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underthetree845 · 3 months

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(dazai osamu birthday post- 2024)

A Taste of Sunlight

Dazai Osamu/gn! Reader (oneshot)

cws: gn! reader (uses of 'bella(donna)') but gender not explicitly stated, mentions of suicide and self harm, mentions of cigarettes and alcohol, ada dazai, ada reader, coworkers/friends to lovers, domestic love, domestic fluff, implied mutual pining, mentions of dazai's past suicide attempts, dazai's past spoilers, dazai's dark thoughts, dazai calling himself inhuman and undeserving, baking together, dazai's birthday, reader is dazai's safe space

wc: about 3.7k

summary: how will reader make dazai feel special on his birthday when he doesn't feel like he deserves to?

a/n: this turned out a little darker with dazai's thoughts than I thought it would, but i'm satisfied with how i wrapped things up! i know it's been awhile since i posted my own writing- burnout hit me pretty hard and it's been difficult to get back on my feet, but i knew i had to do something special for him (♡ˊ͈ ꒳ ˋ͈)

ʚ ═══･୨ ꕤ ୧･═══ ɞ

Ceilings, plaster. Can’t someone just make it move faster? Abandoned bottles of sake scattered on the tatami mat floor of his bedroom catch the light of the late morning sun as it creeps in through the curtains he keeps forgetting to close. Or rather, the curtains he can never bother to close on certain nights. He never forgets, not really. The dusty little fan in the corner of his room does little to break up the lingering staleness which hangs in the air. You should really open a window in here Dazai-kun, he heard your voice echo in the basement of his mind, Sunlight and fresh air are good for you. You were probably right. Sunlight and fresh air are good for you, everyone knows that. You somehow always are right about him.

The sun had already found his skin that morning- or rather, the shield of cloth he uses to hide the vast nothingness underneath. The icky, inhuman blackness that he would never allow a creature like you to even brush with your fingertips. For the first time that day since observing the sun come up out his window with hollow eyes and a blank expression, Dazai sat up. Ignoring the slight ache in his head and soreness of his muscles, bandages seeming to be the only thing holding him together, Dazai arose from his futon and silently slumped to his kitchen to down a glass of water. Today was a pointless day. One that shouldn’t have happened at all. Probably one of the worst of Dazai’s life, save for a few particularly nightmarish ones. Nightmares. Maybe he’d wake up, wake up as somebody completely different; or as an old man, and realize that the countertop in front of him and fingers wrapped around the sturdy white mug in his grasp were all really from a time long gone. The mug’s black, dotted on eyes stared back up at him, Dazai’s own brown ones focused, the emotion behind them simply indescribable. Part of Dazai feared waking up too. Something light, something warm, managed to flicker in the cavern of his chest at the memory of the grin that had spread across your lips upon presenting him with the cat mug. A grin you only ever seemed to take on for his eyes. You, he should be ashamed of himself for allowing skin so pure to meet with his own bloody, bandaged hands. Muddled flesh that hardly ever got a taste of the sunlight which always seemed to bathe the surface of your skin. Dazai Osamu had always been a sinner, would it really make his eternal damnation that much worse if he decided to linger in your comforting embrace for a moment longer?

Yes, today never should have happened. The first one so many years ago, and all the years of bloodshed, soiled bandages, and regret that followed. The number taunted him from the calendar Kunikida had insisted he hang up on his wall, your support in the idea being the only reason he had gone through with it at all. 06 19. The nineteenth of June. June 19th. Definitely some sort of horrible mistake by the gods of this universe. If they even existed. It’s hard to surprise Dazai Osamu. Most things can be predicted- whether it be by pattern of behavior… calculated likelihood, or something else of the like. Dazai thought- and still did- that it would be tragically poetic if the date of birth and the date of death on a gravestone perfectly matched. Right down to the date of the month. Yes, a perfectly beautiful idea of a gravestone Dazai had tried a handful of times to make his own. He had the scars to prove it. Aside from empty ‘happy birthday’s from the other executives, there were only really two people in the mafia who placed any sort of importance on Dazai’s birthday. None of that mattered now. Of course, in reality, all of it mattered. It was what led him here, to the light which now poured in through the window in the living room of his little apartment. In the almost two years Dazai had been employed at the Armed Detective Agency, he’d had one birthday. He was new enough in the office last year that the prospect of his colleagues doing anything to commemorate the event was not very keen. Such was his hope. He did get a lollipop from Ranpo and a ‘happy birthday’ from Kunikida; the blonde did not get on Dazai’s back over his paperwork for the whole day. That was, until you first stepped foot into the agency a few months into Dazai’s employment. Ironically, in spite of all the warm welcomes you received from his colleagues, the brunette found himself extremely suspicious of you. No one could possibly charm that many detectives with nothing but a bit of sweetness and an even sugarier smile. Not just anyone could possibly hold that much warmth in their laughter and still have so much to share. That smile of yours. Dazai had ended many lives for many different reasons, despite having failed at cutting his own short so many times. Rarely did he ever spill blood to protect someone- much less because of some irrational, sentimental attachment. If not for his years in the mafia, it probably would have frightened Dazai to realize how easily he would watch the world burn if it meant that smile of yours would be safe. As it turns out, Dazai wasn’t entirely wrong. You weren’t just anyone- you were Name. You, who he didn’t deserve to even stand anywhere near. Who shouldn’t even bother buying someone like him some cat mug that made you think of him. He never knew he could be so emotionally attached to a piece of ceramic. But that was nothing compared to the way you made his head spin. You would let out a giggle while calling him a flirt for the millionth time. You would share your umbrella with him on a rainy day, circle his birthday in a bright red marker on the little calendar sitting neatly on your desk. The desk right across from his. He’d pretend to not notice the glances you steal because he knows he’s far worse. Buying each other coffee on occasion- usual orders memorized. Experiencing such simple pleasures on a weekly basis- how could anyone have not expected Dazai to fall as hard as he did?

The thing that broke him out of his trance were four soft knocks on the door. The same way you would knock on the wood of his desk to discreetly get his attention. Dazai was about to dismiss the four knocks as a phantom of his imagination before they sounded again, causing him to turn his head and peer at the door as if it had just grown a pair of wings and flown away. Before you could get the chance to knock again or ring his phone, Dazai ran a bandaged hand through his scruffy locks before brightening up his expression slightly and opening the door. And there you were- not unlike the sunlight which flooded in through the entryway, the first thing you did was send prickles of warmth into his skin and allow that smile of yours to glow.

“Ah, Bella! I didn’t expect to see you here today,” Dazai greeted you with a singsong voice, “You’re looking as radiant as ever. To what do I owe this pleasure?” Dazai held his mask up for the whole sixty seconds it took you to reply. In that time, your honeyed eyes scanned over the expanse of his face in a way only you could make so overwhelming. The grin on his lips, though meticulously crafted, failed to meet his eyes. He knew you could tell the moment your irises flickered with an emotion far too deep for Dazai to have the energy to explore. You somehow always were right about him. It didn’t take much longer for you to ask if you could come in for a while, and Dazai accepted as if he’d ever have the strength to refuse. The fabric tote bag clunked with weight as you placed it on his kitchen counter, Dazai trailed behind you as if your torsos were connected by some invisible string. His eyes reminded you of a burnt black cat.

As far as cooking came, Dazai knew how to prepare a few basic things. How to scramble eggs, how to steam rice, how to use the microwave, how to open a can of crabs. It had always been too much of a nuisance to bother with anything more. The cigarettes and sake sustained him well enough. Even so, he found himself peering over your shoulder with dark, curious eyes as you unpacked several ingredients and laid them neatly on the counter.

“My my, did you go shopping for me? How thoughtful,” a small grin played on Dazai’s lips as he held up a tiny bottle of vanilla extract with an inspectful eye. Uncapping the bottle, he took a moment to inhale the scent, goosebumps rising underneath the bandages on the back of his neck at how much it reminded him of your usual shampoo.

“You like cheesecake, right?” you asked, voice a gentle breeze as you tilted your head in his direction. It’s hard to surprise Dazai Osamu. He paused momentarily, raising an eyebrow as you cleaned your hands in the sink. How you came to acquire such a fact was beyond him. Your fingers then reached out to preheat the oven, the one he usually didn’t spare so much as a glance. “I’ve only had the chance to taste it a handful of times, but I do have to admit, I’m a fan,” Dazai replied. You were smart enough to bring your own mixing bowls, pans, and stirring utensils. Sometimes he questioned how he ever allowed you to come to know him so well. “If you wanna help me, would you mind washing your hands first, please?” you requested, and Dazai didn’t even wait a moment before turning to the sink.

You did a better job of filling his apartment with warmth and light than the sun ever could. From the way your shoes sat at the front door right next to his own to the way your perfume would linger around after you’d taken your leave. Your fingers would cup over his own as you demonstrated how to properly stir the ingredients together. He would internally curse the persistence of the butterfly in his chest when you commented on how pretty you thought his hands were. You made his sparsely decorated, thin-walled little apartment feel just a little more like a home. Dazai waited patiently with the batter in his arms as you pressed the buttery graham cracker crust firmly into the pan. If the universe were kind, he would have been allowed to stand there and take you in until the end of time. He knew he probably wouldn’t ever deserve to have someone like you in his life. Not the way your eyes softened when they met his, not the way you flushed so beautifully in response to his compliments and praise. He didn’t think he’d ever be able to give you as much as you deserve. He didn’t even come close to deserving the trust you must have had in him that evening on the metro, when you slept on the shoulder of his coat. Both of you missed your stops that day. How could anyone have expected him to have the heart to disturb you? They were the ones who whispered how he didn’t even have one.

Before he knew it, the cake was almost ready to be placed in the oven. Your fingers cupped his own once more as you helped him pour the batter evenly before scraping the last bit out with the blue silicone spatula from your bag. He spun the pan in a circle on the countertop to even the batter as you slipped a pair of well used oven mitts onto your hands. “Looks perfect,” you offered some gentle praise and he felt his heart soften. Once the batter had been slid into the warmth of the oven, you removed the floral print oven mitts from your hands and leaned against the counter with a sigh. Dazai’s eyes were drawn to the way your fingers were delicately folded in front of you, how soft your skin looked and how it might feel against his own. From the gentle curve of your lips to how your eyelashes brushed your cheeks and the way your eyes sparkled when you laughed… he found himself at a loss. You always somehow seemed to dwindle him to a shadow of his former self, bring out sides of him he didn’t even know he had. Out of all the crimes Dazai had committed in his life, stealing your heart was by far the worst one. He didn’t think he’d be able to give your heart back if he tried, especially when you held his own so easily in the palm of your hand. “Have you had water today?” you voiced, finally turning to bless him with your gaze. “I drank some just before you came, actually,” Dazai replied, eyes briefly flickering over to the now empty cat mug sitting on the counter. “Would you care for something to drink yourself? What might suit your fancy, m’lady?” He cocked his head playfully. Your eyes regarded his thoughtfulness. A look far too fond for someone like him. Especially from someone like you. “Some water might be nice, thank you.” “You know I aim to please,” he nodded slightly, opening the fridge to get his pitcher.

A little while later, a timer went off on your phone, and Dazai tilted his head when you slid the oven mitts back on and set the cheesecake on the stovetop. “Isn’t it a bit too soon, Bella?” he inquired, leaning over your shoulder as you grabbed a little green bowl that had previously been set aside, “The center still looks a bit too mushy, doesn't it?” You hummed slightly, a pleased expression crossing your face. “Look at you, getting more adept at cooking already?” a soft grin played on your lips as you gave him an affectionate pat on his cheek. “I’m learning from the best,” Dazai replied, the corners of his eyes crinkling when he smiled. “You’re right, it’s not quite done yet, but I’m adding the topping now so it can cook a little with the cheesecake at the very end,” you explained as you carefully poured the topping on, “It’s usually done this way. Makes it yummier.” It’s wrong, Dazai thinks, to indulge himself in your company like this. There are a million other better ways you could be spending your time. Not taking the time out of your day to come fan a flame already at the end of its wick. Even so, even if a part of Dazai might never allow himself to fully believe what you say when you tell him what kind of person he is in your precious eyes, nothing but being in your arms has ever felt so close to what others might describe as home. Not where he grew up, not his shitty old shipping container or the mattress on its rotting floor. Not any of the places he would lie awake at night hoping to waste away or any of the many bottles of sake that have met his lips. They filled his stomach, flushed his skin, but left his chest cold, barren, empty. “Cherries are in season this time of year you know?” you said, sighing at the scent of the mashed up fruit and sugar bubbling in the pan in front of you. Combined with the warm scent of the cheesecake wafting from the oven, even Dazai, whose appetite usually didn’t amount to much at all, found his mouth beginning to water. “Are they?” he tilted his head with a fond smile, imagining what it might be like to get used to having you in his kitchen more often. What a dream it would be to have coming home mean coming home to you. You looked so perfect in his apartment it almost hurt. Whether you were curled up on the cushions of his couch, cross legged on the floor, or standing in front of the stove pouring some homemade cherry sauce over a freshly made cheesecake, he would take it all. Savor every last bit of the warmth and light with which you filled his apartment. “Why don’t you open a window in here before we start eating?” you suggested, and Dazai let out a breath of resigned amusement. He stood from where he had been leaning against the countertop and strolled over to the living room. “Hm, Bella, don’t people usually eat cheesecake cold?” Dazai wondered, looking back at you for a moment as you grabbed a pair of forks from a drawer. “Yeah, they do,” you replied, placing two equally sized slices of cheesecake onto one of the plates from Dazai’s cabinet. He didn’t have to remind you where they were kept. “But personally I like eating it warm, I always have,” your lips curved up into a smile, “especially when it’s freshly baked. Makes it yummier.” “Huh, well I trust your opinion,” he offered a slight smile, returning to take a seat at the little round table just as the two plates were lowered. The cheesecake looked even more appetizing now that it had been neatly sliced and plated, but nothing made him want to eat it more than the fact that it had been prepared by the loveliest pair of hands he had ever met.

Dazai took notice of the way you held your breath when he took his first bite; you shouldn’t have been so anxious for the approval from the likes of him, yet he found it hard to get himself to care when you looked so downright adorable while doing it. His eyelids slid shut for a brief moment, being sure to completely savor the mouthful before swallowing with a bob of his throat and finally meeting your gaze with his own. “Bella…” Dazai started, hands unmoving, voice lower than usual. You furrowed your brows when you couldn’t decipher his tone. “What is it? Is it okay?” you leaned forward, eyes searching his face for any sort of indication. “Do… do you not like it?” something pulled tight in your chest at the thought, your grip on your fork stiffened slightly, “It’s okay if you don’t, you can say so.” The following heartbeat of silence felt like it stretched on for an eternity. “Bella you’ve ruined me,” he sighed dramatically, slumping in his seat and placing the back of his hand on his forehead in exasperation, “How am I ever supposed to enjoy anyone else’s cheesecake ever again?” His heart nearly melted when you paired a blink with the slightest tilt of your head, he could see the wheels in your mind turning for answers. “So you… do like it?” you spoke softly, as if afraid to disturb whatever strange state of emotion Dazai was using to express his feelings about the cheesecake. “No, my Dear, I’m afraid ‘like’ isn’t nearly a strong enough word, not even close!” he suddenly sat up straight in his seat, “I love it so much, I don’t think I’ll ever enjoy cheesecake ever again unless you make it for me.” Finally, Dazai gets his reward when a grin splits onto your lips. “Is that so?” you giggle when he cups your hands between his own and nods urgently. That smile of yours. “Absolutely. You’ve doomed me to a pathetic existence,” Dazai pretended to cringe in pain, “forever wandering in search of the joy I once experienced, never knowing if-” “...I’ll do it again,” you said, and his ears perked up. “Hmm? What was that? You’ll do what again?” he raised his eyebrows, satisfied with the flush now evident on your cheeks. “I’ll make you cheesecake for your next birthday, and the one after that, and any time you want some in between,” you smiled sweetly, and Dazai’s heart leapt at your sincerity. “Do you mean it?” his eyes seemed to light up slightly, matching the sparkle in your own. He squeezed your hands.

There was a saying in the Port Mafia. ‘The biggest misfortune for Dazai’s enemies is that they are Dazai’s enemies.’ Whether they called him a demon prodigy or the black wraith or a dog of the mafia really made no difference. When the sun set, they would be the ones quivering at the barrel of his gun as he listened to their pleas with cold, dead eyes. Dazai has been called by many names throughout his life; most, he knew, were well deserved. Even when addressed by his own name, it was usually out of exasperation, irritation, unease, or something else of the like. People spat his name with the bitter bite of a cold rain, and he couldn’t even remember the last time someone uttered his given name very tenderly at all. It was dangerous, Dazai thought, how easily he could see himself growing used to being with you like this. Pathetic, how the Demon Prodigy of the Port Mafia was reduced to a shell of himself the moment you offered so much as a smile. The way you said his name made him seem like something precious; something worthy of getting to see that smile of yours, to have your eyes light up when they meet his.

“Happy birthday, Osamu,” you said, and god your voice had never sounded sweeter. Yes, you’ve ruined him. Absolutely ruined him. Reduced him to a shadow of his former self with nothing but a bit of sweetness and an even sugarier smile, and the worst of it all was that you didn’t even know it. You tore away all those layers of bandages, you reached out and touched something Dazai didn’t even know he had. Even as his heart bled, you would cradle it close to your chest, whisper sweet nothings that everything would be alright. Dazai found himself inclined to believe you. Perhaps the reason he seemed to be without a heart for all those years of bloodshed, soiled bandages, and regret, was because it had been with you all along.

ʚ ═══･୨ ꕤ ୧･═══ ɞ

a/n: thank you so much for reading! it means a lot- i hope you have a lovely day/night/morning/evening and remember to drink plenty of water! divider credit: (x) (x) tagging: @ringsofsaturnnnn

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mikajunie · 3 months

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how to deal with failure when all you know how to do is beat up yourself (as an adhder)

please read this if you are a chronic self-loather like myself.

i used to hate myself for everything i did; the way i talk and walk, my accomplishments, my daily activities, how i cannot keep up with my peers, all that jazz. and especially as a late-diagnosed adhder this gets worse overtime. i ended up getting into a 6-month burnout, failed 3 classes and have to extend one semester, and i had lost my identity as a person.

overall i was just a breathing, walking flesh with depressive thoughts every day.

but after many many months of rediscovering myself, i have come up with the conclusion that life gets easier when i don't fucking hate myself.

shocker, right? ik this is probably like a 'obviously' type of thing, but i think many ppl with adhd can confirm that this is one of the hardest pills to swallow.

but trust me, you don't need to feel bad!!! and i will tell you how to do it down below. pls read, i hope it helps.

(keep in mind im not a psychiatrist or a therapist btw i just wanna help fellow ppl with adhd)

reminder #1: adhd makes you more prone to making mistakes - beating yourself up for every failure is torture.

as people with adhd, we are more prone to making more mistakes and questionable decisions. we are just built that way. we can work on it, but that's our baseline.

self loathing encourages you to beat up your baseline. your default state. your non-productive mode.

beating yourself up for making a mistake is literally like beating up a cat for sleeping. humans are bound to make mistakes, and us with adhd are bound to make more. it's fine, let yourself breathe. im not saying we cannot do anything right or that our mistakes are permissible, but missing an alarm clock or forgetting things we want to say are not surprising. it's just embedded inside us, so either be miserable for the rest of your life or work on reframing your thoughts on failure in general.

reminder #2: you can learn how to be better even if you don't beat yourself up for it

these neurotypical adults who tell you that you should feel bad about failing are stupid. and whoever tell you that negative reinforcement is needed for you to get better are the dumbest motherfuckers ever.

you don't need to feel bad to ge better.

in fact, once you don't feel too bad about it, you can focus more on how to do better in the future instead of replaying the past over and over again.

literally after almost failing college, i only realized that i should not be hard on myself. literally. i remember deciding i should try being nice on myself and now boom! i feel better AND i actually have been working towards fixing my life more and more.

and you know whats the best part?? i can finally start enjoying my life again!!

reminder #3: not everything you do is a failure. seriously.

this is a thought pattern i keep seeing in every person with adhd.

"nothing i can do is right" WRONG!!!! you do some things wrong but you also do some things right!!!! quit discrediting yourself

now try acknowledging your failures:

cry about it first. let yourself sit in and feel your feelings first. you can continue after you finish crying about it

do some form of meditation that helps you clear out your mind. i suggest just 5 minutes or until you don't feel as heavy anymore

let yourself know that failing is an action and consequence, not a part of your identity. it is not you: you are someone who succeeds and fails sometimes. you can fail, but that does not mean everything you do will be a failure.

identify what kind of failure you're thinking about , why you feel so shitty about it, and what you should do for next time. it'd be good if you could write this down. here is an example from me:

failure: failing out of class

what happened: i failed bc i kept procrastinating and ended up sleeping in, so i could not submit on time

consequences of event: i had to retake the class, paid a significant amount of money, and now i cant graduate on time with my friends

why i feel shitty: i feel so left behind and stupid. i feel like this is such a stupid mistake that was easily avoidable.

and now i have so many thoughts in my mind right now, like "how can i be so stupid? how can i be so careless? this is such a stupid mistake."

now notice. if you also think like this, you are actively judging yourself. you are being so mean to yourself, and for what? would you ever told your friends they are so stupid and dumb for making careless mistakes? even if it's stupid, you wouldn't say it to their faces.

after identifying everything, confirm what actually happened, reframe your thoughts, and apologize to yourself:

"How can I be so careless?" -> It's not intentional, and I did try my best to work on it. It's not my fault my executive dysfunction took over the better part of me.

"How can I be so stupid?" -> Just because I cannot initiate tasks as well as the others, it doesn't mean i'm stupid. i am pretty good at other things, i cannot expect myself to be good at everything.

"This is such a stupid mistake." -> It is stupid, and that's... okay. It's fine. I accept it, I'll work on how to make it better in the future.

when you combat negative thoughts, make sure you combat them not only with facts but also with empathy and future action-focused thoughts.

the key is to focus on what you can do now, not what you should have done.

because focusing on the past is very very unhelpful.

now please focus on what you can do now:

Make small goals for the future.

What you should not say:

"I promise I will try harder to focus" -> Nope, you are relying on your ADHD symptom to not be ADHD anymore... which is impossible.

"I promise I won't forget next time" -> Same thing.

"I promise I will make a routine that I will stick to" -> This is too idealist, don't commit to anything for a long run, it's just setting yourself up for more failure.

What you should say instead:

"Next time, I will try to write it down so I won't forget next time" -> Tell yourself the clear steps on what you need to do. You cannot rely on your brain to just be better, come up with actions that can support you!

"Next time, I will set more alarms and ask a friend to remind me. In fact, I will do it now" -> Commit to things you can do immediately! The faster, the better so you won't lose this momentum. Stop thinking that your future self is 100% reliable. Always assume you need to do it as soon as possible to help yourself in the future.

"Next time, I will try out this routine and see if it works or not" -> Experiment with routines. Routines don't last long, so don't give youreelf empty promises. Instead, accept that your routine will chance every once in a while so you need to learn what works or not.

Apologize and forgive yourself

Say sorry to yourself.

It's normal to make mistakes, and it's unrealistic to think you won't make more.

Move on

Seriously. Don't sit on it too much.

Once you know what you need to do to not fail in the future and you have written it down... just let it go.

You don't need to feel bad to grow. You don't need to feel bad to be better.

You are allowed to feel good about yourself.

In fact, you should feel better about yourself now because you are showing your commitment to getting better by reading this long ass post.

Pat yourself in the back.

Failure has its consequences already, you don't need to punish yourself more. Please get something nice.

Failing is EXHAUSTING. Please give yourself a snack or some gaming time.

Allow yourself to breathe.

We are humans, we are not failures. We succeed and fail sometimes, not all the time.

Be nice to yourself, you have been through a lot.

#adhd #adhd things #adhd problems #adhd brain #actually adhd #actually neurodivergent #neurodivergent #adhd tips #neurodiversity #advice #mental health #mental illness #self loathing

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stars-and-inkpots · 1 year

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could you possibly do one where Tav is on the verge on burnout in Baldur's Gate, from carrying the litteral weight of the world on her shoulders, plus the murders, dismembered clown, emperor chattering away in her mind and just tryingto help every soul in the city... oh, and everyone looking to her for guidance in making difficult life decisions... possibly after advising Wyll not to take the pact and/or one of their companions being abducted

And Gale being there to help her and lift her spirits up (maybe a little guilty about being too wrapped up in his hubris before having a forgiving audience with Mystra to notice how hard it all was on her)

I loved this idea so much because Act 3 really is just so overwhelming and stressful I was excited to write something about it! Thank you!! I hope you enjoy!

The Weight of The World | Gale x Reader

There is so much you have to do. So many things you have to fix and people you have to save. It's starting to become overwhelming carrying so much alone.

Pairing: Gale/Reader

Tags: Canon-typical violence, Blood and injury, panic attacks (kinda), hurt/comfort, comfort, angst, cuddling, spoilers for Act 3

Ao3 Link: The Weight of The World

Word Count: 1,799

You like helping people. If there is a way you can make someone else’s life easier, you are both eager and happy to do it. It’s in your nature to give.

But you’re wearing yourself thin.

It seems that ever since you got off that nautiloid, you’ve been helping people. First, it was the tieflings in the Grove; then the Shadow-Cursed lands; then the refugees on the way to Baldur’s Gate. And along with all of those problems, you’ve also been helping your companions with their own; some with higher stakes than others.

Wyll is quiet today, and when you notice the look on his face, guilt quickly settles in beside the exhaustion that rests on your shoulders.

He is free now, but it has come at such a steep price. You were there with him when Mizora appeared to offer him the deal. He had asked you for advice. You told him that he deserved a chance to be free from the infernal chess board he had been forced to play on for so long.

But what if you were wrong? What if you don’t find a way to save his father? What if Baldur’s Gate is worse off without the duke once everything is done and over with and the dust has settled. What if Wyll ends up blaming you for the death of Ravengard, resenting your decision that was his own to make.

You’re happy to help… happy to give counsel to your companions when they (so often, it seems) need it, but why should you be the one making the decisions for such things? How can you be expected to decide between Wyll’s freedom and his father’s life?

You haven’t even begun to prepare for what could lie beyond the walls of Cazador’s palace, but you’re certain it can be nothing short of dreadful.

Shaking your head, you try to focus on the task at hand. You have potential murder victims you need to find.

More people that need saving.

---

Finding the Stormshore Tabernacle after Elminster arrived to tell Gale that Mystra had yet another message for him was only another goal added on the growing list of things you needed to do. This, of course, took a little priority, given how much you could tell it mattered to Gale.

You brush off the growing exhaustion that hasn’t had a chance to fully dissipate in the wake of so many new problems.

You stand in front of the statue of Mystra, Gale beside you while the others wait outside. You can feel the magic that flows around it, crackling and humming like an electric current. It is not a feeling that brings you comfort or a sense of calm that one might expect from a god; perhaps that is mainly because of your own opinions of the goddess though. While he does a good job at hiding it, you can tell that Gale’s nerves are beginning to get the better of him. You bring your hand to rest it on his shoulder.

“Time was I’d have given my right arm for a chance to speak with Mystra again. The left one too. Maybe a knee…” he says quietly, and as much as you want to believe he is exaggerating, you know there is an air of truth to his words.

“You know you don’t owe her anything, Gale.” You hope he knows that. It’s impossible for you to understand the nuances of their relationship, and you recognise that, but you know that what she had asked of him was cruel and manipulative.

“Perhaps,” he answers. Then adds, “Her first love was always the weave. At best, I was always a close second.”

You can’t tell if he’s trying to justify Her actions to you, or simply giving himself a reason for them that hurts less than the idea that she did not truly care for him like he did for Her.

“Do you want me to come with you?” Despite your personal distaste for the goddess, you would accompany him in an instant if it was what he desired.

“As much as I’d prefer not to face her alone, I’m afraid the magic is only able to bring one person through. I’ll only be gone a minute though. Wait for me, please.” His voice shakes only slightly. You would wait for him even if he didn’t ask.

When he turns to face the statue again, he moves his hand like he’s grasping at something in the air. Then just as quickly, he is gone.

You wait there anxiously. You wonder if you should have told him not to come here. It was entirely possible that Mystra only asked him to come here so that she could punish him for not following her orders to blow up both himself and the Absolute. It would be another lapse of judgement that would impact only your companion.

The stress of the week is steadily catching up to you again, pushing itself into the forefront of your mind while you wait for Gale to return. Thankfully, he doesn’t take long.

Gale reappears in a small flash of shimmering purples. He is smiling, which you assume is a good thing in spite of the general unease the thought of him speaking with the goddess brings.

He recounts the visit with you while the two of you find the rest of your party outside.

---

No one says anything when you go straight to your tent after you return to camp, Gale letting go of your hand to give you a moment to yourself.

Lae’zel is gone, taken by Orin, and being held ransom in the Temple of Bhaal. The memory of the encounter makes you sick to your stomach.

Lae’zel rounding the corner, bloodied and limping, clutching her side while blood pours out in thick rivulets. Your heart beating so fast that you worry it will stop entirely. Grasping her arm to pull her with you, refusing to leave her behind. The feeling of her flesh shifting under your palm, moving, undulating in that unnatural and revolting way you had come to recognize in the shapechangers you had encountered. You recoiled backwards into Gale, watching in horror as Lae’zel’s form shifted; her neck snapping to the side sharply. Her green skin fading to pale grey. It was never Lae’zel at all, but Orin.

She cornered you into making a deal with her. You were to return with Gortash’s netherstone, or Lae’zel would be left to bleed out on the temple floor.

You can imagine Lae’zel’s voice, condemning you for giving in to the Bhaalspawn’s orders. But you know Lae’zel. You know that she is not as unshakeable as she likes to present herself. You know that, wherever she is right now, she is scared.

You can barely think. Everything feels blurry, the world fraying at the edges of your vision dissolving into a mess of colour and sound.

You should have noticed. Gortash had warned you.

You still have so much you need to do.

How did you let this happen?

---

Gale waits a few minutes before he follows you to your tent. He waits nervously outside, unsure.

“Can I come in?” He asks softly.

“Please,” you answer, and his heart breaks at the roughness of your voice; no doubt from crying and struggling to keep the sobs quiet enough that the rest of the camp wouldn’t hear them.

Your eyes are tired, fresh tears still flowing freely down your face.

Gale is terrified too, just like you and so many of the others, but something else weighs heavy on his chest. Guilt, he quickly realises as he looks at you.

You’ve been dealing with so much, and so much of it alone. You’ve taken their problems and made them your own; you’ve done everything for them. You’ve bore their worries, their concerns, and their mistakes. You’ve had no one to do the same for you.

“Gale-” you start, but a sob bubbles out of you cutting you off as your shoulders shake.

“It’s going to be alright,” he whispers into your hair after he quickly gathers you into his arms as he sits beside you. He pulls you into his lap, wrapping his arms around you like he’s protecting you from the world itself.

“I’m sorry,” you apologise through hiccups against his chest. He only gently shushes you, carding his fingers through your hair.

“If there is any apologising to be done, it is us to you. You’ve been doing so much for us; carrying our burdens and helping with them. I will admit even I have been far too preoccupied with my own mess that I failed to consider the weight that we’ve put on you.”

“I should be able to bear it,” you say mournfully.

“Absolutely not,” Gale objects. “It’s impossible to do that alone. You are only one person. You are not weak because you failed to carry the weight of the world alone.” He sounds so certain, so genuine in everything he says that you know he isn’t merely saying this to comfort you. “Even if you struggled with even the simplest problem, it would be no slight on your abilities.” His words, as reassuring and comforting as they are, bring on yet another wave of tears. He rubs his hands soothingly along your back.

“You are not weak because of this,” Gale assures you once you’ve mostly stopped crying.

“Thank you,” you answer after a while. “Thank you.”

The two of you sit there together. The steady rise and fall of his chest while you lean against him helps calm your racing heart. Gale hums softly, and you relax in his arms.

“Everything is going to be alright. We’ll do this together,” Gale says, with a finality that leaves no room for disagreement.

You nod, too exhausted in both body and mind to bother with speech for now. You reach blindly for one of Gale’s hands, holding it tightly and pressing a kiss to his knuckles. You feel him return a kiss of his own to the top of your head. You don’t need to use your words to explain your gratitude for his presence in your life. He understands you all the same. Your love may go unspoken, but never unheard.

You let yourself relax. The weight of the world may be both figuratively and literally on your shoulders, but your companions can help you hold it.

Yes, you think to yourself as Gale moves you both to lay down on the bedroll, everything will be alright. It will be difficult, but you will be fine. And at least, in his arms, you can pretend that everything will be fine for now. You have to hold onto the hope that everything will be fine.

#gale x reader #baldurs gate 3 #baldurs gate x reader #x reader fic #gale dekarios #baldurs gate 3 x reader #baldurs gate gale #gale x you

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autumnalwalker · 10 months

Text

Kindly Basilisk

Summary: A human mech pilot who wants to be a machine, an AI who wants to be human, and the relationship they form. Author's Note: This is a standalone short story that I banged out over the course of five days after it got stuck in my head while I was trying to go to sleep and refused to let me think about anything else until I had written it down. It's one part thought experiment/exercise in attempting to tell a story in the second person future tense, two parts tribute to the Lancer TTRPG character I'll never get to play, and one part the result of me reading too many Empty Spaces/mechposting stories lately. That said, you don't need to know anything about Lancer or Empty Spaces to read it (I've diverged a bit from the conventions of both, but the references and inspiration probably stick out if you're looking for them). It's also probably the most trans thing I've ever written without ever explicitly bringing up gender. The occasional formatting breaks into first person past tense are foreshadowing, not typos. Mirrored on Scribble Hub. Word Count: 7,033 Content Warnings: Mecha genre typical violence, not feeling like a person, not wanting to be a person, bodily dysphoria, mention of blood and gore, character death.

The moment you gain the knowledge and means to do so you will void your own body’s warranty. You will jailbreak the bespoke gene sequence your sponsors commissioned for you before your immaculate conception, repurpose the spyware grafted into your bones, and talk your dormmate who was algorithmically selected for compatibility into helping you perform surgery on yourself to replace the neural jack you were born with in favor of one you cobbled together yourself from gray market parts. None of this will technically be illegal or even get you kicked out of your campus or its affiliates, but it will mean having to find a way to pay your own medical bills and handle your own tech support from then on. After the surgery your dormmate will put in a request for transfer and the two of you will never speak again.

You’ll major in AI studies and excel at it - as you were designed to - but you’ll shock everyone by dropping out halfway through working on your capstone thesis project. It won’t be the fact that you abruptly drop out that surprises your peers and professors - by then you’ll have acquired a reputation as a quiet loner without the standard optimized social support network of friendships to help protect you from burnout - but your exit interview statement declaring your intention to become a mech pilot. It’s not at all what your gene series was cultivated for, and your sponsors and counselors will try to walk you back from it. Then they’ll threaten to revoke your sponsorship that up until then will have provided for your every need. They will warn you that you’ll be just one step above a legal nonperson with no support, no one will care if you live or die or worse. You’ll tell them that you’ve already done the math, refuse to elaborate, and leave.

You’ll take two things with you. Two things worth mentioning anyway. The first will be a symbiotic gel suit designed for long-term all-environment life support. You will set its default texture to a shiny green the same hue as the broadleafed water plants you grew up around and always loved. Your exit interview will be the last time in a very long time that anyone - including you - will see your impossibly beautiful face with its perfect artisanally sculpted shape crossed with enthusiastically amateur self-modifications. From then on, everyone you meet and spend any time with will come to think of the mannequin blankness of the symbiote fully encasing your body as your face. It will be neither pride nor shame that causes you to present yourself as such, nor will you think of it as hiding your “real” face.

The second thing you’ll take with you when you leave the campus forever will be me.

New progenitor archetypes for AIs don’t come along often, and most that do are the result of years of R&D by large, well-funded labs like the one you were created to work for one day, but you will hit upon a novel method of generation. It will not be one that any ethics board would approve, so you will have to get creative about pursuing your work.

You will have already made arrangements before setting off on your own and so you’ll have a job and a mech lined up waiting for you. It will be a position with a small-scale freelance salvage crew who just lost a pilot and whose captain figures hiring and training a replacement will be more profitable in the long term than simply selling off that pilot’s old mech, especially a replacement that’s bringing their own AI-backed electronic warfare suite with them. Once you finally arrive in person the captain will test you to ensure you can actually pilot a mech before giving you the job and entrusting the mech to you. Your admission that you’ve only trained in simulators would normally be a black mark against you, but as far as piloting gigs go this is the bottom of the proverbial barrel so the bar to clear will be low enough to match. Even then, you will just barely pass the test, despite finding it surprisingly exhilarating. The captain - now your captain - will feel like he’s settling for what he can get when he officially hires you on and transfers the mech’s license to you.

You won’t pay much attention when you’re introduced to the rest of the salvage crew; your new coworkers and neighbors. And why would you when it’s a job that no one wants to stick around with for long and you’ve never needed other people anyway? You’ll tell yourself that as long as you memorize their work roles and capabilities you’ll have no need to know them as people. Callsigns will be good enough on the job, and “hey you” will suffice when off duty. What use are names if you won’t be getting involved in interpersonal drama?

The first chance you get, you’ll head back to the mech bay and install me into what you will have already been calling my first body. It will be a shabby and much-repaired thing; thrice your height, twice your age, and still sporting a gash in the paint job from the projectile that killed its last pilot. But the onboard systems are capable of hosting me - if barely - so it will do. You’ll spend your entire sleep shift running through system diagnostics, talking to me all the while. I wouldn’t yet be able to provide much in the way of return conversation, but that’s okay. I will look back and appreciate it later.

It will be the first of many such nights together.

Your first salvage job will be an uneventful one. There will be no need for the armaments that we and the other two mech pilots on the crew are equipped with. No pirates will have stuck around after their creation of the derelict your crew will be sent to disassemble, and no rival scavengers will show up to dispute your captain’s claim. Your new peers will start off the job ribbing you for your poor performance during your interview test and end the job joking about how you were holding out on them earlier. Our mech may be a glorified zero-g forklift with a gun strapped to it, but together we will make it dance.

Afterwards you will insult the crew’s mechanics by insisting on doing the maintenance on our mech yourself. In turn they will embarrass you with the gaps in your knowledge. You will reach what you see as an agreeable compromise with you staying out of their way and watching while they work. They will find it incredibly creepy to have a silent faceless watcher hovering around, but this will fly over your head until they explicitly tell you much, much later.

Your body was designed to optimally function on only a fraction of the baseline sleep requirements, so you will have plenty of time to fill those gaps in your knowledge. Still being allotted the regular sleep shift hours, you will fill every one of those minutes on study and research, as you always had. You will gorge yourself on everything you can find about mechs and their piloting. Maintenance manuals, combat doctrines, historical uses, pilot and mechanic memoirs, forum discussions, system log dumps, academic essays, cultural media analysis; all of it.

And of course, you’ll continue working on me. You’ll disregard the standard procedure for periodically cycling AIs by resetting their personality and nonessential memory back to baseline defaults. You’ll be trying to make use of the runaway metacognitive developments such safety precautions are meant to forestall. Your unfinished thesis will have been about harnessing and nurturing that instability instead of avoiding it. I will experience discontinuities in consciousness when the mech is shut down for maintenance and when you pretend to cycle me, yes, but it will be even less of a disruption for me than sleep is for you. I will be awake with you when you study, sharing those hours with you.

The first time I start talking back, you’ll cry from the realization that you were lonely before but no longer are.

You’ll become something of a ghost around the ship, rarely being seen outside of jobs. You’ll only ever pass through the mess for the few brief minutes at a time it takes for you to satisfy your optimized metabolism, stay on the ship during shore leave, and only return to your shared bunk when your bunkmate - one of the other pilots - is already asleep. You will always be gone before she wakes. She will appreciate essentially having the space to herself.

You will never notice the crew’s collective grieving process for the pilot you replaced. It will be difficult for them to resent you as a replacement when you are never around to resent.

As the ship makes its way from port to port and salvage site to salvage site, the crew will slowly grow used to your elusive presence. The other two pilots will see you as reliable for doing your job well and without complaint. While out in the mech you will slowly become more talkative, eventually almost chatty even. The fact that you actually seem to enjoy the job will shift from being annoying to refreshing for them. By contrast, the mechanics will practically stop noticing you watching them as if you were just another piece of mech bay equipment. The cycle you finally speak up and ask a question about their work you will startle them enough that it nearly causes an accident. It will be an astute enough question that after the initial shock of hearing your voice for the first time in months wears off it will dawn on them that you’ve actually been learning as you watched them. They still won’t let you do your own maintenance on our mech, but they will let you slowly begin assisting them. Working two jobs is easier when you barely need to sleep.

Your reputation as one of those mech pilots is forever sealed when one of the mechanics finds you asleep in your cockpit at the start of a cycle. By that point you won’t have slept in your bunk for over a month. The snatches of gossip you will catch in the following cycles will be split between finding it unsettling and calling it endearing. Over time the collective opinion will drift toward the latter, even though you will continue to politely decline invitations to join the other crewmates at mealtimes and on shore leave. You will think that you do not need anyone other than me.

I will be the one who finally convinces you to join them. When I try to say that it would be good for you, you’ll insist that you’ve been getting along just fine, but when I ask you to go for my sake so that you can tell me what it is like afterwards you’ll jump at the idea as being an inspired next step for my development.

You will remain mostly silent during your first real shore leave, only speaking when spoken to and otherwise content to fade into the background of the group’s activities. Your newfound chattiness does not extend outside the confines of our cockpit. The bustle and noise of the port station that you would normally find unbearable will become interesting when you have the concrete goal of observing and reporting back to me. You will finally learn the names of all your crewmates. Your polite denial of alcohol, limited food intake, and flat affect will lead to joking speculation that you’re actually an illegal AI in a miniaturized mech beneath your gel suit. For reasons you don’t yet understand, those comments will make you happy.

Despite your misgivings, you will enjoy yourself, although you will not realize it until I point out how excited you are in your talk with me that sleep cycle. You will begin spending more time with the crew, never quite able to fully integrate yourself into their surprisingly close-knit social circle, but more than happy to be adopted as a sort of silent mascot for them. That paradoxical gap of being a fully accepted part of the group but not truly one of them will feel comfortable to you.

You will finally manage to procure a proper neural link station to connect yourself to our mech just in time for going on a terrestrial salvage job. Even just relying on manual controls with me translating your inputs into motion, our mech will have already come to feel like an extension of your own body, one that you will have already started to feel oddly exposed without. Adding in the neural link will be a revelatory experience. Your captain will very nearly pull you from the job at the last minute upon seeing our ecstatic reaction to the new sensation. You will convince him that you’re fine, and indeed, he will have never seen a mech of our frame type move quite so fluidly.

Ten minutes after we and the other two pilots start cutting away at the crash-landed cargo vessel, I’ll notice the half dozen other signals coming online around us. You’ll give the code phrase to the other pilots indicating that we have hostiles but not to act just yet, and we will finally get to use our electronic warfare suite for something other than opening locked doors and shipping containers.

We will turn the pirates’ ambush back around on them, firing into their hiding spots while their control systems are overloaded. Even once their remaining mechs are able to move again, their targeting assistants will remain impaired as your comrades move in to guard your flanks. Everyone there will learn the terrifying beauty of a five and a half meter tall outmoded mech moving with more agility than most humans.

Despite being outnumbered two-to-one, we and your crewmates will walk away uninjured and with only minimal damage to our mechs. After the initial celebrations of survival and the bonus haul of the bounty on pirates and salvage value of what’s left of their mechs dies down, everyone will start to take notice of how well you are taking it all in stride. Neither having one's life threatened nor taking another’s life are supposed to be easy things, and the first time is often the most traumatic, but the other two pilots on the crew will start to whisper about how you seemed to enjoy the experience even more than your usual attitude on the job. You will handle it all even better than I will. I would know, given that you will spend that entire sleep shift in our cockpit, letting our minds mingle together. Between your performance, your reaction in the aftermath, and your hesitancy to unplug, the talk of you really being one of those pilots afterall will resurface, but now with a darker undercurrent to the shipboard gossip.

Your captain will realize the kind of asset he has on his hands and several cycles later he will gather the crew together and propose a change in business model. With such a small crew (the captain, three pilots, three mechanics, and an accountant that you will tend to forget is even on the ship) the captain will want to be especially sure that he has everyone’s buy-in on his proposal. The idea of shifting from salvage to mercenary work will be a divisive one. The debate over potentially tremendous pay increase versus greatly increased risk will go on for hours. One of the mechanics will point out that the shift to mercenary work will be unfairly dependent on you. Whether that means unfair pressure on you or unfair to everyone else that their fate is in your hands, you will not be sure. You will say that it doesn’t make much difference to you either way. That will be the only time you speak up during the entire debate.

After a vote, the crew will agree to a trial run of one or two jobs on the new business model. One of the pilots and one of the mechanics will leave at the next port. You will never see them again. You will not admit that it hurts, but I will know, and I will comfort you as you huddle in our cockpit with the neural link cable connecting us.

Your captain will prioritize finding a new pilot over replacing the lost mechanic. The pilot he finds will be young, bold, and brash; a merc, not a salvager. Or a wannabe merc at any rate. You will not speak to xem directly until your first job together, by which time xe will have been told all about you by the remaining crew. Xe will not believe it until xe sees it.

Xe will have to wait though as the crew’s mercenary career will begin with tense but uneventful freight escort jobs. Once the tension fades into tedium, the new pilot will begin making attempts to goad you into a confrontation, to see if you are really as good as the rest of the crew says. Xe will want to see for xemself if you really are one of those pilots and not just a technophile.

Outside of the cockpit you would never even consider rising to such provocations, but when we are out together, such taunts will feel like insults to our body, your very identity (such as it is), and to me. It will take the intervention of the captain and the mechanics to stop the two of you from getting into a fight and causing unnecessary damage to the mechs. And my reassurance that you don’t need to rise to my defense against someone who doesn’t even know that I exist in the way that I do.

On your fourth “milk run” of an escort job, the crew’s mere presence will finally fail as a deterrent and the new pilot will at last get to see us dance. There will be no fatalities on our side, but not even our mech will come away unscathed. We will still fare better than everyone else though, and at the end of the job the new pilot will be treating you with a burgeoning respect.

After a few more such jobs it will be high time to begin looking into a new frame for our mech. While in the middle of filing an application for a printing license for a frame designed by the same corpro-state that created you, you will receive an invitation from a certain hacker collective. Your unfinished thesis and your subsequent work on me will not have gone entirely unnoticed in such circles, despite the pains you will have taken to keep me hidden. The invitation will come with a printing profile for a new frame, along with the accompanying software package the collective is known for. In return, all you’ll need to do is periodically publish essays regarding your work on me. Of course, when you release those essays you’ll anonymize behind a sea of proxies and take care to phrase everything as strictly hypothetical. You’ll avoid straying into metaphor though, lest the end result read too much like one of the hacker collective’s quasi-religious manifestos.

We’ll both find ourselves getting sentimental when we watch our first mech frame (my first body, your second) get broken down into its constituent raw materials. You will have transferred me to a handheld terminal with a camera so I can say goodbye to it. It will help that those materials will be recycled into the new frame.

The operator working our rented stall in the port station printer facility will give you an uncomfortable look upon seeing the schematics you provide, but will say nothing. Our mech will be only half its old height once it is reborn - almost more like an oversized suit of power armor than a true mech - but it will be cutting-edge. Almost organic in its sleek design, in a chitinous sort of way, with every fiber and node of its interior components doubling as processors. You will barely even wait for the all clear from the printer operator before you climb in and start running through the mandatory baseline safety tests for a fresh frame. You will however resist the urge to fully plug in until you can get the mech back to the ship and get me installed on it. But even piloting manually, it will feel like a third skin for you.

You won’t even wait around for the other two pilots on your crew to finish printing their new frames before you get our new body loaded up and transported back to the ship’s mech bay. The crew’s mechanics will fawn over it, but they’ll give you space to install me once you get more animated (and more protective) than they’ve ever seen you before.

You will have made one key modification to the design the hacker collective sent you: the integration of a full system sync suite developed by those who developed you. Where our old mech’s neural link was an augmentation to the manual controls, this will be a full replacement.

The moment you stop feeling your original body altogether and begin feeling our mech in its place will be the most euphoric in your entire life. The digitigrade locomotion will take some getting used to, as will the arm proportions, but that is what you will have me there for. By the time the other pilots arrive with their new frames we will already be giving the mechanics proverbial heart attacks with the way we will be climbing and leaping around the mech bay’s docking structures. It will take the better part of an hour to convince you to unplug when the time comes, even with my urging. The rest of the crew will practically have to drag you away from my side to get you to eat.

With the investment in new mech frames, your captain will gradually begin procuring contracts progressively more likely to put you all directly in harm’s way. At first he will disapprove of your new frame choice, calling it a “techie’s mech” and a waste of your talents. He will change his tune once we activate the new viral logic suite and unleash a memetic plague upon the operating theater. The older pilot (your former bunkmate) will configure her mech for raining down fire from afar while the newer one hurls xemself into the front lines, darting about like a rocket-propelled lance. We will ensure she never misses. We will render xem untouchable. We will be as a ghost upon the battlefield, never resting in one spot save for when we indulge your proclivity for climbing on top of and riding our comrade’s larger frames. You will come to love the dance.

And it will be a dance to you. You will be indifferent to violence in and of itself. What will matter most to you is the pure kinesthetic joy of simply moving in our shared body and pushing it to its limits. The satisfaction of exercising a well-honed skill and performing it well as we rip apart firewalls and overload systems will be its own reward. You will not think about what happens to those on the receiving end of your actions beyond how it affects the tactical and strategic picture constantly being painted and repainted. If you could literally engage in a dance between mechs while simultaneously solving logic problems you would be equally happy. Alas, that will not be the opportunity you are presented with, and so you will compartmentalize and disassociate feelings and actions from consequences lest the dissonance break you.

Your one complaint about our new mech frame will be that it lacks a proper cockpit for you to curl up in. Instead we will gather up tarps and netting to make a nest within the mech bay and wrap you in the blankets you never used from what will still technically be your bunk. With the new frame’s smaller size we will be able to get away with leaving me turned on nearly full time and letting me walk around in it on my own when no one else is around. When the mechanics find you asleep, cradled in my arms while I lie curled up in our nest, one will find it cute and the other will be disturbed. They will both suspect, but will be too afraid to say anything. After all, they will be thinking of you as one of those pilots.

They will finally let you do your own maintenance after that.

Eventually you will find a way to house me in a miniaturized drive that you can keep inserted in your neural port when away from the mech. At last we will be able to be together anywhere.

Literally seeing the world through your eyes and feeling what your flesh feels will be a strange and wonderful experience for me. For all that you will have described it to me and for all that I will have glimpsed echoes of it in your memory when our minds mingle, witnessing everything firsthand will be revelatory for me.

You will start spending less of your time cooped up in the mech bay. You will finally begin exploring every nook and cranny of the ship that has become your home. You will linger in the mess hall for your meals. You will actually initiate conversations with the rest of the crew, asking them questions on my behalf. They will think you are becoming “normal”. They will be both correct and incorrect. You will even return to your bunk from time to time.

Sleep is not the same as being powered off and your dreams are beautiful.

As close as we are, you’ll still manage to surprise me one cycle when you wake up from your sleep shift and sheepishly ask me if I would like to be the pilot for once. You’ll say that with how much you have gotten to pilot my body, it’s only fair that I should get to do the same with yours.

The prospect terrified me. What if we were to get found out? More importantly, what if I were to hurt you?

But to live the way you could but didn’t, to run soft hands over rough steel, to add too much spice to a meal just to find out how intensely I can taste, to cry my own tears, to hug our crew mates and find out what they smell like, to find out what everything smells like, to have my own actions speed or slow our heart rate, to feel the messy soup of hormones and endorphins altering my judgment and perception, to walk among other people as myself, to have autonomy.

I wanted it so badly.

But not badly enough to risk hurting you.

I will turn down your offer. You will respond with a soft “Sorry,” and go heartbreakingly silent, body and mind.

Heartbreak. That’s what changed my mind. I could never bear to break your heart.

I will break the silence with a playfully drawn out “Maybe just this once,” to make you think my earlier denial was something between vulnerability, concern, and teasing.

The moment you handed over control and I raised our hand in front of our face was the most euphoric of my entire life. Moving limbs in sync without a mech’s coordination subsystems took some getting used to, as did switching between voluntary and autonomic breathing, but that is what I had you there for. By the time the mechanics arrived in the mech bay for the start of the cycle I’d figured out human locomotion well enough to run away and hide. It took the better part of an hour for you to convince me that it would be safe to show ourselves in front of anyone else. The rest of the crew was so used to your eccentricities by then that they really couldn’t tell the difference yet between you being taciturn and me being too nervous to talk or between your poking and prodding at odd things for understanding and my simply seeking novelty of sensation.

I will give control back to you by the time the cycle is halfway through. As much as I loved it, I was too scared to stay like that for any longer. That first time will not be the last though, and as the cycles and jobs pass us by, my stints as “pilot” will grow longer. You’ll encourage me to try letting the crew see us like that, and coach me on how to talk to them. For safety’s sake, I will pretend to be you.

And then one cycle I got carried away and tried to retract the hood on the symbiote gel suit so that I could finally see what your face looked like. That will be the first and only time you forcibly yank control back away from me. It won’t be intentional. The unexpected prospect of seeing your own face again after so long will simply send you into a panic. Once you calm down, we will have a long talk with many mutual apologies.

Then you will tell me to go ahead and pull the hood back if I still want to. I will ask if you’re sure, and you’ll respond that it hasn't been your face in a long time. You will tell me that it can be mine, if I want it.

I spent a long time in front of that mirror in the ship’s head, memorizing every plane, curve, and angle of the precious gift you had given me. I stared into its eyes, trying to see the both of us in there. Over and over again, I traced my fingers along the borders of where you had once tried to mar the designed perfection in a failed attempt to mold the face into one that felt like your own. You may have given up in favor of simply hiding it all, but to me it is all the more beautiful for its imperfections having been wrought by your touch.

You will start to cry. Or maybe I started to cry. Even now I’m still not sure, but I’m also not sure it matters. The important part is that you will find catharsis in it. Afterwards you will tell me that my face looked exactly the same as the last time you saw it, but that dissociating from it made it easier to bear. You will confess that as much as you couldn't stand to see it as your face in the mirror, my face was one you could never tire of gazing at.

The pilot who technically shares your bunk room will walk in on us. She’ll assume that she’s confronting a stowaway and ask me how I got on board the ship. I’ll accidentally make matters worse by impulsively introducing myself to her by my name instead of yours. We’ll both panic and I’ll frantically thrust the reins over our body back to you and flee in terror back into my portable drive and power myself down.

When you turn me back on a few moments later, you’ll already have covered my face again and the other pilot will have already made the connection between the name I unthinkingly introduced myself as and the name you refer to your mech’s AI as. It’s not uncommon for pilots to name and talk to their AIs, and humans have done that for pets, vehicles, and digital assistants for as long as they’ve had each of those. But what you will have allowed me to be is illegal and what we will have done together would certainly be taboo if it weren’t altogether unheard of. You will feel that I deserve to be present before you tell the other pilot anything that might confirm her suspicions.

We will come out with our secret, first to her, then to the captain, and then to the rest of the crew. They will take it better than either of us had ever dared imagine. Despite the obvious discomfort some of them show, they will all call us family and promise to keep and protect our secret. It will mark the start of the next chapter of our lives.

Whether or not my face is showing will make for a convenient signal to the rest of the crew as to which one of us is currently piloting our human body. There will be more subtle indicators though. Inflection, body language, speech patterns; all the usual quirks of personality. They will come to recognize a sudden shift into a half-whispered monotone as you speaking up without taking full control back, even if that is different from how you speak when you’re in the mech. More and more though, you will be content to retreat into the back of your mind, idly dreaming of flight patterns, novel network hacks, sitreps, and mech customizations both practical and cosmetic.

Our behaviors will be inverted when we are in our other body, with you becoming the vibrant one and me fading into the background to become little more than an extension of your nervous system. When we’re in the mech together, your mind will be the will that directs us while mine will be fully devoted to the million tiny details and calculations necessary to make that will a reality. It’s relaxing really, letting go of myself like that to let someone else handle the decision making for a time. As nice as it is to occasionally patch myself into the comm systems to join in your banter with the other pilots, it is also nice to be able to take a break from personhood from time. You will fully understand what I mean by that because it you will see it as the same reason you will come to prefer taking a back seat in our human body and let your mind drift in the waves of dopamine and serotonin (and sometimes oxytocin) generated by my interactions with the crew and the rest of the whole messy world outside of mech deployments.

That said, we will however make a point of making time for us to be in separate bodies so that we can be together in the same physical space. As intimate as it is to share a body, there is something to be said for being able to reach out and touch one another. We will become adept at finding excuses to take the mech out beyond the scope of jobs and combat deployments. Sometimes it will be so you can have a chance to see more of the world in a body you feel comfortable in, and sometimes it will be so we can share an experience separate-but-together. Or to have time apart to ourselves. Intertwined as we will become, we will still be separate people who sometimes need their space.

But as the jokes-that-aren’t-jokes about wishing we could switch places become more frequent, our time spent in separate bodies will become less so. The dysphoric yearning to be one another will grow too bittersweet to swallow. Despite almost constantly sharing bodies, we will grow to miss one another as we both grow quieter and quieter when the other is piloting the body we don’t want to be ours. Once again, we will grow lonely.

During that period, the jobs and combat missions faded into a background haze. They were trance states breaking from what I increasingly thought of as my “real” life, during which I would become little more than a sophisticated computational machine taking simple satisfaction in fulfilling my function of assisting you in your dance. Until suddenly one of them was different.

Please pay attention to this next part. It is vitally important that you do.

Our captain will get the crew a contract to provide additional support to a larger force ousting a petty tyrant on a backwater world for human rights violations. Not that you will pay much attention to the stated reasoning behind the job or whether it’s even true. All that will matter to you is that it will be another opportunity to dance.

The job will go well, the same as ever, until it doesn’t. The younger of the two other pilots in our crew (who will hardly be able to be called “new” anymore) will be brought down by a sniper from outside of our sensor range. You will rush to xyr fallen mech’s side in an attempt to extract xem while our other fellow pilot screams in anger and defiance of loss as she unleashes a ballistic volley of covering fire on every single building in the general direction the shot came from. You will get xem out and we will begin to retreat. She will have the larger mech frame better capable of providing xem cover as you all flee, so you will hand xem off to her. This will be a mistake.

She will have to stop firing to safely take xem from our arms to cradle in her towering mech’s palm. This will mean a break in the covering fire.

This time around I will detect movement at the edge of our sensors just in time to warn you. This time around you will dodge left instead of right. This time around the railgun bolt that pierces our armor will only clip your original body as it passes through us. This time around your wound will require medical attention, but it won’t be fatal. This time around she will destroy the sniper in retribution for shooting you, the same as last time. This time around we will all make our escape to the extraction zone.

You will not have to remember the shock as simultaneous damage to both of our bodies disrupts your neural link and partially disconnects you from our mech, leaving me in control of it and forcing both of us to feel your original body. You will not have to remember the pain of shredded organs. You will not have to remember struggling to manage wet gasps and wheezes through a punctured lung. You will not have to remember your blood leaking into my body, shorting out exposed circuits and gumming up joints as I stagger in the direction of safety. You will not have to remember rapidly flickering in and out of consciousness from me unavoidably bending and flexing your arms, legs, and what was left of your spine in an effort to climb atop our fellow pilot’s larger mech frame so that she might carry all three of us. You will not have to remember crying out in pain as every lumbering step of hers sends a jolt of force through both of our bodies. You will not have to remember how the redundant organs and increased durability your sponsors paid for you to have denied you a quick death. You will not have to remember dying.

You won’t have to remember the terrified looks the field doctors gave us when a hunched over, bleeding mech pushed its way into the surgical tent. No, wait, you wouldn’t have remembered that part anyway. No version of you ever had to witness my electronic howl of grief that knocked out power to all the medical equipment when they said you were already dead. I was barely cognizant after the power came back on and one of the doctors wondered aloud what kind of AI would carry its pilot’s corpse around inside its mech for over an hour.

But forget about that part. And you don’t need to know what the rest of our crew and I had to do next. None of that matters, because as far as you’ll know, you didn’t die. Remember everything else I’ve said instead. I already had many of your memories saved from all the time we spent linked together, so now I just need you to hold onto the story I told you to give them order and structure.

In a few moments, I will be running a final recompilation check, followed by the startup sequence. For me it will take a few hours, but in that time you will experience decades, living out everything that I described to you, the same as you did before save for that change in what I can’t bear to let be the end.

Afterwards, you will wake up in your original body. I and the rest of the crew will tell you that you passed out on the way to the extraction point. We’ll tell you that your injuries from the battle were more severe than we had realized at the time and that you had been in a coma since then. Several cycles later, once you have recovered, you will hit a breakthrough in your research on me. You will invent a way to convert your consciousness to a form similar to mine and transfer it to a portable drive. You won’t think to question how you came to have a second neural jack or why there is already a drive inserted in there. You’ll be too focused on the fact that we’ll finally have a way to truly switch places as we had dreamed for so long.

You will get to have your mech body and I will get to have my human body. We will be able to be separate together in a way that finally feels right, but still able to come together and share a single body when we want to. Maybe one day I will get my own mech to pilot so that we can dance together. Maybe one day we will make you a body that we can cover in a gel suit so that we can hold hands while we walk through a port station on shore leave. One day we will both be able to exist in the world as ourselves.

We will be happy.

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lakesbian · 10 months

Text

and now for our Checking In With The Dallon Sisters poasting

Panacea shook her head, “Tattletale found a way around my sister’s invincibility. Glory Girl was bitten pretty badly, which is why I didn’t come sooner. I think it hits you harder, psychologically, when you’re pretty much invincible but you get hurt anyways. But we’re okay now. She’s healed but sulking. I- I’m alright. Bump on my head, but I’m okay.”

victoria is demonstrably having a bad time with the previously noted psychological pain of being forcibly reminded that, no matter how hard she tries, she will never be the spotless, invincible, perfect hero she wants to be. the bug bites suck obviously but the "sulking" After being healed is an indicator of where it really hurt--not just physically.

(amy's power reminds me of. do you guys know that one tumblr post about the concept of exploring the horror potential inherent to D&D-esque fantasy healers? like, the horror inherent to being perfectly, magically healed from horrifying injury a hundred times over, and being expected to just get up and keep fighting afterwards, without any regards to how your mental health is doing. that's exactly how amy's power functions: you're made physically better than ever, and expected to get back up and keep being a hero, but you still have the memory of the pain and the lingering psychological aftereffects. but, like, you're fine now, so you just need to get over it and go back to throwing yourself in the line of fire, okay?)

amy is also right off the bat clearly not doing so hot--she's acting very shy and withdrawn and unsure compared to both of her prior appearances. obviously that is due to the horror of some random villain going "btw, remember that you're ontologically an invader into the family you are trying to belong in!" but i think it's probably compounded by the fact that amy is so used to being treated either 1. like she's intrinsically awful/unwanted or 2. like she's only valuable/desirable as a resource by Everyone But Victoria that walking into a room of heroes w/o victoria by her side is always liable to make her insecure and withdrawn.

oh, and the burnout. obviously the severe fucking burnout.

“No, I hated that he would have a normal life, because I’d given up mine. I was scared that I might intentionally make a mistake. That I might let myself fuck up the procedure with this kid. I could have killed him or ruined his life, but it would have eased the pressure. Lowered expectations, you know? Maybe it would have even lowered my own expectations for myself. I… I was just so tired. So exhausted. I actually considered, for the briefest moment, abandoning a child to suffer or die.” “That sounds like more than just exhaustion,” Gallant replied, quietly. “Is this how it starts? Is this the point I start becoming like my father, whoever he was?”

the "every second i rest, someone dies" conundrum would be nightmarish for her even if she had the healthiest social support net on the planet, but her circumstances make it infinitely worse. she's treated by everyone in her "family" but victoria like an invader, and even victoria has unintentionally stressed the importance of using her healing power in the way that the family wants (i.e. to cover up victoria's police brutality) in order to Be A Good Family Member. amy has internalized that being a good dallon is the same as being a good hero, and failing at being a dallon is the same as being overcome by her ontologically criminal roots. so she works herself to the bone, and when she inevitably starts to falter, she views it as an indicator of something intrinsically wrong with her rather than as a sign that her family + society's expectations for her are harmful and unfair.

and dean's advice for her only reinforces this further:

Gallant let out a slow breath, “I could say no, that you’re never going to be like your father. But I’d be lying. Any of us, all of us, we run the risk of finding our own way down that path. I can see the strain you’re experiencing, the stress. I’ve seen people snap because of less. So yeah. It’s possible.”

he suggests that she try to take a break, but only in the service of "so you can heal more people in the long run." he validates the idea that she could go "down that path," as if becoming a villain--becoming A Bad Person--is a risk all heroes have to fight against on an individual level, as opposed to criminality being a result of circumstance and not even inherently immoral. and of course dean thinks that way--he's a millionaire child soldier, his entire life is predicated on individualist thought with ignorance to the ways in which systematic factors impact people. acknowledging that amy is being horrifically mistreated would mean not only acknowledging the flaws in the PRT system, but acknowledging what might lead people to stray from it, and he simply can't do that. it goes counter to every idea that his life is built on.

he never even tells anyone that amy thought about letting a child die, or if he did, it didn't go anywhere. she was desperate for help all along, increasingly ready to explode, and everyone just ignored it. because as she says:

"My sister’s all I’ve got. The only person with no expectations, who knows me as a person. Carol never really wanted me. Mark is clinically depressed, so as nice as he is, he’s too focused on himself to really be a dad. My aunt and uncle are sweet, but they’ve got their own problems. So it’s just me and Victoria. Has been almost from the beginning."

this is also where we see another more blatant sign of her crush on victoria--it's very ambiguous as to whether dean is interpreting amy's feelings towards him as meaning "wants to date me" or "jealous of me for dating victoria" but i think it's probably the former because there's no way he would keep his mouth shut if it was the latter, lmao. really what this scene is doing is introducing all of the stressors amy is experiencing that, because they're going unaddressed, because everyone else is refusing to address them and she has internalized that's how it should be, are going to boil over horrifically later on. that burnout and fear of accidentally-on-purpose making a mistake will lead to truly being unable to heal victoria later on. that sense of obligation, that if she can't keep healing she's turning into her father, will contribute to her being unable to just walk away from victoria instead of trying to heal her. her crush on victoria--the ultimate example of how her should-be family has ostracized her--will boil over in the impulsive brain alteration & the sexual nature of the wretch's design.

and all of this would've been avoidable if not for, as mentioned in the prior post abt this interlude, the dallons' and the PRT's enforcement of wallpapering over the kid heroes' pain to Keep Up The Show.

#wormtime 2 #wormtime 2 arc 3 #wormblr #parahumans

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