#razor trigger warning

[fragmented-artist]

x

Lucy

[hotelsongs]

In a brilliant touch, the razor that he uses to mutilate his own body is later deftly deployed to sever Isabella's bra.

this is from complicite’s ‘04-06 measure production and i am putting it on my blog because no staging i’ve ever heard about has ever made me scream with my whole body like this

[hibiscuts]

also shout out to the time I was going through it and ended up relapsing really bad in the dark. then I forgot I set my r4zorb/ade on my bed and turns out it was under my phone so when I went to grab my phone the damn thing put a big gash into my finger–

moral of the story is put a cover on your cutting tool before setting it down 👍

[somnomantic]

HHFHDHHHHHUUUUUUGGGGHHHH

[kayotic-lost-in-the-void]

[superokayy]

🙂

[macfrog]

sweet child o' mine | pt. ii

hi. this is max's lawyer speaking. please don't get mad at her for this part. she asked me to let you know that she loves you all and hopes that you trust her. sincerely, jimmy mcgill

pairing: neighbor!joel x fem!reader

summary: you're pregnant with joel miller's kid. he's dating someone else. you deal with it.

warnings: reader is literally pregnant so typical pregnancy stuff like nausea (none of the v word, y'all are safe with me), ultrasound scene set in a hospital, anxiety and guilt surrounding pregnancy, description of body change/growth, brief and i mean brief discussion of abortion, joel is dating someone who isn't reader, age gap (late 20s reader, late 40s joel), reader has no physical description save for hair, cursing, genderless use of buddy when referring to baby, joel kisses someone who is not his partner, mention of alcohol, disturbing & semi-graphic nightmare about being involved in car accident, reader has a panic attack, discussion of dead parents, fluff and the beginnings of angst DISCLAIMER: this series covers some issues which i know may be sensitive and possibly triggering to some. warnings will always be as thorough as possible, but if there's ever anything you feel i've missed, please let me know. feel free to drop by my inbox anytime.

word count: 9.2k

pt. i / series masterlist | main masterlist | playlist | follow @macfroglets w notifs on to be the first to hear when i post 🩵

“I know, I know,” Joel holds a palm up, “it’s nine thirty. I know. But I had to lug all this wood over here, and it – You okay?”

You realize when he pauses that you’re gaping at him, wide-eyed and frozen in place behind your front door. Your jaw hinges shut, a gulp like carpet burn down your throat. You didn’t hear a word he just said.

How does he know? He can’t possibly. Did he sense it, from two lawns away? Dream about the binding of cells, the furnace left lit in your body from that night? The embers still floating, just waiting to catch to life again?

Did he do the fucking math, the way you probably should’ve? How does he fucking know?

The minute the question leaves your mouth, you regret it.

Joel’s eyebrows drop. “How did I know what, kid? That you need new closets? Like you ain’t been nipping my ear about ‘em for weeks?”

Your eyes unlock from his and shift to the slats of wood leaning against the balustrade. The toolbox hanging from his fist. The worn jeans and the white dust marks on his thighs. He doesn’t fucking know, you idiot.

Joel steps forward. Takes your wrist. One grounding, steady hand around your thrashing pulse. “You’re freaking me out. What the hell’s –?”

“Nothing,” you chirp, remembering. The closet. The deal. The fucking – the deal. You withdraw your arm. Hidden up your sleeve, quickly slipping out of his grasp, is the news that his life is about to change forever.

Maybe. You don’t fucking know.

“No,” you continue, blinking the burn of sunlight from your vision, “I just – I forgot. Sorry. Come in. Sorry.”

“Quit sayin’ sorry,” he mutters, eyeing you suspiciously. He lifts a foot and hovers it over the threshold, hesitating. Like the first step across a minefield; instinct telling him to tread carefully.

And you swear an oath to yourself, swear it on your own life: if he doesn’t put the heel of his boot in your hallway, if he turns around right now whether because his instinct is razor sharp, or because he forgot his lucky screwdriver, or purely because he needs to take a fucking leak before he gets started – you will never tell him. He will never know.

If his intuition is that good, he’ll turn around and never show up on your porch again. If he has any sense, he’ll forget any of this ever happened. Deal off.

“How’s the stomach?” Joel asks, sole still three inches from wood.

“What?” you bleat, your heel knocking against the bottom stair. It’s a little more panicked than you intended.

“Yesterday,” a crease forms between his brows, “you said you had a weird stomach. That any better?”

Oh, you think, and as you open your mouth to reply, his foot hits the ground. No answer needed. He was coming in whether you tried to deter him or not.

“Oh, yeah. It’s – Well, it’s better than it was. I think I worked it out,” you grimace, tongue curling under the tinge of anxiety and – well. “Thanks,” you add, noticing the brisk cut of your replies.

The heavy thud of his footsteps follows you upstairs, blunt on the carpet as you lead him up. Joel sets the toolbox down and casts your room a quick glance, snapping back to you as soon as you notice him.

You tug on the corner of the bedsheets, a heat bubbling beneath your cheeks. Something shy and self-conscious, all of a sudden. The reality that you don’t feel close enough to this man to share the anatomy of your room with him, mixed with the knowledge that the two of you are, now and forever, bound by the anatomy of something a little more significant than dirty laundry and dusty wardrobes.

A little closer than most humans get, let’s say.

“You want a coffee or something?” you ask, crossing your arms and leaning back against the window sill.

“You havin’ one?”

“Sure. Wait – actually –” Can you have coffee whilst pregnant? A woman at work quit it altogether when she fell pregnant with her son. Fuck. “I’m – No. I’m good. But let me go make you one.”

Joel shakes his head, amused. Screwdriver burrowing into a door hinge already. He flashes you a tickled grin. “I’m good just now, kid. Wait until you’re makin’ one. Thanks.”

You lift a shoulder. “Welcome.”

His eyes flit from the twist of silver to your hunched shoulders, your arms crossed protectively over your chest. “You gonna stand there ‘n watch me all day? You my foreman now?”

“Sure,” you reply, and he laughs. You sniff, twisting your foot into the carpet. The plastic test itches against your skin; you can feel the two lines ripping into your wrist like tiny burns. “I can go, if you want.”

His lip turns, musing. A quick flick of his jaw. “You’re good company, all in all.”

Metal clanking against metal; fingers knuckle-deep in the toolbox. You can hear the harsh sound across your body, like the point of screws and bite of rust are actually scoring your skin. The groan of a near-fifty-year-old man rising to rip a decades-old door from its home. The creak of wood as it splits.

Everything so heightened that it’s actually painful.

Joel straightens up and pauses, turning his screwdriver between his fingers. “Are we –? We’re good, right?”

“Good?”

“Yeah. You’d tell me if things were weird?”

“Why would things be weird?”

His answer scrawls itself across his face. Your response scoffs from your lips.

“I just,” Joel sighs, “I feel like something might be off with ya. Maybe you just ain’t feelin’ too hot. But you’re quiet.”

“Quiet,” you whisper, palms locking heavily against your biceps. More defensive than convincing.

“Yeah. You usually annoy the hell outta me.”

Over your shoulder, Alice Brown waddles down her driveway, eyeing her flowerbeds. She pauses when Diane’s station wagon pulls up across the street; stands motionless as she watches the round figure climb out and totter to her own front door.

“Just – not in a very annoying mood, I guess,” you offer, staring at the white head of hair fluttering in the breeze. The glint of a trowel in her hand.

Joel’s chin lifts. He studies you, tongue tracing the ridges of his teeth. And then he’s nearing you, turning until you’re shoulder to shoulder, two silhouettes stood against the bright square of blue sky inside your window frame. His arms crossed; his stare fixed.

The words begin to boil in your stomach. Violent bubbles against the wall of your midriff. Rising like steam, fading into nothingness over your tongue, the sting of heat where your voice won’t collect them.

Joel moves from foot to foot. It feels like some kind of merry dance, some choreographed moment between you – like a skit in a comedy show. I know something you don’t know.

“What happened – at the wedding,” he murmurs, addressing the polished gold of your bedframe.

Some small sound passes your lips. An affirmative. You’re on the same page.

“We didn’t use – you know. And with you not feelin’ well, it’s…” A deep breath. Chest full of a ghostly bravery. And then he asks, “Are you –?”

Silence swallows the end of his question whole. You didn’t need it, anyway. The stiffness of his frame, his stare shooting straight ahead. The lack of oxygen between you – both holding your breath for fear that something might tear loose from your lungs. He knows. He knows he knows he knows.

You gulp. “…If I was?”

His head cranes upwards, focusing on the cracked plaster of your ceiling. The realization slowly trickling down over his skin. It hasn’t seeped through, hasn’t bled into his brain yet. “Then,” another breath, “then it’d be a conversation…” His voice is halved, split somewhere between knowing and – what is it? Hoping?

Your eyes slip over to the worn sleeve of his T-shirt, stretched around the swell of his bicep; scaling up to his shoulder, the tight set of his jaw. He’s so much taller, he’s so much older. There’s so much life lived and so many lessons learned behind his eyes that you wonder how much the news I’m pregnant would actually crack him.

Your eyes meet. You whisper, “Then – talk,” and his expression softens.

He blinks away whatever’s left of his trying, his polite attempts to skirt around it. He sheds probably a good three decades – turns back into some doe-eyed boy, wonderstruck and terrified. His voice is quiet, and at the same time, the heaviest with emotion you’ve ever heard it. “Are you?” he asks, and immediately, he blurs behind a wall of tears.

Your sentence gets caught in your teeth. It made no sense to begin with. Tangled between your molars, latching at the back of your tongue. Your hand slowly pulls free from your sleeve, the little white test between your fingers.

Joel’s eyes instantly drop, staring at the pale stick with a fraught expression you understand to mean the message has finally reached his brain. The same words now ringing between his ears: She’s pregnant. She’s pregnant. I got her pregnant.

You hold the test out, quivering in the daylight. He takes it in his thumbs, instantly soothing its tremble. Everything muted, every movement steady and considered. And suddenly the sight of that positive test feels less scary, in his hands. Feels like a smaller problem, if that were ever possible.

And he says nothing, and it’s almost unbearable to watch the shape of his lips thin, the shadow beneath his brows darken. Agonizing to stand here and wonder what the next words over his tongue will be.

He stares at it a moment longer. You count the beats of your pulse in your throat. You wrap your arms tighter around your body, holding your skeleton together.

Joel’s lips part. Your breath freezes. Whatever he says, you don’t want to miss a syllable.

“Are you –” he blinks, “– are you feelin’ okay?”

You stare blankly. His eyes finally lift.

“What?”

“Are you feeling okay?”

Your head jerks. “I’m – I’m fine. I mean, I’m fucking shocked.”

He nods. “How long have you known?”

“Took that right before you showed up,” you say, eyes diving to his hands. “Twenty minutes, maybe.”

He’s still switching between you and the test. Checking those two lines are still there, as if they might fade to nothing, and then checking you’re still there – as if you might, too. Might be swept off if he’s not keeping an eye on you.

His face pales. He sinks back against the window ledge. “Jesus,” he breathes, a hand down the scruff of his chin.

And it feels like relief, like a mirror sat before you, presenting the honest truth: you’re fucked, and Joel thinks so, too. It embeds the shock into the cushion of your brain, the weight of it absorbed and laid bare for every particle in your body to pay it a visit. What the fuck do we do now?

“Yeah,” you sniff, “Jesus.”

But then his arm wraps around your shoulder, reminding you you’re still solid. Still whole. He holds you to his side, and when you turn into him, he takes you in the other and pulls you flat against his chest. His lips to your hair. His breathing slowing yours.

“We’re gonna work it out,” he says into your hair. “We’re gonna – Jesus, I did not expect…We are goin’ to be fine, alright? You are goin’ to be fine.”

You’re nodding, the prickle of tears flooding across your eyes again. They’re doing nothing, his words – blunt against your skin and insignificant to the fear swelling around your heart – but it feels better to be afraid with someone. Feels better to hold onto something stronger, something bigger, while you feel yourself beginning to shrink.

“What do we do?” you ask into his shirt.

Joel loosens his grip, pulls away until you’re staring at one another. “What do you wanna do?”

“I don’t…” Your head’s shaking, lips moving quicker than your voice will offer the words over. “I don’t think I want to get rid of it.”

He nods, a hand coming up to hold your cheek. “Alright. Then you don’t have to. You don’t gotta do anythin’ you’re not comfortable with.”

“But,” you sniff, guiltily averting his gaze, “this fucks everything up. Everything’s about to change.”

Joel takes a long, slow breath. “It complicates some things, that’s for sure.” He looks out to the street; Alice Brown now hauling weeds from the edge of her lawn. In his exhale, he breathes a name.

“V…What?”

He looks down. Eyes dance around your damp cheeks. “Vanessa,” he says, clearer now.

“Vanessa?”

A nod. His nose wriggles with an awkward sniff. You push off from his chest.

“Who the hell is Vanessa?”

Joel lets you go; lets you step back. He watches as you brace yourself against the ledge. Runs a hand through his hair while he fixes the right order of words. He’s thinking. Carefully.

Too fucking carefully. He’s taking too long.

“Joel. Who’s Vanessa?”

“She’s…” He sighs. “She’s my ex. From Tommy’s wedding. Vanessa Hart.”

Your jaw slackens. The purple dress. The hair like silk, a halo around her head where the light kissed her perfectly. Her plump lips; the way her head tipped back to laugh. The amount of air you felt her take up the second you laid eyes on her, the second you saw her, arm on top of Joel’s.

“Vanessa,” you whisper, your eyes descending his frame. The memory feels menacing now: her sweet giggle a sneering cackle, and you’ve no idea why. The bulky jewels around her neck, her clawed fingers on his arm.

Joel’s hand sits inches from yours on the wooden sill. Alice is walking back inside.

“We, uh…we swapped numbers the morning after the wedding, at breakfast. I didn’t think much of it, but we’ve seen each other a couple times since.”

This isn’t the time for another it’s a date, it’s not a date argument. What the fuck does he mean by –

“Seen each other?”

“Mhm.” He owes you better than that. He reckons so, too. “Dates,” he clarifies. “We’ve been on a couple dates.”

“Oh.”

Your heart falls to the pit of your stomach. Plummets, dragging with it your breath and your nerve and any other words you can think of. Your chest gnaws at the edges of the cavity left behind. It hurts. It stings.

Though you’ve no right for it to hurt or sting: as far as you were concerned, as far as you think Joel was concerned, that night was a one-off. It meant as little as the alcohol draining from your glasses, the vacant buzz of love and hope loose in the air. Equally as intoxicating as each other.

Cataclysmic, for the first little while. So heavily awkward that you would wait to watch Joel head out in the morning, clear of your path, before you’d set off for work. It felt like the aftermath of some natural disaster – the cleanup of debris and mistake.

But oh, it feels like a punch to the gut. Low, unexpected; a foul move by someone who never meant to hurt or not hurt you. Someone ignorant to every move he made, right up to this moment.

Your arms wrap around your body again, as though tending to the bruise left by the sucker punch shaped something like that tall woman named Vanessa.

Joel scratches the back of his neck. “We were…we were seein’ about starting things up again. Me ‘n her.”

“Yeah,” you nod, “I got you. That’s – I mean, I’m – I’m sorry, Joel, I –”

“Woah, woah,” he’s stepping forward now, “hey, no. No way. This wasn’t you. Well, shoot – it kinda was you. But it was just as much me, right?”

You smile, your face back in the safe hold of his hands. Tears roll down your cheeks, collecting in the corners of your mouth. His thumbs swipe them away.

“This was just as much me,” he repeats, voice soft and soothing.

“But, you know – if you wanted to – just ‘cause I don’t want to get – so if you didn’t wanna have to – that’d be okay, you know that, right?”

His head snaps back, brows low. It’s the first time he looks like his cool has broken all morning. It’s the first time he looks…downright offended. “Are you kidding me?” he asks, and then, “Tell me you’re kidding.”

“I just – I know this ain’t ideal. It’s even worse if you’re tryna make it work with Vanessa. So if you felt like it was too much, then…”

Joel shakes his head. “Shut up,” he says, edged with some kind of groan. “Stop talking, right now. Stop. You gotta take a deep breath, alright? I’m here, ‘n I mean I’m here. We’re in this together. I am not running out on you.”

“Joel –”

What was a mere crack in his cool before, rips through it now like lightning spreading across the sky. He closes his eyes, a sigh escaping between his teeth. “If you think I would leave you right now, to deal with this on your own –”

“I don’t,” you tell him, his vexation powering your sudden animation. You wipe your tears away, shaking your head. “I’m just saying, it’s a fucking lot. I don’t want you to feel trapped. I’m giving you an out, man.”

“I am not interested in taking it. Enough. Conversation over.”

“And what about Vanessa?”

“What about her?” he asks, the question dripping in something akin to anger. He catches himself, draws it back in. “She’ll just – We’ll talk, I’ll explain it. The hell else can we do? One thing at a time, okay?”

“Right,” you nod, “okay. One thing at a time.”

“Let’s just build these damn wardrobes. I sure as hell didn’t lug all that timber over here to not do ‘em.”

“Okay,” you repeat, making for the door.

“Ah.” He clicks, and you turn back. “Where the hell do you think you’re goin’?”

“To get the timber.”

“I don’t think so,” he says, pointing to your bed. “Sit down. Relax. You ain’t getting a damn thing.”

Joel calls it a day at six o’clock.

The skeleton of the closet is up: a smooth, tan frame lining one wall of your room. Much bigger, much sturdier than its predecessor.

You’re in the same spot he left you in: lying across your bed, admiring his handiwork. He’s good at what he does. You told him twice, and the two of you almost heaved both times. Compliments aren’t something you’re used to handing one another.

He left, maybe, three hours ago. Said he had to shower; said he’d be back first thing to finish the job. You sat up to see him out, got struck by a wave of nausea so bad that you fell back to the bed with one hand on your stomach and the other over your lips, and Joel had insisted – demanded – that you stay where you were.

I’ll be back later to check on ya, he assured, setting a glass of water at your bedside. And then he told you to call him if you felt even remotely off – sick, or panicked, or had a tickle in your throat that you couldn’t clear – and that’s when the two of you realized that you don’t even have one another’s numbers.

And you laughed, the both of you; laughed at the absurdity of you carrying his child when you don’t even carry his contact details in your phone. Laughed at how quickly everything has turned one hundred and eighty degrees in the few hours since you woke up. It felt like some form of release, the only way to clear the blockage of tension in both your throats. So, you laughed, until you felt sick again, and Joel swept the hair from your shoulders to cool you down.

The attentiveness is…new. It’s interesting. It’s kind, in the same way that being told to say hi to whoever your grandma is talking to in the grocery store, is kind. Sweet, the same way that answering the door on Halloween to a bunch of kids you don’t know from a street you don’t recognize the name of, is sweet.

Whatever. It’s fucking weird, alright?

You’ve never seen this side of Joel. You didn’t know or even think, in your wildest dreams, that he existed. Let’s face it: you two have spent the entirety of your inhabitance next door to one another, antagonizing each other. Your favorite hobby has always been pissing Joel off – teasing him for having backache, seeing how far down his porch you can launch his newspaper and he’ll still go get it. Playing the same kind of music you heard him playing on his guitar that one time, full-volume from your kitchen window just to fuck with him.

And, likewise: his favorite hobby has always been…well, ignoring you. Doing everything he can not to engage. If it weren’t for that fucking cat lady and her jittery green Chevrolet, none of this would’ve ever happened. She was a catalyst where one was neither needed nor wanted. You would’ve gone about your life, pinning your underwear only slightly more carefully to your clothesline, and Joel would’ve gone about his, doing – whatever the fuck he does.

Sure, it’s weird. But it’s nice. It’s nice to have him on your side, turning to check on you rather than snap at you for something. Nice to have him talk – actual, rounded words in place of grumbles and mumbles and groans and sighs. Nice to hang out with him and watch him work and ask questions about screws and power tools and pretend to be interested just to distract from the weight of queasiness in your stomach.

Your hands trail down, cupping around your navel. Your stomach still feels like your stomach: still soft, still spongey under your touch. If not for the two more tests you’d taken this afternoon, perched on the bathroom counter waiting for Joel to unstick his gaze from his watch and announce, That’s three minutes – both also positive, by the way – you’d have no fucking clue.

You hold the bottom half of your tummy, fingers rubbing gently over the skin that will soon enough grow and swell and protect.

“Hey,” you whisper, staring at the stationary ceiling fan overhead. A pause. An awkward inhale. “…hey, little buddy. I don’t – know you very well, yet. I figure you can’t even fucking hear me, but whatever. Just wanted to say hi. I’m – Ew, no. I’m not Mom, yet. What the fuck. I don’t know who I am right now, so just…maybe go easy on me until I figure that part out. And after, too. Alright? Are we…we cool?

“You can’t tell me, I know. I just have to assume we’re cool. Okay. Well. Keep growin’. Keep…doing your thing. You’re doing great. We’re doing – we’re doing alright.

“Good job, kid. Good job.”

Joel tells Vanessa two days later. She takes it…about as well as you might hope.

He says they talked for four hours. Three cups of coffee and a drive to Taco Bell later, she agreed to meet you. Properly. Not across the cluttered dancefloor of Tommy’s wedding.

She –? Is – is that a good idea?

I don’t know, kid. It’s the best I’ve got.

Meet me? Like, come kick my ass for sleeping with her boyfriend?

Joel had sighed and deadened his eyes on yours. Not her boyfriend, he corrected, passing you a sweater folded a little slapdash for your liking, and wasn’t her boyfriend when we slept together.

You shook the sweater straight again and fixed his work, muttering to yourself that at least he’s a better builder than he is a folder.

Joel heard you, and let it go. Passed you another – unfolded – sweater to sit in your wardrobe. Let’s just see how it goes, alright?

Alright.

We’re really trying this again. It’s only been a couple weeks.

Okay.

And neither of us have had much luck in that department since we broke it off, y’know?

Joel. I said okay.

He held your gaze a moment too long. Okay.

You’re on your porch when he strolls over, wrist blocking the six o’clock sun from his eyes. Newspaper in his fist, wind licking the corners. “Forget somethin’ today?” he asks, meeting you at the top of the steps.

“Came out to get it,” you brace yourself on the railing, “felt sick. This is me workin’ up to it.”

“You want me to toss it back onto my lawn so you can go fetch me it?”

You smile, eyes screwing shut. “Was coming over to ask what time for tomorrow.”

The reminder snaps him from his happy daydream. He says, “I was comin’ to ask you the same thing. Seven work?”

“Seven’s good. Are we getting food?”

“You wanna get food? I figured maybe you wouldn’t be up for it, what with the, uh…” Joel gestures to your hunched position, your head low between your shoulders, your deep, deliberate breaths.

“Maybe just drinks,” you utter, gulping back the sharp taste of bile.

He nods. “Drinks it is. You okay? You need anything?”

“I’m good. Thanks. See you guys at seven.”

Four minutes early, there’s a knock at your door. You pull it open, and there they are. Picture-perfect, like they might be posing for a holiday card. A bottle in his arm, a bunch of flowers in hers. A timid but genial smile between her cheeks, a twinkle in her eye. That same circle of shining light around her head, brunette tresses curled into bouncing waves.

“Howdy,” Joel says, stepping into the space you create. He dips his head, kisses your cheek, whispers a brief, Y’okay? in your ear. You nod quickly, gently shifting him out of the way.

Vanessa lingers for a moment in the doorway. She glances from Joel to you again, blinking in the porch light. Her pale skin lit in an ethereal glow. She’s prettier up close.

Joel addresses you, hand brushing the small of your back, “…this is Vanessa.”

“Hi,” she says, and pushes the flowers towards you – a small bouquet of gypsophila and eucalyptus. Bright, polite. Each sprig laden with the burden of appearing simpatico, but important. Meaningful, in the airiest sense of the word. “Hi,” again.

“Hi,” you echo, and then feel stupid for having nothing more to offer. You can feel Joel’s eyes on you, hot on your shoulder.

But Vanessa takes the weight from your chest. “It’s nice to meet you – officially. I saw you at Tommy and Maria’s wedding. You looked so beautiful.”

“Thanks,” springs from your tongue sooner than the rest of the sentence. Your brain scrams to find more words. “You looked – you looked great, too. Do you wanna –? I mean – Sorry. Come in. Obviously.”

She clicks over the threshold, her pale dress floating into your hallway like she’s part of a dream. She’s just as beautiful in this light, relaxed form – pastel blue and the glimmer of golden jewelry – as she was in the sleeker, more dramatic form you saw her in before. An aura about her which captures and tends to your attention. Intense, captivating, but not intimidating.

You usher them to the living room, offer them a space on the couch while you take Vanessa’s flowers to the kitchen. Joel follows you through, sets the bottle on the counter.

“Nonalcoholic,” he says, unscrewing the cap.

Your eyebrows jump. “Great. Thanks.”

“She’s nervous,” he murmurs, leaning in. “I know you are, too. Y’all are similar like that.”

You slot the stems into a vase of water one by one, carefully organizing a display. “She seems sweet,” you assure him. “She shouldn’t be nervous.”

“Neither should you.”

“Is this…totally weird for you?”

Joel breathes in deep, filling three glasses. “Yeah,” he says, eyes never lifting from the sparkling peach.

“Sorry.”

He angles his jaw. “Stop sayin’ you're sorry. I’ll kick your ass.”

Your head drops between your shoulders, eyes lifting only to his elbows. “Sorry.”

He scoffs, swiping the glasses and stepping back to let you out first.

“I’m trying not to make it weird,” you offer, slipping by.

“I don’t want you to try anything.” He kicks your ankle lightly and follows you back into the living room.

Vanessa sits forward and clasps her hands around her knee when you sit back down, shifting as though to reach for you before she stops herself. “How are you feeling? Joel said you’re a little…worse for wear, right now.”

“I’ve been better,” you say, smiling. “Just morning sickness. Which lasts – all day.”

She nods sympathetically. “My sister had it rough with her first. I actually…” She twists around, reaches for her purse, fishes out an orange packet. “I brought you some ginger tea. Kate told me it helped her a lot, so.”

She holds it out in almost trembling fingers. Likewise, you steady yours to take it from her, thanking her with a shy nod of the head. “That’s so kind,” you reply quietly, eyes darting to Joel. He’s staring at the pack in your hands, watching as you turn it over to read the back.

“And – listen,” Vanessa continues, the acceptance of her offering clearly fueling her assuredness, “I don’t want anything to be weird – between you and I, between you and Joel. I know this situation is…new. It’s, um…”

“It’s kinda weird,” you say, humoring. “It’s okay. I know.”

She breathes a relieved laugh. “It is. Thank God you said it.” She glances back at Joel, who smiles at her, slips his hand onto her knee. “But I guess,” a deep breath, “I guess it is what it is. And we’re all adults, you know? We can make it work, right?”

Your head switches rapidly between nodding enthusiastically and shaking enthusiastically. “Yeah. Yes. No, absolutely. And, you know, me and Joel – there isn’t – we’re not at all…”

“Oh,” she bats the idea away, “I know. I know that. He told me everything. It’s – You know, it’s just a timing thing.”

Joel’s staring down at his hand locked around her leg. Unblinking. Unmoving. His expression doesn’t shift until the two of you settle back into your seats; until Vanessa asks if he’d mind making you a cup of ginger tea.

You barely notice his absence, the way she takes you up in conversation. Like twirling you off in some kind of dance, each sentence strung safely to the next. There are no lulls, no awkward pauses. She asks about work, asks about your family. She tells you stories about her niece, who’s three now, and compares how you’re feeling to how she remembers her sister feeling.

Then her work, and the IT guy her friend hooked up with, and her class at the gym which she’s trying to convince Joel to come along to, and Kate’s hot yoga class every Thursday night, and the new sushi place which just opened downtown and You gotta try it some day; the nigiri is divine.

And you nod along, and you laugh at her anecdotes and tell your own, and Joel tells her to tell you about the jazz band who were playing at the restaurant they visited a couple weeks ago, and you offer to top her drink up and she says she’ll do it herself and she leaves you and Joel alone for the first time all evening, and – it’s weird.

Because – behind the veil of conversation you’re doing your best to uphold, sits an image of this very night – only, in Joel’s house. In Joel’s house, on Joel’s couch, drinking nonalcoholic wine with Joel’s brother. Joel and Vanessa leant against one another on one couch, Tommy and Maria on the other.

You can’t help it – you’re wondering what Maria thinks of Vanessa. How long they knew each other, if at all, before the breakup. Whether they hung out, whether they discussed sushi and yoga, or the housing market, or their Miller boyfriends and their annoying Miller habits.

Maria would’ve liked her, you think. Would’ve found her as lovely as you do. And the idea, the image of them giggling together at family parties and being Tommy’s Maria and Joel’s Vanessa – presses a firm, bullying finger into the bruise you thought had faded some from the other day.

And once they’re gone, once you’re left alone again – lying in still silence, closed in on yourself by the thick darkness of your room, nothing but you and your thoughts and your unborn child for company – it slips out.

“Fuck her, right?” You hold your hands out, addressing your stomach. “She was so fucking nice. Did you like her? Fuck me, I liked her. I hope they break up.”

And then, realizing who you’re talking to: “No. Sorry, baby, no. I don’t hope they break up. I want your dad to be really happy. But – Goddamn. She was so sweet. I thought she was gonna slap me, and she just – she brought ginger tea! Fuck. They look good together, don’t they?”

It’s just hormones. Just the emotional trip that is being four weeks pregnant. Everybody feels like this when they fall pregnant – sensitive, vulnerable, clingy. Right? Right?

Your words sit stagnant in midair. You swear you can see them, heavy and intruding. Awkwardly lingering someplace they don’t belong. Because none of it even matters – the hormones, the emotions. The weird knot burning a hole in your chest, shaped like a clenched fist, knuckles branded by the heat of longing. It can’t matter.

You’re where you are, he’s where he is. A pillow in your arm, Vanessa in his. Feet apart, bricks and mortar and something like twenty years and two dates too late separating you.

Both staring up at the ceiling, wondering who the other’s thinking of.

“At eight weeks, your baby is roughly the size of a raspberry.”

Your knee bounces, breath coming and going in shaky ripples. The rubber sole of your shoe cries against the sterilized hospital floor. Your chest hums anxiously and your throat catches when you swallow and are the lights too bright? The room too hot? You’re sweating. Why are you sweating? Can you breathe right now?

Joel nudges your arm and your eyes roll to the pamphlet in his hand, his finger tracing the words. “C’mon,” he utters, leaning in, “how can anything the size of a raspberry be scary?”

You squint under fluorescent white. “A raspberry that grows into the size of a watermelon, can break my ribs, make me throw up, make me lose hair, and then tear my vagina apart on its way out? That’s pretty scary.”

He smirks. “Not to me it ain’t. My vagina stays perfectly intact the entire time.”

“Oh, fuck off,” you reply, whacking him.

He laughs, swatting your palm away, keeping ahold of your fingers inside his own. “Speaking of – we gotta talk.” He elbows you, waiting until you’re looking again to speak. “We gotta cut the language.”

“Cut the language?”

“Uhuh. Rein it in. And by we, I mean you.”

“Uh,” you scoff, “I don’t think so. When you do the growing, then you can rein your own swearing in. Leave me alone, asshole.”

“Charming,” Joel says. “You know the baby can hear you? You want it to come out swearin’ like a trooper?”

You grin, tipping your head to him. “If it comes out and says anything, we’re rich. So – yeah. Let it.”

He opens his mouth to reply when a nurse emerges from a nearby room and calls your name.

“You’re up, kid,” Joel says, standing beside you.

You turn back, speaking before your brain settles on words. “I’m scared.”

“Hey,” he says, taking your hand. He squeezes it gently, uses the other to keep you facing him. “This is the easy part, right? We’re just going to meet them.”

“Oh, fuck,” you breathe, and wander over to meet the nurse. Joel’s hand a vice grip around yours.

She leads you into a similarly washed-out clinic room, only slightly dimmer with the lights turned out, and yanks a roll of paper across the bed. Tapping it twice, she smiles. “Hop up, darlin’.”

You settle into the crinkly paper, leaning back until you’re blinking up at the speckled ceiling. Another door opens and a woman in a white coat floats in, and you swear that if it weren’t for Joel’s Evenin’, ma’am when she greets the two of you, you’d believe she were a figment of your imagination. Another character in this fucking insane dream.

“Not often I do these past five o’clock,” she says, clicking her mouse and typing on her keyboard and fixing a hair grip back into her bun. Casual. It’s not even a thing to her, introducing parents and children. She does this all fucking day.

Joel tosses half a glance to you and then realizes you’re not currently in the room. He pinches your hand again. It grounds you for all of two seconds.

“Yeah, uh,” he clears his throat, “work commitment. I couldn’t get away any earlier, so we’re havin’ to do this a little late.”

“What do you do?” she asks, staring at her screen. Her glossy brown eyes and rich, dark skin.

“I’m a contractor,” Joel replies, thumb stroking your shoulder.

Something bubbles in your stomach, something akin to jealousy, an urgency to tell her that right now, in this room, he’s mine. No more questions. Something which quickly dissipates when you remind yourself to quit being fucking ridiculous and that right now, in this room, he’s someone else’s, and the thumb on your shoulder is merely to hold you back from fleeing. Nothing more.

The sonographer nods. Her name badge reads Freya. Pretty name. Stop picturing what your kid would look like as a Freya. You are not naming them after the first sonographer you meet.

“Shouldn’t be too long, then y’all can get home for the night. You live nearby?”

“Twenty minutes’ drive. Not far, are we?” Joel asks you.

Your eyes shoot down to his. “No,” you push your cheeks up, telling Freya, “not far.”

She flattens her lips against one another, lending you a sympathetic smile. “You got nothing to worry about, honey. Promise. Gel might be a little cold, that’s about as scary as this gets. We’re just gonna make sure everything’s looking good, check your dates, check your measurements. You’re doing great.”

“You hear that?” Joel murmurs, settling down into the chair by your side. His hand hasn’t left yours. His voice is low, meant just for you, when he repeats, “You’re doin’ great.”

You huff a laugh, some nervous release from your lungs.

Freya smiles, face lit by the faint glow of the screen in front of her. “We ready?”

You roll the hem of your tee up when she motions, bunching it under the wire of your bra. She squeezes a bottle over your stomach, which tenses solid when the frozen bite of gel curls right below your belly button. Freya smiles apologetically when you wince. Told you, she murmurs, and your breath escapes in a slightly more comfortable laugh. Lighter, easier. Scariest part over.

She presses the probe to your skin and spreads the gel, coating the bottom of your tummy in a slippery slick which tickles with each inch she covers. Two buttons pressed, and a dark image appears on a screen opposite you.

A gray fan, speckled like the ceiling above your head. Dark, black shapes growing and shrinking at the turn of Freya’s wrist. She pauses, two blobs onscreen: the larger, black, round, home to a smaller, misshapen one. Flecked with white and silver and moving slowly, gently, but – right there.

“Mom, Dad,” she grins, “meet your baby.”

You and Joel move forward at the same time, drawn closer to the crunchy image as if by some kind of natural magnetism. Eyes never blinking, lips agape. The shapes flutter, the smaller dipping in and out of view.

“You see right here, right in the center?” A white cross appears over the blob’s middle. “That little movement? The kinda – pulsing?”

You each nod. Your nails dig so deep into Joel’s hand that you risk drawing blood.

“That’s the heart. Ticking away.”

“The heart?” you ask, watching the rhythmic flicker in the center of the screen.

“Yep. Perfect, too.”

She hits another key and suddenly the room is filled with a muffled thudding; a steady, energetic pulse in your ears. It matches the movements onscreen, the tiny throb of the baby’s chest, the shape of your womb moving like waves before you.

And suddenly, it's real – all of it: the screen and the room and the sonographer and you, and Joel’s hand encasing yours, holding your knuckles to his lips, and –

And the heartbeat. Right there, right in front of you. Shy, probably as nervous as you are to introduce themselves. Feeling your eyes on them, curled up somewhere safe inside you. Right there.

You turn to Joel, and his illuminated face is staring straight at the screen. Eyes soaked with tears, blinking as they form, cheeks dappled with wet. He draws his eyes from his child only to look back at you, only to mirror your stunned smile, your disbelieving laugh, more tears dripping down into his beard. He sits up, presses his damp lips firmly to your forehead.

Freya mutes the heartbeat, pauses the scan where the image is clearest, and sits back. “I’ll give you guys a moment to yourselves,” she says, wheeling back in her chair. “Take all the time you need. I’m right outside.”

“Thanks,” Joel mumbles for the both of you, sweeping hair from your face.

The door closes on your little bubble – you, Joel, and the grainy image of your baby. The evidence that – yeah, that night happened, and yeah, you’re forever changed because of it. The evidence that you’re about to become a mom, for real, no matter how much the thought makes you feel like your stomach is kicking around at your ankles.

And the evidence that, no matter how scared you might be, how unprepared and unworthy you feel – you fucking adore that little blob already.

Love it as much as Joel does, stood over you, kissing your hair and whispering words you’re only half-listening to. A quiet thank you, a shaky I can’t believe it. Something about showing his brother. And when you look up at him, blinking at one another, inches apart – he takes your jaw in his hands and lowers his lips to yours.

Different. Softer. No want laced through. No urgency. Nothing needed, nor requested, that isn’t already right here in this little bubble of yours.

He kisses you slowly, eyes closed, holding you until you pull away for breath. His nose bumps against yours and you laugh, heads together, eyes low.

“Still scared?” he whispers.

“Terrified,” you tell him.

“Me, too,” he says, and kisses you again.

You lean back against the bed, relief settling your bones and soothing your heartbeat. The notion washes over you that, if you could, you’d stay in this room forever. Staring at the screen, holding Joel’s hand. Whispering fears into his mouth and letting him swallow them in a kiss.

He hands you some paper towel and helps you drag it across your stomach, your eyes still fixed on the little shape opposite. He hooks his chin over your head – the fresh, woody smell of his cologne infiltrating your lungs and throwing you under the haze of something you’re not quite sure how to define.

“Duck,” he says, voice vibrating into your skull.

“Huh?”

“Start saying duck. Make the baby think we’re saying that, then you can say –” he lowers his voice, “– fuck, all you want.”

“The hell would I have to say duck for?”

Joel stands upright and shrugs. “I don’t know. Think of somethin’. A nickname, maybe.”

“Duck?”

He nods plainly, glancing over to the screen.

The pillow beneath your head sighs as you turn from Joel back to the ultrasound. “Baby Duck,” you offer, and he smiles.

Smiles in a way you don’t think you’ve ever seen him smile. Eyes glistening, cheeks swollen. Something innocent and earnest about it. Something pure.

He agrees. “Baby Duck it is.”

Joel insists that you spend the night at his place.

“It’s been a big day,” he reasons, fixing the bed in his guestroom. “Just – let me run around after you for a little bit.”

You fight your corner as much as you can be bothered – I gotta maintain my independence, I’m gonna be a single mom soon enough, you know – but, truthfully, you’ll take any excuse to have him rush around at your beck and call. Some days you open your mouth and he hears the wet click of saliva between your lips, and grabs a glass of water for you before you’ve even voiced the request.

He orders takeout, settles shoulder-to-shoulder with you on the couch, and lets you pick whichever movie you feel like putting him through until the food’s gone, he’s out of beer, and you’ve abandoned Heath Ledger and Julia Stiles for an argument about the best part of pizza.

You don’t like the crust?

Nope.

What fuckin’ age are you?

If it ain’t stuffed, it’s just not worth it.

At eleven, you bid him goodnight and wander upstairs, falling into a sea of navy-blue sheets to be delivered to sleep by the serene silence of Joel’s home. It takes no time for your eyes to flutter closed, the soft sheen of moonlight painted across the wall, sweeping from your view to be replaced in a whir by –

Lights. Overhead and all around and so bright and so close that you swear they’re etched on the inside of your eyelids.

You’re in the backseat, watching them soar by in blurs of white and red and amber and green, and your pulse is rattling through your veins and throbbing between your temples and you can’t focus on any one object for longer than three seconds, before your eyes roll and your head dizzies.

A word, slung from your lips in a half-wakened attempt to stop it. A word you barely recognize at first, don’t understand the meaning of. It’s been years. Why now? Mom.

You’re not sure why, or who you’re even reaching out to. There are two figures in the front seats, heads facing forward. She’s not turning around. She’s not even fucking moving, not reacting to the speed or the lights or your voice. Mom.

You scream it, the syllable ripping violently from your throat, and your tiny fingers reach for her swirls of hair. You pause, staring at the chipped polish on your stubby, kiddy nails. Mom, I’m scared.

The distorted blast of a horn scoops the car up in one motion, hurtling over itself along the freeway. You’re thrown to the roof of the car, plummet back down to your seat; the seatbelt throttles you, rips a burn deep into the skin of your neck. Back up again; your head hits the spongey roof of the car. Your stomach somersaults.

Mom, please, you wail, swiping for her hand. It’s lying limp by her thigh, dark droplets on her wrist. Mom Mom please Mom I’m scared Mom please I’m so scared I –

“Baby.”

His voice is low, earthy. It chews apart the high-pitched squeal of brakes and screaming. The glass smashing. The metal crunching.

You lift from the bed like it’s ice water, gasping when you finally surface back on Earth. Your chest heaves, it’s not sucking in enough breath; you can’t breathe you can’t breathe you can’t fucking breathe.

Joel whips the cover from your legs and you roll from the mattress, feet planting on the floor. You bend forward to grip onto the sheets, a choking rising up your throat, closer and closer until it tugs on your tongue.

“Icantbreathe,” you pant.

Joel’s body curves around yours. “You’re alright,” he’s telling you – urging you; one hand between your shoulder blades, the other holding your wrist for fear you might collapse. “I’m here, you’re okay. You’re at my place, you’re safe, but, kid – I need you to slow down. You’re hyperventilating.”

You work your breathing to the strokes of his hand up and down your spine: in out in out in and out and in and out and in, and out, and in, and…out…and in…and…out.

“That’s it. Keep doing that. You’re good, baby, I got you. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

In – and out. In – and out again.

The room slowly desaturates back into boring, moonlit blue. Feeling sputters back into your hands, clawing at the sheets once the sharpness dissolves. The cotton pets back, smooth under your quivering touch. Your lips stop tingling, your ears stop ringing. One after another, until your blood settles back to a steady stream and you straighten up.

“Can you sit down for me?”

“No,” you whimper, and Joel nods.

“That’s alright,” he says. “I’m gonna get you a drink, that okay?”

You grab his T-shirt. “No. Don’t leave me. Please. Sorry.”

He cups your frozen cheeks. “I ain’t goin’ anywhere. Just downstairs. You can come.”

He settles you at his kitchen table and shuffles over to the cupboards, rubbing his eyes. You feel the heat of embarrassment and guilt, watching as he settles down with a groan minutes later.

“Ginger,” he tells you, voice rounded by his mug, sliding one of your own over to you.

“Sorry,” you mumble, lifting it with two hands. The smell sharp, cutting up the remnants of gasoline and smoke.

“Many times do I gotta say it?” he asks dryly. “Quit sayin’ you’re sorry.”

You gulp nervously. “You got work in the morning. You’re gonna be exhausted.”

“And if I hadn’t let you keep me up watchin’ chick flicks, I’d be rested. That’s something I can deal with later. I got you to worry about right now.”

You shake your head; the ceramic hits the table with a sharp thud. “I don’t want you to worry about me.”

“Well,” Joel sniffs, “you’re carrying my child. I’ll always worry about you.”

You sit back, the curve of the chair cradling, your heart beating lamely against the wood. Joel’s jaw rests in the cushion of his palm, staring back at you.

“What time is it?” you ask, and he glances over his shoulder.

“Three. Take a sip.”

“I’m fine.”

“Sip.”

You obey, lifting the tea and swallowing harshly.

He watches every move, every shift reflected in his dark eyes, decorated by a tense, stony expression. “Does this happen a lot?”

“Never,” you say. “This never happens.”

Joel cranes his jaw, cracks his neck. “Alright,” he sighs, “that’s okay. Breathe again. You’re doing fine.”

But you don’t feel fine. The dregs of panic sizzle into something thicker, hotter. Anger. Frustration. “Why the fuck is this happening?” you hiss, fingers prodding into your eye sockets. “What the f–?”

“Easy. I don’t know. Hormones? Stress?”

“You sound like my fucking doctor.”

Joel smiles. Amusement, before concern wipes over it again. “Let’s just give it some time to pass, okay?”

You nod, hanging over your drink, the silhouette of your reflection staring back at you. The steam snakes up, seeping into your skin, bubbling under the surface. Wiping clean any memory of freeway or nail polish, like coating over a bathroom mirror. The shapes still visible behind, but blurred. Gone.

“How’s Vanessa?” you ask, an attempt to distract yourself.

Joel adjusts a little awkwardly in his chair. “She’s good. She loved the scan photo. Showed it to her sister. They’re sure it’s a boy.”

“Ha. Joel Jr.”

“Joel Jr.,” he agrees, and then attempts to distract himself. “So,” he says, “Allandale.”

“Mhm?”

“Wonder if I ever saw your mom or dad. When I was there visitin’ Sam.”

You shrug. “Doubt it. I mean, they always lived right next to the elementary school, if that helps. My mom was a first-grade teacher. The two of us used to walk there ‘n back together, every day.”

“First grade, huh? Best one.”

“Yeah. Yeah, and she was the best of the best. She used to go all out for her kids; used to go to Michaels and get all this crafty stuff so they could spend all afternoon making little houses or zoos, or – whatever she could think of. And she’d always keep some aside, bring some home for me to make one, too. One time, she came home with all this blue tissue paper and little foam fish, and we made an aquarium together.”

“That’s pretty cool,” Joel says.

“Yeah,” you say again, nodding eagerly. “She was so cool. And fun, y’know? I just remember her being so much fun. I always felt safe with her, felt loved. I actually used to think she hung the sun every morning, just for me.” You take a deep breath, replacing it with a broken sigh.

“What about your dad? What was he like?”

You frown. “He was…fine. Real quiet, reserved. A little grumpy, I guess. I always got the idea he couldn’t be bothered with me, young as I was. Always wanted to be left alone. I think my mom overcompensated a lot.”

Something flashes across Joel’s face that seems to say he knows – or, at least, he understands. Almost imperceptible, a quick flicker of annoyance. “You miss her?” he asks, switching back.

“My mom?” You almost laugh, gripping onto your mug. Staring at the slow swirl of ginger. A shrug which presents more like a flinch; an animal swatting a fly away. “I miss those parts, when I think of them. The aquarium, the walking to school. Miss the memories. But I don’t think I knew her well enough or long enough to miss her.

“I’ve lived way longer without her than I ever had her. Done everything without her, like –” gesturing down, “– this. But, sometimes…sometimes, I bundle the sheets up behind my back in bed, and I pretend it’s her. Pretend I have a mom, and she’s cuddling me to sleep. I dunno. Maybe that’s what missing her feels like.”

Joel soaks in every word you say, letting the shape of each one settle on the table between you before he speaks again. Letting them be spoken into the dead of night, collected by no one, and letting them fade into silence. Secrets sweeping off into starlight. Nothing you would admit in the daytime.

“What was her name?” he asks, voice timid and gentle in the dark kitchen.

You almost choke on your tea. “Shoot – I’m sorry. That was a lot. Sorry. She, uh – Her name?”

It brings the first genuine smile to your lips; the memory of your mom now clear behind your eyes. Her round cheeks, her fluttering earrings. The deep, dark curls of her hair, thick ringlets twisting and lighting in the sun. The gap between her front teeth, the purse of her lips as she kissed your cheeks, your hands, your tummy.

Her name like a melody in your head; a safe word, a calming mantra when the world becomes too noisy, too saturated, too sharp to bear. Two syllables. Two little beats, like a piece of her still lives in the sound of her name.

“Sarah,” you tell Joel. “Her name was Sarah.”

[finnbbl]

Stray Kids Reaction To Seeing Your S/H Scars - SMAU/Fake Texts (Hyung Line)

- Prompt: Stray Kids see your self inflicted scars and confront you about it - Hyung Line | Maknae Line

- Genre: Comfort/Angst/Fluff

- Gender Neutral Reader

A/N: This topic can be heavily triggering for some people. Proceed with this heavy warning. This was solely made for comfort and just know you’re not alone in whatever you’re going through. My dm’s will always be open to talk <3

Masterlist

MAJOR TW

Warnings: mention of s/h (obviously) blood, razors, fresh scars. Let me know if I missed anything

Please read disclaimer in masterlist

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Zuck’s gravity-defying metaverse money-pit

Tomorrow (Oct 31) at 10hPT, the Internet Archive is livestreaming my presentation on my recent book, The Internet Con.

Think of everything that makes you miserable as being caught between two opposing, irresistible, irrefutable truths:

"Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops" (Stein's Law)

"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" (Keynes)

Both of these are true, even though they seemingly contradict one another, and no one embodies that contradiction more perfectly than Mark Zuckerberg.

Take the metaverse.

Zuck's "pivot" to a virtual world he ripped off from a quarter-century old cyberpunk novel (reminder: cyberpunk is a warning, not a suggestion) was born of desperation.

Zuck fancies himself an avatar of the Emperor Augustus (that's why he has that haircut) (no, really). The emperors of antiquity are infamous for getting all weepy when they run out of lands to conquer.

But the lachrymosity of emperors has little causal relationship to the anxieties of tech monopolists! Alexander weeps because he just loves a good conquest and when he finishes conquering the world, he's terminally bored. That's not Zuck's problem at all. When Zuck attains monopoly status, his company develops an autoimmune disorder, as his vicious princelings run out of enemies to destroy and begin to knife one another.

Any monopoly faces these destructive microincentives, but tech is exceptional here because tech has the realtime flexibility and speed that brick-and-mortar businesses can never match:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

Sociopaths with tech monopolies are worse for the same reason that road-rage would be worse in a flying car: adding new capacity to indiscriminate self-destructive urges turns ordinary car crashes into low-level airburst warfare:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

The flexibility of digital gives tech platforms so much latitude to break things in tiny increments. A tech platform is like a Jenga tower composed of infinitely divisible blocks. The Jenga players are the product managers and executives who have run out of the ability to grow by attracting new business thanks to their monopoly dominance. Now they compete with one another to increase the yield from their respective divisions by visiting pain upon the business customers and end users their platform connects. By tiny increments, they increase the product's cost, lower its reliability, and strip it of its utility and then charge rent to restore its functionality:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/24/cursed-bigness/#incentives-matter

This is the terminal stage of enshittification, the unstoppable autocannibalism of platforms as they seek to harvest all the value created by business customers and end users, leaving the absolute minimum of residual value needed to keep both stuck to the platform. This is a brittle equilibrium, because the difference between "I hate this service but I just can't stop using it," and "Get me the fuck out of here" is razor-thin.

All it takes is one tiny push – a whistleblower, a livestreamed mass-shooting, a Cambridge Analytica – and people bolt for the doors. This triggers the final stage: the "pivot," which is a tech euphemism for "panic."

For Zuck, the pivot got real after a disappointing earnings call triggered a mass sell-off of Facebook stock, history's worst one-day value incineration, which lopped a quarter of a trillion dollars off the company's market cap:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-19/dramatic-stock-moves-of-2022-led-by-meta-dive-nordic-flash-crash

This was when the metaverse became the company's top priority.

Now, in my theory of enshittification, the step that follows the pivot is death: "Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Many people have asked me about the conspicuous non-death of Facebook! That's where I have to fall back on Stein's Law: "Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." Facebook can't continue to annihilate value, alienate its workers, harm the public, hemorrhage money in support of a mediocrity's cherished folly forever. Can it?

Admittedly, it sure seems like it can. Facebook's metaverse pivot has thus far cost the company $46,500,000,000. That is: $46.5 billion. That's even more money than Uber torched, seeking to maintain the illusion that they will be able to create monopolies on both transport and the labor market for driving and recoup the billions the Saudi royal family let them use for the con:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/11/bezzlers-gonna-bezzle/#gryft

Don't worry: the Saudi royals are fine! They cashed out at the IPO, collecting a tidy profit at the expense of retail investors who assumed that a pile of shit as big as Uber must have a pony under it, somewhere:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/19/fake-it-till-you-make-it/#millennial-lifestyle-subsidy

Uber has doubled the cost of rides and halved drivers' wages, using illegal gimmicks like "algorithmic wage discrimination" to squeeze a little more juice out of the nearly exhausted husks of its workforce:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

But Stein's Law hasn't been repealed. Drivers can't drive for sub-subsistence wages. Do that long enough and they'll literally starve: that's what "subsistence" means. We lost a decade of transit investment thanks to the Uber con, at the same time as traditional taxi drivers were forced out of the industry. Uber can't be profitable and still pay a living wage, and the fantasy of self-driving cars as a means of zeroing out the wage-bill altogether remains stubbornly, lethally unworkable:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

Which means we're at the point where you can get off a commuter train at a main station and find yourself stranded: no taxis at the taxi-queue, no busses due for an hour, and no Uber cars available unless you're willing to pay $95 for a ten-minute ride in a luxury SUV (why yes, this did happen to me recently, thanks for asking).

As more and more of us are exposed to these micro-crises, the political will to do something will increase. This can't go on forever. "Don't use commuter rail" isn't a viable option. "Walk three miles each way to the commuter rail station" isn't viable either. Neither is "Pay $95 for an Uber to get to the station." Something's gotta give…eventually.

"Eventually" is the key word here. Remember the corollary of Stein's Law: Keynes's maxim that "markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." Sure, anything that can't go on forever eventually stops, but that is no guarantee of a soft landing. You can't smoke two packs a day forever – but in the absence of smoking cessation, the eventual terminus of that habit is stage-four lung cancer. Keep hammering butts into your face and your last smoke will come out a crematorium chimney.

Zuckerberg hasn't merely blown a whole-ass Twitter on the metaverse with nothing to show for it – he's gotten richer while doing it! In the past year, his net worth increased by 130%, to $59 billion, thanks to an increase in Facebook's share-price, driven by investors who stubbornly remain irrational, keeping the Boy Emperor solvent long past any reasonable assessment of his performance.

What are these investors betting on? One possibility is that the rise and rise of Facebook's share-price represents a bet on technofeudalism. Since the Communist Manifesto, Marxists have been predicting the end of capitalism. That end seems to have come, but what followed capitalism wasn't socialism, it was the return of feudalism, an economic system where elites derive their wealth from rents, not profits:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

Profit is the income you get from investing in capital – machinery, systems, plant – and then harvesting the surplus value created by workers who mobilize this capital. Capitalism produces massive returns for its winners – in the Manifesto's first chapter, Marx and Engels just geek out about how productive and dynamic this system is.

But capitalism is also a Red Queen's Race, where the winners have to run faster and faster to stay in the same place. Capitalism drives competition, as other would-be winners pile into the sector, replicating the systems that the current winners are using and then improving on them. This is why the prophets of capitalist end-times like the FBI informant Peter Thiel say that "competition is for losers."

Capitalism's "profits" stand in contrast to the feudalist's "rents." Rents are income you get from owning something that other people need to produce things. The capitalist owns the coffee-shop, but the feudalist owns the building. When a rival capitalist opens a superior coffee-shop and drives the old shop out of business, the capitalist loses, but the rentier wins. Now they can rent out an empty storefront in the neighborhood everyone's coming to because of that hot new cafe.

Feudal and manorial lords also made their fortunes by extracting surplus value from workers, but these rentiers don't care about owning the means of production. The peasant in the field pays for their own agricultural equipment and livestock – control over the means of production is necessary for worker liberation, but it's not sufficient. The worker's co-op that owns its factory can still find the value it produces bled off by the landlord who owns the land the factory sits on.

The jury's still out on whether American workers really see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires," but America's capitalists have a palpable, undeniable loathing for capitalism. The dream of an American "entrepreneur" is *PassiveIncome: money you get from owning something capitalists and/or workers use to create value. Digital technology creates exciting new possibilities for rent-extraction: a taxi-operator had to buy and maintain a car that someone else drove. Uber can offload this hassle onto its drivers and rent out access to the chokepoint it created between drivers and riders, charging all the traffic can bear. This is feudalism in the cloud – or as Yannis Varoufakis calls it, cloudalism.

In Varoufakis's Technofeudalism, he describes Amazon as a feudal venture. From a distance, Amazon seems like a bustling marketplace of manic capitalism, with sellers avidly competing to offer more variety and lower costs in a million independently operated storefronts. But closer inspection reveals that Amazon is a planned economy, not a market.

Every one of those storefronts pays rent to the same landlord – Amazon – which determines which goods can be offered for sale. Amazon sets pricing for those goods, and extracts 45-51% of every dollar those sellers make. Amazon even controls which goods are shelved at eye-height when you enter the store, and which ones are banished to a dusty storeroom in a distant sub-basement you'll never find:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/14/flywheel-shyster-and-flywheel/#unfulfilled-by-amazon

Zuck's metaverse is pure-play technofeudalism, Amazon taken to the logical extreme. It's easy to get distracted by the part of Zuck's vision that will convert us all into legless, sexless, heavily surveilled low-resolution cartoon characters. But the real action isn't this digitization of our fleshy wants and needs. Zuck didn't spend $46.5B to torment us.

The cruelty isn't the point of the metaverse.

The point of the metaverse is to rent us out to capitalists.

Zuck doesn't know why we would use the metaverse, but he believes that if he can convince capitalists that we all want to live there, that they'll invest the capital to figure out how to serve us there, and then he can extract rent from those capitalists and start earning "passive income." It's an Uber for Cyberpunk Dystopias play.

Zuck's done this before. Remember the "pivot to video?" Zuckerberg wanted to compete with Youtube, but he didn't want to invest in paying for video production. Videos are really expensive to produce and the median video gets zero views. So Zuck used his captive audience to trick publishers into financing his move into video. He fraudulently told publishers that videos were blowing up on Facebook, outperforming boring old text by vast margins.

Publishers borrowed billions and raised billions more in the capital markets, financing the total conversion of newsrooms from text to video and precipitating a mass extinction event for print journalists. Zuck kept the con alive by giving away (fewer) billions to some of those publishers, falsely claiming that their videos were generating fortunes in advertising revenue. These lucky, credulous publishers became judas goats for their industry, luring others into the con, the same way that the "lucky" guy a carny lets win a giant teddy-bear at the start of the day lures others into putting down $5 to see if they can sink three balls in a rigged peach-basket.

But when we stubbornly refused to watch videos on Facebook, Zuck stopped spreading around these convincer payouts, and precipitated a second mass-extinction event in news media, as the new generation of video journalists joined their predecessors in Facebook-driven unemployment. Given this history, it's surreal to see publishers continue to insist that Facebook is stealing their content, when it is so clearly stealing their money:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech

Metaverse is the new Pivot to Video. Zuckerberg is building a new world, which he will own, and he wants rent it to capitalists, who will compete with one another in just the way that Amazon's sellers compete. No matter who wins that competition, Zuckerberg will win. The prize for winning will be a rent increase, as Zuckerberg leverages the fact that your "successful" business relies on Facebook's metaverse to drain off all the value your workers have produced:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/18/metaverse-means-pivot-to-video/

This can't last forever, but how long until Zuck's reality distortion field runs out of battery? That's the $46.5B question.

The market can certainly remain irrational for a hell of a long time. But the market isn't the only force that regulates corporate outcomes. Regulators also regulate. Europe's GDPR is now seven years old, and it plainly outlaws Facebook's surveillance.

For nearly a decade, Facebook has pretended that this wasn't true, and they got away with it. Mostly, that's thanks to the fact that Ireland is a corporate crime-haven with a worse-than-useless Data Protection Commission:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town

But anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. Facebook has finally been dragged into EU federal jurisdiction, where it will face exterminatory fines if it continues to spy on Europeans:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/07/luck-of-the-irish/#schrems-revenge

In response, Facebook has rolled out a subscription version of its main service and its anticompetitive acquisition, Instagram:

https://about.fb.com/news/2023/10/facebook-and-instagram-to-offer-subscription-for-no-ads-in-europe/

For €10/month, Facebook will give you an ad-free experience across its service offerings (it's €13/month if you pay through an app, as Facebook recoups the 30% #AdTax rents that the feudal Google/Apple mobile duopoly extracts).

But this doesn't come close to satisfying Facebook's legal obligations under the GDPR. The GDPR doesn't ban ads, it bans spying. Facebook spies on every single internet user, all the time. The apps we use are built with "free" Facebook toolkits that extract rent from the capitalists who make them by harvesting our data as we use their apps. The web-pages we visit have embedded Facebook libraries that do the same thing for web publishers. Facebook buys our data from brokers. Facebook has so many ways of spying on us that there's almost certainly no way for Facebook to stop spying on you, without radically transforming it operation.

To comply with the GDPR, Facebook must halt surveillance advertising altogether. There's no way to square "spying on users" with "you can't surveil without explicit consent, and you can't punish people for refusing."

And of course, "not spying" isn't the same as "not advertising." "Contextual advertising" – where ads are placed based on the thing you're looking at, not who you are and what you do – is hundreds of years old. Context ads underperform surveillance ads by a slim margin – about 5% – but they're vastly more profitable for publishers. That's because surveillance ads are feudal, controlled by rentiers like Facebook, who own vast troves of the surveillance data needed to run these ads. Traditional ad intermediaries (agencies, brokers) took 10-15% out of the total advertising market. Ad-tech companies – the Google/Facebook duopoly – take 51% out of every ad dollar spent.

Eliminate surveillance ads and you torch their feudal estates. Facebook will always know more about someone reading a news article than the publisher – but the publisher will always know more about the article than Facebook does:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-ban-surveillance-advertising

There are rents under capitalism, just as there are profits under feudalism. The defining characteristic of a system is what happens when rents and profits come into conflict. If profits win – for example, if productive companies beat patent trolls, or if news publishers escape Facebook's rent-extraction – then the system is capitalist. If rents win – if investors continue to bet large on the metaverse as its losses pass $50 billion and head for the $100 billion mark – then the system is feudal.

Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. The question isn't whether the platforms will eventually become so enshittified that they die – the question is whether they will go down in an all-consuming fireball, or whether they'll go down in a controlled demolition that lets us evacuate the people they've trapped inside them first:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/09/let-the-platforms-burn/

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/30/markets-remaining-irrational/#steins-law

Image: Diego Delso (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Puente_de_las_cataratas_Victoria,_Zambia-Zimbabue,_2018-07-27,_DD_10.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

[thatdeadaquarius]

Hello there, friend I'm here for fluff

OK, this has been on my mind for a while

But like

The reader is just becoming the biggest parent to the Benny's adventure team kids

And the wolfs

We are like a parent of like 27

Knitting and making food brushing razors hair(let's be for real, you would hear a crunch when you brush it)

I'm not gonna lie

Do these kids know what spices are?

Cuz when I think about it

Razor hasn't had shit so he's has the least tolerance for spice

He would probably cry if you feed him a pepper

Bennett has tried spicy food but does go well with it

And not completely sure if fischl has had a spicy food before

But what flavor does mondstadt add to their food??

These kids need the damn flavors

AHDHAKALL FERAL ANIMAL AQUARIUS- ANOTHER PLATONIC ASK AAHHHHGGGGDJJSFHSAK!!!!!

AND ITS YOU!! ITS- ITS- ONE OF THE WRITING RULERS OF SAGAU (FOR ME AT LEAST) <3 !!!!!!!!

You cooking in genshin all anime studio ghibli style looking like food from god (literally): ⬆️

Sun: Reader (you/they/them)

Orbit: Headcanons-ish

Stars: Benny’s Adventure Team! (Bennett, Fischl, Razor), Diluc, mentions of other Mond characters

Comets & Meteors: Content Warnings: mild cussing, & Trigger Warnings: none known.

Please comment if I missed any. /gen

☆

^^ The posts being referenced in ask, (OG Razor ask) (Benny + Razor) and a more direct sequel, a part 2? a part 4 atp?? of this post (Imposter/Not Dark AU + Razor + Diluc) ^^

OMFG

ALRIGHT LISTEN UP BITCHES

SINCE UR IN TEYVAT

YOU GONNA COOK LIKE TEYVAT

AS IN-

SHIT BE SUPER EASY TO COOK, AND MASS MAKE DEPENDING ON COMPLEXITY OF DISH

(So, like Zhongli's special Bamboo Shoot Soup is like getting made... once a year if you read the little desc. for that dish 💀)

AND THEYRE ALL LIKE-

ANIME GORGEOUS FOODS ✨️❤️‍🔥

OKAY SO

PROMO TIME-

U GUYS HAVE TO WATCH THE ANIME "CAMPFIRE COOKING IN ANOTHER WORLD"

Bc that's mostly where this inspo gonna come from to both be realistic cooking + best parts of video game cooking

A guy gets isekai’d and instead of hero powers he just gets the skill of "online grocery shopping" LMAO

and ofc he gets insta gifted whatever he orders and starts making dishes and adding spices and regular stuff you know. like soy sauce.

but the best part is the food in that world is like British medieval soup shit

like barely salted, no spices definitely, no sauces, its barren

so he ends up attracting all kinds of interest that want to eat his cooking ofc

And it gives buffs too!

dw i didnt spoil anything u don't learn in the first episode, but that's just to say that's exactly whats happening here

u DO have to manually collect more ingredients but its so worth it, also u can just buy in bulk or put a commission thru the adventurer guild

tbhhh now that i say that, that could be how u end up drawing in Benny’s Adventure Team even more, bc they just take all ur quests for collecting ingredients around Mond!!

(u have to actively sneak behind their back and whisper to Katheryne that you want to put in other food quests in other guilds tho, silly kids will absolutely go running around Liyue and crazy shit just to have an adventure and do smth for you + eat ur banger food lol)

omfg the first time u barbecue smth???

the wolves, Razor, and Andrius??? Go feral.

Fischl and Benny who were already on their way to u guys to hang out again start booking it thru the woods, dodging hilichurl camps (thatve since settled down and been v peaceful to the wolves + anyone in the woods of Wolvendom after u started living there)

they knowww ur cookin smth fucking amazing

(and u even have some hilichurls and mitachurl that wander close to Andrius’ edge of the woods to shyly beg for scraps,, u give them a portion)

Razor was actually lookin at u like u hung the stars just for him when u gave him a homemade barbecue sauce to put on his food

(u acc may have done that to Teyvatians according to Andrius + the stories u overheard from Springvale…)

ok but the amount of begging u get for desserts like-

No, Razor u cannot have chocolate cake/cupcakes after every meal, u need to take care of ur teeth

(u use ur collection of mora-monster-donations for comms for more ingredients and living supplies like fabric + furniture, u cant afford dental on top of that for ur boy)

Fischl dutifully declares you the “best chef in the kingdom” and writes down all ur recipes (u have them auto-stored in ur settings obv but it cant hurt to have a physical copy, and they look so happy doing it, u don't have the heart to tell them its not necessary-)

Benny insists on both giving u extra ingredients when he takes ur commissions, and giving u handmade trinkets or weapons for the meals!!

No!! He will not take “im good” for an answer!! ur sharing ur home-cave with him, taking care of his best friend Razor, and now feeding him food better than Liuli Pavilion!!! There’s no way he can just take all that and give nothing back!!!!

and theyre not the only ones getting some food tbh

when the knights begin patroling near Wolvendom and slowly all of Mondstadt to search for their “All God”, u break up the beginnings of a fight between 2 confused knights and the now peaceful hilichurl camp at the edge of Wolvendom

U offer some snacks u were going to give Benny’s Adventure Team when they got back (u made little triangle sandwiches, rice balls, etc. finger foods, and u made plenty extra bc u kno their teenage appetites lol)

the knights and hilichurls nearly cried with appreciation, which made for a hilarious sight when the teens actually showed up lmao

ur wearing ur cloak, bc u dont wanna take on that whole “creator of worlds” title just yet, and the kids helped verify u werent anyone suspicious (Benny + Fischl keep ur godly secret, theyre the best like that 🥰)

the knights just swing by for snacks occasionally (they also either pay u in trade or with mora, theyre not bullies)

another person who gets flavored food privileges is the lazy librarian witch herself

u also sometimes pick Razor up from Lisa’s tutoring and bring “the best tea and tea snacks in the world” along with to share with Lisa and him

(she is also fully aware after awhile of meeting u of what u are, and fully believes this is why the food must be enchanted to be so good, but u dont want to be treated super reverently she can tell, so she keeps ur secret too and is just extra flirty when u come by lol)

(Razor refuses to let his pare- Lupical move out of ur cozy cave to the library, so he sometimes hauls u away when Lisa flirts too much LMAO)

…and the moment you've been waiting for.

Yes, Diluc got to try ur food that night he was searching Wolvendom for signs of the god of Teyvat

tbh Diluc was half-convinced that shit was a fever dream.

a bunch of sleepy wolves, a coffee table in the stone colosseum, a giant spirit wolf licking a big plate clean, the wolf-kid glaring at him, and you.

you with gold eyes, staring right thru his soul, like you already know everything there is to know about him, (like the way Kaeya looked at him that night),

like he doesnt even have to introduce himself

and he doesnt, u just lightly smack Razor’s hands until he gets rid of his claymore w/a pout, since Diluc had long since dropped his,

and grab a plate, piling on what leftovers u could, and turn back around from the coffee table to smile at him, patting the cushion-seat beside u for him to join

The giant glowing wolf licks his lips and watches him, the wolf-kid’s creepily watches him, and you, with eyes gold in teh light of a simmering bonfire just past the table, watch him

he just sits down and begins to eat.

its the best food he’s ever had, its his dad’s favorite dish, but not realistically, but the way memory embellishes a dish so much it can never be tasted again, except its right here. in front of him. u pour some wolfhook juice for him, and offer him a napkin to wipe his mouth and eyes

Diluc visits often after that, obviously.

u give him snacks too, and when he lets the staff try some, Adeline will not stop harassing him abt gettin ur recipes/ingredeints so u get him to pay Fischl to get a copy of their recipe book :)

including blank pages for future entries, and Fischl is literally glowing with happiness, would not stop monologuing abt ur food for weeks (send help Oz wants some peace and quiet sometimes)

Oh Diluc absolutely told the Favonius knights he found you. But he’s not saying where LMAO

Jean is actually begging him, Diluc ik u hate the knights but this is an international investigation-

this is the closest Diluc has ever gotten to getting under Venti’s skin.

when he told him this at Angel’s while bartending, he just casually ofc said this, just his smug little smirk, and the anemo god cracked a glass and everything- esp when he said he tried ur cooking??

he's gotta start looking over his shoulder in the city bc not only is Venti stalking him, the entirety of Mondstadt’s citizens are glaring at him in envy everywhere he goes LMAOO

(Venti now has a bar glass or too on his tab to pay off as well)

mans is literally paying u in weapon/artifact materials/mora to make him lunch one day and Venti nearly lunges over the counter

(Diluc purposefully ate it in front of him 💀)

ur food is the ultimate, “u could make a religion out of this!” /ref

like Diluc fully gives u offerings of ingredients he can pay for shipping from other countries + along with regular materials after grinding in domains

does the rest of Mondstadt + the world find out where u are?

only if Diluc lets them tbh. LMFAO

☆

bk trashfire my beloved <3 love ur ideas and stuff, goes without even saying im so sorry i took actually forever to respond :’(

hope u have a great weekend and i did this little side story justice for you

Safe Travels BK Trashfire,

💀♒

If you wanna join a taglist, DM me what for! "Pspspsss, please tag me for [All SAGAU posts, Only SAGAU Language AUs, diff fandom, etc.]!"

(If you ever wanna drop, just DM me! "No more taglists/[specifically this AU/fandom] please!")

♡my beloveds♡

@karmawonders / @0rah-s / @randomnatics / @glxssynarvi / @nexylaza / @genshin-impacts-me / @wholesomey-artist / @thedevioussmirk / @the-dumber-scaramouche / @chocogi / @fallen-starr / @areaderofbooks / @devilangel657 / @esthelily / @justinsomniachild / @nanithefuck / @questionotmystopit / @chinuneko / @silvers-tongue

@kiyomi-uchiha777

[darkficsyouneveraskedfor]

Someone New 5

No tag lists. Do not send asks or DMs about updates. Review my pinned post for guidelines, masterlist, etc.

Warnings: this fic will include angst, pining, romcom tropes, and some darker elements later in the series. Some triggers may not be specifically tagged. My warnings are not exhaustive, enter at your own risk.

This fic will contain explicit content. 18+ only. Your media consumption is your own responsibility. Warnings have been given. DO NOT PROCEED if these matters upset you.

Summary: You’ve had a crush on your best friend for years, but you’re slapped in the face with reality when he takes things to the next level with his girlfriend.

Characters: Steve Rogers, Thor

Note: Tuesday! Ugh.

As per usual, I humbly request your thoughts! Reblogs are always appreciated and welcomed, not only do I see them easier but it lets other people see my work. I will do my best to answer all I can. I’m trying to get better at keeping up so thanks everyone for staying with me.

Your feedback will help in this and future works (and WiPs, I haven’t forgotten those!) Please do not just put ‘more’. I will block you.

I love you all immensely. Take care. 💖

It’s nearly midnight in Norway by the time you’re free of the airport. The train station isn’t far; it’s part of the airport. You wait on a bench between the rails as your boarding is two hours away. You sit with your luggage and mope. This new land only adds to the gloom clinging to you. 

You shiver as a draft flows down the tunnel. Not only is grey and grim, but it’s cold. It’s almost June but the weather is more akin to the cusp of winter and spring back home.  

Your weeks of research couldn’t prepare you for the real things. All that anticipation could never compare to that moment of desolation; alone in this far land, away from everything you knew. Everything around you is new and foreign and unwelcoming. 

When the train pulls up, you wait in queue with the other passengers. Some are native, speaking in lilted English or indecipherable Norwegian. Duolingo hasn’t done much for you as you catch only scraps of pronouns and verbs. Others are new arrivals like yourself but they seem much more certain of themselves. You feel utterly lost. 

You show your ticket and board. You tuck your bag away with the larger pieces kept at the front of the carriage and hug your carry-on in your lap. You stare out the window as the train begins to roll on the tracks, screeching as it pulls out into the black night of this strange land. 

The subtle rumble of the locomotive lulls you into a half-sleep. Your head is wrought with the ache of your building hangover and twisted visions of the life left behind. You hear Steve’s final goodbye, you feel the hug that was snugger on your end than his, and you feel the razor of Peggy’s spiteful eye. Even in a stupour, you can’t forget it. You hope Sam is right and that it will fade with time, yet you fear it might all be gone for good. 

You wake as the automated voice announces your stop as the next one. You sit up and rub the sleep from your eyes. You’re trying to be optimistic. Just focus on work. That’s what this is all about. Everyone keeps saying it and you haven’t heard any of them. This is a great opportunity. What you’ve been hoping for all these years. How did you forget that?  

You disembark and drag your bag behind your heavy feet. You’re exhausted but you still have a trek to go. Everything looks so different than back home. Small differences but enough to reinforce your displacement. 

You find the rental car kiosk at the other end of the station and show your reservation. Work is paying for that too. Apparently, you’ll need it to get to the site. Another harbinger of desolation. 

You hook up your phone to the built-in bluetooth and tap the address already saved in your maps. The app takes a moment to recenter and finally, you’re off. You wonder if you should even be driving. You’re definitely not drunk anymore but you’re barely awake. 

It’s only an hours ride across the city, just along the ridges that look off onto the coast. It’s beautiful. You can see that even through your melancholy.  

The morning rises as you get your key to the blue paneled townhouse. You should try to stay up to reset your clock but you’re jet lagged to the bone. The moment the door is locked, you let your bags fall to the floor and stumble through to the first piece of furniture you see. You collapse face first onto the couch, unable to feel the impact as you plummet into a deep sleep. 

Time, space, and all your pain disappears. There is only the endless void of fatigue. Your mind is too tired to summon nightmares or nonsensical visions. Your body is so drained that even your brain is empty. 

You wake on your arm, fingers tingling painfully as your shoulder muscles burn. You hiss and sit up. The bend of your fingers and a shaky attempt to move your elbow make you whine. Ugh. You rub feeling back into the limb as you lean against the back of the couch. 

You look around, finally able to take it all in. The house is neat and sleek. White plaster and pale wood finishes. The couch you sit on is a sectional and there’s a match ottoman across from you. The TV mounted on the wall reflects the shadow of the archway behind you and the tall lamp in the corner and the stone and marble ornaments. 

You rise, wobbling on your legs, and put your arms out to get your bearings. You meander through the townhouse. You can hardly admire the furnished interior as it underlines your loneliness. All this space for just you. 

There’s a kitchen at the rear of the house, a large wooden island standing center to a fridge with a glass door and polished counters carved in granite. The tiles are pristinely placed diamonds in hexagons and a large window looks out into the rain-soaked yard. It’s night again, or maybe that’s what the daylight looks like here. 

Upstairs, there’s a bedroom and a bathroom. A full tub and separate shower, two sinks set into a sparkling counter, and a wall of mirrors above them. It truly is a dream but why doesn’t it feel like it? 

You amble down stairs and fish out your phone. The battery is at eight percent. You have several texts. All from Sam. You only remember then why you don’t see any from Steve. No, you won’t check. 

You quickly type that you’ve landed safely and set the cell down. You’ll let it die before you plug back in. You need time. You need to get yourself straight. You need to accept that this is all real. You made this choice.  

You’re starting over. It’s a new life and there’s no room for your heart here. 

💟

You have the night to unpack, more than just your luggage. Still, there are things you can’t let out. Not yet. As much as the blade twists in your chest, taking it out will mean a deluge you can’t quell. For now, you just won’t think about it. 

You sleep a few more hours and wake just before six. You have your bag ready to go for the day. You tie on your boots and pull on a lined jacket before braving the Norwegian summer. You lock the door behind you and yawn into the brisk air. 

Before you head for the site, you stop at a cafe you see along the way. You get an egg biscuit and a coffee with extra espresso. You’re sure to add on a snack to eat between your work. 

You drive towards the greater mountains and turn onto the road that angles up the side. You follow the curved ledge as the GPS guides you through the car speakers. The drive is two hours up, maybe a bit quicker on the way down. Suddenly, a ping sounds from the system and you glance at the screen; ‘signal lost’. Shoot. It’s okay. You think you’re almost there. 

You pull over, not that there’s much space to do so. You have the physical maps you’ll use for the work itself. You find yourself amid the lines and symbols and memorise the path forward. You continue on cautiously, reassured as you’re met with a sign that delineates the site. The plot has already been closed off with a fence. 

‘Grant land. No trespassing.’ 

You park just outside the fencing and grab your bag and your breakfast. You sit on the hood and eat as you look over the muddy site. You read the grant report. It’s here they think there was a settlement. Not a very big one but an important one.  

The rock wall hugs the site in an almost perfect basin as the slick land is barren of almost any growth. You’ll start with gridding it all out, both with string and on paper. You clap your hands off and get up to begin. The process will keep your distracted. 

You put your earbud in and set to task. You pause to sip coffee and mark the paper between planting the stakes and the string the twine to divvy it all up in squares. You watch where you put each step, the mud sucking at your treads. A wet site is never an easy one. 

It takes the first day just to prep for digging and you don’t even think you’re done. You’re tired and achy and ready to go home. It’ll take you nearly three hours back by your guess. The night will be a short one as you figure you’ll need to head out earlier, especially if you hope to take advantage of the fleeting sunlight. 

As you get back to the townhouse, it’s night again. You walk down to a fish restaurant just a block away. The faces are friendly and the food is good, but it all seems so bland. You eat and go back to your accommodation. Not home, just a place to lay your head. 

You check your phone. Back amid the world of the living, you have a dozen messages; Sam, Bucky, your mom, Arturo. You respond to each of them in turn, assuring them that all is well. You don’t have the energy for much more. 

Yet it isn’t up to you. Your phone chimes at you as you near the bed, sitting on the edge as you answer. You know with Sam that ignoring him will only make him worse. 

“Hey,” you answer with an unrestrained yawn. 

“Yo, how ya feeling?” he asks. 

“Erm, tired,” you lean forward, crossing and arm over your knees. “How are things there?” 

“Eh, usual. So, uh, did that paradise punch knock you on your ass too or am I getting old?” He chuckles. 

“Heh, yeah, no I’m feeling it still,” you mutter. 

“Mm, it’s late there...” he says, “sorry, if I’m keeping you up.” 

“No, it’s fine. Just... a lot of driving.” 

“Oh? You worked today?” 

“Wanted to get a head start,” you shrug as you play with the fold of your pajamas across your knee. 

“How is it? Is it bleak? Cold? Are the men gruff?” 

“Uh, yeah, I guess. Grey. Bit chilly but it’s not bad around noon,” you say dully, “haven’t seen much of the locals. With how long it takes me to get up the mountain...” 

“Oh, a mountain,” he echoes enthusiastically, “that’s exciting.” 

“I guess. Eats away the day.” 

“I’m sure,” he agrees glumly, “hey, don’t forget to treat yourself. Take a weekend off and hit that spa.” 

“I will. I just got here.” 

“Well, we all miss you,” he says. “Bucky especially. We got in a huge blow out the other day over the string in his hoodie.” 

“Of course you did,” you can’t help but laugh. 

“Really, I didn’t do anything. I was trying to fix it and it just... slipped inside, I don’t know. I don’t think it was about the string,” he snickers. “Probably having to deal with Steve and his--” Sam stops himself, “sorry.” 

“What? No, it’s fine. Really. I came out here to get away but it doesn’t mean he doesn’t exist.” 

“I know but you’re tryna forget him. Like you should,” Sam insists. “And he’ll realise soon enough what he missed out on all these years. And you need to do the same. Go out, explore, enjoy it. You’ll need to have some good stories to bring back to us here, we’re dying of boredom without you.” 

“Yeah, uh, I’ll try,” you grumble, “anyway, I gotta head out early for the dig so I should let you go.” 

“Right, of course,” he agrees, “don’t be a stranger.” 

“I won’t. Promise.” 

“Night,” he says. 

You return a ‘good night’ and hang up. You toss your phone onto the pillow and heave as you clutch your head. You hate this. Why did you come all this way just to suffer? You should have just stuck it out. Sat on the sidelines like you always did and just swallow it all down. This is worse. Being so alone.  

There’s no going back. Not now. So you just need to get through this and after... after you’ll just have to face Mr. and Mrs. Rogers with a fake smile and broken heart. 

💟

The next week goes by much like your first days there. You wake up, drive up the mountain, plot, dig, clean up, and drive back. You sleep almost as soon as you sit down. You don’t have time to mull over what you left behind, not as you catalogue every bone and bead you come across. 

You check in with Arturo when you can, just to confirm that everything is going according to plan. Often, you’re asleep when anyone else calls. You wake up to notifications from your mom and Sam and even Bucky. You should call them back but you just can’t. You can’t put on a fake voice for them. Not yet. 

You take a day off. Only after Arturo insists. You know you should. You may as well have a proper grocery shop. You can’t keep living off the cafe and fish shop.  

The shop feels more like a market. You pick through produce and meats, and get what’s easy. You’ll cook it all and package it up so you can just heat it up later. Some muffins to eat on your way up the mountain and maybe a few protein bars. 

As you trawl the grocery store aisles, you pull out your phone. You have a pile of unread notifications from Insta. You don’t often check it anyway but your curious and a little homesick. 

You see your mom’s post about her trip to the vineyard with her book club pals and Sam’s story with a very agitated looking Bucky. That makes you laugh. You scroll by some crafting videos and the pages you follow of castle curators living your aspirational goals. 

Then you stop. You pull the cart still and go rigid as you stare at the screen. The image of Steve and Peggy burns into your retinas like a blinding light. It’s there engagement announcement. He has her in his arms, kissing her, as she holds out her hand to the camera to show off the diamond. 

You can’t breathe. Your chest is on fire and your ears are ringing. It’s like salt in the wound and you don’t doubt it's intentional, at least on Peggy’s part.  

Your hands shake as you grip the phone tightly and tap on Steve’s username. You ignore the rest of his profile and the pictures you know will only add to the turmoil brewing in your stomach. You hit the button in the corner and tap again and again. ‘You are about to block ‘starsnstripes18, are you sure’. Yes and yes! 

You lock the screen and drop the phone into your purse, nestled into the basket of the cart. You grasp the bar and push the cart forward, steadying your steps with it. You look between the shelves and exhale. 

You need to go cold turkey. No more Steve, no more Peggy, no more New York. You stood still so long, it feels good to run away from it all. 

[katiesyellowcardcollection]

i’ll drive, i’ll drive all night - part two

Katie McCabe x reader McCabe

(teen younger sister)

part 1 part 3

Trigger warnings: a lot of talk about sexual assault and self blame,references to self harm and minor reference to suicidal thoughts, overall just poor mental health

AN: Not the best writing, it’s more of just me trying to put my own feelings and experiences into words. Also i have dyslexia so spelling/grammar isn’t the best sorry 😅

You wish you never went out that night, most nights you stay awake wondering what would life be like if you didn’t go out if you had just stayed home to watch katie play for ireland on tv like you had planned, if you had accepted your brothers offer to hang out for the day, if you hadn’t needed to go to the bathroom that night, if you had worn something less ‘sluttier’, if you didn’t put on so much makeup.

You blamed yourself, how could you have been so careless, you know the risks of going to parties at your age with people who your barley knew nor trusted, if you had followed your mams rules it wouldn’t have happened, if you weren’t so stupid and ignorant you’d never had been in that position. You shouldn’t have gone up the stairs with him trusting that he was just showing you to the bathroom, you knew better then that you should have known better.

Even now as your sat cuddling katie your head hidden away in her arms, tears streaming down your face, you can feel him, sense him, you know your being dramatic and it was your fault you knew this but it doesn’t make the feelings any better, you pull apart from Katie suddenly feeling trapped, the air feeling quite thick making it even harder to breathe then it already had been, you were panicking now it felt like the world was caving in in you, like you was suffocating as though your lungs were caving in.

“bug can you hear me? sweetheart i need you to take a deep breathe in for me, come on breathe with me, watch my chest y/n”.

Following katie’s words you watch as her chest rises up and down slowly, you notice her exaggerated breathes as she tries to get you to follow her breathing pattern, to try and get your breathing back to a healthy state, eventually after watching her chest for a few more minutes and having katie whispering soft words to you, stroking your forehead as she does so you, you can feel your breathing returning back to normal.

“We don’t need to speak tonight sweetheart, how about you go up to the spare room and just get some sleep, we can talk tomorrow alright?”

You agree instantly no longer wanting to talk to katie about what was happening, you weren’t to sure that you’d even be able to explain to her what was going on in your mind, although your fairly certain she just about understood what you were referring to before you broke down.

“go upstairs kiddo, i’ll be up in two minutes just need to lock the house up alright and then i’ll get you some clothes to get changed into”

Slowly you make your way upstairs, going into the bathroom to your face out, washing away any evidence that 10 minutes you’d been crying into your older sisters arms.

You look briefly in the shower, spotting the pink razer on the shelf, you don’t use it in the way you’ve been using razors recently instead you just stare at it, you want to use it so badly, so badly it almost hurts, you wanted to get away for a while, for everything to just go numb for a least a couple minutes

“Y/n can i come in”

The sound of Katie’s voice makes you jump dropping the razor into the sink as you do so. You’d been so close, so close to using it, it scared you how easy it was for you to find things to hurt yourself, but also how easily it was for you to do it, without having a care in the world you could mark your skin permanently and that scared you in fact it horrified you, how easy it was for you to lose control.

Hearing the door click open, you turn around from facing the mirror looking at katie who was now stood in the bathrooms door way, leaning against the frame, she looked like she’d been crying, because of you, your the reason she’s upset you realise.

“y/n what are you doing?”

hesitant to answer you opt to look around the bathroom, noticing how it’s changed since you’d last been here, the once green walls were painted white and you noticed a newly added bath.

You want to avoid her worried expressions, the way she spots the razor in the sink and not on the shelf where she could’ve sworn it was left, your shaking hands.

“nothing sorry”

Katie’s looks up at the ceiling taking a deep breath as she does so before focusing her attention back on you

“what were you doing with that”

she nods to the razor in the sink, keeping her eyes on you.

“nothing”

Katie rolls her eyes at you, shaking her head.

“you and i both know what you were going to do, i’m not stupid y/n”.

Katie’s reply stumped you, not entirely sure if she wanted you to just say it outright or just acknowledge that yes you wanted to hurt yourself or if that was even what her assumption was.

“Okay you don’t want to speak tonight i get it, you’ve had a tough day, we’ll speak tomorrow alright bug? i’m so proud of you for starting to speak to me earlier though, i love you goodnight y/n, remember im only next door and if you need me or you need anything at all don’t hesitate to knock alright?”

she lets you know breaking the silence, her words hang in the air as she leaves the bathroom, although not before taking the razor with her.

~~~

Getting under the covers in Katie’s spare bedroom, you can hear her soft mumbling on the phone outside your room, you think she’s talking to your mam about you, what she saw in the bathroom and the mess of what happened in her living room.

After awhile you heard katie end the call, you listened as the bathroom door opened and shut, as she turned all the upstairs lights off, as she paused outside your door for a few seconds and then eventually you heard the bedroom door click shut. The house going still and silent.

Once upon time the dark had scared you, when you were still little and innocent, when you thought that monsters lived under your bed so you needed your da to scare them away every night before bed, when your mam would tuck you up in bed in your pink dotted pyjamas and read you stories before giving you a kiss goodnight, turning your night lamp on and closing your door, you’d cry out for your mam or da to come and take you to their bed. Darkness scared you then, not anymore though instead it became something you craved, you lived for when everyone went to sleep and the house went dark and quiet.

It was the only time when you could truly think and feel every emotion of the day, when no one was there to judge you, sometimes you wish you could lay in the dark forever and never get up, sometimes you wish death would take you on your sleep, you wished that maybe this would be the last time you closed eyes, othertimes you remember your still a teenagers and life won’t be like this forever.

Laying in katie’s spare bed starring up at the ceiling you couldn’t sleep, you lay awake in the dark replaying the events of that night over and over again, it was like this every single night, you’d replay your every action that night, what drinks you had, who you had been with, how you could’ve prevented it from happening and it always circled back to that same point you shouldn’t have gone upstairs, you wish you could take it back, wish that you did everything differently, you wish so desperately you were that carefree kid with pig tails running circles around your siblings giggling without a care in the word.

~~~

The next morning was weird, you’d hadn’t slept at all, this had become a common occurrence, in fact you wasn’t sure when the last you had actually slept was, around 8am Katie popped her head round the door expecting you to still be sleeping having not been awake long herself.

Looking up she frowns at you “have you actually been to sleep y/n?” she questions her frown becoming more evident.

you shake your head “no i can’t sleep sorry” you mumble back at her, avoiding her gaze.

Katie so desperately wanted to know what was going on with you, she wants to know why you can’t sleep, why your getting into trouble constantly, and she needed more clarity on what you were trying to tell her last night, she already had an inkling to what you meant and it broke her heart, knowing that someone had stripped her baby’s sister innocence away from filled her with a kind of rage she’s never experienced, how could someone do that to her? her carefree, loving, kind, beautiful sister.

“i came in to let you know that cait has practice today but i’m gonna stay home with you alright? we can have an open and honest conversation okay?” she says smiling up at you “and you don’t ever need to say sorry for struggling, i love you”.

You nod in agreement getting out of bed as you do so, following katie down the stairs.

walking down the stairs you wonder what the conversation will be like later, what she’s going to say to you, what her reaction will be to you basically ruining your life, for spilt second you wonder if she’ll be angry at you, yesterday was the first time you’ve ever seen her anger directed at you, she never shouted at you, not even when she was a moody teenager wanting to be alone she had always made time for you, played with you when the others said no, ma used to tease her for it “y/ns got you wrapped round her finger Katie” she’d say as you convinced her to play trains downstairs, you had been as close as siblings could be, even when she left and moved to london you were still close, visiting as much as you could and going to as many games as school allowed, you feel bad realising you’d never given any explanation to your older sister, you just stopped calling, stopped visiting, she hadn’t done anything wrong you just didn’t want to talk knowing that she’d having you poring your little heart out in minutes of hearing her voice.

“Morning y/n” caitlin shouts enthusiastically startling you “would you like some toast? or cereal?”

“No thanks i’m not that hungry sorry”

this causes both caitlin and katie to frown, “you didn’t have dinner last night y/n and you probably didn’t have lunch either” Katie says butting in, you nod in agreement “i didn’t but i’m just really not hungry kats” you tell her sincerely not wanting to keep lying to her face.

“okay but your having something soon and i will not be taking no for an answer” she lets you know giving you a pointed look.

~~~

You and Katie had had a pretty chill morning, neither of you yet to address the talk that was supposed to be happening. Katie had made you come with her to drop caitlin off at training stopping at Starbucks on the way home, despite the chill morning your nerves were at an all time high waiting for katie to start the questions, you knew you weren’t going to get away with lies and so you’d gone through exactly what you wanted to say and how you wanted to say it.

it was around 12 when katie paused the tv show you’d been watching and came over to sit next to you calling coopurr over in hopes to give some comfort.

“Ma wants you to come live me” she lets out looking at your face for some kind of reaction, she had been expecting you to be angry, taking you away from your home, your friends.

Your not really sure what to say, you think moving away could help you, a fresh new start where no one knows you, you wonder if your ma was washing her hands of you, no longer wanting to be associated with the failure of daughter she now had, you wouldn’t blame her if that was the case however the more rational side of you realised your mam didn’t have a bad bone in her body and if she thought it would help you then you’d do it.

Slowly nodding your head you agree “i think a new start would help me” you tell

her honestly.

Katie hasn’t prepared for this answer, she thought you’d storm out, start shouting at her, she hadnt expected you to agree instantly with zero arguments.

The pair of you sit in silence for a few minutes, you were unsure how to approach the conversation that needed to be had and Katie didn’t really know what to say, how to get you to open up to her”

“Talk to me y/n”

You don’t want to talk, but parts of you know that you’d probably feel better if you did, it was something your ma had rammed into you from an early age, talking always helps.

“i don’t know what to talk about”

For once your being genuine , to much had happened since you’d last saw Katie, to many things were running round your mind that it was hard to pick one to talk about.

“How about we talk about the party”

you wonder if she knew what had happened, you thought it was fairly obvious from what you said the night before, even so you agree”

“he-h-he touched me” you say barley above a whisper “i didn’t want him to but he did and it’s all my fault im so sorry please don’t hate me” you sob out, fresh tears running down your face for what feels like the tenth time since you’ve been in London.

Katie’s wraps you up in a hug as your tears continue to fall, everything that had happened coming back to you, everything you’d have built up coming out in tears streaming down your face.

The look on katie’s face was heartbreaking she already knew what you meant from what you said last night, she wasn’t naive but hearing you say it aloud and blame yourself, apologising to her, killed her, knowing how long you’d kept it in blaming yourself what happened. How could someone do that to her baby sister, in her mind her sister was still that sweet little 8 year old, how could anyone do that to her, she was shattered, that night she had run through all the possibilities of what you could’ve meant hoping praying to god that you hadn’t meant that, she was furious, furious with the boy, furious with herself for not spotting the signs, furious at the universe for putting her sweet baby sister through this.

“Thank you for trusting and telling me baby, it wasn’t your fault, it will never be your fault you didn’t ask for it, what you were wearing or what you drank or how you behaved wasn’t asking for it, you were just trying to have fun at a party with your friends, nobody deserves or is ever at fault for being taken advantaged of, it wasn’t your fault y/n.

You want to believe her, you really want to believe that it wasn’t your fault but you just couldn’t it was like your brain was conditioned to believe that everything that ever went wrong in your life was your fault.

You think Katie gets at what you’re thinking.

“if someone came to you and told you what you told me, would you blame them? would you say it was all their fault”

This leaves you feeling stumped because you know for a fact you wouldn’t, you’d do everything in your power to make them know it wasn’t their fault, to help them just like katie is doing now.

You just shake your head unsure of what to really say.

“Exactly, look at me y/n you were 15 years old, trying to have fun on Tuesday evening like most teenagers do, it wasn’t your fault”.

For the first time since it happened you realised that maybe you weren’t at fault, you started to believe your older sister’s words because yes you had done some some things you shouldn’t have done but you didn’t deserve that.

Katie seemed to have realised that in the last minute or so you’d relaxed more, there were no longer tears running down your cheeks nor were you shaking as much.

“How about you get some sleep y/n, i can tell your tired just close your eyes baby, i’m so proud of you for telling me y/n”

Closing your eyes move over to her side resting your head on her lap.

“will you stay?” you whisper up to her, she smiles and agrees.

“i love you y/n so much my baby sister”

[th3-c0rps3-r0gu3]

Sinking

Natasha romanoff X civilian fem reader

Warnings: sadness. Lots and lots of sadness. Angst. All the angst. Reader has a past with self harm and abandonment issues. Allusion to self harm. Allusion to suicide. Suicide. If any of these trigger you don't read this.

Summary: Natasha loved you. And you loved Natasha. But sometimes when the everything is too much and Natasha choses her work over you you don't know how much longer you can go.

You loved Natasha. You really really did. And Natasha loved you. Well that's what she said. But Natasha's job was literally to be a brilliant liar. But even if it was a lie you cling to it like a lifeline. Because in more ways than one it was. The only tether you had left. That final strand connecting the rope. And at first everything was fine. Truly it was. You and Natasha moved into an apartment not far from the Avengers so Natasha could still have easy access to work and it was close enough to the coffeeshop you worked at. It was fine. Everything was brilliant.

Those first few weeks were heaven. Natasha coming home from a mission or just work as an Avengers in general. You coming back from the coffee shop making Natasha her favourite drink because you made sure to learn it just the way Natasha liked. The days ended cuddled up on the couch by a fire watching a movie or just sleeping. It was perfect. Picture perfect. Too perfect.

It started a month after you moved in with her. Natasha came home later and later. Sometimes sending messages to say she couldn't be bothered driving home or she was too drunk. You tried picking her up. But Natasha called you clingy. You were clingy weren't you. You always were. Maybe it took moving in for Natasha to see that.

It was three months after you and Natasha moved in together did you notice that Natasha didn't have the energy for you anymore. She never wanted cuddles or to curl up in the couch by the fire anymore. You thought it was because Natasha was just tired. But even when she came home on time or hell even early Natasha just didn't want any affection. But you knew that. She had said she wasn't very affectionate. It was here that Natasha stopped telling you when she would be home. Why does this hurt so much.

It was seven months after you moved in with Natasha did the assassin finally come home early and spent the afternoon with you. You went to a fancy dinner you wanted to try for weeks. And then at the end you and Natasha curled up by the fire with a movie. Just like those first few weeks together. And you thought it would be ok. That you could once again stop looking at knives funny. That every time you saw something sharp you had to stay away or else.

It was eight months after you moved in with Natasha did you start again. It wasn't meant to go that far. Natasha had come home drunk and you got upset and concerned. Natasha called you overbearing and clingy. She told you that that was why she was never home anymore. You locked yourself in the bathroom that night to calm down when you saw them. Simple razors. It won't spiral you told yourself. It was your fault it did. Granted in the morning after that fight when Natasha sobered up she took it all back. But drunk words sober thoughts right. You always messed up. Every damn time.

It was a year after you moved in with Natasha did the assassin finally get the hint that something may be wrong. She had come home and asked for a hug because that day had been rough. But your wrists hurt and you didn't want Natasha to know. She couldn't know. So you refused. Then you hid not wanting to be questioned. After that Natasha looked at you funny all night. How was it you always ruined everything.

It was a year and a half after you moved in with Natasha did you finally break. She had come home drunk again. Another stark party. It was long past two am. And you were done. Done with the long nights and constant worries. Never knowing if Natasha would be home or not. Forgetting to eat because your only reason before was making Natasha food. Never sleeping out of concern. Locking yourself in the bathroom after particularly difficult days at the coffeeshop or from worries with the razor again. Only now you had a stash if razors. It wasn't meant to spiral.

It was two days after you left Natasha's apartment were you standing at that bridge edge. Staring down at the unmoving water below. It felt so bad. You weren't in a hoodie anymore. You had sat down with your feet dangling over the edge. Razor in one hand and phone in the other. A draft to Natasha ready to be sent. A blade ready to be used. You had sharpened it first. Your favourite out if all of them. It wasn't meant to spiral.

It was an hour after you jumped did Natasha read the message. She stared down at the text as she entered the shared apartment. She thought she shared anyway. It had been two days since you had left after your argument. Natasha thought you would be back soon. Not gone. Natasha hadn't considered what she had done as bad. But looking back at it now as she sunk to the floor by the kitchen counter. Natasha's favourite drink made just how she liked and the left over blades from the collection waiting on the counter. Natasha had screwed up badly. She hadn't seen the neglect. How abandoned you must've felt. Wanding these rooms alone when Natasha couldn't be bothered coming home. And now she was the wanderer.

It was a year and a half after you left. Natasha stood at your grave stone. The blades on your grave had rusted from the weather. Red roses Natasha had left wilting slightly. She had come to renew the bouquet. Tears threatening her face as she pinned yet another letter under the rock by your headstone. Natasha didn't know why or when she began writing to you. Most the letters were trivial things about her day. The things she never got to say after her work days when you were still hers. Natasha still couldn't wrap her head around it. To her you were gone so suddenly. Watching your limp damp body be removed from the water. The damage to your arms and the small smile on your face broke her that day. But to you. You would've seen that day coming from a mile away. Or maybe you were just as blind.

It was three years after you left. Natasha was once again pinning yet another letter under the fourth stone. The other three piles next to it. More roses on-top the stone in a wreath. The Avengers had told Natasha to move on and sell her apartment since she hadn't touched it after you left. But Natasha refused. She couldn't have your final moments in your shared space destroyed. And sometimes whenever Natasha felt the guilt rise too much she went home. Imagined herself coming home to your welcome arms. To your smile and drink made just for her.

It was five years since you had left. Natasha was in therapy after Wanda scheduled her in. The Avengers saying it wasn't healthy for her to be so hung up. But Natasha didn't want to move on. It was her fault you were gone. Her fault you felt the need to go. But today was yet another free day. Another day she should be spending in your arms. It was winter. You hated winter. Always too cold you had said. Natasha always laughed it off saying the cold didn't bug her. It did now. The cold biting her skin away. Natasha pretending it was you telling her it really was just that cold.

It was ten years since you left. Natasha felt empty. Therapy hadn't worked. The therapist said to burn everything of you away so Natasha could forget. But how could Natasha forget when it was your light she had darkened. Natasha had killed so many and not felt a thing. But your life had mattered. Mattered to her. To the people you served in the coffeeshop. Natasha couldn't even look at that coffeeshop anymore. Not without guilting herself.

It was ten years and one day since you left. Natasha stood at that same bridge. Staring at the same still water. Razor in hand and phone in the other. A message drafted to you and the blade sharpened. Only you wouldn't read the message and hour later. You wouldn't panic and ring emergency services. You wouldn't pull her limp body from the river and arrange a funeral. You wouldn't spend ten agonizing years alone and desolate. And Natasha was honestly glad she had suffered what you did. Because now she understood. She was careless. But she would apologise. Natasha stepped off.

A hand reached out for her.

A/n: hey felt emo. Hope I wrote this ok. This is just a small vent but anyway we don't pay attention to that. This probably won't have anymore parts to it. This was meant to be posted tomorrow but I felt a surge of energy today so here ya go.

[angelwings-crossbowstrings]

Look for the Soul and the Meaning

Pairing: Daryl Dixon x Fem!Reader

Setting: Early Alexandria

Warnings: Depictions of illness

Summary: You’re sick. Daryl makes sure you’re not alone.

A/N: I have been uber sick this week and just needed some self indulgent comfort. Idec if he’s ooc this time.

*gif is not mine

Groaning, you rolled your head from side to side, even the soft cradle of the pillow intensifying the ache in your skull. Your throat was a tunnel of razor blades, your lungs trying their best to eject themselves over your tongue. Your body ached and protested, skin sensitive from fever. It hurt to breathe. It hurt to think.

“I feel gross.” You whimpered. You raised a hand toward your face but found it to be too much work, letting it drop to the mattress beside you.

“Know ya do.” His raspy whisper acted as a balm to your pain.

A blessedly cool cloth touched your forehead, remaining there for a moment before it was pressed against each cheek and then your neck. Your sigh came unbidden, shameless and sudden.

“That’s nice.” You croaked before being seized by a coughing fit. It was dry and unproductive, the mucus coating the inside of your lungs like slime, unmoving. It hurt. “Daryl.” You whimpered.

The flu hit Alexandria during your first autumn within the walls. Though some fell victim, just as they had at the prison, the community had medicines readily available. IV fluids, oxygen tanks, and fever reducers. This virus was different, thank god; a less intense influenza. That, however, was not a comfort when it came to feeling the symptoms.

“M’right here, Sunshine.”

The coolness left your skin to burn, but once his fingers began carding through your hair, his lips touching your forehead, you could no longer feel the heat. And for one moment, coherency filtered through.

“Daryl—Daryl, your bandana.” You wheezed, reaching for the fabric he had pulled down to hang around his neck. Looking at him, even your eyes felt like they would singe out of your skull. “You’re gonna get sick too.”

“M’gonna be fine.” He caught your hand easily—your movements too sluggish—and kissed the inside of your wrist. “Means ya gotta get better so ya can take care’a me.”

You chuckled weakly, triggering another cough. It jostled your sore body, earning a whine and a few tears. Your eyes had screwed shut to ride out the ordeal, but opened when something touched your lips. The bottle felt odd, warm and scratchy.

“Gotta drink for me.” Blue eyes flickered up to the bag of fluids hanging from the bedpost but didn’t linger. “Help them fluids do their job.” You reluctantly obliged, fearing the feel of the water against your already irritated throat.

Turned out, it was heavenly.

You drank greedily, not even thirsty but lost in the relief the cool liquid was providing. When it was suddenly taken away, you chased it with desperation.

“Gimme.” You pouted.

“In a bit. Ya gonna make yourself sick.” The cool cloth was back and the water was forgotten. With weak uncoordinated movements, you pulled the blankets up further, your entire form trembling with chills.

“Tell me a story, Daryl.”

The cloth ceased its travels. “A story?”

“Mhm. Don’t care what it is.” Sleep was standing in the corner, pulling at you incessantly, your eyelids growing heavier and heavier despite the heat and pain. “Tell me about your chupacabra.”

It was Daryl’s turn to laugh, a sharp exhale through his nose. “Nah, that ain’t no sickbed story.”

“Tell me—something.” You yawned, wincing when you could feel the pull on your inflamed throat. It was quiet in the room, your eyes closed and chest wheezing. But then:

“Once upon a time—”

You mimicked his earlier laugh, your eyes remaining closed. “So cliché.”

The man at your bedside scoffed. “Ya want a story or not?”

“Mhm. Sorry.” You whispered, already fading, the cloth pulling away to be replaced by his fingertips in your hair, ghosting over your face.

Daryl cleared his throat, the deep breath he sucked in was unsteady. “Once upon a time, there was a woman. She was a smartass. Pigheaded as all get out.” The corner of his mouth lifted when you began to snore, your stuffy nose making it impossible to breathe properly. “She met a redneck drifter, a real asshole.” Leaning down, he pressed his lips to your overly warm forehead, letting them linger there. Pulling back, he stayed close, just watching you sleep, stroking the hair on the crown of your head. “An’ somehow, she changed him.”

Sitting back, he grabbed the cloth and dipped it in the bowl of water, back to battling the flames beneath your skin.

“S’far from the end, Sunshine.”

[lieslab]

Daddy issues

꘎♡━━━━━♡꘎ ꘎♡━━━━━♡꘎

Pairing: Chan X gn reader

Summary: A simple phone call from your father and Chan's added anger makes you mentally crumble.

Genre: Angst & comfort/hurt

Word Count: 7.3K

Trigger warning: Parental issues, (specifically daddy issues) emotional abuse and neglect, physical abuse, a bit of an unhealthy romantic relationship, anger, self-hatred, blood, self-harm, mentions and attempt of suicide via razor blade, and a panic attack.

A/N: Even without the request, I feel like this has been a long time coming. Please heed the trigger warnings. Please. Shout out to all the baddies out there with parental issues. Shout out to all the Chan stans with daddy issues. You're so strong, keep going, I believe in all of you <3

Requestee, I hope this leaves you satisfied. I don't think you ever said you were struggling, but just by this, it seems you are. I hope this helps you cope with whatever struggles you either have had or currently are facing in life.

I did change a few things around to fit the story more, but most of it's the same. I think I got everything you wanted in there, besides those few minor changes. I also experimented with time jumps which is new, but I think they were needed for this one. This is a long one, so buckle up and please enjoy!! <3

_ _ _

The words are thrown around without much thought. Daddy issues this and mommy issues that. People wear them like a badge of honor. Always seeking out other people that can fill the gaps that their parents left behind. Searching for temporary band-aids to cover wounds that need stitches to heal. 

Everyone wants to be perfect. Nobody wants to admit that the people who were supposed to love them the most fucked them up the worst. Nobody ever wants to admit that their nurture was ripped away before they ever got it. Cruelty swaddled them instead of sweetness. Neglect and despair instead of encouragement and understanding. Some people were doomed from the start. 

At twenty-two years old, you understood that your daddy issues were a noose around your neck, they were always there. A poking twine that pressed against your windpipe and jugular. All it took was a few words and the noose tightened. It was suffocating, it was restricting, and it was paralyzing. 

There was a devil and an angel on each shoulder. One was angry and smoldering. Smoke bellowed out of its ears and it was always ready to snap. The other was an angel, sweet and soft-spoken, constantly reassuring you that you had it better than most. Of course you did because, at least, you had a dad, right? 

Any dysfunctional relationship could cause a rocky conscience. You swore you were doomed from the start. You’d never fall in love. Nobody would be able to care about you in the way you wanted them to. At least, it was like that until Bang Chan. 

When Chan came into your life, you fell hard. You didn’t get a chance to stand before your knees were jerked out beneath you. He was strong, he was charming, he was dominating, and he was everything you wanted him to be. 

Being older meant he had more wisdom and more life experience. He was soaked with the knowledge that you craved. He understood you, he got you, and heading towards his later twenties, he was hesitant when you showed up. While you turned twenty-five, he’d be thirty. 

You didn’t let that stop you from wowing him. From caring about him with every fiber of your being, you would have given up everything to appease him and more. Hell, if he experienced organ failure, you’d cut yourself open without a second thought and rip it from your insides with a smile on your face. You were down bad, but your issues were still there. 

You were aware of them when you seeked out his validation. When you kept asking if he was sure he still loved you. You couldn’t shake everything that your father had ingrained in you, but you were still so desperate to fill that void. 

Some would say it’s weird, but you would say that you needed him to survive. You needed him. He was the air in your lungs and the familiar thump of your heart. You needed him as much as plants needed the sun. Like the Earth needed the moon and like bees needed pollen. You called it destiny whereas a few of your family members called it desperation, but they didn’t understand it. They just…didn’t get it. They had no idea what you had been through. They didn’t understand the gaping wounds that had yet to be stapled, but Chan got it instantly. 

He realized it after you swayed the conversation in another direction at the mention of your family. He knew it when fathers were brought up and the hurt flashed across your eyes. He knew it when you clung to him like a koala with fear and asked for clarification on his thoughts about you. 

You were damaged and he knew that. He didn’t mind because everyone had their issues and besides, at the end of the day, he still loved you as you were. He was thrilled to wrap his arms around you when you curled around him and point out everything he loves about you. 

From the squish of your soft cheeks, the curve of your nose, the shade of your eyes, and the way you dress, he loved it all. The good, the bad, and the ugly, he gave the relationship his all; you both did. No matter how much the guys joked that he was a silver fox, he always rolled his eyes and shook off their comments. They were just joking and he knew that deep down, the guys cared about you too. 

He knew a lot about you, but he didn’t realize just how much these issues bothered you. He didn’t realize that you were nearly suffocating yourself. Out of all the things he knew, he had no idea how much you silently suffered until you snapped. 

∘₊✧──────✧₊∘

The day started a lot like any other day. You went to work and by the time you finished, you found a text message from Chan announcing that he’d be at the studio later tonight. It was one of those days where the creative juices were overflowing and he wanted to get everything worked out before he forgot. 

You didn’t mind it and started to head home, but then you thought about the dimpled smile and sparkly eyes of Chan. God, you were utterly smitten. With a quick change of direction, you found yourself heading towards the JYP studio instead of your apartment. 

Give or take twenty minutes and you were walking into your second home. The JYP building truly has become your home away from home. You came here a lot to support Chan and the guys. It was strange having an extra person along, but eventually, they grew used to your antics. 

The guys accepted you with open arms and when you came around, they got excited. Sometimes you brought presents, like cookies. Other times, just your brief distraction sidetracked them from their ongoing issues. That temporary change of direction helped them sort out their issues quicker. 

You checked in at the front desk and pulled on your guest badge. It was a new system that the company had been doing after a sasaeng had managed to gain access to the building. If you were found roaming the halls without a pass or a security badge, you were instantly booted unless you could properly explain yourself. 

You tugged the lanyard over your head and practically skipped to the studio room. Upon knocking, the door opened to reveal Changbin. A grin pressed his cheeks up into points. “Hi!” 

“Hey,” you returned the smile, “is Ch-” 

He jerked the door open wider to reveal Chan in the background. Chan was directing whoever was in the booth. You picked up Felix’s deep voice in the background. Chan was sitting in a hoodie and a pair of navy blue basketball shorts. He bobbed his head along to the voice. 

“You can come in, just try to keep it down because we’re rec-” 

“You’ve got it.” 

He opened the wooden door wider and you stepped inside. In the booth, headphones were over Felix’s ears. His messy blonde hair had been pushed around by the band connecting the ear covers. 

His eyes focused on the lyrics as he sang. You slung your bag to the side and smiled as you saw Jeongin sitting on the opposite side of the couch. The two of you exchanged a wave and you quietly came to sit beside him on the opposite side. 

Changbin snuck back into the chair beside Chan and Felix continued to sing. After a few more seconds, Felix’s voice cracked and he stopped singing. “Fuck!” He cried out. 

“I don’t ever recall that being part of the song,” Jeongin mumbled. 

“Yeah, what Innie said,” Changbin agreed. 

Chan stopped the recording with a sigh. He pressed a button, so Felix could hear him in the booth. “Felix, is something wrong today? This is the fourth time your voice has cracked. Do you need us to change the lyrics or-” 

“No! No! No! Of course, I don’t need you to change the lyrics! It’s just the pitch of the song. It’s so high and I’m really trying my best here, but I’m not sure if I’ll be able to get it or not and oh-” His eyes brightened when he saw you. “When did you get here?” 

Chan shifted in his seat and blinked when he saw you behind him. You smiled softly at him. “Hi, baby.” 

“What are you doing here? I told you that I’d be home late.” 

“I know, but I just wanted to see you.” 

“I’m busy.” 

“I’m fully aware. I have no intention of stopping you from working. I’ll sit here silently without a peep. You won’t even know I’m here.” 

“Yeah, right,” he mumbled beneath his breath. 

Felix and Changbin both shot him a glare. Changbin’s fingers jabbed into Chan’s side. Chan was worked up and stressed because Felix wasn’t getting this part of the song. It wasn’t just Felix that had struggled, everyone was struggling. 

Chan had created the instrumentals of this song and thought it’d be a home run, but he hadn’t considered how much the pitch would be a struggle for some of the guys. He was frustrated because if they couldn’t reach the right note, the song would have to be scrapped and he was distracted by other songs he wanted to work on. 

Seungmin’s silky and strong vocals weren’t the same as Felix’s deeper tone. Han’s wide range of vocals wasn’t the exact same as what Minho was comfortable with. Songs could be challenging and this seemed to be the biggest challenge yet.

Luckily for you, you hadn’t heard Chan’s mumble because your phone vibrated in your hands. You swiped the screen before thinking and held the phone up to your ear. “Hello?” 

When Chan rolled his eyes, Changbin slapped him in the back of the head. “What is your issue today?” He whispered. “Knock it off and stop being an asshole.” 

“We’re busy and-” 

“So tell them to leave and don’t be an asshole about it.” 

“Easy for you to say, you don’t have a significant other always up your ass.” 

“You're the world’s biggest asshole right now and unless you want to lose them, I’d drop the attitude. Just because you’re frustrated, it doesn’t give you the right to be a jerk. Use your words, you’re supposed to be the oldest in the room, so act like it.” 

“Oh, so you’re finally picking up the phone this time?” 

Your father’s voice in your ear caused your heart to sink to your stomach. The blood in your veins turned to ice. You shut your eyes before responding. “I’m sorry, but I’ve been busy recently and I-” 

“Busy my ass. You can text your mother, but not me? I was the one who created you and you still can’t be grateful for that. Without me, you’d be nothing.” 

“I’ve been texting the family group chat and I-” 

“You know damn well that I don’t give a shit about no family group chat!” 

You winced and pushed yourself up. Jeongin stared at you with a raised eyebrow. When you noticed, you flashed him a smile and held up a finger to let him know that you’d only be a minute. Before anyone could say anything, you disappeared outside the room and into the empty hallway. 

“What do you want?” 

“Is it a crime to want to know how my child is doing?” 

Your stomach twisted into thoughts as your father scoffed. A frown appeared on your face and, even though he couldn’t see you, you shook your head. 

“I’m sorry, but it’s difficult to find time to talk when we’re on different time zones and-” 

“Bullshit! You’re an ungrateful piece of shit! I gave you this goddamn life and you can’t even come visit! I have to find out from Google that you’re dating an idol! What have you told him? Why won’t he come visit?” 

“Nothing!” Your voice squeaked in shock. “I haven’t told him anything, he’s just so busy. He’s in a band and we-” 

“Then bring him down here, so your mother and I can meet him! What happened to respecting your parents? I didn’t even give you permission to date him!” 

As his voice raised louder, you tugged the phone away from your ear. A lump began to form in your throat as curse words were thrown your way. You shut your eyes and waited for him to calm down. Your hands were shaking as you mumbled into the phone. 

“I think I’m losing reception, I’ll call you back in a while.” 

“Don’t you fucking hang up on m-” 

The click ended his words before he got out the sentence. All at once, the weight of everything fell on top of you. Insult after insult wormed deeper and deeper into your brain. You wanted, you needed, to speak to Chan. You weren’t strong enough to deal with this on your own yet. 

You shoved your phone into the back pocket of your jeans and pushed the door open. Felix was singing again and your fingers curled into your palms. “Chan?” Your voice came out hoarse. “Can we talk for a moment?” 

The sound of your voice caused Jeongin to look up with a face full of worry. Even Changbin glanced behind his shoulder to check on you. When Felix caught Changbin’s head turning, he looked up to find you rapidly blinking back tears. His singing stopped and Chan’s fist flew into the desk. 

The rattling of the desk shook your soul. It started everyone, but you the most. Suddenly, you were five years old again in the back of your father’s van. You were weak and vulnerable. Defenseless, there was nothing you could do as your father’s wrath expanded along the four locked doors. 

You sucked it in and you couldn’t breathe. Your heart hammered in your chest, but there was nothing, absolutely nothing you could do. You were five and yet the anger of a thousand angry men was cast at you. 

It vibrated the marrow in your bones. The strands of your heart strings curled inward. Your childlike curiosity shattered in the backseat. Stay quiet, don’t utter a word, just take the yelling. Like a deer in headlights, you were trapped. 

It funneled down your throat and created a lump. Crocodile tears appeared in your eyes. You sniffled and your bottom lip shook, you were alone once more. Alone in the thunder and anguish; the swirl of one man’s anger. 

A flower in the middle of a tornado. Thrown, chucked, depetaled. Ripped from the stem and crushed between the winds. At the end, you were ripped to shreds and utterly defeated. Not even the thorns of your own stem could save you. 

“Goddammit! Why can’t you just go home? I’m trying to work here and you’re ruining it! I don’t have time for you right now! Go home and I’ll deal with your bullshit later. This is my career we’re talking about!” 

The song’s soft instrumentals faded in the background as the song ended. You couldn’t stop the tears from slipping down your cheeks. It stung more than you ever would have imagined. The words were a sharp sting to your cheek. The noose of daddy issues choked you again and you couldn’t breathe. 

“See you later,” you mumbled as you tipped your head down and rushed towards the door. You pawed at your tears and rushed into the hall and down the corridor to head home. 

“What the fuck was that for?” Changbin snapped. 

“We’re working!” 

“And they were crying! If you would have taken five seconds to look behind you, you would have-” 

“Don’t try to guilt trip me! It’s bullshit! I probably hurt their feelings. Whatever. We have work to do. I’ll apologize later.” 

While the two bickered, Jeongin stepped up and disappeared out the door to try and find you. Whatever you were struggling with, it hadn’t been good. Chan’s outburst had only made it worse and he knew that. He saw the terror in your eyes when the other person responded on the opposite end of the phone.

Felix looked from Chan’s angry face to Changbin’s scowl. When he caught Jeongin rushing out the door after you, his confusion only grew. “What’s happening?” He asked into the microphone. 

Chan slammed his hand down on the button, so Felix could hear him. “Don’t worry about it. Get out of the booth, we’re going to take five.” 

∘₊✧──────✧₊∘

As you walked home in the whipping wind, your hair tangled around your head. It blocked your vision and the gray skies added to your warped reality. It felt like everyone and everything was against you. 

That was the one fatal flaw with humans. When we enter a dark mindset, it’s the only thing we think about. The only thing we feel is the harsh and back-breaking weight of the world on our shoulders. The clouds close in and all feels lost as the rain pours down. 

You walked quickly with your head down. Keeping to the sidewalks, you were nearly running. You were moving so fast that by the time Jeongin made his way outside the studio, you were already halfway down the road. He wanted to talk to you, but he didn’t want to frighten you. He kept his pace brisk, but he didn’t run. 

He loved Chan for a wide variety of reasons, but he couldn’t believe he had just snapped at you like that. Of course, Chan was angry when he was mad, but this wasn’t okay. None of this was okay. 

You sniffled and kept rushing as the wind cupped your ears. You were hollow on the inside. That faint flicker of light inside you had been kept going by Chan. It wasn’t the best idea to depend on one person to make you happy, but you didn’t know what else to do. 

Your biggest fear has finally come true, everyone hates you. Maybe not to your face, but you can feel it. The bitter hatred that’s so vitriol, it’s rancid. A hatred that’s thicker than oil and stickier than jam. 

You were looking at assumptions, not facts, but your brain was set in stone. No one would be able to save you now. You had fallen far from grace. Your issues had poisoned you from the start. Maybe, just maybe, you weren’t meant for any of this life. 

Perhaps, you would take a chance and try again in the next. 

∘₊✧──────✧₊∘

When Jeongin knocked, you didn’t respond. He shoved the hair out of his face and tried again. When you didn’t respond to the softer knocks, he knocked harder. When you didn’t respond to that, he held his breath and turned the knob to your apartment. 

Breaking and entering wasn’t something he would have liked to go to jail for, but could you blame him? He knew you were hurting and he couldn’t stand the thought of you being alone and sobbing. 

Chan’s words to you had been far too cruel. Sure he was angry, but anyone in the right state of mind would have realized that something was terribly wrong with you. It was a gut feeling in the pit of his stomach that he couldn’t shake. 

His brain was screaming at him to leave as he silently ventured further into the apartment. One step into the hall and then another. He didn’t bother with the common courtesy of kicking off his shoes. 

The place smelled like sweet citrus. It was a familiar scent that had belonged to you since he had known you. Once upon a time, Chan marveled at how much you adored citrus. If only he would have been here now. 

The carpeted hall felt too silent. The living room was too empty as he stepped out into it. Bookshelves filled with books, a coffee table with the TV remote, photographs of Chan and the rest of the band on the back wall. Your friends were your everything and so was Chan. 

Where were the photos of your family, he wondered. It was such a simple thought, but it flew by just as quick. Your presence was here, but yet you weren’t. Where were you at? 

He softly called your name and stepped by the coffee table. The bar table in the kitchen had been left abandoned. The hum of the fridge caused his heart to strum faster. There was an eeriness that he just couldn’t shake. 

Every fiber of his being was wound up. Loose floorboards creaked beneath his feet. He was sure that he had seen you enter your apartment. From a distance, he watched your figure fumble for house keys and stumble inside. Your hands brushed past your face and he was positive you were wiping away the tears that kept blurring your vision. 

He called your name a little louder, but there was no response. His mouth dipped into a frown and he uttered your name again when a faint whimper caught him off guard. His spine stood erected as he waited for another sound, but it never came. 

As he approached the room it came from, he was prepared for sobs. He was prepared for tears. He was prepared for the anguish that came with it, but he wasn’t expecting the bright red that began to seep beneath the bathroom door. 

His heart stopped and for a brief moment, he couldn’t breathe. Nothing made sense. The circuit of his brain had stumbled across a trip. Something cut out and his brain whirled trying to reboot. 

A scream ripped from his lungs as he rushed towards the bathroom and there you were. You didn’t stop. You didn’t even care or notice that he was there. 

Full of self-hatred, you were cutting, no. You were sawing it out of you bit by bit. They don’t tell you that when you hate yourself, there is no pain in self-harm. It’s a dangerous sweet release. The stinging and burning sensation fills you with a sense of euphoric triumph. Self-mutilation feels like bliss and the cold blade in your hand feels like a friend. In some twisted way, it can be the best thing you ever feel. 

There was blood everywhere. It dripped from the slices in your wrist. It saturated your clothes and it was all over the bathroom floor. Maybe you tripped and fell. Maybe you were set on killing yourself. Maybe you just snapped. 

Human skin is so thin that it can easily be penetrated by a single piece of paper. So small, so little, and yet the fiery ache of pain is felt everywhere all at once. You couldn’t feel the fire in your arm. Gone into shock, your body had blocked you from feeling anything. 

You weren’t even aware of Jeongin’s presence until he grabbed your arm. Your bloodshot eyes were watery as they met his concerned russet ones. “Please, stop,” he whispered. 

With a snarl, you jerked your arm away from him. You started to scream and lash out. He grabbed your hand and pinned you down again. 

“Get the fuck off of me!” You yelled. 

“Please, please, please stop.” His voice wavered. He was terrified for you and he didn’t want to make it worse. He knew how much Chan’s yelling earlier upset you. He didn’t want to trigger you further. 

“Leave me alone!” Your shrill voice cracked from desperation. “Get off! Let go!” 

“No!” 

You swiped the blade down with your hand, nearly cutting him in the process. Your head bucked as you tried to free yourself. He ducked his head with a yelp. 

He shoved your bleeding body back onto the floor. Your free hand flew up, in an attempt to stop yourself, but it didn’t work. Your brain rattled around your skull as you were blinded by the sudden pain of it all. 

Jeongin panicked as he desperately used the code word to activate the voice command on his phone. When you heard “call Bang Chan,” you lost it even more. 

“Stop it!” He begged as you squirmed again. Your hands flailed and you yelled back. 

Back and forth back and forth, you refused to let go of the blade. You gripped it so hard that you didn’t care that the sharpened blade cut into your opposite palm. You were fighting tooth and nail to keep a tight grip on it. You weren’t going to let go. Not even Jeongin, one of your closest friends, could save you from the demons in your head. 

∘₊✧──────✧₊∘

In the studio, Chan was ready to slam his head into the wall himself. Changbin was non-stop lecturing him and once Felix found out, Felix was also up his ass. Nobody seemed to understand that they had a job to do. 

When his phone rang, he used it as an excuse to leave the pair angrily grumbling to themselves. He stepped out the studio door, just as you had. He let out a sigh before he swiped and answered the call. “What do you want, Innie?” 

A thump responded along with a yell. His eyebrows furrowed in confusion. “I.N? What are you-” 

“Put it down! Put the blade down! Stop it!” 

His heart suddenly turned to ice. “I.N?” He whispered. “What is hap-” The response that you gave nearly dropped him to his knees. 

“No one cares! Just let me die!” 

He suddenly felt like he was about to projectile vomit. His stomach churned and twisted and the world felt a little blurry. “What is happening?” He raised his voice and began to yell at the phone. “Jeongin?” 

“Alexa, speaker phone!” Jeongin cried out. “Chan, I can’t stop them! Please! I need you! I don’t know what to do! They won’t stop hurting themselves!” 

The world stopped tilting on its axis. The seconds froze in time. His breath caught in the echo-chamber of his lungs. “No,” he whispered. Tears pricked in his eyes and he suddenly rushed down the hall. 

“Don’t let them die! Do you hear me, Innie? Don’t let them die!” 

He flew out of the JYP building like a bat out of hell. He clutched his phone, now on its own speaker phone. This path that he used to practically skip after work because he was so excited to see you. Now it could potentially be the path to your corpse. 

“Fuck!” He cried out as the struggle continued on the other end of the phone. 

“C-Chan?” You croaked weakly. “I don’t wanna do it anymore. I-I can’t.” 

Guilt swallowed him whole. He could barely breathe as he ran. “Baby? Baby, can you hear me? It’s okay. I need you to listen to me. Can you do that?” 

“You hate me.” 

“I could never hate you. I took it out on you earlier and I’m sorry.” His head jerked as he made sure he was pursuing the correct street. His footsteps thudded on the pavement. 

“Listen to me, I need you to drop the blade. Can you do that to me? Listen to Innie and drop the blade. I’m coming, okay? I’m nearly there, just listen to my voice.” 

To Jeongin’s relief and Chan’s surprise, there was a soft clatter as you released the blade from your hand. You were exhausted after fighting with Jeongin and the blood was starting to become tacky against your skin. 

You hated the murky feeling that it left behind. Every movement of your wounded palm oozed more blood. Jeongin panted over your body. Your arms were pinned to your sides as he straddled you. 

His own body was painted in your blood. Bright red handprints smeared across his white shirt. His light pair of blue jeans seeped it up like a sponge. There were even fingerprints staining his cheek from where you had swiped your hand at him. 

“I’m almost there, I’m coming to the house right now. Where are you? What room?” 

“Bathroom!” 

Chan burst through the door and into the bathroom. His heart dropped when he found you pinned and nearly half unconscious. Blood was all over the floor. It was smeared against the bathroom cabinets and the tub. 

Jeongin never took his eyes off you. He was too afraid that you’d find the blade again and do something worse. Chan ended the call and stepped over the puddle of blood leading into the bathroom. 

He softly called your name and stepped beside you. Your eyes weakly met his. He felt like he was going to burst into tears. His knees buckled and he sank down beside you. He didn’t waste time grabbing a wet rag and shifting beside Jeongin. 

“Innie, I’ve got it from here, go call an ambulance.” 

Jeongin hesitated, but finally nodded and stepped out of the bathroom. Before he left, he kicked off his shoes, so he didn’t trample blood into the rest of the house. 

The realization of your situation sent shocks of electricity buzzing through your skull. “Fuck,” you muttered. Tears began to build up in your eyes and they trickled down your face. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I-” 

“Shhh. It’s okay, it’s okay. Just try to save your strength, okay?” 

“I didn’t mean to,” your voice came out shrill. 

“I know, it’s okay.” 

“No, it’s not.” 

The lining of your lungs seemed to thicken as you struggled to breathe in. You squeezed your eyes shut, but it felt like breathing through a straw. Your brain had expanded with every wrong thought and now you were suffering. 

“Baby?” Chan whispered. He leaned forward closer to you and placed his hand over the razor blade, so you couldn’t see it. “What happened? What’s going on?” 

“Can’t breathe.” 

“Panic attack?” 

“Sorry.” 

“It’s okay, it’s okay.” 

“M-my dad,” your voice wavered. “I can’t-” 

“You don’t have to talk.” 

“Not a good relationship.” 

“Is that who called you earlier?” His eyebrows furrowed with worry. “I assumed, but I didn’t know for sure.” He reached down and pushed a bit of hair from your face. 

“He’s not good. H-he yells a-and-” You hiccuped, “abusive.” 

“Oh, honey…I didn’t know. I-I was just so frustrated earlier, I shouldn’t have yelled at you. I didn’t mean to upset you and I-” 

“I don’t feel good,” your eyes drooped further. 

“Don’t do that. Don’t do that. Baby? Baby, listen to me!” Not caring about the blood, Chan cupped your face. “Don’t you dare give up! Stay with me!” 

The last thing you heard were his desperate pleas as your eyes rolled back into your head. 

∘₊✧──────✧₊∘

When you finally came back home from the hospital, Chan forbade you from going to your apartment alone. Instead, he was nice enough to open up his dorm for you to use temporarily. It wasn’t a permanent fix, but it was a manageable one for now. 

Ever since you regained consciousness, everything had been so foggy, but you remembered bits and pieces. You remembered the wine colored blood and the fear on Jeongin’s face. You remember being unable to breathe and the desperation of Chan’s voice. 

Maybe some part of you was glad that you couldn’t remember the entire thing. You weren’t sure that you wanted to remember traumatizing your boyfriend and your friend, at least, not the specific details. 

Your hospital stay had ended up turning into a week-long stay. It turns out the hospitals don’t play when it comes to suicide attempts. You didn’t even try to deny it. There was a tender hurt inside of you that you had no clue how to fix. 

It was a surprise when things that the mandated therapists were saying made sense. Sure, you knew things were wrong, but to hear validation from people, it made you feel a tiny bit better. 

When you left, you promised to come back. There were parts of you that really did want to heal from all of this. You never wanted to put anyone through this ever again. When clarity came through at the hospital, you realized you didn’t really want to die, you just wanted the self-hatred festered inside your being to stop. 

You wanted the negative energy to cease and you wanted to be loved. You wanted to be healed in ways you didn’t know how to heal. You wanted a lot of things and the therapists had promised that if you came back, they could start to help you turn things around, but you had to consciously make that decision. 

You yourself had to focus on your own healing. It was hard and it was difficult. Healing is one of the hardest things a person can do for themselves, but it can be so rewarding. You don’t have to let your demons win. 

“Fight back. Raise hell. Don’t let them win.” It was something another patient had said during a mandated group therapy. “I’m tired of letting the negative thoughts in my brain win. I want to live. I don’t want to just survive, I want to live.” 

The more the people talked, the more you realized that you had some of what they were missing. Sure, your parents weren’t the best, but you had friends. You had a significant other. You had little things that some people craved. 

For most of your time spent at the hospital, you were lost in your thoughts. You had barely uttered a few words to Chan. When Jeongin came in, you nearly collapsed into tears apologizing over and over again for scaring him. 

He insisted it was fine, but you knew it wasn’t. Nothing you could do could ever take back the damage that you had given him. The nightmares, the trauma, it’d be something he might have to live with forever. Sure, it’d fade, but for now, it stuck to the back of his head like glue. 

“So…” Chan’s voice snapped you out of your thoughts. The two of you were standing in the dorm living room. He had sent the rest of the guys over to the other dorm, so you could settle in. “Welcome to your new temporary home.” 

This place really was your home. You had been here time after time again. These walls just might have known you better than your own apartment did. You glanced around and nodded. “Thank you.” 

“I cleared out my room, so you can have it.” 

“We’re not sharing?” 

“I didn’t think you’d want to.” 

Your hands tugged at the sleeves of your long sleeve shirt. Your fingers curled into them. The damage to your arm was so bad that doctors had a hard time fixing all the damage. They had also been concerned about infection since the wounds were so deep and there were multiple of them. 

You played with the hems trying to find words to say. “I’m sorry,” you finally got out, “for everything.” 

“It’s not your fault.” 

“It is entirely my fault. I don’t know how to deal with things in a healthy way. I’ve been handling a lot on my own and I broke down. I snapped in the worst way possible. The doctors called it a nervous breakdown.” 

“You know I’m not mad at you, right?” 

“Maybe you should be.” 

He shook his head, “I could never be mad at you.” 

You lowered yourself to the faux leather couch behind you and slowly took in a deep breath. “I have a lot of issues and I’ve always known they were there. I just…” You shrugged, “I didn’t think something like this would happen. I’ve struggled with self-harm before, but I snapped.” 

He sat across from you and shifted his body to face you. “I’m really sorry I yelled at you that day. I shouldn’t have ye-” 

“You were stressed and upset, it happens sometimes.” 

“That doesn’t make it right.” 

“The therapist says I have parental issues from my father and it has affected me in a variety of ways. In fact, she said it’s why I’m probably dating you.” 

“What’s wrong with our relationship?” 

“She said I need to stop leaning on you to fill the void that my dad left behind and I hate that she’s right.” 

“Oh…” His face fell. “So does that mean we’re breaking up?” 

“Do you want to?” 

He shook his head. “I don’t, but what about you? What do you want to do?” 

“I don’t wanna break up either.” 

“So…” 

“So I’ll attend therapy and work on my issues. I’ll attempt to stop relying on you to make me happy because it’s not healthy.” 

“Yeah…” 

There was an awkwardness between you. Neither knew what to say and nobody wanted to harm the other. Chan finally broke the silence. “Can I hold you?” 

You shifted and crawled over towards him. He was careful of the stitches in your palm and in your opposite arm. You curled into his lap and he pulled you to his chest. Your head leaned against the familiar thump of his heartbeat. “I missed you,” you mumbled. 

“I miss you too.” His lips kissed the top of your head. Your sweet scent engulfed him. He leaned his chin on your head and shut his eyes. The warmth of your body was enough to set his soul ablaze. 

“My dad wasn’t a good man,” you finally mustered the courage to talk about it. “He called me at the studio and I didn’t read the caller ID. I just wanted to see you after a long day. When I left and went outside, he just started yelling and getting upset.”

“He’s verbally abusive and a hothead. Ever since I was a kid, he gets angry easily and he can’t control it. He throws things, he swings, and he’d destroy my things. I lived my life in so much fear because he’d threaten to disown me. My family never did anything about it, they just let it happen.” 

Chan’s hand went to your back. He soothingly rubbed it while you spoke. “I had no idea.” 

“I felt like I shouldn’t talk about it because some people don’t have fathers. I should be grateful that I even have a father and I-” 

“You don’t have to be grateful to someone who frightens you and makes you hate yourself. That’s not what a father should be. I probably enhanced your fight or flight instinct when I yelled at you, I’m so sorry.” 

“Every time I talk to him, I feel miserable. All of them, I’m so angry at all of them.” 

“You don’t have to continue putting yourself through any of that. You don’t have to talk to the people that make you miserable. Please don’t keep putting yourself through all this distress, baby.” 

“I just want to be happy.” 

“And I have no doubt that you’ll get there soon, sweetheart. When you’re feeling at your worst, you don’t have to turn to self-harm. You can come find me, yeah? I’ll always be here for you. Now that I know what’s wrong, I’ll be sure to never act like I did that day. I don’t want to lose you.” 

His arms tightened around your body and his lips found the top of your head again. “You mean so much to me. I can’t imagine a life without you. I’d be devastated if you weren’t here. If you ever feel like that, come find me and I’ll distract you.” 

“But that’s such a burden for you to carry.” 

“It’s not a burden if I love you.” 

You finally picked your head up and looked at him with teary eyes. His own eyes were similar as they looked at you. Without asking, you leaned forward and your lips connected. 

It was pure bliss…until it wasn’t. The front door to the dorm slammed open. The crack of it into the wall sent both of you pulling away from each other. 

Hwang Hyunjin sashayed into the room with a pair of sunglasses, a towel around his neck, and a blue pool noodle over his shoulders. “Surprise, bitches!” 

“Hyung, you have no manners,” Jeongin grumbled as he stepped in behind him. When his eyes found you, he beamed. “Hi!” He waved excitedly and rushed towards the two of you. 

Minho stepped inside, grabbed the pool noodle from Hyunjin, and bonked him on the head with it. “You insensitive fuck! I told you they couldn’t swim due to stitches!” 

“Ow!” 

Minho bonked him again. “You’re lucky you’re getting a pool noodle to the head and not a fist to your pretty face.” He glanced over at you and grinned. “Sup?” 

Chan sighed and kept his arms clamped around your back. “I’m so sorry about them. I didn’t have time to tell you that I invited all of them over to hang out for a game night and maybe some movies. We can order your favorite foods and w-” 

“Hyung, look at all my snacks!” 

“Mine too!” 

Han and Felix walked inside with grocery bags full of snacks. They wasted zero time going to the coffee table and dumping them out. The pair beamed happily as they waited for your approval and you managed a soft smile. 

“You two waste zero time making messes, don’t you? Hey,” Seungmin called out and he nodded towards you. “Glad you’re not dead. I can’t wait to-” 

The sound of Changbin screaming your name at the top of his lungs caused your eyes to widen in shock. Thunderous footsteps sounded from the porch and rushed inside. Changbin rushed in grinning with his arms outstretched. He was getting closer and closer until a pool noodle slammed into his face. 

He stumbled back dazed and Minho rolled his eyes. He handed the pool noodle back to Hyunjin and shook his head. “You are all unbelievable. You have zero manners.” 

“Strike,” Seungmin mumbled beneath his breath. 

You snorted which caused him to glance over and grin. 

“This is okay with you, right?” Chan glanced down at you. “If it’s too much, I can ask them to go back and I-” 

You shook your head, “it’s fine. I’m not sure about participating in games, because uh…” You gently shifted your bandaged arm hidden beneath your long sleeves. “Movie night and food sounds wonderful.” 

“Ya-hoo!” Changbin cheered. “Let’s get this party started.” He grinned and rubbed his hands together. “Oh, snacks!” 

“Ah, ah, ah!” Minho ripped the pool noodle from Hyunjin’s hand and bonked him on the head again. A scowl filled Changbin’s face. “Let the guest pick first.” 

“Sorry,” he mumbled. 

“Hit him one more time and he’s going to lose the last brain cell he has,” Seungmin complained. 

“Yeah!” Hyunjin agreed as he crossed his arms over his chest. Minho bonked Hyunjin over the head. He groaned and slumped into the recliner behind him. “Channie, hyung, he’s beating me up! He’s killing my brain cells too!” 

“You idiot,” I.N huffed, “you don’t even have any to lose!” 

“Hey!” 

“So how have you been?” Felix asked as he got on his knees beside the couch. “Do you want a snack? Do you want to play Animal Crossing?” 

“Or we could watch an anime?” Han offered with a cheeky smile. “Whatever you’re up for, we’re down with.” 

“Exactly, whatever you want, babe.” Chan rubbed your back with some reassurance. “The guys and I got you.” 

“Can I just observe you interacting with each other? There’s plenty of humor in that and I-” 

“Oh, sure!” Minho beamed. He lifted up the pool noodle with a smirk. “Sit back and watch me play whack-a-mole.” 

“Wait a minute!” 

“Hey!” 

“Don’t you dare!” 

Without another word, Minho grinned as he started to take turns whacking the guys’ heads.

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[jjbalice]

Martyr's Folly

Summary: Yunho helps and comforts the reader after they've accidentally cut too deep.

Genre: a hurt/comfort Yunho x reader oneshot

Word count: 4.81k (15-20 mins)

Trigger warnings: semi-descriptive self-harm (blood, cuts, use of blades - nothing too crazy, though, don't worry!), panicking, crying, mentions of relapsing, lots of pet names, nicknames, and physical affection lol, Yunho is a blessing

A/N: This fic is pretty personal since I've been struggling with not feeling valid enough because of the way I SH, which isn't the stereotypical kind you see in movies and such. In a way, it's an attempt at scaring myself from buying any actual blades mixed in with the comfort I crave whenever I slip up, I guess.

Baby cuts. Cat scratches. Damage dealt within the epidermis and the higher half of the dermis. Whatever you want to call it.

For a few weeks now, that's exactly what has been slowly but steadily appearing on your feet and lower calves. Or re-appearing, rather. A bad habit from the past coming back to haunt you all over again for no apparent reason.

No but seriously, what reason for doing this is there? You're happy, you have a stable part-time job on the side of your studies that are also going great, and an incredible boyfriend with whom you've just celebrated a 6-month anniversary. No real issues in your life as far as you can see.

Sure, sometimes you get caught up in a fight with your friends or parents, or even with Yunho, or maybe some of your insecurities hit extra strong on some days. But all of that is normal, right? Just some passing obstacles that get resolved in a few days tops.

So why are you here, at 3 am, staring at the husk of a person in the mirror? Why is your head so empty yet incomprehensibly full at the same time? Why are your hands all fidgety, getting ready to strike any moment?

Truth be told, you have no clue.

This was supposed to be a lovely weekend for you. You got off work early on Friday, securing enough time to pack your stuff at your dorm before heading to Yunho's apartment for a sleepover. He's been trying to convince you to move in with him after your anniversary, saying how it would be both cheaper and closer to your university. Both of those arguments are true, and yet you remain stubborn, wanting to keep your independence for just a bit longer.

Alas, Yunho has no choice but to respect your decision and settle for weekend sleepovers in the meantime.

And even those are great! The two of you get to talk for hours and play games, cook dinner together or order in and watch TV... Mainly, though, you get to cuddle and snuggle to your hearts' content (and maybe even do a bit more than that, if the opportunity and want arises).

That's also one of the main reasons for your hesitance over this whole... relapse thing.

Because of Yunho and his affectionate nature towards you, hiding the traces of your renewed habits became much more difficult. You couldn't cut where you used to before, all of those areas feeling way too exposed now.

And so, you settled on the bottom of your legs. Anything a pair of longer socks could easily hide without too much questioning from your boyfriend. Let's just say your feet are cold all the time now, even though summer's just barely starting to end.

Is it satisfying to harm there? No, not at all. The area is too small and angular, and the pain-to-mark ratio is nowhere near optimal. Everything feels too bony and stings more than other places, and all you get from it are the faintest of scratches.

But anything to at least partially quell the urge, right?

Well, not exactly.

If the razor blade hidden within the confines of your duffel bag was any proof, your methods weren't exactly effective.

You've never used an actual razor blade before, never even planned on trying it since you knew about the dangers of using it and how everything could get out of hand within seconds. Sure, the scissors and other sharp objects you've used until now weren't exactly perfect either, but they didn't put you at as much of a risk of going to the ER.

...So why did you buy the blade then?

Well, it was pretty cheap, first of all. You could just buy it, think about using it, and then throw it out without feeling too guilty about it, right? Not to mention how it helped you feel more valid about harming, even if you haven't used it yet. Self-harm is always depicted as razor blades on wrists, so even just owning one somehow helped you feel a bit more valid amidst the disappointing scratches on your leg.

It's been a week since you've bought said blade (or 5 blades rather, as they came in a pack - what a steal!). During that week, not much has happened to it. Right after you paid and got your receipt, you tossed the paper into a nearby trash can and stashed the pack of blades into your wallet. And there they were even later tonight, as you quietly crept to your bag to retrieve them, careful not to wake Yunho up.

But let's rewind back a bit. Back to where today's misfortune started.

Just like with everything else lately, you don't know why the urge to indulge washed over you specifically tonight. You and Yunho have spent such a fun evening together, lounging around and enjoying each other in whatever way felt right.

And yet, the moment the lights were turned off and your boyfriend spooned you from behind, holding you close while his breathing slowly evened out, it was as if something had shifted in the air. An overwhelming sense of emptiness washed over you, making you feel both completely dull and overstimulated. Yunho's arms around you felt both like an anchor and a vice, the opposing feelings adding even more to the already rising chaos in your mind. You were suddenly overly aware of every part of your body, as if your own skin was calling out to you.

You didn't want to.

You knew you had to.

As gently and quietly as you could, you unwrapped yourself from Yunho's embrace and got up. He let out a soft sigh at the loss of contact, and you had to admit, you already mourned it too.

Sneaking into the bathroom, you closed the door before turning on the lights. Avoiding the reflection in the mirror, you began searching through the cabinet under the sink. You didn't want to see yourself right now. If anything, it would just add to the confusing conflict raging within you, and you really didn't need that.

Rummaging through each shelf one more time, you let out a frustrated huff. There was nothing you could use. Well, save for the expensive-looking razor Yunho owned, but you really didn't have the patience or coherency to take apart your boyfriend's belongings.

It's time, then.

The return to the bedroom was a bit stressful, as you couldn't decide between searching through your duffel bag there or bringing it with you to the bathroom. Both options seemed too noisy right now, causing you to awkwardly loom over the bag for a few moments, chewing nervously on your bottom lip.

In the end, you decided to just risk it, crouching down to begin unzipping the top. Strangely enough, you kind of hoped Yunho would hear it and wake up. Maybe the shock of being caught would stop you for the time being and you could just go back to bed.

To both your luck and dismay, Yunho didn't wake up, his biggest reaction being the slightest stir of the sheets.

With your wallet in hand, you walked back to the bathroom, your steps a bit bolder this time. Now that you knew Yunho wouldn't wake up so easily, you didn't pay as much mind to the noise you were making.

In a weird way, you were upset. Upset he didn't wake up. Upset he didn't magically realize what your new obsession with socks could possibly mean. Upset he wasn't there to stop you right now.

But along with the upset came a strange feeling of calm. Joy, even.

He doesn't know. Nobody has any idea you're doing this right now. Nobody cares enough to find out anyway. You're free to reign over your body as you please, especially if it will finally shut down the confusing mess of emotions boiling within you.

It will, right?

It's 3 am. You're staying over at Yunho's apartment and he's currently sleeping in the bedroom next-door. You finally gather enough courage to look at yourself in the mirror, but it's rather disappointing. The shell standing in front of you doesn't bring up any emotions anymore. It doesn't even look like you, you think. Maybe this isn't you, after all. That's what you like to tell yourself whenever the moment is over, that this isn't actually the real you harming yourself. This is someone else taking hold of you and your upcoming actions.

You sit down on the cold bathroom floor, a razor blade in hand. When did you unpack them? The small paper packaging and 4 other blades are lying right next to you. Huh. Guess you did just now.

You don't bother taking off the socks. A precious thing like this shouldn't be used in such a shitty spot anyways.

Then again, you also don't exactly want to die right now, so the wrists are off-limits. Sure, you want to feel more valid and that place is the most stereotypical one to cut, but you're already holding the blade you thought you'd never dare use, so that's enough "progress" for now.

Now that you think about it, the thighs sound pretty scary too. You've always heard of some major arteries being located in the thigh. Perhaps you shouldn't risk it there then. Not yet, at least.

And so, like a coward, you move back to your lower leg.

To your defense, you do go considerably higher than usual! You pick a nice spot that's vaguely in the middle of the side of your leg, where your shins and calves would meet.

Deep breaths. You can do this. Just brace yourself and-

...

...

Oh fuck.

No, no, no nonono-

You knew the risks, you knew you should watch out for the pressure when using a razor blade for the first time since it's so much sharper than any pair of scissors you own, but somehow even the lessened pressure you put was too much.

Within seconds, blood started flowing to the surface. You dropped the blade, making it fly in a random direction as your hands trembled.

Your eyes welled with tears as, despite the blood, you could see a gash way deeper than any cut you'd ever made until now; you could literally see two parts of your skin split-

You're gonna throw up. Or faint. Or both. Oh fuck.

The first drops of blood fell onto the tiles just as your own tears pooled over. Your chest heaved with your labored breathing. You didn't know what to do.

Should you go to the ER? Will it stop on its own? Should you wake Yunho up? Oh god, you should probably wake Yunho up, shouldn't you.

Wiping your tear-stained face as best as you could with your shirt, you crawled over to the bathroom door. You were too scared to walk, afraid you'd faint if you stood up so suddenly.

As you sat by the door, another sob wracked through you. You couldn't calm down, you were too scared of what might happen if you didn't take care of the gash in time. And yet, you couldn't help but fear what might happen if you woke Yunho up. Now that you think about it, maybe it will just stop on its own and you can hide it for the rest of the weekend and then you'll just make up a story of how you got into an accident at work and-

One look at the trail of blood behind you was enough to get your hands on the door handle, pulling the door open on your second try. The door handle flew back up with a loud bang as you dropped back down, but the door was open at last. You pulled it fully open from where you sat, taking a few shallow breaths once you did so.

"...Y/N?"

Now. Now he wakes up. Not at any point before you could have done this. Now.

In the back of your mind, a strange feeling of anger bubbled up. Somehow, you wanted to blame Yunho for not getting to you sooner. But the second you realized what your brain was trying to do, you felt another pang of nausea hit you.

Yunho was not to blame in the slightest. This is all you. You started this, you went through with it, and now you're crawling back to him for help. Don't even try to put any blame on him, no matter how much easier it would make this whole thing to stomach.

"Y/N, are you okay?"

Right, he was awake. The shuffling of the sheets coming from the bedroom confirmed as much.

You tried to call out to him but choked on another sob instead.

All of your fear of being seriously hurt and needing help immediately shifted, transforming into the most heart-wrenching wave of guilt imaginable. Just what have you done? Why are you burdening someone else with this? Are you really going to make him see this?

Your thoughts were quickly interrupted by the first footstep. All the raging panic hit you anew, making you speak before you could think.

"W-wait!" You cried, an unknown feeling of desperation clutching your chest. "Please, please don't come here, please."

To your surprise, the footsteps actually stopped.

"...I'm waiting, but please tell me what's going on," Yunho replied with obvious unease.

Well, uh. You haven't exactly thought this far, have you?

"O-okay, I, well, I," you stumbled over your words, trying to work through the mush of your brain to come up with anything even barely comprehensible. "I did something really bad and I think I need your help but you have to promise not to be mad. I don't know what to do but please don't be upset."

Selfish. That's what you were. Even amongst all this chaos and pain you were about to drag Yunho into, all you could think about was saving your own face and evading consequences.

"Y/N, I'm sorry but I'm coming in," Yunho suddenly announced, and the footsteps resumed. "I need to see if you're okay, I promise I won't be mad."

There was no escaping it now. You could only brace yourself for the worst, whatever that would entail.

Two feet stood before your hunched-over form. You didn't dare look up, you didn't dare see what he was feeling.

As carefully as he could, Yunho stepped around you and further into the bathroom. You heard the scraping of metal across tiles before the cabinet doors opened. A towel, a first aid kit, and a medium-sized, colorful box appeared before you, along with your boyfriend in his cozy pajamas. Still, you didn't dare look up.

Wordlessly, he propped your injured leg up as gently as he could, as if he was handling the finest china in the world. Placing the dark grey towel under it, blood immediately rolled down and seeped into the material.

"Okay, this might seem a bit weird, but just- I'm not an expert or anything, far from it, really, but-"

As Yunho rambled nervously, you watched his hands tear open a pack of pads. Ever since your sleepovers became a more regular thing, he'd made sure to keep some in his apartment at all times in case of an emergency. Never had he thought he'd use them in this type of emergency, though.

You watched in confusion as he pulled out one of the pads, opening it and double-checking which side was sticky and which was dry. Unable to hide his worried grimace as he got closer to the wound, he pressed the cotton pad against it.

"I- I probably have something better in the first aid kit to stop the bleeding, but while I look through it, just hold that down to the cut, okay?"

You nodded weakly, deciding not to ask any questions and just let your boyfriend try to fix you. Not that you could say much anyway, not with the way your throat had dried and closed up from all the anxiety.

You silently kept watch as Yunho fumbled through the red bag, noticing the slight tremors in his hands. When you looked at his face, however, it appeared surprisingly neutral.

Ah, so he was trying to stay calm to not worry you any further, but on the inside, he was freaking out just as much as you, if not more. Great. You didn't think you could feel more guilt than you already had, but guess not.

"I'm sorry it's taking so long," he spoke up again, "Mingi would get injured all the time before he'd moved out - you know how clumsy he can get - and I, uh, haven't exactly taken the time to re-organize everything. Sorry."

Your lips twitched into the smallest of smiles, along with a hushed "It's okay, babe".

Yunho's eyes shot up at your words, mirroring your soft smile with his own. Pausing his search for just a second, he leaned over and planted a quick, reassuring kiss on your forehead. "You're right. I'll take good care of you, don't worry. After the first accident Mingi had here, I bought some steri-strips... They should still be around here somewhere, but we threw the original packaging away, so they're just a bit hard to find."

You hummed in understanding, hoping you could ease at least some of his worries by showing him you were doing alright.

Somehow, the moment Yunho appeared in the doorway, all of your previous panic stopped. It was as if through his presence, the jumbled mess of worries surrounding you had split into two. Yunho had graciously shouldered the worries about your physical state, while you focused on keeping his mental well-being in check. All of the fear about his reaction to this situation as a whole was still there, of course, but for the time being, you'd managed to shove them to the back of your mind. It was something to worry about later, when the two of you could calm down and properly talk to each other.

For now, all you had to do was just worry about Yunho while he worried about you.

"Finally!" Yunho sighed in relief, fishing out two small packs of steri-strips. "Okay. Let's do this, then."

But as he shuffled closer to your leg again, he paused.

"Wait, I'm sorry for assuming," he began while opening the first set, "but you don't want to go to the hospital, right? They'd obviously do a much better job than me, but since you said you needed my help, I just, I guessed that- you know. Should we go to the hospital instead?"

You immediately shook your head no, making Yunho smile faintly, glad to have read you right and that he wasn't wasting time trying to play hero.

You were thankful he didn't insist on taking you to the hospital. You knew it would probably be for the best, but right now, in your state, you couldn't even fathom going. You were terrified just crawling to the door to beg for Yunho's help, let alone driving to the opposite part of town to have complete strangers examine you.

"Right then," Yunho sighed, mentally steeling himself for the next step. "Can you feel your leg fine? Feeling faint or anything?"

You just shook your head, slowly easing the pressure you held on the cut. "I'm okay, I think. Just a little shaken up still."

Yunho nodded thoughtfully, helping you unstick the bloody pad from your hand. Luckily, it seemed that most of the bleeding had stopped, at least for now. "It's okay, I'm a bit out of it too."

"Sorry for making you do this," you whispered sincerely, but Yunho quickly stopped you again.

"Don't be sorry, Y/N. I know you didn't mean to do this. You wouldn't have called for me like that if things went down the way you wanted them to."

You couldn't bring yourself to say anything after that, feeling your throat tighten as a fresh wave of tears rushed to your eyes.

You averted your gaze as Yunho began cleaning the area as gently as he could before placing the strips down, helping hold the wound shut. Four strips helped the cut close up, and then two were laid on top of them to help everything stay put. Despite no professional medical training, you swear your boyfriend could do anything like an expert first-try. Well, considering him saying something about treating Mingi's injuries, he might have actually trained a bit already. Either way, you could feel your nerves easing a considerable bit at the sight of the gash finally closed-up.

"There we go," Yunho said contently, giving your other leg a gentle pat. "Just stay put a little longer, okay? I'm gonna clean up a bit in here."

Oh, that's right.

You were so out of it you completely forgot about the blades scattered around, the blood dripping across the floor, the towel, pads, first aid kit, everything.

Closing your eyes, you tried to focus on your breathing. It has mostly returned to normal, but you could still feel a lot of tightness in your chest.

"Hey now, don't go falling asleep on me, okay?" You heard Yunho calling out to you a few meters away, making you peek one eye open.

He was kneeling by the sink, scrubbing at the dirty tiles. When he noticed you looking at him, he flashed you a quick, comforting smile.

"'m not falling asleep," you protested, "I'm just resting a bit, sorry."

"It's okay, I was just a little worried."

Yeah. That's definitely one way to put how Yunho was likely feeling right now.

But that could be dwelled on and discussed later. For now, all you had to do was sit still, breathe deep, and stay strong.

...

"You still with me, princess?"

You opened your eyes again, this time to find Yunho sitting in front of you. You don't know how much time has passed, too focused on pacing your breaths, saying the alphabet forwards and backwards, thinking about your favorite TV show moments - anything to calm down, really.

When he saw you were still fully awake, he pulled out a gauze bandage with a small smile. "We should be fine with just the steri-strips, but let me wrap this up for you to be one hundred percent safe, okay?"

You let him do as he pleased, trusting his judgment better than your own at the moment. As he bandaged your leg, you looked around the room, noticing everything was back the way it was before you'd entered.

"I put the, uh, the blades away for now," Yunho continued, a nervous edge to his tone. "I didn't want to just throw them away without permission, but leaving them out here in the open didn't seem like a great idea either. Sorry if it seems distrustful, it's just... you know."

"You're scared I might do it again," you finished for him, making him nod hesitantly. "It's okay, I get it."

It was honestly surprising how easy it was to talk to Yunho about this. Maybe it's because he already saw the worst of it, maybe it was the way he took such gentle care of you, or maybe it was just his entire attitude about this so far. Caring, non-judgemental, open to listen.

"Alright then, I think we're done here. Let's get you to bed, shall we?"

Before you could respond, you were picked up by a pair of strong, warm hands. You wanted to object for a split second, but on second thought, maybe it was in your best interest not to move too much right now.

A few moments later, you were laid back down on the bed, a soft kiss pressed to your temple before you were shrouded in your blanket. With a whispered promise of returning again, Yunho rushed back to turn off the lights and close the door, enveloping the two of you in darkness. You waited a second, two, and then the bed dipped behind you with a quiet creak.

"Come here." Yunho's arms wrapped around your waist from behind again, holding you closer than before. "Is this okay? Should I give you space?"

"It's fine, Yuyu."

His chest shook with a small chuckle. "Oh come on, don't call me that right now." He somehow snuggled up even closer to you, pressing his face into your neck. "I'm already emotional enough as is."

A beat or two of silence passed between the two of you before he spoke up again.

"Was this," Yunho paused, hesitating for a second, "was this the first time you did something like this, or are there... more?"

You sighed. "Well, this was the first time I've messed up like this and used an actual razor blade, but in general? There's been a few instances, yeah. Most of them happened years ago, but lately, it started up again."

Yunho stayed quiet this time. As the silence stretched on, you began to grow worried. Is this the moment where he gets mad at you?

A sniffle broke through the air, quickly followed by another. The hold around your waist tightened.

"It's the socks, isn't it?" Yunho barely choked out, voice trembling.

Never have you felt so guilty in your life before.

"I thought it was weird, I wanted to ask you about it, I really did," he sobbed, burying his wet face further into your shirt. "I didn't want to make you feel bad about it if it was genuinely just something you preferred, so I held back, but it worried me anyway. I should have asked so much sooner."

"Yu..." You tried to turn around in his embrace, but he stopped you, not letting you see his tearful eyes. "Honey, it's not your fault in the slightest, please don't beat yourself up about it."

"But I should have-"

"Just listen to the same advice you gave me, hm? You never wanted this to happen, you wouldn't be so torn up about it otherwise. It's really not your fault."

With what you assumed to be a watery hum of agreement, Yunho nodded into your back.

You tried to turn around again, and this time, Yunho finally let you. You watched as his silhouette sat up, reaching around for the tissue box on the nightstand before wiping his tears and blowing his nose.

"I'm sorry," he muttered, crumpling the tissue and putting it away, "you're the one hurting and I'm making it all about myself."

You tutted softly as he laid back down, shuffling closer to him to drape yourself over his broad chest. "That's not true, Yun. I know this is really hard on you as well, you have all the right to be upset. Please don't hide it just because I'm also in pain."

"Okay," he accepted, taking a deep breath to calm himself.

The room stayed quiet for another few minutes, save for the faint rustling of the sheets as you intertwined one of your hands with his.

"If it's okay," Yunho croaked in a careful, ginger tone, "could we maybe talk more about this tomorrow? I feel like I have over a million questions right now, but I don't want to overwhelm you when you should be resting."

You let out a small, sleepy chuckle. "Yeah, that sounds good. I think I'll also feel a bit better if we talk about this some more tomorrow. It's a bit embarrassing even now when I know that you know, but I trust you enough to share this part of me, I think."

Yunho leaned down to kiss the top of your head, making you smile. "Thank you, you have no idea how much that means to me. And please, never feel embarrassed about this. Just because this stuff is not talked about enough doesn't mean your feelings are wrong or not valid. We'll figure this out together, I promise. No matter what it takes."

"Okay. I look forward to tomorrow," you said, pressing a quick peck to his sternum before lying down again. "Goodnight, Yuyu."

"Goodnight, love."

Please, don't hesitate to reblog or comment!! Any kind of feedback is much appreciated!! <333

(Also would once again like to say that this was not meant to romanticize SH in any way, and I hope it did not come across that way. Take care, everyone <3)