your mind is just in overdrive right now. Once it hits the brakes, it’s easier to think about what really happened. You can recognize his critique wasn’t some personal attack because he suddenly abhors your mere presence. He was genuinely trying to help improve your piano skills. It was out of love. Everything he does is out of love.

The embarrassment and low self-esteem are his chief concerns. You deserve to feel comfortable with your mind and body. Who cares if someone doesn’t like your dress? Screw them. You’re fucking beautiful and worthy of having fun and feeling good. He tries his best to kiss the tears away. If you need more kisses in the places you hate, he gladly obliges. 

The idea of failing a task is too painful, so you never try. You don’t speak up even when you have a great idea. You don’t vocalize your needs because you’d rather be insignificant than called clingy and weak. Hizashi is the ideal man to help. He’s your cheerleader, supporter, and defender. He’ll tell the server your burger was wrong. He’ll listen to your ideas and bring them up, knowing they’re terrific, then make sure you get the credit you deserve. Your words are valid. You’re valid. It doesn’t matter if something you do isn’t the best. You’re still entitled to be heard, helped, and respected.

Hizashi cracks jokes galore. Sometimes they’re groan-worthy. Sometimes they’re pretty funny. Sometimes, after a stress-filled day when you’re raw and insecure, one minuscule jab in a teasing-but-maybe-not-but-maybe-bullying voice can reduce you to nothing. Because that’s exactly what you feel like- a stupid, unwanted, fruitless fool. He’s quick to catch the fumble and switches into snuggly mode, apologizing and nuzzling you under blankets. You know he never means to insult you. But that doesn’t stop the emotions from bursting.

He changes how and when he jokes by paying attention to your anxiety level. He also compliments you more, immodestly and extravagantly. It’s almost too much, but Hizashi doesn’t care. He just wants you to know how much he loves and appreciates you.

Gang Orca

Kugo struggles… a lot. Relationships and delicate emotions in general aren’t his expertise. In the beginning of your relationship, he notices your sensitivities straight away. He doesn’t bring it up at first. Thinking it’s him doing something wrong, he changes how he acts. Then it happens again and again, over things he’s plain confused by. Why does him saying “Not right now” or “I don’t care” bother you so? He was only answering your question.

The more he apologizes, the more ashamed you feel. You must start the conversation on RSD. He’d never mention it for fear he would appear rude or prying. And you’ll need to be specific about what you’re sensitive to so he can do his best to work with you. He reads all those relationship blogs and self-help magazines, hoping to find new ways to support you.

Like Aizawa, Kugo talks through what happened whenever you feel blamed or criticized. He desperately wants to understand your thinking. He hopes it’ll help you realize it wasn’t a big deal. Of course, it is a big deal when you’re sobbing and whipping yourself. But once you’ve calmed, he sits with you and just talks, openly and honestly: What about his words hurt? Was it a specific word, his tone, or what he said? Do you believe he meant to hurt you or was your mind goading itself on?

If you react with anger, he’s baffled. You asked for constructive criticism on your drawing and then when he gives it, you’re slamming your sketchbook closed and snapping at him. His go-to is to apologize. That just makes it worse because now you’re feeling angry and guilty. And his sad expression makes you absolutely incensed because why the hell isn’t he realizing that it’s not about him? And now he’s apologizing again and you’re crying and feel so exposed and threatened and judged and you can’t talk so you just run away, preferring to be forsaken than a burden.

Take the time you need to calm. Kugo will give you plenty of space. When the emotional flash dies and you realize you vilified him over nothing, find him, apologize, and explain. He appreciates both. He accepts your emotional dysregulation and all your strengths and flaws. However, he wishes you wouldn’t take your frustrations out on him. He loves you. He wants to be your backbone. But he can’t do that when you succumb to your fight-or-flight response.

To help reduce unnecessary stress, Kugo reminds you to eat right, exercise, and keep a sleep schedule. When you’re tired, he notices you’re on edge, expecting anger and rejection to come out of nowhere. He takes your phone from your fingers and carries you to bed. You’re unable to get up since he wraps you tight, so you might as well sleep. He pays attention to what you eat. If you haven't eaten healthily, he brings you a glass of water and apple slices with peanut butter. Any time you’re particularly jittery, he recommends going for a walk to get out the swirling energy. Or, if you suggest, sex to work out and get pleasure (which is always a bonus).

[padawanlost]

“Attachment is not compassion.” What does that mean? Attachment are undoubtedly normal but I don’t get this quote

“Attachment is not compassion” Title card – TCW 02x08

Well, attachment and compassion are two different thing. The fact you’re attached to something or someone doesn’t necessarily mean you have compassion. Attachment can come from a selfish place too. That’s what Ahsoka needs to figure out by the end of the episode. Did she save Barriss out of selfish attachment (*she* didn’t want to lose a friend) or out of compassion (sympathy for Barriss and what she was facing)? Because, by choosing to save Barriss, it could’ve backfired costing thousands of lives.

On a deeper level we have to ask ourselves if it’s possible to experience real compassion without any kind of attachment. Filoni believes that the Order’s approach to compassion failed them and the galax.. you have to ask what’s compassion without action? Is it really compassion if it doesn’t translate into action? The Jedi, by becoming so focused on the greater good, failed to notice how dispassionate they had become at a personal level. They tried hard to save the galaxy but did very little to save people as individuals. We this see on multiple occasions:

Obi-wan’s initial reaction of Qui-Gon’s helping Anakin and Jar Jar;

He moved out of his seat to kneel close to Qui-Gon. “Master,” he said, unable to help himself, “why do you keep dragging these pathetic life-forms along with us when they are of so little use?” Qui-Gon Jinn smiled faintly. “He seems that way now perhaps, but you must look deeper, Obi-Wan.” [Terry Brooks. The Phantom Menace]

The Council’s reaction to Anakin:

Like Anakin, I was well past infancy when I began my training at the Jedi Temple. There was much concern about whether I was too old to learn the ways of the Force, that my Cerean childhood might cloud my judgments, but … I am not certain of how to express myself. My mind tells me I should feel empathy for Anakin, but my instinct tells me something else. [Ki-Adi-Mundi in Ryder’s Windham’s Jedi vs. Sith: The Essential Guide to the Force]

What disturbs me most of all is Anakin Skywalker himself. It is not in my nature to make assumptions about anyone based on appearance, and yet I find it almost alarming that the boy looks so entirely unremarkable. If I didn’t know better, I would have dismissed him as a harmless raga-muffin. [Ki-Adi-Mundi in Ryder’s Windham’s Jedi vs. Sith: The Essential Guide to the Force]

Their usual reaction to slavery:

The pirate spoke in a hushed tone. "I am Condi, from the planet Zoraster. I am not a pirate. I am a slave. As are my companions. Stolen from our home worlds by Krayn. Under penalty of death, we have been assigned guard duty aboard the ship." Condi looked at him eagerly. "Thank the moons and stars, we have rescue in our grasp at last." Obi-Wan deactivated his lightsaber. The naked desperation on Condi's face unnerved him. It was mirrored in the faces of his companions. All of them had obviously suffered great deprivations. "I am sorry," he said. "I have not come on a rescue mission." [Jude Watson. Path to Truth]

Can you help him? He did not know how that was possible. “I don’t know,” he told her, keeping his voice gentle, but firm. “I didn’t come here to free slaves.” [Terry Brooks. The Phantom Menace]

And, our most recent example, the Martez sisters.

A couple of years ago, there was a prison break on the surface of Coruscant, where you live, some gangster named Ziro. Then came the Jedi.  We watched, like so many others, as they chased Ziro and his gang down the portal, leaping from speeder to speeder as they went. Finally, some red-eyed alien protecting Ziro blasted the engine of an ascending cargo transport. The ship went spiraling out of control. The Jedi went into action, tried to gain control of the ship. There was a populated landing platform right in the path of the ship, but the Jedi steered it clear of that, right into the portal wall. And on the other side of that wall was our home. Mom and Dad saw it coming. They got Rafa and I out. But they weren't so lucky. The Jedi didn't even capture Ziro. The "distraction" of the ship helped him get away. Afterward, the Jedi came back, and one of them came over to me. I'll never forget it. She was beautiful, dark robes contrasting against her light green skin. Penetrating eyes. She looked at me, and you know what she said? She said, "I had to make a choice, but not to worry, the Force will be with you." That's it. Then she was off. And Trace and I were left without parents, without a home, just left there to find our way in their system.” TCW 07x07

Is any this compassion?

The point here is whether or not compassion means anything if you don’t act on it. You can say you love everything and everyone but if that love is not put into action is it really love?. What Ahsoka did was not the Jedi way but it’s clear she did the right thing by saving Barriss.

He looked over at Yoda. “Master Yoda, you and I have been close since I was a boy. An infant. Yet if ending this war one week sooner—one day sooner—were to require that I sacrifice your life, you know I would.” “As you should,” Yoda said. “As I would yours, young Obi-Wan. As any Jedi would any other, in the cause of peace.” “Any Jedi,” Obi-Wan said, “except Anakin.” Yoda and Mace exchanged glances, both thoughtfully grim. Obi-Wan guessed they were remembering the times Anakin had violated orders—the times he had put at risk entire operations, the lives of thousands, the control of whole planetary systems—to save a friend. [Matthew Stover. Revenge of the Sith]

Ahsoka, like Anakin, doesn’t take things that far. Her compassion is translated into actions. and that’s a result of Anakin’s training. Her desire to get involved and help individuals with their personal problems is a trait she got from Anakin, not from the Jedi.

“Not that Luminara is indifferent, but that Luminara is detached. It’s not that she doesn’t care, but she’s not attached to her emotionally. And at the end of the day, one of the questions that I guess I pose is, is that really a good thing? Is Anakin’s way of being so compassionate wrong? Because on a certain level, you have to accept that the Jedi lose the Clone War. So there is something that they’re doing that’s wrong.” Dave Filoni

“I’ve always felt that one of Anakin’s downfalls, like it’s never that Anakin was innately going to be evil, but the people around him, the Jedi, in their lack of compassion, in being so selfless that they almost forgot to care.”— Dave Filoni

“So as far back as Anakin, there is a seed of an idea of love and compassion, which admittedly in Attack of the Clones, the Jedi say they’re lacking because they’ve become arrogant and very sure of themselves. As Ahsoka gets older, her first big challenge comes when she’s abducted by Trandoshans and put an island [to be hunted for sport]. Anakin is put in a position where he can’t help her, and he obsesses over trying to find her, and there’s nothing he can do. But she survives anyway, and at the end of that she says, “I was only able to do this because of your teachings. Because the other Padawans I was with, boy, they were completely messed up. They were cracking.” So again we see this comparison of where Ahsoka is at because of Anakin, and where these other Padawans, which represent the other Jedi, are at.” Dave Filoni 

In the end, the message is attachment is not compassion but neither is detachment. Both extremes are wrong. Complete detachment and obsessive attachment are wrong. Ahsoka’s balanced approach to compassion is the best way.

[rotationalsymmetry]

Sometimes my brain will not let go of a thing.

And, when I argue I tend to go back and forth between being very sure and argumentative, and second-guessing everything I’ve thought or said ever.

So, since I’m well into my second guessing phase, did I miss something there? I think if I missed something, it would be “sometimes it’s not about you.” Thing is though? I didn’t miss that. I’m aware of that. I’m fully aware that healthy people complaining about being inside more than usual, and missing out on stuff, isn’t about disabled/chronically ill people.

And that itself is part of the thing? Intention/impact. Not thinking about people can be a problem too. It’s...actually OK for people to notice and comment on when we’re *not* being thought of.

And it’s certainly not about not being able to handle people talking about being different. That’s...how do you even get there.

It’s not about being intolerant of people who are more sociable or more outdoorsy missing stuff. I miss stuff too. I get it. It’s fine to miss things. (We’re not different. I do miss things. I miss things so much.)

This is really not about whether it’s ok for people to be sad about pandemic restrictions. Of course it’s ok. (Feelings = always ok.)

It’s also incredibly frustrating, speaking as a chronically ill person, to hear people be publicly sad about missing things you’ve been missing from before the pandemic, while being completely oblivious to your own more enduring sadness. I get this with worship a lot: I tried a virtual worship service at a congregation that normally meets in person early on, and there was a lot of public mourning around not being able to meet in person. And I get that. Zoom worship is not the same. I miss in person worship too. And: I was already missing in person worship. And feeling profoundly alienated and ignored over it — not just that I couldn’t go to worship in person, but that I could easily see things my local congregation could be doing to be more inclusive, really simple things, that it wasn’t doing. So, zoom worship, especially everyone being on zoom, that’s actually a significant improvement for me. So hearing people be sad over something that’s a step down for them and a step up for me, without there being room for me to talk about how it’s a step up for me. How I’d been a step down (several steps down) from the current situation before. It’s.

There aren’t words. It’s like I turned invisible, or turned into a not-person, some time when I wasn’t looking.

I think that’s worth talking about. And at least as much worth talking about as the sadness of healthy people who are missing out. Who can also talk about their sadness, just, it’d be nice if sometimes they looked around.

It’s, uh, well sorry for this, but it’s a little like Dudley complaining about only getting thirty eight presents or whatever, when Harry’s right there and not getting any presents at all. There’s, uh, it’s ok to be upset, it’s not a competition, there is room for many different levels of disappointment, and of course some people are getting hit harder than others, but also...perspective please.

A little over a year ago I was in an airport, and had sensibly requested a wheelchair, and I got treated like luggage. Pushing the wheelchair without giving me a heads-up first even after I complained the first time it happened, for instance. Getting treated more like an object than a person is, tbh, not really something I’m used to happening to me. It’s jarring. To go from someone people care about. To being luggage. Going from being a valued member or prospective member of a congregation, someone who’s welcomed in and wanted. To someone that people won’t make even the smallest accommodation for, even when that accommodation would mean the world to you.

And, good grief, this is just me and I’ve still got it WAY better in many ways than a lot of other disabled people.

It’s not just about disability either. It’s also “oh it’s like being in prison” well no, you see there are actual people in prison, and they’re dying at appalling rates, and having to stay in your home that’s set up the way you like it and might even have multiple rooms you can be in and also being able to go for a walk around the neighborhood when you want, is only a tiny bit like prison even when people aren’t dying.

(And people can talk about their frustrations without bringing prison into it. And people who feel disappointed or frustrated that they’re missing out can be a bit cautious about complaining to or perhaps in front of someone who’s objectively missing out on more, or make sure they’re all ears when the person who’s missing out more wants to vent, because let me tell you a lot of disabled people find that abled people are in general not very helpful when it comes to expressing our frustrations.) (Some exceptions of course — but it is a very common experience, and personally I rarely full on vent to anyone except my partner or other chronically ill people. Healthy people tend to take complaints as a request for suggesting possible treatments, which is not constructive.)

There’s a lot of ways in which some people habitually have it much, much worse than others, and yet somehow the people who have it less bad get lots of room to talk about their troubles, lots of sympathy and understanding and getting to see their troubles represented in fiction and talked about on the news and so on, and the people who have it the worst do not get any sympathy at all. (Which of course is not to say I myself am perfect and always get it right, I’m not and I don’t.)

And when we’re presented in news articles or other media, often it’s for abled people and not for us (“inspiration porn”.)

And you see this on so many levels with the pandemic. There’s a zillion articles on working from home and reducing your risk when you don’t have to do anything more risky than a grocery run. And virtually none on how essential workers can protect themselves. I don’t know about media specifically aimed at parents, but news articles aimed at the general public rarely mention the difficulties of parenting during the pandemic. I don’t think I’ve seen a single article talking about how the pandemic and staying home might be especially hard on kids and teens, or even young adults (even though obviously it’s easier to be resilient when you’ve had a ton of positive past experiences you can draw on, which for many people includes prom night and early-twenties bar hopping, and even though young people are more likely to be in a life stage where they’re looking for a friend group or a romantic partner which is much harder to do if you can’t go places) or the elderly. (See? I get it. Nights out and road trips and so on aren’t frivolous, they’re what tie the social fabric together.) But there’s a ton of articles about how to adjust to working from home. And how the economy is doing.

Almost like we live in a society that values “workers” and “consumers” more than people. And only certain kinds of workers at that.

Let’s push back on that, OK? I’m a person. Terminal cancer patients are people. Old ladies who go to the dialysis clinic are people. Full time wheelchair users are people. People with intellectual disabilities are people. Dementia patients who don’t remember their own name, are people. Prisoners are people. Immigrants and asylum seekers are people. Sex workers are people. Black peoples are people. Indigenous people are people. Bus drivers and garbage collectors and baristas and cashiers and janitors are people. Trauma survivors are people. People with all sorts of mental illnesses — not just depression and anxiety, but psychosis and schizophrenia and personality disorders (edit: and addictions), all mental illnesses — are people. Furries or whoever is being made fun of these days, are people. People who can’t use words are people. People who “look funny” are people. People who are “I don’t know, they just have a really weird vibe, I just don’t like them, you know?” are people. People with bad teeth, with weird accents, who don’t know that thing that everybody knows, people who don’t have the right politics or use the right words, we are all people.

We all have inherent worth, we all deserve basic respect and compassion and care, we all have the same basic rights, we all deserve to have our struggles heard and taken seriously. Even when we don’t explain ourselves well. Especially when we don’t explain ourselves well.

Do you understand? Especially when we don’t explain ourselves well. Because, people who aren’t good at explaining things, also have problems and are understood less often.

Or people who want to explain things that are hard to explain, because they’re outside of the mainstream frame of reference.

[ariainstars]

Why I Don’t Want Ben Solo to Die

Look, I am aware that Kylo Ren is a widely unpopular character with Star Wars fans. And that seems only legitimate, after all he killed his own father.

But reading and listening to fans’ comments, I come across the same judgement all over again: he is simply hated because he’s not badass.

The moment he destroys the ship’s console in a fit of rage it was already clear to most fans: what a baby.

When he took off his helmet so we could see his vulnerable features: that is supposed to be the villain?! He’s neither ugly nor beautiful enough! He looks normal!! (How awful.)

Kylo Ren / Ben Solo after the patricide, obviously traumatized. What a sissy. He did not enjoy the terrible thing that he did. He’s in pain and sorrow because his father is dead by his own hand, which means that he did love him.

A villain who loves someone? Who doesn’t enjoy the terrible things he does? My, my, how uncool is that. What a bad example to kids watching the show.

Ben watches Rey leave with the Falcon, tears on his face. He’s more miserable than ever, kneeling on the ground, literally having hit rock bottom.

But he’s the Supreme Leader now, folks!! Wasn’t that what he wanted all along? Why isn’t he triumphant?!

Ben Solo / Kylo Ren, like Anakin Skywalker / Darth Vader is a split personality. Many fans have never seen Ben behind the mask, not even in his interactions with Rey, because hey, if he was secretly a hero, he ought to be badass. And Ben is not badass, the son of Han and Leia is vulnerable and timid. So there can’t be a good guy in there somewhere, am I right?

Sorry, but I can’t help wondering how people can be so blind. It has been staring us in the face from the start that this man is not the story’s villain, that he is on a painful but ultimately successful way to redemption.

And by “redemption” I don’t mean coming back to the Light, but finally finding and sharing the balance the Force and the galaxy so desperately need. It wasn’t for nothing that he had promised his grandfather that he would finish what he started.

A guy I know claims that the wide-spread sympathy for Kylo / Ben (mostly coming for females) springs from the fact that for some unexplainable reason the role was given to Adam Driver, and that the actor’s personal charisma is leading fans to unhealthy and illogical conclusions. He never wondered why Disney gave Driver of all people this role in the first place, and that there actually might be a very good reason for that.

It’s easier to pretend that the saga is ruined, that Lucas has lost his magic touch and Disney is defiling the saga’s miserable remainders, than to sit down and try to think about it for just a minute. To listen, instead of believing to know everything by breaking down a 9-film-3-trilogies story to “it’s always black against white, ka-boom, the white ones win, the end”. Maybe, just maybe, Lucas had a good reason for telling the prequels the way he did and for selling the rights for the sequels to the Disney studios of all places.

One of the things that annoy me most is that so many fans keep calling Ben “Kylo Ren” and simply refuse to accept that actually they are speaking about Ben Solo, the son of Han and Leia and the nephew of Luke. Hence, also, the stubborn and unrelenting “it will turn out that Rey is a Skywalker / Organa / Solo / Kenobi”, even if in the first three cases these fans would actually be expecting her to kill her own cousin or half-brother.

Many of us have grown up with and loved the Star Wars original saga. I can understand that a lot fans are irritated by both prequels and sequels because used to stuff like Jaws, Rocky, Rambo, Alien etc. they of course expect a diluted and warmed-up rehash of the original story and not a development of themes and characters.

But these antis never seem to consider that Ben dying, and dying unrepentant, is the very worst service the saga could do to the original story. It has been said and shown over and over that Rey is a nobody from nowhere. Ben is, thus, indeed the last scion and heir to the heroes from the original trilogy. If he “gets by his deserts”, all that his family suffered and went through was in vain.

His father sacrificing himself - for nothing.

His uncle - ditto.

But to these fans, Kylo’s miserable death would be the only thing that could still halfway reconcile them with the allegedly disastrous, or at least very unsatisfying, sequel trilogy. If they were “real fans” like they claim, in my opinion they rather ought to pray day and night for Ben’s redemption. If they would dare to look beyond their noses, they would realize that Ben has his uncle’s learning, his father’s slyness, his grandfather’s protectiveness and his mother’s empathy and that these qualities are only waiting for the right spark to ignite inside of him and light the galaxy.

I have my own, personal reasons why I’m hoping for Ben Solo to be redeemed, and I’m going to admit that they are pretty personal.

Yes, I like Ben Solo and I like Adam Driver: not because of their pectorals and arm muscles (although they’re nice to look at 😊) but mostly because I identify with them. I want Ben to change and be happy and I hope for Adam to make a marvelous job of this role. I know he and the rest of the crew won’t be capable to convince everyone, but I do hope that they will make Ben Solo’s character, life and development understandable to as many viewers as possible.

I don’t want Ben Solo to fail and die miserably, unrepentant.

Nor do I want him to become Rey’s pet, only good enough to have kids with her so that she will finally have her own family.

I don’t want Ben Solo to die “because that whiny sissy deserves it”.

I don’t want him to die because he’s sensitive and “a real guy isn’t sensitive”.

I don’t want him to die because “he’s done so much evil and doesn’t deserve to be forgiven.”

I don’t want him to die by Rey’s hand because she’s badass so whatever she does, it’s ok.

I don’t want him to die because “he’s not good-looking so he can’t be the hero”.

I want the last scion of the Skywalker saga, the oversensitive, doubtful, patient, emphatic, funny-looking Ben Solo to prove to the world at large that you can be a hero and find your place in your own place, as a man, even if you don’t come up with any of the common prerequisites for a hero in the common sense of the word.

I want him to show the galaxy and the audience at large that it’s never too late, that you can change, grow beyond your wounds and weaknesses, find your own place among humanity and a happy ever after.

I want him to be a role and an encouragement for everyone like me who is introverted, insecure, thoughtful, sensitive and overall not badass.

For the same reason, I was happy when I saw that my theory that Rey would take a plunge into the Dark Side was founded. Rey is being mistaken by most fans as the true heroine of the saga because we see the story unfold mostly from her point of view, so we tend to identify with her and to overlook the arrogance, stubbornness and aggressiveness that were already hinting at her personal development.

I hope that Episode IX will finally make abundantly clear down to the last fan that even the most pure and intelligent and well-meaning heroine can still go down a dark path. (Louder for the people in the back: Anakin and Ben had all chance to be heroes and they were turned evil by the events around them.)

I want the Star Wars saga to end on the note “you don’t have to be badass to save the world.”

I want Love to be the triumphant end note.

I want vulnerability and empathy to be portrayed, in this action science-fiction world-wide known saga, as qualities that do not necessarily make you weak but can make you strong if you’re in the right place and employ them in the right way, instead of denying them and secretly admiring who has no qualms with going over corpses.

I know that many, many fans will never have compassion for Vader or Anakin. For some reason, if someone is frightening, they are likely to bow down before him and to think he’s right with everything he does, even killing and torturing.

Most fans hated the prequels’ depiction of Anakin Skywalker because he wasn’t a fearsome person like Vader but so desperately human.

They similarly hate Kylo Ren and wish him to end in the most horrible way because he’s conflicted and suffering instead of “enjoying” his crimes.

I know I’m being mean now: but I really hope that the expectations of these fans for “the badass wins” will explode in their faces when Episode IX comes out.

I predict that countless viewers all over the world will howl to the moon in frustration, claim that Disney ruined the franchise for good and sign petitions to start everything all over again.

But I hope that viewers who are less prejudiced will listen with their heart and find confirmation for what, in Lucas’ own words, the saga is all about: compassion and family.

And I also hope that future generations who will watch the saga on the whole, in particular boys and young men, will grow up with the message that you don’t have to be canonically handsome, formidable, violent and cruel in order to be a hero, but that loyalty and belonging to something bigger than yourself are more important; that a true hero is not someone who saves the world all by himself but who overcomes himself and creates a better place for other people and together with other people.

I don’t need to watch the lonesome hero, the cowboy riding away into the sunset. There are more than enough action films like that. Let Star Wars be a glorious exception for that cliché. I want it to give encouragement to people who, like me, are not cool and badass but for this are not useless, weak and have nothing to give to the world. If the saga ends the way I hope, I will assuredly not sign petitions for some of its chapters to be removed from canon but send George Lucas personally an enormous bouquet of flowers together with a card offering him all of my admiration and gratitude.

Do it for us, Kylo, Ben, Adam, George, please. Show the world that it’s always love that ought to win, not violence. Prove in a convincing way to whoever watches the saga that emotionality and doubts are not weaknesses but virtues, and that you can be a worthy and happy person without being cruel, vicious and creepy. I’m right here rooting for you and waving your flag.

See you in December. 😊

[twisterss]

hey, I'm that anon you're calling spineless. I get where you're coming from so totally go ahead and block me but? Im not saying that you shouldn't speak up about blatant normalized racist behaviours, its not rlly abt being a kid either. its more that the Tumblr art community is mostly self taught. not everyone learns how to draw dark tones and its not super "appropriate" or "productive" to gang up? theres a million skin tone sheets on here it feels better to link those bc its y they exist, sorry

You don’t understand where I’m coming from. You’re not a Black person. The tumblr art community has Black people as part of it. You probably didn’t think about that. I started drawing in January so I’m self-taught. When I wanted to get Sam Wilson’s skin tone right, I looked around at other good drawings of him, and I looked at reference photos of Anthony Mackie. I wasn’t satisfied until it actually looked like him. Why? Because that’s normal. Black people are not alien. You don’t need to take a special class or be an art major to draw someone with dark brown skin. We are human beings, we’re not a special type of human, a rare type of human, or a fucking alien type of human. Just human! Brown and all its shades are not some alien fucking colors!! Do you get that? I don’t think any of that matters to you though. At all. Because you alienate, other, and dehumanize the Black people on this site. You only have pity and sympathy for people who commit racists acts, never any compassion for the Black children and Black adults who have to see you guys being racists fucks day in and day out. When we see racism and we comment on it - that’s ganging up. When you guys put thousands of racist shit in every fucking tag - that’s an opportunity for you to learn. For us to send you guys link and talk to you nicely and tell you “oh whitey please don’t do this disgusting thing. Here’s a guide on how to not violently hate Black people. And if you have any questions, miss mayo, please feel free to ask me anything and if you want go ahead and ask the 14 yo Black kids who are busy laughing about anime to teach you not to be hateful too - because all Black people are your mules! We’re here to never be mad about racism and to teach you oh important pale one! 😔✊🏻”. Lol! So you’ll never understand because you’re fundamentally a dumb racist bitch.

[geminiimagines]

Little Sister (1/?)

Summary: In which Eli Vanto’s adopted little sister meets Leutient Thrawn at her brother’s graduation and is immediately enchanted.  

Chapter 1: A Rare Find 

“Grand frère!‘‘ Eli nearly jumped at the sound of his sister’s voice. During his time at the Academy, he often spoke to his sister (though in private), and nowhere she was running at full speed towards him. He almost didn’t react in time his catch his sister. 

“Hey, there sweet pea.’‘ He hugged his sister tight. Ever since they found his adopted sister wandering around town a few years ago. Eli’s father decided to take her in and make her a Vanto.  His little sister snuggled against him, much to his embarrassment,. 

“I am so proud of Eli! Maman and Papa should be here in a few minutes. They said they we might go out to eat! I cannot wait to see Coruscant.’‘ His sister climbed off him. Eli couldn’t help but smile. She was always so bubbly. The holos that she sent from home were always with her and gaggle of friends. 

“I don’t know about that Giselle. You know how Mom and Dad feel about being here.’‘ Eli said putting her down. Her black hair was done in a loose ponytail… and… was that a tiara she was wearing? How the hell did she get that? The Vanto family was well-off, but not that well off. 

“Elle, sweetie! Are you with your brother?’‘ Eli heard the voice of his mother calling out. Giselle turned around, “Maman je suis là! Je suis avec Eli!*‘‘ She called in her native tongue. Eli watched as his parents walked over to where and his little sister was.  

“We talked about this Giselle. You know we can’t understand you when you talk that in that nonsense.’‘ Eli’s mother said. His father, not too far from his wife, walked up and hugged his son. 

“Congratulations son. We’re proud of you.’‘ He said releasing his son from his hug.  Giselle hugged her brother and held tight to his arm. His parents stood awkwardly as the silence set in. His, usually talkative sister stood quietly too. 

‘‘So…’‘ His mother began, ‘‘Is it true?’‘ Eli winced. He had hoped that wouldn’t come up. Eli had hoped that his family would tell him how proud they were and then get out. 

‘‘Yeah, it’s true.’‘ His parents visibly flinched at the thought of their eldest son being an aide to an alien officer. The Vantos held a standard in the Outer Rim, and it was already being talked about with their friends.  Giselle in her usually naive manner turned with wide eyes. 

“About Monsieur Thrawn? You have talked about him before.’’ Giselle said innocently. Her innocence was something that people found charming. Her wide-eyed view of the world. Innocence was something found in short of supply in the Empire. Like Eli, that innocence would soon fade, but if his mother had anything to with it his sister would remain as naive as a newborn until she died. 

“You know about him, Elle?’‘ His father asked with wide eyes. Eli bit his, lip. He shouldn’t have told her about Thrawn. But then again who could he complain to without his parents knowing. Giselle nodded, she looked up and saw a familiar face. It was Thrawn, and his sister was already running towards him. Panic immediately weld up in Eli. This was one of her flaws. She was way too friendly. On some days she was caught talking to stormtroopers on the occasion. Protective instincts rose up in Eli as he watched her interact with the Chiss. 

“Monsieur Thrawn! Je suis Giselle! Je suis la souer d’ Eli. S’il vous plaît rencountrer mes parents.’’  Thrawn watched as a young girl around eighteen come barling towards him. He had his name mixed with the language he did not recognize. She stopped in her tracks. He watched as an air of friendliness came from the girl. Looking at the girl he noticed the rosy cheeks and wide smile that graced her faced. Her gown and tiara gave away her staus of someone of high social standing. Though her dress was that of the not of the usual fashion of Coruscant. He looked down at the girl, and like a light bulb, he recognized her. It was Eli’s younger sister. He couldn’t remember her name… Elle was it? 

‘‘I’m sorry, but I do not understand you,’‘ Thrawn said bowing his head slightly. The girl giggled. It was obvious that she didn’t care to talk to a non-human. She tucked a stray hair behind her hair. 

“I am sorry,’‘ She said switching to Basic. Her accent was not like Eli’s where one could see that he came from Wild Space, but his sister talked with an accent Thrawn had not heard before. Her native tongue was free-flowing, carefree and passionate. Her accent was thick and he almost could not understand it himself. It sounded like she had only just started to learn Basic a year or so ago. Her voice high and windy, chime-like. 

“It is not a problem, are you Eli’s sister? I recognized your voice.’‘ The girl smiled and nodded. Without any hesitation, she grabbed his hand and started to drag him over to where Eli and his family were standing. A look of embarrassment over Eli’s face, his parents, Thrawn noticed stiffened at the sight of their daughter practically dragging the alien to them. 

 I swear Giselle’s friendliness is going to bite in the back you one day. Eli thought bitterly. He watched as his sister dragged Thrawn over to his family. Her face in a full-blown smile. Thrawn didn’t seem to mind at all much to Eli’s surprise. Though his parents… he watched as their faces go from surprise to shock. 

‘‘ My name is Giselle, I am Eli’s little sister. The Vantos took me in a couple of years ago.’‘ She said proudly. Eli and his father unconsciously stepped closer to the youngest member of the family. Eli’s mother stiffened and placed a hand on her daughter’s shoulder. 

“Yes, we adopted her a couple of years ago. Her parents were friends of ours, unfortunately, they passed away. We took in her in.’‘ It was a story they had rehearsed many times. Thrawn nodded, and much to Eli’s chagrin he knew that Thrawn could spot a lie from a million miles away. He nodded as if he accepted the story. Thrawn noticed this protectiveness. It was something only natural, Thrawn had noticed. Many of the young ladies of Coruscant often had companions chaperoning them. Eli had to explain it was a way of preserving their honor. Thrawn gave a small bow gave a smiled. 

‘‘You are extremely kind to take her in. Your kindness has extended to Eli he has been gracious in my learning here at the Academy.’‘ He said smoothly. He watched as Eli’s mother puff up a little with pride. His father gave a nod towards him. Eli watched Giselle as she slipped from his grasp. 

‘‘They have been very kind to me. I cannot repay their kindness.’‘ Giselle said. Her boldness caught Thrawn of guard by taking his hand. It was a gesture he was not used to. It not usually among the Chiss for public displays of affection, that was usually held in private it was only something done between partners, never with complete strangers. 

‘‘Eli told me how everything. I know how it feels to be alone in a strange world. When the Vantos found me I had no idea where I was. The only thing I knew was that name is Giselle. My memories came back in time.’’ The young lady explained. It was rare that he was offered sympathy for his ‘‘plight’‘. Often times when people were told of his ‘‘rescue’‘ it was met with awe and often fake sympathy. It was a rare find indeed.  The expression of compassion on her face was genuine. Uncharaceristly, Thrawn gave her hand small squeeze before letting go. He could also see how naive she was. Perhaps it was the way she was raised. He didn’t know where she had come from before becoming to the Vantos. Thrawn would not lie, he found it rather amusing about her wide-eyed view of the world.  He found it rather refreshing. He watched as Eli scooted closer to her. 

‘‘Well… uh. It was nice meeting you Lieutenet Thrawn.’‘ Eli’s mother said stiffly. Eli knew that his parents were uncomfortable with being on a Core World planet, and their son being an aide to a non-human… and was Thrawn flirting with his sister?! He couldn’t believe. The faster they got out of here, the better.  There was no way that his sister would be involved with him! It wasn’t uncommon for navy men to have relationships with civilians… but this was his sister! His sister who saw the good in everyone, despite what everyone else thought.  Giselle had little knowledge of the Empire, and how it worked. She didn’t understand the implications of what would happen it would be in a relationship with Thrawn. And… neither did Thrawn. Did Chiss court outside of their own? Would he understand what would happen to his family if word got out… Eli shook his head. Thrawn wouldn’t be that stupid… then again it was Thrawn.  

‘‘ It was nice to meet you too, especially Miss Giselle.’‘ Thrawn said. He took Giselle’s hand and lifted it to his lips, giving it a light kiss. Eli felt rage surge through him. How could he do that? Calming down he knew Thrawn was just mimicking what he saw many times at parties. His parents were the first to leave, his mother giving him a hug and told him to write often. His father shook his hand and told him good luck and that he always a Comlink call away. Giselle was the last one. 

“Goodbye grand frère. Goodbye Monsieur Thrawn.’’ She hugged Eli. She didn’t want to let go. It had been so long since she had seen her brother. Eli gave his sister a tight hug. 

‘‘ You be good sweet pea. Don’t cause mom and dad any trouble.’‘ He said with a sad smile. Giselle gave her brother a kiss on the cheek before turning to Thrawn.  

‘‘Keep my brother safe. I know it can be scary out there. Don’t hesitate to call or write if you get bored with my brother.’‘ She giggled. Eli winced internally as she said that. A smile spread across Thrawn’s face. 

‘‘ I would be happy to,’‘ Thrawn said giving Giselle a smile. Eli watched as his sister caughter up with her parents, she turned and called out, 

“Que Dieu bénisse votre voyage!’’ Thrawn watched as Giselle went away with her parents. He turned to Eli. 

“What did she say? I am not familiar with her language.’‘ He said. Thrawn watched Eli think about to way. It was obvious that he wasn’t used to her native tongue, but it was obvious he knew some of it. 

‘‘Uh, something about blessing our journey.’‘ Eli said, ‘‘ It’s really a good luck thing. Come on we need to get our orders.’‘ He said. Eli couldn’t help but worry about his sister and what she was entering into. 

[randomnessunicorn-imagine]

Could I get a Don't ever do that again prompt with Weyoun from DS9 and a female security officer who always gets into trouble? Perhaps fighting a Jem'hadar in order to protect Weyoun? :)

{ I know I’m verylate but I’m still watching DS9 and I was unable to write it before since Ididn’t know the character.

Then his name lookslike Korean, don’t know why, lol, but it’s kind of funny!

If you want a secondpart of this, let me know but you have to tell me a plot, because I’m too lazy to think about it - }

✨ WEYOUN ✨

Peace could not lastforever. Impossible.

For years you hadbeen obsessed with the heaven on earth and the idea that the earth was an Edenbut it was not true. Paradise existed only in the imagination of men, theirillusions. These illusions made them blind.

The earth was apurgatory like any other place and now hostile, mysterious and fickle enemies werecompromising the human race’s safety. Enemies who could take any form, even theshape of your best friend or mother. They did it to know every secret and thendestroy everyone and take any form, take people’s place in the world, and commit crimes and conspiracies under a false name. Sneaky, extraneous, and combative enemies.Enemies similar to the human being of the past when it was still a savage and stilldiscriminated the other human beings just because they had a different skin colouror a different love aspiration. The human race was losing its integrity becauseof these ruthless enemies.

The Earth was notheaven, no planet was because the universe was hell and there was no mercy foranything or anyone. Anymore

You did not want to behavethe same and become like those violent men who had spat on peace and so youdecided to stay on DS9 and help your Captain as much as possible.

The Dominion hadbrought problems everywhere and the panic reached every corner of the space. Noone was safe and no soul could sleep peaceful in the night.

Maybe you were notthe only one who had believed in an awful lie because there were so many otherpeople who still held onto illusions.

They were other kindsof illusions but they still had the same definition: lies told to itself, liesof honey that tasted so good. Beautiful lies that made their lives meaningful,inestimable but they were still lies, and would have dissolved like the morningmist, they would have melted like snow in the sun. Someday, they would havevanished.

At this time, somefanatic aliens who believed that their god was inimitable, fair and perfect, hadinvaded DS9. However, these believers had not even had the possibility ofchoice because the said gods had decided to be worshiped and had decided tochange the original DNA of these races; they modified every individual of thesespecies to reach their dirty and dishonourable purpose. Without consent and morality,defining themselves as gods.

You could not imaginethe changelings, the family of your boss Odo, could be so insensitive andcruel, they only searched for revenge and there was no honour or logic in whatthey pursued. They were only brutal and merciless assassins, anything more. Itwas the horrible truth and truth never tasted like honey, it was bitter anddisgusting.

One of the Changeling’sblind believers was now walking briskly, almost running, on the promenade, hisgaze was focused, serious and composed but you were able to glimpse anotheremotion on his pale face, a feeling that you would define as anxiety. You hadno idea why he was so nervous, but since your duty was to keep the spacestation safe, you decided to keep an eye on him.

The name of thisindividual was Weyoun and you still did not understand if you hated him or ifyou felt sympathy toward him since he was an enemy, but he did not seemthreatening or dangerous, he was not a warrior but a mere diplomat. He lookedso innocent, but you had learned that nothing was as it seemed, you no longerlived in lies and therefore you could not think that he really was innocent.

Nevertheless, youfelt sorry for Weyoun because he continued to obey, believe and submit to thefounders even though they were not real gods because they played with the Vortas’DNA, they genetically modified the Vortas. People who acted in this way couldnot be defined as deities but you also knew that Weyoun and his race would havenever understood this concept and would have continued to adore those changelings,their deities, their masters and jailers.

Afterward, youunderstood why he was running, in fact, he was chased by a Jem'Hadar and thiswas not the first time something like this happened. A Jem’Hadar had alreadykilled Weyoun and so it could have happened again.

You did not helpWeyoun because you were worried about him, you did not want to be a friend ofyour enemy but you helped him anyway because it was your duty. At least, you keptrepeating this motivation to yourself.

You could not feelcompassion for a person like him, just because he had not freely chosen hisfaith and his means and intent were wrong, it did not mean you had the right to be cruel.

Therefore, you ran towardthe Jem'Hadar, you screamed, “Stop! You aren’t allowed to run on the promenadeand any act of violence and harassment is prohibited.” Your voice was authoritative,serious and loud, you pointed your phaser at the Jem'Hadar.

On the other hand,Weyoun did not seem surprised by your reaction but he was relieved because thissituation was stressful, the Jem'Hadars were ignoble slaves, he could not trustthem. While he was listing in his mind all the reasons that made the Jem'Hadar stupidand savage beings, Weyoun hid behind you, without shame or shyness.

Weyoun was sure youwould help him and not just because this was your job but for some other reasonhe was still analysing, he thought you could be particularly interested in him butit was still a mere theory.

Maybe you were drowningin another lie, you were deluding yourself once more but you would never haveadmitted it, or maybe he would have admitted it for you, he would have made yourealizing the truth, your true feelings. 

The Jem'Hadar, beforeleaving, looked at Weyoun doggedly, the Vorta would not have escaped forever,and his fate was to dying for the rest of eternity. Actually, Weyoun did notcare about it so much but all these deaths made him wasting a lot of time hecould dedicate to complete his job and help his beloved changelings.

“Oh, Y/N, thankyou very much. That savage Jem'Hadar didn’t want to leave me alone.” Weyoun said,smiling amicably and settled the collar of his jacket that had frayed duringhis ridiculous run.

“I only did my job.”You answered seriously.

“Of course, likeeveryone here.” Weyoun said, looking around with a scrutinizing gaze.

“But why was thatJem'Hadar chasing after you?” You asked suspiciously, raising an eyebrow.

“Ah, I don’tknow, Jem'Hadars have no manners. Many of the things they do make no sense.Maybe he wanted his ration of ketracel-white, it is not the first time theydisobey to a superior order.” Weyoun said, smiling innocently or perhaps insidiously.

“Or he justwanted to kill you. It seems it’s become everyone’s hobby lately.” Youshowed his same smile, talking sarcastically. Maybe you hoped to hurt him withyour words but it did not happen because he chuckled at your joke.

“Is my presenceso unpleasant?” Weyoun asked and you almost heard a charming tone of voicevoice but you knew it was impossible, he could not flirt with you, and then hecontinued, “People only waste their time, they are not like us, verypassionate about their duty, judicious and willing.”

“The presence ofstrangers and people who are threatening the station is not definable as pleasant.”You said firmly. You were exactly the opposite of him: you always said thetruth, nothing but the truth and as a member of security, you had to be honest.“And we’re not the same.” You answered to his last sentence and said, “Otherthan that, don’t do that again!”

“Doing what?” helooked at you with an innocent confusing look.

“Run through the promenade.It’s not allowed, you know, even if they are chasing after you. You can’t doit!” you declared with a cold tone of voice.

Actually, Weyounreally appreciated the way you spoke and behaved, you possessed a charm, maybe it was your courage or maybe it was your blind honesty, which fascinated him a lot. Hesmirked, gently and then he nodded because he did not want to disappoint you.

“I understand and Iwill be more careful next time a wild Jem'Hadar attempts on my life. I did notmean to offend you, mine was just a compliment, anything else. The care and theperseverance you put in your job is laudable, I wanted to expose myappreciation. I am desolated for this misunderstanding.” He said with a softtone of voice, he half closed his eyes, his smile so gentle and you wonderedwhat his real intentions were.

Secretly, you foundhis deceptive ways very alluring, attractive somehow but it was wrong, you felt inadequateand you could not fall for his fake kindness.

You could not even fallfor his sinister and weird games because it made no sense, he was certainly lyingand he had something in mind but the only way to find it out was playing hisown game and see where it would bring you.

“No, don’t worry, I’veexaggerated.” You said politely, but Weyoun could understand you were forcing asmile. You were unable to hide your true feelings and thoughts. He could read you like a book.

“You know I candistinguish lies and truth.” Weyoun said calmly, since you were a bad liar, thenhe kept saying, “You don’t have to be anxious or preoccupied of me, noreason to be.” He tried reassuring you and he looked you in your eyes as if hewas reading the secrets written in your soul, you were hypnotized and lost inhis purple, deep eyes.

You just nodded,unable of speaking or thinking rationally and you loved every word he said.Indeed, Weyoun never stopped talking with his candid and delicate tone, “I’dlike to show you my appreciation, since you have been so kind with me, you havesaved me from that mad Jem'Hadar. Would you like to spend some extra time in mycompany?” His voice so gentle, low and only you could hear his words, nobodyelse even if the promenade was not so crowded but you already forgot abouteverything, about your job, your thoughts of mistrusting and hatred toward the changelingsand you only saw his bright, wide, insightful eyes, nothing else.

You did not havereasons to refuse his invitation and you did not want to do it, even if yourbrain kept warning you that Weyoun was your enemy, you could not trust a liar but somerisk had never killed anyone and so you followed him wherever he would havebrought you.

And then you decided to fall for another illusion, to believe in another lie that tasted like honey, so sweet, gentle and ephemera because it was human’s nature, to live under the dome of delusions.

[fandomscollective]

Works in Progress

This is very long so it’s all under a cut, there are several original fiction stories and a couple fanfiction. I’m trying to decide what to write next so I finally made decent descriptions instead of trying to verbally explain them to people. I might be able to write but I can’t talk in a coherent, linear, concise way to save my life.

Opinions on what to work on next are greatly appreciated. 

Original Fiction

     AER 9833(AER): A sort of Dystopian Future. A.E.R. were created as tools. Toys for the rich and powerful. AER are beautiful, elegant, and capable of tapping in to the background radiation of the universe to preform amazing feats. After an AER goes rouge they are determined to be sentient and therefore responsible for their own actions. Suddenly no one feels safe having these Artificially Intelligent beings around and so they are placed in The City, where a special device suppresses their power. Some time later the world is beset by an unknown force that destroys most life leaving the remnants to flounder. Humans begin to seek shelter in The City, which survived the Apocalypse. Things get complected with AER and humans living side by side. One AER breaks the field that suppresses their power and starts a chain of events that lead to a startling truth: we are not alone. This story has a mad max/cloud atlas thing going on. A hyper futuristic society falls to an outside attack that destroys most of the world, leaving wastelands interspersed with pockets where nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of civilization. A few scattered cities survive and humans struggle for security. In this bleak landscape a single AER possesses the power to save the world from a horrific fate, but the cost might be more than they can pay.

     Beyond the Stars(BTS): Sci-fi/Fantasy epic. In a distant future humans and Martic share a world cut off from both civilizations. What began as a short lived and devastating war between the two has settled into a strange and unbalanced power dynamic. The Martic king rules with a pleasant public facade that hides a dark and devious plot. Soon he will have the power to contact his home world and take the humans as slaves into their great empire. But not everyone is fooled, the Maquiya, a group of guerrilla resistance fighters, know the truth. The story follows the members of this resistance movement and other key players as the fight to save this small pocket of humanity from a terrible fate draws to a startling close. Prophetic dreams, confusing nightmares, double agents, and a century old secret come to light. And there is more than the fate of this world in the balance.

     Descendant Effect(DE): Magical Realism. Davin Khaye and his husband Eric Douglas just adopted a baby girl with a mysterious past. They thought they were leaving that whole occult investigation thing behind when they settled on Staten Island but when and old flame develops a magical illness Davin and Eric find themselves, and their new friends, pulled into a fight for the fate of the world.           Descendant Effect Book One: Sins of the Father, Complete (Looking for Beta and Sensitivity Readers and Editors) Davin, a magical historical fiction writer and former occult investigator,  gets a call from his first boyfriend’s sister saying that Gary is deathly ill. When Davin visits out of sympathy for Sarah he discovers that not all is what it seems. A virulent Wrong Magic has infected Gary and it’s contagious. Davin gathers his Chemist husband, the newly minted Descendant, Kaila, and the not JUST a vampire Jeb, along with Davin’s own personal guardian demon to unravel the mystery. Things get ever more complicated with mysterious Hunter Rex, Angels, demons, and Rex’s erstwhile sorcerer adviser Ambrose getting involved. By the end there are more questions than answers and long road to travel before Davin can finally let go of his terrible past.

     Dirty Deeds(DD): Magical Realism. Lady Luck gifted Clay with Power, now he’s fallen out of favor. Can a Demon with a moral compass guide him back into the limelight or will Clay be forced to watch as tragedy dogs his every step. When a goddess tells you to use your probability power for the good of mankind, taking a trip to Vegas is probably the last thing you should do. Clay learns that the hard way when he ignores his duties and a favorite of the Lady dies in a tragic accident. Lady Luck is no mans fool and she curses Clay to a terrible fate. With his powers severely effected he must still try to help, try being the operative word. After Clay is connected to a series of terrible deaths the FBI steps in. The lead detective is more than she seems and when she figures out clay’s secret she has to make a choice, her career or the man she’s starting to fall in love with. Considering her kind aren’t supposed to be able to fall in love it’s not that hard a choice. But Clay doesn’t seem to feel the same, until he does, and the curse is completed, leaving Clay in a sorry state. Kaezon won’t give up easily though and fights to make sure Clay comes back, but Clay isn’t so sure that’s a good idea. (some inspiration for this came from American Gods by Neil Gaiman)

     Nowhere Places(NP): Sci-fi/ Fantasy, Magical Realism. The history of Earth is secretly intertwined with an alien war thousands of years in the making, and so is it’s fate. To save his people the King of the Fay brought them to earth 15,000 years ago, but something went wrong. From a base on the moon the king directs a war in The Nowhere Places, overlaps in this dimension and another barren dimension. The Fay and the Phaedron have been at war for fifteen centuries and the people have had enough. Two of the Fay princes hatch separate rebellions while a Phaedron warrior, having crashed his vessel near a human school, discovers that humans aren’t the stupid cattle he’d always been told they were. Things take a dramatic turn when an archaeologist finds a massive structure several hundred feet below the exactly center of the Sahara desert and learns that this war, which threatens to take the earth out any time now, was never meant to happen because the Fay king… has been in suspended animation in the Cityship for 15 thousand years. This is one of the least fleshed out stories I currently have. Several scenes popped in my head that inspired the story and they almost all look like anime/mange scenes, the one where the archaeologist discovers the king reminds me of the scene where Integra discovers Alucard in Van Hellsing for instance.

     Prince of Darkness(PoD): Superhero, Magical Realism. Jamie was five when she first met the mysterious white haired boy. He didn’t have a name but Jamie could tell he was smart and creative so she called him Donny after her favorite ninja turtle. When she’s 32  her best friend Donny and his ‘boys’ Raziel and Gadreel are back after a ten year absence. Things are going great for the up and coming journalist and then she hits the big time, the very first real life superhero! Henry, her detective little brother, isn’t so thrilled and Donny and the boys seem strangely reluctant to talk about The Prince of Darkness. Soon things start getting even stranger when three people with white hair begin to try to capture The Prince. Tensions run high and weird people keep popping up at Donny’s lounge club. As Jamie searches for answers Donny searches for a connection. Lost and isolated from his ‘true’ family he begins to forge a new one through his Club, The Nine Circles. But the sort of people that hang out in Hell bring their own kinds of trouble. As Donny’s checkered past starts to come to light, the mysterious man finds that his heart wants more than it can have. Starting a relationship with his sister’s best friend was never Henry’s plan, especially since he knows they both love each other, but when Jamie rejects Donny’s advances what’s a guy supposed to do? Comforting his friend leads to something more but the more that Henry gets to know Donny the more concerned his is that he’s sleeping with the ‘enemy.’             PoD: Raising Cain: The story of Cain. Yes, that Cain. After an accident leads to a terrible curse Cain walks the earth searching for meaning. When he learns of ‘Lucifer’s’ fall and those that walk the earth destroying in his name, Cain finds his purpose, because he knows something is wrong. Hêlêl was the kindest of all angels and he would never have turned on the others. But the road to Hell is paved with good intentions and Cain finds that much of the time his attempts to help only cause more problems. After thousands of years traveling the world Cain encounters a spirited young man who calls him Red and falls in love, then one day, he vanishes. It’s the beginning of the end for Cain’s optimism and he spirals into a place so dark he thinks even his long lost friend would forsake him, but he can’t manage to care. Then Cyd and Nancy come along and drag the grouchy old man out of the depths of his despair. And just in time to find that maybe some friends aren’t as lost as previously thought.          PoD: Cyd's Story. Cyd grew up in the sixties. His little hometown was the picture of middle America. On the outside at least. In truth the town is made up of Hunter’s and their families. People who have dedicated their lives to taking out every last Tecum on earth. Unfortunately for Cyd, his mother had tried to get out of the lifestyle and ended up returning home a single mother. Most of the town whispered that she had fallen in with a ‘bad crowd’ and believed Cyd was a Tecum half breed. Only respect for his mother’s family kept them from doing anything, until it didn’t anymore. After ‘The Incident’ Cyd withdrew ever further from those around him and when his mother died when he was 17 he fled the town and never looked back, until Red and Nancy insist on following a Tecum on the run from Red’s brand of justice straight back to the town.                                       PoD: Saints and Sinners: The story of Casper and friends. Casper has never been one to run from his problems so when his team goes missing on a mission he doesn’t hesitate to comply with their captor’s demand. Of course it helps that he knows the guy. Really really well. After liberating his friends from his long time antagonist Ray, Cas find that, this time, he can’t seem to get rid of the man. That’s OK though, because he’s ready to mend the rift between them. Shadow isn’t happy about sharing his closest friend but when a supernatural threat looms they are happy to have an angel on their side. (this is like leverage if it was set in a world were the supernatural exists)                                                       PoD: Charlemagne Song: The story of Charlemagne. When she was in high school, Elle went by Elliot, and had a best friend named Jessica. Back then Elle was head over heels for the tiny blond girl but that was years ago. After a chance encounter with the famous musician Charlemagne Song leaves Elle single and depressed she discoverers that Jess might still be her best friend even though they haven’t talked in years. Suddenly Elle finds herself in a world of pure imagination as she navigates life with one of the most famous musicians of the day, who just happens to be half angel.                                                               PoD: R.E.D.: Story about a band, few details but some characters and lots of song titles and album titles, two of the band members are part of Donny’s ‘family’

     Sad Story(SS): Lucifer’s punishment wasn’t just banishment and when Michael finds out, all Hell breaks loose. Michael wants to let his brother live out his last days on earth instead of locked in a dark cage so he kidnaps him and with lawyer-angel Raziel and his twin brother Gadreel, find a place to hide the erstwhile devil. But Michael’s absence from heaven does not go unnoticed and while the other angels search for him strange murders have been happening in the city. The few witnesses give a description that strangely matches Michael. Can he prove he didn’t do it, or will he be parted from Lucifer before the Brightest of god’s angels fades away completely. (some cross over potential, very sad but with a happy ending cause I like that)

     Sonnets(Son): Inspired by ‘The Good Place.’ Lucifer misses heaven so he tries to recreate it, but to recreate perfection you have to recreate imperfection. (minimal work, the newest of things that have popped into my head)

     Twilight on the Moon(TotM): A Space Epic. Originally conceived of as a graphic novel, this story follows the exploits of the first human intergalactic journey. Humans reach a point in their development where they attract attention from the Galactic Coalition, a group comprised of advanced races from throughout the universe. These races band together to form a peace keeping force and have strict rules and regulations that they expect all members to adhere to, and if a race refuses to follow the guidelines then they are banned from involvement in the larger community of space faring civilizations. Of course, humans, being humans, don’t much care for the Coalition’s ultimatum. A stealth ship arrives on earth and informs the governing bodies that the Coalition isn’t the only group out there and that humanity can find out how other races live by constructing a ship, from plans provided by the individual in the stealth ship, that can travel to all non member systems and pick up ambassadors to have a conference on what humanity should do. The ship they construct is christened La Luna as it was made on a moon base. The captain of the ship is a short delicate looking man by the name of Rane Laforge. He hand picks a complement of characters for the mission that include his ex-girlfriend, Dr. Sandra Fisk as his CMO, Lt. Cmdr. Lars Tavic, Security Chief Anton Talon, Specialist Translator Rendell Hartford, and many others. They pick up several ambassadors including the accidentally acquired Ares LacTon of the La Mer Ray, who falls in love with Lars. It quickly becomes clear that the mission is going to be stranger than expected when we discover that very few of the people on board are actually human! (a sort of comedy of errors in space with the occasional serious moment, the world this is set in is my most elaborate and most complete but the story itself has no coherence yet. There is significant possibility that it will cross over with BTS as two-three of the characters from that likely served aboard La Luna at some point.)

     Unnamed Prince and Regent Story(PR): Fantasy. A princess gets kidnapped but it’s not what you think! She escapes her captors and flees on foot. She stumbles across a caravan and is taken under the wing of their guard who helps her disguise herself as a man. On the trip back to her home she realizes that she’s never been happier and that she is actually a he and he has fallen in love with the guard who seems to feel the same. After getting back to his home however, his love mysteriously vanishes. The now Prince throws the kingdom into chaos and becomes despondent. Spiraling into a drunken haze until a visiting royal entourage brings an unexpected guest and a wild revelation.(another where I have a fairly thought out world but only a sketch of the plot)

FanFiction

     Sherlock Fan Fiction(Sher): A Ghost From the Past. Someone from Sherlock's past shows up and John finds out how little he truly knows of his best friend. Basically Sherlock’s best friend from childhood shows up and it turns out that she was more than a friend and part of the reason Mycroft and Sherlock don’t get along is that Mycroft had asked her to marry him and she had said yes and Sherlock believed(for actual reasons) that Mycroft purposely stole her from him. That’s only the first big revaluation about Sherlock.

     Strange Sounds Supernatural Fan Fiction(SSFF): A Ghost From the Future. The boys are transported to the future where the supernatural is no longer hidden and some major event created a post apocalyptic fallout, but this time it was humans who did it. The result is that massive creatures are roaming the planet destroying any pockets of civilization they can find. Thanks to a few not so dead and reformed archangels there is a part of the US that’s a ‘safe’ zone. When Past Sam and Dean show up around the time that safe zone begins to come under attack both versions of the boys and the future archangels join forces with Occultist John Constantine, Alien Technology Specialist Mickey Smith and his wife Dr. Martha Smith, and the secret organization known as Torchwood as they travel the world looking for clues to put this new threat to rest at last. Features several original characters and many crossover characters from similar worlds with cameo appearances by characters like Crowley and Aziraphale from Good Omens. (Only about Half plotted but the most written of any FanFiction I have so far.)

     Supernatural/Batman Beyond Fusion(SPN/BB): This plot bunny may not make it, basically just replacing the cast of Batman Beyond with the cast of Supernatural but tweaking the plot for supernatural stuff.

     Ultimate CrossOver Fic(C/O): This fic started out in my head with a few comic panels showing Jack Harness falling comet style out of the sky over the impala. The boys investigate and find a very naked Jack in the crater. He of course starts flirting. At the same time that that is happening, the TARDIS bumps into the hull of the USS Enterprise, manifests on a landing deck, and then they both get sucked into some kind of time distortion. Meanwhile, Gabriel, trapped in a spell that Metatron set up to siphon his power to keep the wards on heaven set, uses the last of his strength to send a dream message to Sam. This story would include Supernatural, Doctor Who, Torchwood, Sherlock, Harry Potter, Good Omens, Marvel, Pushing Daises, and basically anything else I can find a way to add and every conceivable mlm ship. (I can’t write sex that involves women because of dysphoria but feel free to believe those ships happen too)

[bookmawkish]

Prompt fill: Unexpected Hero, part 2

Part 1 here

@worldoftherandom I don’t know if you even remember sending me this one but I got inspired to continue so here it is

It’s fortunately past closing at the Dino Bite when Riley decides to share his confusing day with everyone else and turns up to bang at the door with one arm around Heckyl at his side. Tyler answers, a broom still in hand. He looks startled as he unlocks and opens the doors.

“Before you say anything,” Riley says, pushing past and dragging Heckyl in with him, “the answer is, I don’t know. But he just stopped me from getting beaten up by Snide and a whole bunch of his friends, and he’s hurt, and I couldn’t just leave him out there.”

“Wait, Snide was there? And Heckyl? They’re separate?”

“Yeah. Very much separate. And really, really mad at each other. Can I just -”

Riley gestures to the booth seats, and at Tyler’s nod, he slides Heckyl onto one of them. The alien is barely conscious and Riley carefully tilts him forward so he’s leaning his head on his arms on the table. Riley lowers his voice. “Look, he fought Snide off, as well as a bunch of Vivix, and a couple of outlaws. And I’m grateful to him, but I don’t understand why he would do that.”

“I’m guessing being separate from Snide has a lot to do with it. Maybe we’ve had it wrong all this time. Maybe Snide’s had control over Heckyl all along. He’s just never been able to break free and fight back before.”

Heckyl groans, quietly, and slumps further forward onto the table. On closer inspection, he’s now fully unconscious and isn’t roused when Riley speaks to him, says his name, even shakes him.

“Now what,” Riley murmurs, genuinely upset by this turn of events. Heckyl is certainly no friend of his, but he feels weirdly responsible for the injured man. Tyler looks similarly disquieted, and the small trickle of blood on Heckyl’s face that is just starting to drip onto the table is bothering him more than he’d care to admit.

“I think we should call Ms Morgan,” he says.

 “His tattoo is gone.”

Kendall, all business, is checking Heckyl over. He’s still out cold. She is gentle handling him: lifting his head from the table, wiping away the blood from his nose and mouth with a napkin. She turns his head to the side to expose his neck to Tyler and Riley. “See? That backs up what you saw. Snide has been detached. We’ve only got Heckyl here. By himself.” After a pause and a slight grimace of embarrassment, she quickly slips her hand down across Heckyl’s vest, presses at his chest, and draws back almost as fast when he jolts and cries out in pain, his eyes snapping open.

“Sorry!” Kendall whispers, automatically, because the look on Heckyl’s face is awful, and he scrambles backwards in the booth, away from them all. “Heckyl. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I just - I had to check. I think a couple of your ribs are broken. They’re bruised at least.”

“What - what am I doing here?”

There’s a very odd moment for the assembled Rangers, because Heckyl looks bewildered and frightened, as if he’s seriously considering bolting from the café: but then he seems to gather his bravado and his mouth curls in a much more familiar sneer. “If you’re going to kill me, get on with it. This is just boring me,” he snarls, his eyes darting from one to the other of them, determined not to back down. The Rangers exchange glances.

“I don’t know what it’s like where you were raised,” says Riley, “but where I’m from we don’t just kill the people who’ve saved our lives. Thanks for that, by the way. I’d love to know why you did it.”

“Well, much though this has been lovely,” Heckyl says, keeping the sharp, sarcastic tone in his voice, “I really have to be going. Right now.” And he gets up. Or at least he tries - shoving back from the table, but almost as soon as he moves he gasps, unable to mask the instinctive reaction. His hand comes up to curl protectively around his ribs and he stumbles.

“Yeah, good luck with that,” says Tyler, not without sympathy. “Sit down. We’re not going to hurt you. We just want to know what happened.”

“I’m gonna get you some Advil,” Riley says, and is indeed going to do so when Kendall says: “No, don’t -”

She glances apologetically at Heckyl. “It’s a painkiller,” she says. “But I’d rather you don’t take any. I don’t want to poison you when you’re not…I mean…”

“I’m not human,” Heckyl says, wearily, sinking back into the chair. “You can say it. I do know, you know.”

“I’m sorry,” Kendall says, again. He shrugs.

“Why? It’s not your fault.” He sees the still-stricken look on her face and rolls his eyes in irritable defeat. “If it makes you feel any better, I heal fast. I‘ll be out of your hair very soon, pretty lady, don‘t you worry.”

Riley brings him a Coke instead (because of course that‘s far less potentially poisonous to aliens). Heckyl drinks it all, in one long series of gulps, and doesn’t die, so Riley gets him another one. It seems to relax him a little: he huddles over the table, but he doesn’t have that tenseness in his posture, that preparation to flee that was there before.

“So,” Riley says, when Heckyl is halfway down his second Coke, “you wanna tell us how you and your worse half got broken up?”

“Arcanon,” says Heckyl, and the venom in his voice is unmistakable. “Split us apart with the split emitters. Wrench helped him. I suppose I should be grateful.”

“Grateful?” queries Kendall, looking at him sharply.

“You think I liked sharing a body with that -”

Heckyl abruptly looks down at the table and seems to make an effort to get himself under control, flexing his fingers. Little motes of white-blue light curl between them.

“It wasn’t my choice,” he says, and because he’s busy staring at the tabletop he doesn’t see the utterly horrified expressions the three Rangers are wearing. Because this changes everything for them. The villain they’d been fighting had been himself under duress.

It hadn’t been his choice.

“Arcanon won’t let me live,” Heckyl adds, after a moment’s thought. “I am as much his enemy now as you. And so -”

He heaves himself up again, and this time makes it all the way, although he’s white with pain by the time he’s fully standing.

“ - as I said. I’m leaving.” He gives them a truly dreadful, shaky grin. Lots of teeth. Absolutely no humour. “Thank you, Rangers, for the entertainment. You’ve been. Well. Just wonderful.”

Because of their surprise, he actually makes it halfway to the door before a hand falls on his arm and grips, hard. Riley glares at him.

“You’re leaving to protect us,” he says, and ignores Heckyl’s eye-rolling, lip-curling denial. “I know you are. But I won’t let you. You didn’t ask for this. You’re just as much of a victim as I was when Snide attacked me tonight.”

“Oh please,” Heckyl scoffs, shaking Riley‘s grip loose, “you’re dreaming. Maybe you think you can ‘save me’. “ He inserts the air quotes seamlessly. “I’m not your responsibility. I can look after myself. I’m a grown-up. In fact, I‘m so grown-up compared to all of you that -”

“But you‘re hurt,” interrupts Kendall, quietly. “If you go after him now he’ll kill you. But if we go after him together -”

“I don’t need or want your help,” Heckyl spits, immediately, but it’s too late - Tyler and Kendall alike have seen the flicker of fear and uncertainty in his eyes.

“No,” says Tyler, and he glances at Kendall, who nods. “I guess you don’t. But you’re going to get it anyway. And we’re going to start by getting you healed up. Come on. You can’t rest properly here.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you,” Heckyl hisses, sinks into a combat stance, and his hands spark with electricity. Immediately, Riley spins on one foot, kicks Heckyl accurately in the back of the knees, before leaping back to avoid being fried. Except that Heckyl is too busy sprawling on the floor to attack. He’s shaky and weak, and the power pooling in his palms fades as he tries to stop himself from collapsing completely. Knelt on the ground, furious and helpless, he looks up to see Riley bending to his side, his face showing nothing but compassion.

“Sorry,” Riley says. “but you made me do that. Please, Heckyl. I want to help you. Just let me. You can shout at me while I do it if it‘ll make you feel better, I don‘t care. Just - please.”

And Heckyl, shuddering and scowling on the floor, his hand clutched to his injured chest, hangs his head in defeat.

He protests all the way to Tyler’s house, but it’s obvious the fight has gone out of him now and it’s just words. Tyler puts down a camp bed in the den, and Heckyl allows himself to be installed in it without more than a token protest. He’s obviously exhausted and while he grumbles vindictively at Tyler when he’s brought a blanket (“I’m not a child. I’ll kill you in your sleep.”) he crashes out very fast and is asleep in an untidy sprawl within minutes of pulling the blanket over himself. True to his word, Kendall notes that the bruises on his face are visibly fading as he sleeps. Fast healing, indeed.

“Phew,” Riley says. “He’s hard work.”

“He doesn’t know how to be nice,” Kendall says, quite accurately. “He’s had no practice. I think he’s actually doing quite well, considering.”

“I feel bad,” Tyler says, unexpectedly. When the others look to him, he adds: “Look, I know we didn’t know. But he was innocent. All this time. Snide was holding him prisoner.”

“He’s still hard work,” says Riley, grinning. “He’s even more sarcastic than my brother.”

“We can’t change how we treated him in the past,” Kendall says. “But we can change now. And we can finish Snide for good, if he’ll help us.”

“Sure,” says Tyler, unconvinced, his gaze darting down to Heckyl again. Heckyl is snoring, his head lolled back on the bed. “I’m sure he’ll be a great help.”

[snickerl]

The Return

XF Fanfiction

Now that season 11 is on hiatus, I hope the fandom is ready for a (sorry!) loooong background story about an almost unknown family member.

tagging @today-in-fic

He looks out the window and sees her sitting outside on the porch alone, deep in thought, her eyes fixated on something in the distance. She looks so lost and despite the still existing chasm between them, he feels the strong urge to console her. She said goodbye to her mother today, scattered her ashes to be reunited with her father's just as the last will stated, and he's utterly surprised about how deep the impact of all of this is on his own soul.

Charles Scully has been distant from his family for he doesn't know how long. Very long. The last time he had personal contact was when they were mourning another family member, his sister Melissa. She had been shot by a cold-blooded killer and the news had toppled the house of cards he'd been constructing so conscientiously around his family history and his reasons for cutting the ties. He had booked the next available flight out to become one of the mourners. Everyone, including him, was too shocked by how a young woman's flame of life had expired so very suddenly and randomly that nobody, including him, questioned his being there. And now he's in this house once again because of a funeral.

He'd spoken to his mother on the phone seconds before she drew her terminal breath. Bill had called him, informed him that she was in the hospital suffering from a heart attack and that she had asked for him before she had slipped into a coma. He had given him the number to Dana's cell phone and more or less commanded him to give her a call as if Charlie was one of his plebes from the Academy. It was a short, awkward, and one-sided conversation, reminding Charlie of the ones he used to have with his father before he turned his back to his family.

Being on the phone with Dana was different. She sounded so relieved when she realized it was him. Charlie could hear in her voice how desperate she was, how she was overwhelmed by the fear for her mother. She begged him to talk to her, didn’t order him like Bill. When her voice broke in the end, it touched a heartstring he already believed to be numb.

He can't remember what he said to his mother, something about why all of a sudden he was willing to reconnect probably, but he remembers the fuzz he overheard when his voice had obviously really caused her to open her eyes. He heard Dana's sharp intake of breath, he heard a man's voice asking his mother if she knew her name and where she was, he heard his mother say something but couldn't make anything of it. Then he heard Dana calling out to her in panic, the faint sound of the heart monitor indicating a flatline followed by his sister's heartbreaking sobs. Eventually, someone picked up the phone and talked to him. The words he heard only confirmed what he'd already suspected, feared even.

"Hello, Charles, this is Fox Mulder. We haven't met, I'm, uh...I'm a friend of Dana's." "I know who you are, Mr. Mulder." "Oh, okay, well...I'm very sorry but I have to tell you that your mother just passed away. My deepest condolences."

Charlie didn’t reply, he just killed the call without even saying goodbye, and when Dana called a few days later to inform him about the funeral arrangements, he didn’t want to attend at first. He talked himself into believing that he had paid his dues as a son by fulfilling his mother's last wish and that this was it for him, that he was through with his family for good now that both his parents were dead. Three sleepless nights and an earnest conversation with his better half later, he booked a flight to Washington.

And now he's here, in his mother's house, shaking hands with people he's been alienated from for a long time. The only person he feels slightly connected to is his sister who hugged him fiercely instead of clumsily holding out a hand like his brother. She thanked him for having talked to their mother, for having brought her back if even only for a split-second.

Dana's forlornness and grief don't leave Charlie cold, and so he opens the back door and joins her on the bench outside. He gets her attention by leaning to the side and nudging her shoulder. "You and Mulder are back together?" he asks to start the conversation.

"What makes you think we are?" Dana tosses over her shoulder without looking at him.

"He was at the hospital with you when mom died and today he's here, observing your every move like a bodyguard. He looks like he wants to wrap you in cotton wool. I'm surprised, that's all. The last thing I heard was that you'd left him."

His sister turns her head now and looks at him. "Heard from whom? I was under the impression you didn’t care to know anything about us."

"And yet, people have been telling me things."

"People?"

"Old high school friends. Navy acquaintances. Aunt Roberta calls once in while. You remember her? She's our father's half-sister's out-of-wedlock daughter. We met her once at a Scully family reunion out in Portland when we were kids. She was never really accepted as a member of the Scully clan but she has her sources when it comes to what happens in this family."

"Yes, I think I remember her. And she's telling you things about us? What things?"

"For example that Dana and her FBI agent with the funny name broke up."

"I have an FBI agent with a funny name?"

"At least Aunt Roberta thought so." Charlie chuckles when he thinks back to the more than peculiar conversation. He tries to imitate her Southern accent and her slight sigmatism which had amused them already when they were kids. "Charles, honey, have you heard about Dana and this FBI agent of hers? The one with that funny name I can't remember. It was some native flurry four-footed species with a bushy tail and pointed ears." His assumed voice makes Dana laugh and the unexpected joy he managed to bring to her urges him to continue. "She went through the whole list: lynx, coyote, raccoon...jackalope."

On the last one, her head turns slowly toward him and his ever-suspicious sister only needs to cock an eyebrow to make Charlie understand that she is questioning his story.

"Okay, I'm kidding on the jackalope, but I swear she mentioned the other three!"

"I wouldn't have thought, I bet if I browsed through the cabinet long enough I'd find an X-File involving someone named Jackalope," she retorts and her deadpan expression makes Charlie chuckle now.

The amusing twist their conversation has taken helps Charlie cover what he doesn't want to tell his sister about his telephone call with Aunt Roberta. For example, how troubled he was by the news of her failed marriage, partnership, romance, or whatever it was. The family had been discussing the state of her relationship to this man for years. Aunt Roberta once reported a 'friend of a friend' who was with the IRS had seen them file their income tax as a married couple. Those rumors coming from a questionable source were never confirmed and it didn't matter anyway if they were married or not, when a relationship fails it hurts, that much Charlie knew from experience. So when Aunt Roberta told him Dana and her FBI agent had separated, he felt an instant pit in his stomach. He later identified this as a mix of compassion and sympathy. He was sorry for his sister that she suffered from another setback in her life. He also doesn't want to tell Dana how conflicted he was when Aunt Roberta offered her new address, also obtained through rather murky means. He had declined and regretted it later on, because at that moment he had felt that one day, maybe, he would want to reach out for her.

Charlie doesn't fail to see that Dana isn't particularly generous with information about her relationship to Mulder, a trait which isn't new to him. When they were kids, she already hated being interrogated by her family about her teen romances, especially by her mistrustful father and concerned mother, but also by her siblings who, of course, teased her more than they really wanted to know what was going on in her heart.

Charlie wants to assert her now that they don't have to talk about Mulder if she doesn't want to, but then she picks up his initial question on her own accord and clarifies, "we didn't break up, at least not with finality. I moved out of our house about a year ago, but it was meant to be only a temporary separation. Mulder needed space to....ugh, well, it's too complicated to explain. We're both back at the FBI and have gotten closer again working alongside each other. Besides, he's still my best friend. I don't know how I would be able to survive all this without him."

"You call him by his last name too."

"I do."

He's heard the man his entire family has been gossiping about for years call his sister 'Scully' today a few times and at first, it bothered him a bit. Calling someone by their last name usually was a put-down, a means to create a distance. But the way he says it doesn't sound rude by any means, rather gentle, more like a term of endearment. And now he's just heard Dana call this man 'Mulder' for the first time as she hasn't spoken much during the service, and it also sounds so affectionate.

"A very special relationship you have there."

"Yeah," Dana huffs, "as if you knew anything about it."

"For someone to follow a convicted murderer underground, I'd say the relationship has to be very special. He's your son's father, I assume."

Her pinched mouth clearly indicates he's reached the limit now of what she's willing to share of her love life, and she doesn't hesitate to verbalize it either. "I don't want to talk about it. Besides, it's none of your business."

"Sure. Sorry. I didn't mean to intrude. It's just good to know that you have someone who looks after you."

Dana's head whirls around to look at him so fast, he fears it might give her a whiplash. Her steel blue eyes pierce through him and an ice-cold draft wafts off of her. It gives Charlie an idea that what she's going to say won't be very pleasant for him to hear and the sharp undertone she spits the words out with strengthens the impression.

"Is it, Charlie? You worry about me all of a sudden? I haven't heard from you or seen you in ages. You didn’t care if someone looked after me after my abduction, when I had barely survived a gunshot wound to the abdomen, when I buried Mulder, or when I had my baby, your nephew. You didn't even care when I was dying of cancer."

There's going to be no warming up, he realizes with a start. No getting reacquainted first after so many years of separation, no holding back, no fence time. She throws the accusations right at him and every word feels like a slap across his face.

"I cared," he replies flatly, a bit shocked by the list of terrible things that happened to her. He's heard about all of them. Sometimes only years later, but he knows that she's been at death's door too many times in the line of duty, he knows he once had a nephew called William, and he's heard a lot about one Fox Mulder playing a decisive role in almost everything. He also was in the loop when she was ill with terminal brain cancer. His mother had told him, had left a message on his answering machine pleading with him to visit his sister at the hospital. It was the time she still tried to bring the lost sheep back to the herd. It was only after the umpteenth message he'd left unanswered that she gave up and left him alone. Probably to save herself from more hurting. Even a mother can only take so much rejection.

"Why didn’t you come to the hospital? I was waiting for you, Charlie! Day after day after day, I told myself that tomorrow you'd show up with a good explanation why you hadn't been able to make it earlier, until one day I realized you deliberately stayed away. I can't say it didn't make me sad."

"It would've been a sorrowful cause for a family reunion."

It's the only explanation he can think of this quickly, fully aware that it's a lame excuse. It's a pretext he tries to hide the real motives behind. It's not going to help him out of the confrontation lurking right in front of him, he figures. He sees the determination in his sister's eyes to get to the bottom of the matter and the bundle of questions she's been waiting so many years to ask him.

"I was dying, Charlie. It was your last chance to ever see me alive. Didn't this have any effect on you?"

"You didn't die."

Another useless remark. The fact that she didn't die doesn't lessen his wrongdoing in the slightest.

"No, I didn't, but nobody was able to foresee that at the time. My body was weeks away from shutting down, maybe only days."

He has nothing to say to this. Not even some senseless, placatory words. He's getting more and more uncomfortable. His pulse rate must have risen significantly, the lump in his throat is growing, and the air around him feels sticky. Beads of sweat start forming on his forehead, although the temperature is moderate and a light breeze is blowing in his face.

"Don't you have anything to say? Any explanation, any excuse?"

"There is no excuse," he admits meekly to his sister and actually the first time to himself, he realizes. Deep down at the bottom of his heart, he knew he was making a terrible, irrevocable mistake, but he never had the guts to concede this fact to himself.

"You're damn right there isn't! I don't get it, Charlie, your surviving sister being at death's door wouldn't bring you to put aside the family dispute for just once? Huh? Didn't it matter just a tiny little bit that I was diagnosed with a terminal illness?"

He sees the hurt in her eyes, the wound he caused that has never healed completely and still oozes.

How is he to make her understand that both Ahab's and Melissa's sudden deaths had paralyzed him? He felt strong and invincible having dissociated himself officially from his family, a family whose paternal structures of command and obey had suffocated him. But when his father had died unexpectedly from a heart attack, he felt deprived of the possibility to ever set things right. The family he had left was never going to be the same with its head being gone, the person Charlie had rubbed against the most. There seemed to be no way back to where he once had been. There had been no doubt that Bill would take over, moving upwards in the chain of command from being someone receiving orders to giving them. The friction that had existed between his older brother and himself would increase tenfold with their father gone, of that Charlie had been sure. And things got even more complicated for him when with Melissa another pillar of the family structure was eliminated without a warning. His place in the remaining mesh of relations was evermore undefined and Charles Nevin Scully, youngest branch of the pedigree, departed more and more from his family, even from the ones he never had a reason to be at odds with other than that they belonged to that particular family: his mother and living sister.

Charlie's sinister flashbacks leave him silent which leads Dana to voice her very own interpretation. Misinterpretation, that is. What else?

"You were of the same opinion as our older brother, weren't you? That it was all my fault. That only I was to blame for everything that happened to me because it had been my choice to join the FBI. A choice which killed our sister."

"Bill said that to you?"

"Yes."

"When you were in the hospital?"

"Yes."

"What an asshole!"

Dana narrows her eyes and furrows her brows. "That wasn't what you thought of me?" she asks, surprise evident in her voice.

"No. Never."

"Then I understand even less why you completely ignored my being ill. If a hospital bedside visit was too much to ask for, why didn't you call or at least write a few lines? Something. Anything. I was longing for a sign that you cared about me, Charlie."

He would like to tell her that he cared. He cared so much that he called the hospital every day to ask how she was doing. He had been able to convince a nurse that he was a family member authorized to get next of kin information. Her name was Estelle, and she reported to him every up and down of the course of his sister's illness. How she battled her way through the aggressive treatment, how the hopes everyone had pinned on chemo and radiation were disappointed, how she became a little less every day. He knew of the mysterious chip Dana's FBI partner had come up with even before his mother and brother heard about it. The last time he spoke with Estelle was when she called him the day the cancer had gone into remission to tell him about his sister's miracle cure. He cried when he put the receiver back into the cradle. A few days later, Dana was discharged and Estelle received a huge bouquet of flowers.

Why he can't tell his sister this, Charlie doesn't know. Instead, he gives her some other reason, one that is equally true though. "What good would it have done to rekindle, Dana? Tell me. Why get close to someone you're going to lose again?"

Her eyes wide and gasping for breath like a fish out of water, her indignant reply isn't long in coming. "Pardon, I'm not sure I got this right. Are you saying it wasn't any use? That it wasn't worth the effort because I would be gone soon after anyhow?"

Tears flood her incredulous eyes and Charlie hates how he is making things worse instead of better.

"No, that's not exactly what I meant."

"Then what did you mean, Charlie? I don't understand a word you're saying. I never really understood why we were estranged in the first place."

"We," he fidgets with his hand between them, "were never estranged, Danes."

"No? Then how come you didn't get on a plane and pay me a sick visit as long as you still could?"

Maybe it's time to finally be honest, his mind supplies, to finally explain his state of mind at the time. If it only wasn't so damn difficult to pour his heart out to someone he had taught himself to cut out of his life. But she is his sister, and back in the days as kids, they were like two peas in a pod. The two youngest Scullys were inseparable and always attached to one another. He owes her an explanation, she deserves to understand why his behavior as an adult differed so much from when he was a child.

He musters all his courage and clears his throat, then starts to explain, his powerless voice revealing how hard it is for him to speak the words. "I had already lost one sister, I wasn't ready to lose another. It had been hard for me not to be able to say goodbye to Melissa, but to watch you die, Dana, simply seemed impossible for me to handle. I thought that if I pretended that the family drama didn’t have anything to do with me, it would be easier for me to cope with the inevitable, which would be the...the, uhm..."

"My death," Dana supplies unmoved.

"The loss of my second sister."

It doesn't take her long to understand the essence of his profession. "So you're saying you ignored my medical condition to protect you from the pain my passing would eventually inflict on you."

"I know that was selfish of me."

"It was. Very selfish. Incredibly selfish." She hesitates a moment until she goes on, probably because it takes her a moment to grasp the whole concept, something that took him years to accept, and he sees it coming, she won't spare him his shortcoming. "All you saw was your loss and how you would have to deal with it. The situation I had to fight with at that very moment didn't even exist in your imagination. Do you want to know what I had to deal with, Charlie?" She doesn't wait for him to answer. "There was no hope for a cure but I underwent treatment anyway just to buy myself a bit of time. Chemotherapy made me vomit my insides out, radiation gave me gum sores and made it difficult for me to swallow. I suffered from constant fatigue and lost so much weight they gave me nutritional IVs so I wouldn't die from malnutrition. I was terrified, Charlie, I didn't want to die. I was too young to die, and I didn't deserve to die. I was so scared. I could've used you to help me through this, little brother."

Scanning his face, her eyes tell him how hard her struggle was, how it had taken every bit of strength she had within her tiny body. Charlie feels the same horror as all those years back when Estelle gave him the minutae medical reports of her ordeal, and he's employing the same whitewashing technique to justify his failure as a brother, only it was much easier back then to convince himself that he wasn't doing anything wrong than it is today.

"You had people taking care of you much better than I would've been able to. You had mom and Bill. Your partner."

He had heard from Estelle that there was an FBI agent who moved heaven and hell to be allowed to sit at his sister's bedside outside visiting hours, that he spent the nights either holding Dana's hand or in her bed spooning against her. Estelle had never witnessed so much compassion from a patient's work colleague before. Charlie didn’t have to be a psychic to be able to conclude that this man had to be the infamous Fox Mulder, of whom his mother had spoken so dearly during Dana's abduction, but his brother had called a joke figure unworthy of being in law enforcement.

"Mom's sad face only reminded me of how much fear and worry I had caused her since the day I joined the FBI. She tried to hide her tears from me, but there were days her eyes were so red and puffy, I knew she'd been crying until she stepped into my room. I was grateful to her for her love and care but sometimes the way she clung to me made it difficult. Mulder also tried to put on a show for me and acted as if there was nothing to worry about, but I knew him too well not to see the underlying fear. I noticed how he tried to keep a calm face as long as he was in my room but deep inside struggled with the idea of going on without me. I wanted a pledge from him that he would continue our work but he refused to even talk about it. He tried to keep from me that he was searching for a cure, breaking every FBI rule there was, but I looked right through him. He reminded me of a duck that floated serenely on the water but paddled frantically underneath. There were days I worried more about him than about myself. And Bill, well...you know him, he's not really good at displaying his soft, compassionate side, although he has one. When he said he wanted to come to terms with me, he just did not go so far as to add 'as long as you're still here'. He's never forgiven me my decision to join the Bureau. He's been more unforgiving in this than dad ever was. Mom told me that Ahab had eventually accepted my choice before he died."

Charlie isn't so sure about it. Their father could be very stubborn and unrelenting. He himself had been at the receiving end of the paternal pressure, they all had. Their mother had always been the balancing force and of course, she wanted Dana to believe that her beloved father had finally made his peace with her career choice. That Bill had taken over Ahab's role as her stern critic also fit into the mold of how he pictured the family dynamics from the distance he had been keeping so eagerly.

"I don't understand it, Charlie, we'd always been so close. I loved how you lived for the moment, how you looked at your life so differently from how I did. You were always so carefree and confident. I could've used your optimistic attitude to cheer me up, your inappropriate jokes to lift my spirits, your positive thinking to assure me that everything was going to be fine. I badly needed someone to distract me, to take me away from all these people with their worried faces and sinister forebodings."

He doubts he could've been this someone for her, given the worry and sinister forebodings he was hatching inside himself at the time, but he would never admit it. He's already told her so much more than he ever thought he would. There was something else though he needs her to understand.

"Danes, I may have been a selfish bastard...correction, I was a selfish bastard...but there's one thing you have to believe. There never was a time I did not care about you. You've always been my favorite sibling. I mean, Bill and I never had a lot in common. Being so much older than me, he always thought he could boss me around when dad was away. Melissa was fun and easy-going but too occupied with herself to pay a lot of attention to her baby brother. You, Dana, you were the only one who looked after me. Do you remember how you once intimidated some boys who bullied me in school?"

Dana shakes her head in disbelief as if his well-meant words don't make any sense to her, probably because they contradict his behavior during these past years, but he needs her to understand that he's always loved her dearly. The distance he put between them has only been physical, never emotional. The happy childhood they had shared wouldn't let him dissociate completely from his sister, even if he had tried.

"They were taller than me, and a lot taller than you, but you put your hands on your hips and told them to leave me alone if they didn't want you to give them a lesson of a girl's secret combat strategies. Your flaming red curls and fiery eyes put them to rout alright. You were my heroine then, today, and always."

"Your heroine?"

"Yes, my heroine. Geez, you never avoided a confrontation, never abandoned your beliefs. You were the only one of us who dared to argue with dad, and I adored you for that. Not even our older brother would've had the guts to do what you have done: choose a career against our father's explicit will. I asked myself if the Navy really was Bill's first choice or only dad's. You were the tiniest of us four but also the strongest and most courageous."

"Overpraise."

"Oh no, not at all. I couldn't have wished for a better big sister."

Charlie watches her with silent scrutiny and when his eyes find hers, a little smile sneaks from the edge of Dana's lips. Her voice becomes softer with every sentence of the childhood memory that leaves her lips.

"I was so happy when mom and dad told us we would have another brother or sister. I'd always wanted to be a big sister like Melissa. Mom told me years later that she had two miscarriages after me and didn't dare to try for a fourth child for quite a while. That's why the gap between you and me is somewhat larger than between us other three. When you were born and dad took us to the hospital to visit you and mom, I was allowed to hold you although I was the youngest. I remember that dad said it was Bill's right as the firstborn but mom insisted I should hold you, and of course, Bill didn't mind. He had his hands in his pockets the whole time to keep anyone from placing the fidgeting baby in his arms. Melissa was too occupied with the current book she was reading to bestow as much as a glance on you, so I held you the entire time. You looked at me with wide eyes, then fell asleep in my arms. Mom said that you'd been crying all day, that she'd thought you were never going to stop, and that from now on she would call me to help her soothe you whenever you were upset. I almost burst out of pride. I had fallen in love with my baby brother at that very moment and I felt that nothing and no one would ever come between me and him...until I was lying in a hospital bed, sick and scared, yearning for my brother to hold me for a change. And he didn't show up."

The way her voice breaks at the end is stealing Charlie's breath. "God, Dana," he groans. His stomach churns and he feels like he is being stabbed in the heart. It's not easy to be told so plainly how wrong he had been.

"I'm sorry, Charlie. I shouldn't have said that."

"No, it's alright. I deserve every word of it."

"Maybe, maybe not. I mean, I guess you had your reasons to distance yourself from the family. Seriously, how many fights did you have with dad about scholastic merits, majors, and fields of study? About the so-called serious sides of life?"

"He wanted me to become a second Bill Jr., one more son he could push into the Navy to follow his footsteps. Why did he never argue with Melissa like that? She wasn't exactly an industrious, determined student either, was she? When she told him she was going to move into this esoteric commune to learn how to free her spirit from the shackles of the performance society he only shook his head, shrugged and continued reading the paper. I didn’t get it. If it had been me, he would've given me an hour-long lecture."

Dana has to chuckle now. "She was a girl, Charlie. Dad probably thought she'd get married one day and left it to the future husband to put up with those silly ideas of hers."

"And he had you, of course. Bright, ambitious, A-student Dana at the onset of a career in either science or medicine. You raised the bar to unreachable heights for us ordinary mortals."

"That was never my intention. I just loved to study and I found joy in being the best possible in everything I did. I still do actually. Mulder can tell you a thing or two about it."

"I knew you didn't become daddy's pet on purpose, but you were, and at a certain point there just was no valid place for me to settle myself in. Bill was his golden Navy boy, you were the brainiac, Melissa had already taken the role of the black sheep, so what was I going to be?"

"Is that why you went away?"

"I couldn't do anything right by him, he was always on the lookout for mistakes he could blame me for. Mom always tried to make up for it but let's face it, dad wore the pants in that marriage. One day I realized I was happy and satisfied as long as he was away. The nearer his homecoming, the more uncomfortable I got. The family was thrilled about his return, whereas I dreaded it, and when you cried when he left us again, I had to feign being sad. At a certain point, it had become so obvious for me that I was an outsider in this family that I decided I would move out as soon as possible."

"And so you did," Dana states.

So he did. On the morning of his 18th birthday, he let his mother and siblings know over the birthday breakfast they had set up for him that he was going to move in with a friend. His father was at sea, luckily. Charlie wouldn't have had the guts to go through with it probably if Ahab had been sitting at the table with them. His mother was utterly aghast, his brother ridiculed him, the older of his two sisters babbled something about how one must pursue the path being offered, the younger cried, pleading with him to stay.

"Please believe me when I tell you that it wasn't you personally I needed to get away from, it was this family dynamic I couldn't cope with any longer."

"A dynamic I was a part of."

"Yeah," he sighs, "you were. It wasn't easy for me, especially in the beginning, but I needed a complete cut. It wouldn't have worked any other way for me."

"I hear you using 'I' and 'me' a lot, Charlie. Have you ever wasted a single thought about what your leaving did to us? Mom especially?"

He had. He thought a lot about his mother and it felt terrible to turn her down in her persistent attempts to reestablish contact. He can't explain what made him react to this last effort of hers. Maybe he'd realized that even if it was too late for him to reconcile with his mother, he didn't want to lose a third family member without even saying goodbye. Fate had been so courteous to him as to give him a second chance with Dana, it didn't offer him a second one with his mother, but at least he got to show her he still cared about her before she died.

"I did think of her, more than I would want, but, well...it's just that you can't make an omelet without breaking the eggs."

Dana cocks an eyebrow, a gesture Charlie is familiar with since early childhood. "Weird analogy here," she snorts. "It means you accepted you hurt her, I guess. "

"I'm afraid I have to say yes."

Dana presses her lips into a sharp line and nods slightly, processing his painfully honest words. "Well, thank you for taking the time to ease her heart at her last moments on earth." If she tried to prevent sounding sarcastic, she's not succeeding.

"Even at the risk of you not believing this, I'm glad I did. She was my mother, I owed it to her. I, uh...I did love her."

He's rendered his sister speechless for a moment with these last words. A tear escapes her eye when she finally says, "I believe you, I only wished she would've had more time with you."

Charlie swallows hard. His voice is small when he replies, "I'm sorry, Dana, I know I should've come back earlier. I should've been there for you, and for mom, when you needed me."

"You're here today, Charlie, and that's all that matters now."

They turn toward each other and after a moment of hesitance they hug, long and tight.

"Mmmm," Dana hums and the sound vibrates comfortably in Charlie's ear, "I'm so glad to have you back, little brother."

"It's good to be back, sis."

"You won't hide anymore?"

"No. I promise."

After a moment of significant silence they spend with Dana clutching Charlie as if her life depended on it, he breaks the embrace. To his dismay, the moment he lets go of her, his sister collapses. Her shoulders start trembling and when her chin falls to her chest, he hears the first sob escape her throat. He looks at her, not knowing exactly what she is crying about. She has so many reasons to cry. There were so many losses in her life she had to deal with, starting with a brother who vanished from her life without leaving a trace. Guilt crawls up his spine for having left her in the lurch for so long. He places himself right next to her, their thighs touching, and puts an arm around her shoulder. She instantly falls into him and the dam breaks. Her body is shaking from heavy sobs and soon Charlie feels his shirt getting wet from her tears. It's as if she's bottled up her sadness for too long that it now gushes out of her unchecked.

It takes Dana several minutes to recompose herself, minutes in which she's being rocked and comforted by her long-lost brother until the sobbing subsides eventually. She disentangles herself from him, pulls a tissue out of her pocket and blows her nose. Looking at him with red and blurry eyes, she manages a weak smile when she says, "seems you've returned the favor now."

"What favor?"

"To hold me until I stopped crying like I did when you were a newborn."

Charlie can't keep the sour chuckle down which is climbing up his throat. "Superb, it only took me 46 years. Well done, dude!"

Now Dana chuckles too, but hers is full of relief, not reproach. "Better late than never."

The sudden realization strikes him hard. How he wishes now that he'd been her rock also back then. Hell, how often had she stood up for him when their father had told him off, justifiably or not? How often had she covered for him, both in school and at home? She'd helped him out of more than one predicament, and he had only taken, taken, taken. He'd taken his unselfish, giving sister for granted and he'd never given her anything in return but his outright admiration and brotherly affection. As a kid, it had probably been all that could've expected from him, but as an adult in his mid-twenties, he should've had the decency and morality to swallow his personal sensitivities and shove his pitiful ass all the way from Fresno to her bedside in Washington to hold her hand.

"I'm so glad you got cured, Dana. I would've never been able to forgive myself."

In his state of harsh self-flagellation, Charlie fails to recognize that Dana's mood has already shifted from reproach to reconciliation. If he wasn't so self-centered once again, he would be able to read it in her face, in her open look and appeasing smile. She lays her hand on his forearm and squeezes it gently.

"Let's not talk about it anymore, Charlie. The cancer is gone, I'm fine. I've been cancer-free for years. We have all the time in the world to make up for the past years."

"What? That simple? You're forgiving me just like that as if I'm belatedly returning a book I borrowed from you? I failed you in the moment of your worst distress and you're saying 'let's forget it'?"

"If I learned anything during my illness, it has to be that it's no use trying to redo what's past. The past can't be changed, only the present and future.  When I was still in the belief that my remaining days were numbered, I struggled with what I had missed doing in my past and it was hard to accept that there were some things I would never be able to catch up with. Then a miracle happened and I got cured. I was given a second chance and I swore to myself I wouldn't waste it with regretting the mistakes I'd made in the past."

"You got cured thanks to a...erm, somewhat alternative approach, so I heard."

Dana's hand goes to her neck, her fingertips reaching for the spot where an implant had first been taken out and later on another one put in. He heard the whole story.

"Mulder's chip, well...it certainly led to some discussion with mom and Bill. They thought I was being crazy to even try it, but I had nothing to lose. And I trusted Mulder."

"Are you still carrying it?"

"Yes, I am. It seems to have kept me in remission ever since."

"That's wonderful, Danes. How did Mulder know it would work?"

"He didn't, but he is a believer. And he taught me to believe."

"What a great partnership. How long have you been together now?"

"More than 20 years."

"Wow."

"Yeah, it's quite a time span. What kind of life are you living, Charlie? Do you have a significant other? Are you married?"

"Divorced. Twice."

"Children? Any nephews or nieces I don't know of?"

"No children, no. At least no biological ones. Carrie, my second wife, has two boys, and we get along pretty well. Once in a while, I take them to a football game or out for burgers. They're cool kids, but it seems I'm not made to be a family man. I'm not good at playing house. I definitely won't marry again. I'm living with someone though. Haley. She's 32, a free spirit, artist. She reminds me of Melissa at times. She's very open when it comes to addressing my flaws," he adds with a grin. "She's good for me."

"Sounds wonderful. It's good not to be alone."

"What about Mulder and you?"

"We're not living together at the moment."

"You already said that, but will you again? One day?"

"Maybe," she says, and with a little more emphasis, "probably."

"He seems like a good person. Quite different from what I've been told by Bill."

"How come Bill talked to you about Mulder?"

"Well, you're not going to like it, but uhm...he wanted me to help bring you to your senses. Back in the day. I think by now, he's given up on the endeavor to eliminate him from your life."

"Bill and Mulder have never really connected. Bill blamed him for dragging me into this dark world of his, into his quest of finding the truth. He completely neglected the fact that I was a grown woman who made her own choice when I decided to follow him. One day, his quest had become mine."

"And you had fallen in love," Charlie points out.

"It's a very long and very complicated story but yes, somewhere along the road we fell in love with each other. I think neither of us can pinpoint the exact moment when it happened, one day we simply found ourselves being in love. When you've found your perfect other, you don't let them walk out of your life just like that, even though not everything is always perfect."

"I like him."

"You do?"

"Yes, he seems kind and decent, and absolutely devoted to you. He guards you like a mother bear."

"He's always been very protective of me, unlike what Bill thinks."

"He was in the hospital with you. When mom died."

"He was. I received Bill's call at a crime scene and Mulder sent me to go see mom right away, saying he'd cover for me. He came to the hospital later. He knew I needed him. Apart from that, he liked mom and was worried about her. She liked him too. She liked him a lot. Her last words were to him. I guess she said them to both of us, but she was reaching out for Mulder and looked him in the eye when she said what she said."

"That she also had a son named William."

"Her last thoughts were of the two people that were lost to her - William and you. She loved you, Charlie, despite everything, and she needed to know you were alright before she was ready to go. As a mother, she never gave up on her child."

He's surprised about the warm feeling spreading inside. Maybe as a son, he also never gave up on his mother. Maybe even if the umbilical cord is cut there's an invisible bond between a mother and her child that never ceases to exist. He thought he had burnt all bridges behind him but that obviously wasn't true. He's glad he made that last phone call and talked to his mother. It not only gave her peace but also him. He missed the chance to make full amends with her, but maybe she'd known what their last-minute reconciliation would do for him. A mother always knows what's best for her child.

"But why did she tell you she also had a son named William? She should've known you were aware you had a brother with that name. It seems a little peculiar to me."

"I don’t think that was what she was trying to remind us of."

"Of what then?"

"That we, Mulder and I, have a son named William too."

"Huh? She thought you forgot that?"

"No. She knew we missed him every day of our lives. She wanted to tell us to never give up hope, to keep believing that we will reunite with him one day, just like she had reunited with you after so many years of separation."

"Well, reunited is probably too big a word. I spoke two sentences to her. She didn't even answer."

"She felt the connection re-established, Charlie. Your two sentences pulled her out of the coma. The fact that her prayer for you had been answered, that you had come, even if only through the speaker phone, gave her peace, and she wanted the same peace for us."

"Awesome. I never would've thought."

"It took me a while to figure it out myself. At first, I was confused and even a bit angry at her. I asked myself why she had to remind us of the child we had lost. What was the use of hurting us? Only days later I understood what she was trying to tell us."

"To look for him?"

"To always feel responsible for him. We are his parents, even though he's not living with us. Mulder and I created this life, and for as long as we live, our obligation is to assure he's safe and happy. If it means we have to stay away from him, so be it, that's what we have done the past 15 years, but maybe the day will come when we can dare to contact him. She told us to never stop hoping for this to finally happen."

"With saying she also had a son name William she put herself in your shoes."

"She acknowledged my motherhood, something I've had difficulties with since I gave him up. She always saw the mother in me, never the woman who gave her son away. I can't tell you what this means to me. Especially because she disapproved of my decision to give him up for adoption, and very strongly so. She loved William and didn't want to lose her grandson. I've been told many times by people who didn't know better that I would understand a certain situation better if only I was a mother. Working at the children's ward does that to you, it puts you in a situation where you have to talk to parents making tough choices for their sons and daughters. The choices I made for my children-"

Dana stops mid-sentence, takes a deep breath and bites her lower lip for a moment, then turns toward her brother. "Do you know that I had a daughter? A beautiful girl. Emily. Begotten with my ova, carried and given birth to by another woman."

Charlie nods. He has never fully understood the whole story of that girl's existence, but his mother, God bless her, had written him a letter back then giving him the news of how her first grandchild had entered her life so miraculously and then left it again within the blink of an eye. The letter even contained a picture of a little girl that looked so much like his sister it had taken his breath away, but he had been in a phase where a lot of things were going on in his own life, so he had never really allowed this story to get at him.

Dana's eyes become unfocused and she looks beyond her brother to an image only she can see. Charlie is aware that she hides the full depth of her pain. To her questioning look as how he'd come to the knowledge of that other child of hers, he only answers taciturnly "mom". A fleeting smile crosses Dana's face at the mentioning of her mother, then she takes on from where she left a moment ago. "I didn't know Emily existed until she was three years old. She was so terribly sick when I found her. There was no hope for a cure, and I decided to accompany her on her way of death instead of prolonging her suffering just to have her with me a little while longer." The last sentences come out in a staccato without drawing a single breath in between them as if this was the only way for her to be able to do it.

"Jesus, Dana, there's been so much suffering in your life, so much pain and loss."

His sister heaves a bitter chuckle. "Yeah, it seems that my adult life has been one long master class in death beginning with my choice to go into forensic pathology. Fate would've had it that I not only studied death but gathered a lot of personal experience to add to the scientific approach. God, there are so many deaths, one after another, it's almost difficult to put them in a chronological order." She squints her eyes for a second, then starts the morbid list. "Dad, Mulder's father, Melissa, Emily, Mulder's mother, Samantha, Mulder, the Gunmen, and almost myself now and then. Now I have to add mom to the list."

Some names don't make sense to Charlie, like Samantha and the Gunmen, and he asks himself how Mulder made it onto the list, but he won't dwell on it. There's no use in deepening the cuts in her heart. His sister is a textbook definition of a strong person but where is her breaking point? When would all this death be too much for her to take?

"Well, anyway," she shakes her head as if to push the thoughts about death out of her mind, "what I wanted to say was that the choices I made for my children left me at a point where I wasn't seeing myself as a mother anymore. All I felt I was, was being the biological origin of two human beings who lived, or had lived, their lives far away from me with other women raising them. Mom never saw it that way. Every Mother's Day she sent me two white lilies and a card, thanking me for the two grandchildren I gave her. In her eyes, I never ceased being a mother, and I'm so grateful she reminded me of it before she left us."

As a man, not even a father, Charlie can only try to imagine what it was like for his sister to lose two children, and, to make matters worse, under such unfortunate circumstances beyond her control. From the way she so fondly speaks of her emotions connected to her motherhood, he feels safe enough to ask her a question that has been on his mind for a while.

"How was he? My nephew?"

Dana's self-containment is gone for a moment. She sucks in her breath deeply through her nose while her eyes slide closed. Charlie already fears he's gone too far, but then a slight smile tugs at the corners of her mouth. When she opens her eyes, they are filled with tears, but they don't seem to be sad, rather dreamy.

"How was he? Let's see. Hmmm, he was such an easy baby. He didn't cry a lot, he was happy and satisfied most of the time. As difficult as the pregnancy and childbirth were, it didn't have any negative influence on him. He smiled mostly, ate and slept well. He would look at you with his big, curious eyes and melt your heart. He was a godsend for a first-time mother."

"Did he look a lot like you? Like a Scully? Bill's kids all looked so much like him when they were babies, I almost pitied them," Charlie deadpans.

"It's what nature intends. Fathers don't share a mother's certainty that a baby is theirs, so newborns resemble their fathers early on to assure men they invest their resources in their own offspring."

"So he resembled Mulder more than you?"

He can't stop himself from asking the trick question. So far, she has spoken of her partner's fatherhood only in casual half-sentences and Charlie wonders why. At this point, he's certain that no one else can be her son's father but Fox Mulder.

"Well, he had blue eyes like most babies have and only peach hair when he was born, but whenever I looked at his face I saw Mulder, especially after he had to leave us. William was all I had at a time I didn't even know if Mulder still lived." Leading her yet again to a sad chapter of her life story hadn't been his intention but she seems unfazed and Charlie doesn't even have to voice another question for her to continue and eventually answer his question. "When I picture him now, I see a mixture of the both of us: a lanky teenage boy with Mulder's brown unruly hair and my blue eyes. I hope he's been spared the red hair, I remember how Bill and you wrestled with the color of your hair as kids. And you're dying it now, I see." She rakes her fingers through her brother's hair with an amused smile on her face.

"I've tried more or less every single color, I can tell you as much. It was green for quite a while," he quips.

The information makes her laugh. It's a wholehearted laughter, taking a bit off the edges of their sad conversation. "Well, you were far away enough from home to be allowed to experiment. Imagine Bill with green hair. Dad would've been mad as hell."

Charlie joins in her laughter and they both can't hold it, they laugh until the tears stream down their cheeks. It's a good laughter which puts an end to the heavy talk and lets them both cherish their togetherness. This is how it used to be between them when they were kids, light and easy.

Dana and Charlie are both so absorbed that they startle when the back door opens with a creak and Mulder pops his head out.

"Sorry to interrupt but there's an Aunt Roberta on the phone who wants to pass on her condolences to you, Scully. She says she's a distant relative, the second daughter of your father's cousin or something like that. She asked me if I was the FBI agent with the funny name. What am I supposed to make of that?" Dana and Charlie look at each other and burst into hysterical laughter, much to Mulder's bewilderment. "Well, I'm glad to see you're having fun," he growls with a hint of annoyance in his voice.

"Sorry for that, Foxxx," Charlie says, stretching his name for emphasis and gritting his teeth at the same time in order to keep himself from laughing. He gets up and puts a hand on the taller man's shoulder. "I'll talk to her."

After Charlie has vanished into the house, Mulder takes the now empty spot next to his partner and mumbles under his breath, "agent with the funny name...moi?"

She also tries to suppress a grin but is only half successful. "There's obviously been some talking about us within my family and Aunt Roberta has been adding her own anecdotal details to the stories."

"Anecdotal details, I see. Well, as long as she calls me funny and not spooky, I shouldn't complain."

"I never thought you were spooky, Mulder."

"Not even when we first met and I showed you the slides to our first case?"

"No."

"I can't quite believe that, Scully. Everybody thought I was spooky."

"First of all, I'm not everybody...." Mulder smiles consentingly, "second, I thought you were nuts when we first met."

"Ouch." Mulder's face contorts in feigned hurt for a second before he shoots back, "and I thought you'd last a week maximum. I guess we've both changed our minds."

"Who said I have?" she deadpans.

"Funny. Very funny, Scully." Mulder's face is empty now, whereas Dana's lightens up upon their banter.

Inside the house, Charlie isn't listening very closely to what Aunt Roberta is saying. He tries to follow the interaction outside on the porch and strains his ears to get at least some of the conversation. Casually, he tells her now, "stop calling him that, Aunt Roberta. His name is Fox, and forget what you've been told about him, he's a good person." It only takes his aunt, who's probably a second or third cousin or actually not a real relative at all, a brief moment to process this new information before she showers Charlie with more questions he chooses to ignore. His attention is again directed outside when he hears Dana and Mulder resume their conversation after a few moments of silence. He takes the receiver away from his ear to be able to follow what's being said outside.

"Did you two have a good conversation?" Mulder asks

"Hmm, yes, we did. A long overdue conversation, but a good one. I lost my mother, but I got my brother back."

Charlie's heart swells.

"That's good, Scully. I'm happy for you. He seems like a nice guy."

"He said the same about you."

"Seriously? Should there really exist a male Scully on this planet who doesn't hate me?"

Instead of commenting, Dana places a gentle kiss on Mulder's cheek. It elicits a delighted smile from the man who in Charlie's head had been an ego-driven, reckless, unhinged sorry son of a bitch destroying his sister's career in his stubborn pursuit to find little green men until he was able to form a view of his own on the infamous Fox Mulder meeting him personally today for the first time.

"What was that for?" Mulder asks, obviously surprised by Dana's gesture of affection.

"For helping me through this, Mulder. For being my friend."

"Anytime, Scully."

"Yes, I know. That's what I mean."

Charlie watches his sister lean into her partner, and he can see that he is so much more than just an FBI partner - with or without a funny name. She puts her head on his shoulder and he pulls her closer with one of his long arms. What a cute couple, Charlie thinks. This is how she's been able to survive all this, with Mulder at her side. That she'd been taken care of by this man while he had been absent from her life makes it a little easier for Charlie to come to terms with what he'd done wrong. He smiles and puts his ear back to the receiver, his eyes still locked on the display of human compassion and love outside.

"Pardon, Aunt Roberta? The connection is a little wonky. What did you just say?"

He listens to her babbling some more and doesn't deem it worthy to interrupt her flood of words, but then she asks him something meaningful and he's happy to give her an honest answer.

"Yes, it definitely was the right decision to come back."

[rorykillmore]

this next gift is for my friend jay! who is no longer on tumblr (the augers got him,) but i’m posting this here for him to save however he wants. jay left his request open and so i thought for awhile about what i wanted to do and settled on -- what better than a fic about our first important rp dynamic? naruto joining the legends may still be a plot in progress, but i wanted to explore a few snapshots of his relationship with them and sara specifically. so this is kind of? future-set? as will become apparent the more of it you read.

merry christmas, jay!!! idk if there are words to properly express how grateful i am to have met you and gotten to know you so well this past year. and i know it’s only been a year, so it really speaks to your character how quickly you’ve become one of my very best friends. you’ve always been there to support me and listen and be validating when i’m upset or frustrated, or just make me smile by linking me to some silly (or terrifying, CLICKHOLE) video. the trust we’ve built up is very rare in my life and important to me and i feel so lucky to know you and be able to share all our varied interests with each other (from saw to borderlands to cry of mann to dctv -- and of course, cube!). never forget that you’re a wonderful person and friend.

Child soldiers, Sara thinks dryly, great.  She supposes the League wasn’t much better, but at least she’d been old enough to vote before they started training her to kill.

“Wow,” Naruto says the first time he’s ever aboard the Waverider.  “Does this thing have a kitchen?”

Sara feels like that’s the point at which she should have realized she was in trouble. 

Honestly, the team doesn’t exactly need any more teenagers. They already have Gardner, and Maive pretty much counts, and Ratchet is along for the ride at least some of the time. It’s not that they can’t fend for themselves in their own respective ways, but they’re still teenagers, questionable judgment and poor impulse control and all, and looking out for all of them can be a little bit stressful especially when it’s just her and Newt.

Except Naruto, whatever else he might be, is brave, with a genuine sense of compassion and a desire to help other people. He gets along well with the other Legends -- Maive especially, which is a big plus in Sara’s book, all things considered. Worst of all, he’s eccentric, one-of-a-kind, a bit of a disaster -- just odd enough to not quite fit with the rest of the world, in spite of all his friendliness and easy charm.

In short, he was practically a Legend in the making even before she met him. She supposes she never really stood much of a chance.

The first time they bring him along, it’s to put a wrench in the plans of some time traveling rifter who wants to fuck with World War II (Why do they always pick World War II? Are there that many people running around who want to see the world overrun by Nazis? It’s discouraging, honestly). Maive suggests Naruto might be useful, and Sara can’t turn down the extra firepower.

So they go -- right into the thick of it, which means Ratchet has to come up with these bullshit holographic disguises for him and Maive. Sara tries not to laugh as Naruto lines them up for a picture with ‘Franklin Delano Roosevelt’ and ‘Winston Churchill’. It’s silly and dumb and out-of-this-world, and somehow, they all have fun. Even Maive seems happier and more at ease with the group when Naruto’s around.

And so, Sara relents, maybe it won’t kill her to keep him around.

Or (knowing the Legends in any universe) maybe it will -- but it just might be worth it.

“Is it normal for kids to learn to fight like this, where you’re from?” she asks her one day after Naruto’s talked her into some light sparring. He seems to like to make a game out of it -- his sparring style is eager and fun even compared to the non-hostile practice she and Rkorya do. It’s not that he’s not skilled, because he undeniably is -- it’s just that his attitude is different from the people Sara once trained with.

“Well, I mean --” Naruto pauses to scratch behind his head, and Sara clamps down on the instinct to take advantage of the casually given opening.  “Kinda? Most of the people I know have been training since they were...”  He seems to lose count, and shrugs.  “I mean, I guess it’s like -- how else would our villages protect themselves?”

Child soldiers, Sara thinks dryly, great.  She supposes the League wasn’t much better, but at least she’d been old enough to vote before they started training her to kill.

“Where’d you learn to fight?” Naruto’s question breaks through her thoughts, and she pauses.

“It’s complicated.” Somehow, she knows that answer won’t satisfy his curiosity. “The organization that trained me -- most of them weren’t very good people.”

And yet that part of her, the assassin trained by the League, still sometimes feels like the part she knows best. It wasn’t so long ago, after all, that she’d gone running back to them when she’d felt she had nothing else to do with herself.

Naruto’s expression falls, and Sara tries not to grimace. “Look, there’s no reason to worry about it. It was a long time ago.”

“Still...” He frowns at her without trying to hide his reaction. “I’m, uh. I’m really sorry, Sara.”

The thing is, he doesn’t even know what he’s expressing sympathy for. The thing is, it’s not just what happened to her, it’s what she’d done. 

The thing is, even if Naruto knew all of those things, Sara gets the feeling he’d be no less shy about reaching out to her.

“Well.” She shrugs, because she’s still not very good at taking sympathy, but she doesn’t want to brush him off either.  “Whatever happened to us before -- it’s not an excuse not to move forward now. Right?”

“Right!”  Naruto breaks into a grin just as quickly as he faltered a moment ago. “I mean, hey, look at you now -- you’re a superhero!”

Sara scrunches her nose, but it’s half-playful. “Don’t use that word.”

Inaccurate though it may be, she can’t help but appreciate his sincerity. Naruto might belong with them because of his general ragtag misfit nature, but the reason he makes a difference -- it’s moments like this.  He doesn’t seem to have it in him to ever stop caring.

She gives him a brief, friendly nudge, and raises her bo staff. “Let’s get back to it.”

Leery as she may be of taking her team to the 80′s after the chaos emeralds incident, Sara will concede that they could all use a holiday vacation. That means picking a ‘fun’ decade, and it generally doesn’t get much more fun than the 80′s (well, okay, the 70′s, but a good portion of her team is underage). She lets them pick a few things they want to do - namely things that don’t involve too much more of Ratchet and Maive hiding, although Ratchet insists he can pull off a killer Madonna - and one of those things happens to be attending a real, authentic, 1980′s drive-in movie.

Their movie of choice? One of the original showings of Aliens.

Newt spends most of the time being concerned over the extinction risk to a foreign species ( “You’re thinking too much about it,” Sara keeps telling him, “They’re supposed to be evil aliens.”) while Gardner seems more intrigued with the technological aspects ( “Pretty inaccurate for the time period this is supposed to be set in. But cool.”). Maive, for her part, has found a new hero in Ellen Ripley, which Sara can’t help but consider to be the best thing in the world.

“Does she die?” she keeps murmuring. “Don’t tell me if she dies. She can’t die. She’s unkillable.”

“I’m... pretty sure she’s in other movies in this franchise?” Ratchet ventures. “So she probably doesn’t die. In this one, anyway.”

“Just so you know, Alien 3 isn’t worth watching under any circumstances,” Sara shoots back at them. “Ripley or no Ripley.” Her gaze catches on Naruto, and she tilts her head, amused. He’s sitting there in uncharacteristic silence, squashed between Ratchet and Maive, sporting one of the goofiest grins she’s ever seen. Sara’s not sure she wants to interrupt his experience, so she doesn’t say anything.

Maive, on the other hand, has no such reservations. “What’s with you?” she asks teasingly, nosing him.

“Huh?” Naruto’s eyes barely move away from the screen.  “Nothing! It’s just --” He pauses to soak in a particularly detailed action sequence, then finally steals a glance at Maive. “This is one of the coolest things I’ve ever done.”

It sounds nothing short of sincere, for all that Naruto is a trained ninja with a lifetime’s worth of experiences that Sara is certain are way flashier than this. She has to admit, it’s a little bit sweet. Even Maive pauses for a moment. Then --

“Wow. You really need to get out more.”

“Hey!”

“As if watching Ripley kick alien butt isn’t one of the coolest things Maive’s ever done, too.” Apparently confident in the distance Naruto’s currently putting between them, Ratchet calls her out. Then he looks at Naruto, and ears wiggle in a way Sara recognizes by now to mean that he’s a little apprehensive. “Anyway, I... kinda get what you mean. I never really got to do stuff like this, back on Veldin.”

Naruto gives him a friendly nudge. “Weren’t you a superhero even back in your world? Saving people and getting to visit different planets in a cool spaceship is still pretty awesome.”

Ratchet looks even more embarrassed, and Sara turns around again to hide her smirk.  Suddenly, she’s pretty sure it’s a kindness that Maive isn’t the one sitting between them.

They seem happy, she reflects as the banter fades away and they all get caught up in the movie again.  Happy is a concept that still seems a little too far out of her own reach, but if holding this team together means that these kids get to have something like this -- well, it’s worth it.

She really is glad they picked up Naruto, after all.

But things like this don’t last forever. No matter how important they are, or how much she wants to protect them. Sara knows this by now.

Maive is dead. Sara can’t get her lifeless form out of her head -- so starkly contrasting, so unreal compared to the energetic, alive Maive they all knew only days ago. She steels herself, in spite of everything, and gives her team what she knows they need to hear. That it’s going to hurt for awhile, but that they have each other. That they can come to her if they need anything. That she’s going to lead them through this, that they’re going to find Maive’s killer, and win her some justice (because they need something to drive them forward, and Sara knows from experience that revenge is an excellent motivator).

It feels hollow to her own ears. The strength she tries to lend them feels like a lie, because the moment she retreats to her office, she has a hard time believing any of it.

There’s just the loss. Another hole in her heart. She’s used to it by now, or she should be, but it’s different now that she’s captain. That she’s responsible, that there are a million things she’s telling herself she could have or should have done.

If she’s being honest with herself, well -- the big speech she called the team together for was as much to shield what she’s really feeling from them as it was meant to be a reassurance. They have each other - they have her, if they need her - but she’ll deal on her own.  She always does.

Still, she knows them by now, so she’s not entirely surprised when she hears a knock at the door.  She’s fully prepared to brush whoever it is off, to tell them to go get some rest --

“Sara?”

But somehow it isn’t Naruto that she expects, and it stalls her a little. She makes the mistake of looking at him -- she doesn’t think she’s ever seen him look so tired.

“What’s up?” she asks him dully.

He hesitates uncharacteristically.   “I’m... not gonna ask if you’re okay. ‘Cause I don’t think anyone is.”  He shifts slightly in light of her lack of response.  “But there’s something else I wanted to ask.”

Sara straightens from where she’s leaning against the desk, trying to look a little more attentive.

“I wanna -- help you guys find who killed her.”

The statement hangs there for a moment. She blinks. It takes a moment to process.

“I know I haven’t been hanging around with you guys for very long.” Naruto continues a little more quickly. “But she was my friend - she was all of our friends - and I’m not gonna let whoever did this get away with it. I know you have a lot to deal with right now, but I -- I just wanna help. I wanna help all of you.”

She doesn’t think she’s ever heard him sound so serious. She swallows, mulling over a response slowly -- more how to word it, because she already knows how she feels.  “I know.”

Naruto opens his mouth, closes it again, then blinks. “You do?”

“I’d already figured you weren’t going to stand by.” She shrugs, giving him a thin smile (or as much of one as she can manage). “And why wouldn’t I let you help? You’re part of the team.”

It’s Naruto’s turn to go quiet for a moment “I am?” He frowns, dissatisfied with his own uncertainty. “I mean, uh -- I just... didn’t know if it was official, I guess.”

Sara guess that somewhere amidst everything that’s been going on lately, ‘official’ has kind of slipped through the cracks. But the truth is, she accepted Naruto a while ago -- she’s pretty sure most of them have.

Moving almost makes the ache in her chest a physical ache, but she crosses the room and rests a hand on his shoulder regardless.  “You are,” she tells him, meeting his gaze levelly.  “And we’re going to get justice for Maive. I can sure as hell promise you that.”

The determination that flares in Naruto’s eyes is as good as an agreement, and this time, Sara thinks her own words don’t feel like quite as distant from the truth.

[fromthebottomup-blog1]

Goodbye 2017, I thought you’d be different

The heavy weight of 2017 had me quite disappointed. I thought this would be a grand year, but instead I got death, sickness, misunderstanding, and a lot of mirror in the face syndrome. I did however obtain some great things as well. I guess, I’d sum up this year as an evil seesaw of circus magnitude. Unfortunately, it will get worse in 2018. 

It’s not that I am not hopeful, I just think the world is going through a transformation and like all transformations, there is a trajectory of chaos to tranquility. I’ve been on this path personally for a while and am hopefully coming out of the abyss. Not so much internal chaos, but more of a transition of lethargy and a cumbersome routine to actually pursuing what I want out of this life.

This year has been a whirlwind. The older we get the more swiftly time swooshes past us and the more we are reminiscent of those carefree college years. Youth, mostly. I felt the impact and realization that 45 is just around the corner and to be honest...it scares me. Watching the streaks of white hairs contrast with the black, noticing the wrinkles, noticing the heaviness of my body, noticing the thinness of my tresses and feeling the oppressive energy of the current world left me a bit disheartened and angry.

I experienced things this year like no other. I experienced alienation for my political and social stance on certain issues. I experienced the come to Jesus moment that I can no longer use my time to soothe the wounds of others while mine are newly scabbed. For the first time ever, I experienced racial prejudice. I also realized I’m not the right kind of feminist. I apparently was mistaken about what being a woman in this world means. I walked out of a job I loved for the first time in my life. I experienced severe anxiety for things I could not control and literally thought I was going insane. Despite how all this sounds, not everything was a big ball of negative energy, there was some room for the good.

This year I fell more in love. Love for the person who is consistently there for me. Love for the one who worries if he thinks something has happened to me. Love for the one I can laugh hysterically with for a good 15 minutes because let’s be honest...farts are funny. Love for his little one who constantly surprises us and makes us smile as she becomes her own little person, even if she isn’t mine. Love for the most thoughtful partner I’ve ever had in my life. Love for my family, although we have our differences, in the end I cherish them. Yes, there was a lot of love in the wake of the big bad that surrounded me.

This year I found a new calling. I have truly lived up to the moniker of “Dame of All Trades”. As I walked out of my dream job and into another, I realized that I deserve to be appreciated for the hard work I put in. I love that I can be creative. I love that I have a boss who doesn’t want to pin me down or throw my ideas away for his own, but who is nurturing and believes in what I bring to the table. I never would have thought that I would be in the real estate business, but hey, I surprise myself a lot sometimes. I feel like I can grow where I am and I feel more confident because of it.

This year I fell in love with Thomas Shelby in Peaky Blinders again. I celebrated my youth through Star Wars. I cried through This is Us. I savored every single moment of Game of Thrones and I binged through The Defiant Ones, Master of None, Stranger Things, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and The Handmaid’s Tale. It was an excellent time for visual stimulation. I did indulge in the YSL exhibit at the VMFA for some artistic love. I realized as I write this, I should probably incorporate more art into my routine. 

This year I I enjoyed the sonically charged Cult of Luna and Julie Christmas in New York, tested my old bones through Converge, and started it all off with City of Caterpillars at the beginning of the year. Revisited my adolescence by seeing the Psychedelic Furs again. I went to a house show where there was a Square at the “bar” and saw my friend’s Jimmy Eat World tribute band and I truly accepted that nothing will ever be the “same” again.  I was earwormed by Anousheh’s “Bones” and My Little Pony soundtracks...nothing like waking up in the middle of the night because you can’t get this out of your head:

So there was that. 

Finally this year was a lot of firsts. First time apple picking. First time having a real Christmas Tree. First time in 7 years with a semi new car. First time being debt free. First time singing Karaoke in a public venue in front of people (after several jello shots). First time I don’t feel guilty because I cannot change the past and although sad that people are manipulative and non-responsive, I know I did my best. And for the first time ever I have a core group of female friends who respect, understand, inspire, support, and care about me and I them like no other group of women I’ve ever had in my life before. Completely refreshing!

My connections remain strong and ever growing, my education perpetual, and despite the ugliness and sadness I felt during the whole year, I am hopeful. We will reach the enlightenment that is due. I feel like this year I’m beginning a new spiritual and creative journey.

I am forever thankful to my family and friends who give me strength and purpose. Thank you for never judging my decisions. I give a heartfelt sympathy for all of you who have lost someone this year. I know a lot of you lost family abruptly and I’m sorry you had to contend with that loss. To all the births this year, thank you for including me in your news and introducing me to your little ones, nothing brings me more happiness. To all those who’ve shut the door on our relationship, I am disappointed I meant so little, but I am not sorry for being me. To all those going through a divorce after such long histories...it is not over, there is always a beginning. To all those I reconnected with, you were never forgotten and I’m glad our friendship has endured. 

With that, I wish a hopeful, healthy, and prosperous 2018! We will resist and overcome all the turmoil, but there needs to be a disruptive catalyst in order for us to change.  Change is not easy, but necessary. Be kind to each other and show compassion. We are not the same and it is in those differences we can truly grow. Tell those around you that you appreciate them. Get rid of the clutter and open up your hearts. Happy new year to you all!

And here are my goals for 2018, if you feel like reading further:

Turn 45 with exceptional grace, lots of dancing and champagne

Travel somewhere I’ve never been

Love, Dance, Read, Write, and Collaborate More

Get my real estate license

Start a new creative venture

Finish a House | Find a Home

Do something constructive within my community

Go riding for the love of all that is equine!

See more art

See more music

[girl4music]

My thoughts and feelings on these recent Hurricanes in America (minority opinion, long so read at own disgression)

Maybe a Hurricane is taking America because Mother Nature wants to fight back against Trump and his supporters. When the privileged already have everything they could possibly want... why is it they want to take it all from others? This is coming from a privileged white person by the way. But I consider myself to be an "illegal alien" too because I know I don't belong here. Even if I might be brought up privileged, I am with all those that aren't and would gladly give all I have over to them in a heartbeat. I have everything and I don't want anything more. It's never made me happy. What would make me happy is for everyone to be treated equally. I assure you that my mind, my heart and my soul do not belong on this planet although my physical self stays rooted to it. I am an alien to the Earth. I always have been. I have never belonged to it. I have never owned it. I have never felt a part of it. And I am with those that feel the same, no matter what country they're from, no matter what race they are, no matter what status they have. I am a white privileged girl and I don't deserve any of it. I do not share the racist and facist rhetoric other white privileged people do. If you're an alien, then I'm an alien. I am with you. Always! I am a firm believer in the phrase that money doesn't give you happiness. It gives you opportunities. But when you feel unloved, it won't mean a damn thing. So whatever that money could buy couldn't provide what compassion could. There is no price on kindness therefore no price could ever buy it. Humans should give it out willingly. This world is so twisted, so upside down, so wrong. Countries that have nothing are considered the enemies. It makes no sense to me. I don't see people as different coloured skittles. I don't see people as a chess board of black and white and where it’s a game to see who can win over the other. I know who already reigns as King. And it's wrong. It's all wrong. So I am sympathetic to those that have fled their country to feel safer. Even though they still aren't. Why should I feel sorry for those that are finally experiencing pain, loss and trauma? The same they've made others feel. Why should I offer a sympathetic hand to them? They don't deserve it. They need to learn a lesson. These natural disasters are happening to them because they need a taste of their own medicine. They need to feel the grief they make others feel. They need to learn for themselves how fucking awful it is to lose everything they have to something they have no control over. Harvey and Irma are their just desserts. Yes, I realize there is many that don't deserve it. But Mother Nature has to attack the central area of ignorant privileged motherfuckers. The captain has to eventually go down with his ship.

I am now speaking to those ignorant privileged motherfuckers that commit to hurt others rather than help them. If the shoe fits, this is to you. Oh, I'm being cruel am I? I'm laughing at people's expense, am I? I'm sorry, I didn't hear you crying these pathetic excuses when you were causing the same cruelty and humiliation to others. Big babies. You'll get out of it. You always do. But let's see which one's stronger anyway. You'll have to forgive my sarcasm. It's my first language. I'm afraid plain English doesn't suffice when talking to you. The people you consider "illegal aliens" face issues like this every day, only Mother Nature isn't the one dishing it out. You are! If you read the Torah, which I’m doubting you ever have, you will have read about how God through his messenger, Moses, brought down the 10 plagues on the privileged side of Egypt. I don’t care how “fucked up” it is to say this, but I'm on the hurricanes side. God didn't care when he brought the 10 plagues down on Egypt. So consider me Moses. You have to ask yourselves whether it all just happens at random and if it really is a coincidence. Where the most civil unrest is happening, these Hurricanes are also happening. They are not a coincedence. I swear by it.

Fear is a great motivator. You never fear something to the point where you want to kill it, unless deep inside you feel like you haven't got it and can’t admit to it. What it is and what you feel are two entirely different things. You can be at the top and feel like you're at the bottom. You can be at the bottom and feel like you’re at the top. Perspective matters. The poorest people on Earth are the happiest. It's because they view what little they have as absolutely everything they'll ever need. You're so poor, all you have is money which keeps you at the top. So here is what you must do if you want to feel like you are at the top. GIVE BACK! Pull somebody you've always pushed down up with you. Then you will deserve to feel it. You must do good to earn your redemption. Give out what you've always taken for granted to those that actually need it. Learn your lessons. Acknowledge your privilege. And provide consolidation and compassion to those that have never had it. You’ll feel better and God will have mercy on you. God doesn't want you to pray to him. He wants you to help others. He wants you to give compassion to those who desperately need it. He wants you to realize that you do not own any part of the world and that you can't prevent any human from taking residence in it. Violence against violence should never be needed, but Mother Nature doesn't care anymore. She wants you to learn the lessons you always ignore. So when that Hurricane comes roving it's way through your town, think about that. Because if you can't learn for yourselves the meaning of loss, Mother Nature will make sure you do. You deserve what's coming to you. I only feel sorry for the ones who don't deserve it. Who have to be caught up in your mess. You shouldn’t think these Hurricanes are just a coincedence, a simple happenstance or bad luck. You bring this on yourselves so this is your oppotunity to redeem yourselves. Start to protect and defend those you've hurt and damaged. I have no sympathy for you. You need this. You need to learn this kind of pain because it's only a problem when it personally affects you. Otherwise it's just a procedure. Well, this is karma and she ain't playing with procedures! You want to get out of her hurricane unscathed, then help somebody else. Take time to attend to the needs of another who has never had the same medical aid you are privileged with for just being the colour you are and living in the country you live in legally.

I can guarantee you if this was personally happening to me and the Hurricane was coming for me, my first move would be to make sure my loved ones got to safety over myself. Then I'd go back to help those who I may not personally know if it looked like they need help too. Because I have never deserved the life I live. I've caused people so much pain. I have treated people like shit. I am making amends for the horrible excuse for a human being I was. I don't care to keep myself safe from harm anymore. I care to help, protect and defend others. And I know I will never ultimately redeem myself. I know I will never make up for everything I've done. But I'm going to try anyway. At no price. At no offering of any kind. At no ulterior motive. Just to pay for my sins. I do not feel sympathy to those who are just like I used to be. I battle against them to stand for the Greater Good. Just like Xena: Warrior Princess has taught me. I was a bad person. I still am in some ways. I still have the attitude and horrid temper of a bully. Only I use it for good now. I don't expect anyone to feel sorry for me. I don't want anyone to pray for me. What I want them to do is help those who have it much worse. Because now at this point in my life, I will always do the same. It's the only priority I have today. To serve others. To be their protector, if they'll have me. So what I suggest to you, from one white privileged person to another, is to do the same. Give back because you don't deserve all that you have. Most of what you possess should belong to others who have way less. They rightfully deserve it because it was taken from them to begin with. You need to give it back willingly and sincerely and make this planet a balanced, peaceful and prosperous place again. For EVERYONE. That is your purpose. Now do it! Don't sit there feeling sorry for yourself. Crying for help from the Hurricane and complaining about why it's happening to you. Do something! Help others. Protect others. Save others. Put them before yourself. Give out what you can to give them a better chance at survival over yourself.

To conclude this post... Mother Nature is fighting back and will make you taste your own payed for medicine. Your leader, Donald Trump, doesn't believe in climate change. Well, he is about to see it for himself. I wonder if he will have a change of heart or stay ignorant. It's all a learning process. Whether you come out of it alive is entirely up to you. Mother Nature takes no sides. God has no discrimination despite what you read about in the Christian bible. They only seek to keep the planet in balance. Those that deserve it will get out alive. Those that don’t, won’t. You might survive if you help others.

This is the only time I will ever repeat Donald Trump's words.

"Good Luck”