xarrixii

[xarrixii]

sometimes being told that you're not making it all up is actually like the only thing you needed. like, yes, you are experiencing Negative Feeling(s) as a result of Negative Experience(s). that's normal.

[xarrixii]

F/B Chapter_39 : "The Gray Area"

CW: a physical altercation, awkward interactions between friends, mild injury

previous chapter | beginning | masterlist

/ / / / / | ---

Someone was outside. Someone had pressed one of those stupidly loud keypad buttons on the electronic lock that liked to get stuck even though they had a cover to flip down to protect them from getting sticky.

Harlow had paused immediately, mid-way through the Agent Reid fight. There was a scalding thump of flame that would hit him when he unpaused.

He shut off the TV and got up from the couch, setting the controller down and maneuvering over behind the desk in the back corner Raiden had put together hastily once as quietly as he could. Whoever was outside did not press another button for a while and Harlow allowed himself to steal a pocket knife Raiden had left some time ago into his hand.

If it was Liam at the door, he would’ve revealed himself by now by either some loud dramatic entrance or proclaiming the prank. If it was his mother, it meant she’d finally figured out she’d been making absent payments for several years or she’d found him out and was kicking him out of one of the only hiding spots he’d ever had from her.

And he would be fucked over by being inside. He’s occupying a space being sold that is supposed to be empty.

If it was anyone else, they wanted to break in and steal something. Why they would choose the specific garage someone was clearly inside of was another story entirely. Harlow heard the other three loud keypad beeps before the click of the slide door unlocking.

They knew the code. Did they break into the office, rifle through the cabinets? Did they just know?

Harlow gripped onto the knife tighter.

Raiden would have announced themself by now, right?

He heard the shabby metal sheet lift up and made a quick check for his lighter. It was less-than-delicately allowed to slam back onto the rubber strip on top of the concrete. Harlow shifted the position of his lighter, flicked the knife open, and took a deep breath as quietly as he could.

And then he winked the light away from the bulb with a wave of the lighter.

Harlow fixed the general posture of his crouch. If there was anything he had learned from Raiden over the years, it was that he needed any advantage he could get in a tight space. Including the dark. The switch was a literal light switch—it turned on and off when flashed by a source of light. Fire. One of Raiden’s projects from school.

Okay.

The fabric shifting was a very obvious noise in the complete lack of any other sound, and Harlow half-rolled to the side to avoid the body vaulting over the desk. The only light was from the crack of the garage door where it had bent from Raiden slamming it too many times before the rubber strip was installed. It was enough to see the shape of a person’s existence in a space—without much else.

The outline of someone who knew a little bit about throwing punches forced itself at him and before he really thought about it he’d grabbed their wrist and pushed the blade side of the pocket knife forward.

Fire blasted out of the person’s fist and Harlow dodged it on instinct, crouching lower to⸺

Harlow was full-force kicked off balance and had to scramble to the side, ditching the knife to back off into the open garage from the figure lunging to tackle him. They collided with the wall and let out a breath before sending another blast of fire at Harlow.

He caught it and strangled it free from the pyrokinetic’s control before shooting it back. They flinched, barely, before realizing and diving straight through. Harlow made a noise as it connected with his face and shoved them off, hiding for a moment in the dark spot behind the couch to grab his lighter and crack it open. Harlow absorbed the fire into his lighter hand before getting up out of the way.

The immediate break for the garage door ended up being mostly futile, leaving Harlow to messily elbow the person on top of him into the sheet.

It clacked and heaved. The person hacked a note out and managed to get up properly before Harlow did to yank him back. Harlow burned and held the fire in his hand, using every single movement in that short scrimmage to amplify it before half-crawling under the controller cord still taut from where his controller sat on the couch.

Whoever this was clearly had a lackluster grasp for the dark, despite their ability to probably knock Harlow out cold in the light. They took a bit to climb over the cord after feeling it even though the controller was knocked to the floor. Harlow grabbed for the pocket knife on the floor and flicked it out again, giving the person a short arc of fire to follow and register Harlow had a knife.

They backed off, slightly, before repositioning and trying to close the distance again.

Harlow arced the knife’s blade around as he moved until he felt the fire in his hand actually begin to get hot and let it fly free and smack against the pyrokinetic’s arm. They recoiled their next action and were left stunned for a moment long enough to let Harlow bolt for the garage door.

He’d lifted it a few inches off the ground by the time he was tackled again and forming the fire around the shape of the knife and cutting through the sheet door until there was slightly more light in the room.

The pyrokinetic intruder grappled for the knife and let Harlow get enough of an opening to grab their neck with the fire before letting go of him in favor of the knife.

I just need an opening, Harlow thought absently, breathing. I need to get out.

He formed the fire around him. Watched the pyrokinetic actually hesitate to move before they summoned fire of their own and hucked it at Harlow’s face.

Harlow forced himself to swipe the blinding fire away to watch as they again tried to close the distance between the two of them. He tried to grab for a layer of open skin to pulse through the fire he’d built up and found a lack of useful spots.

Another hit connected and doubled Harlow’s breathing out of wack. Harlow blocked the knife edge with his lighter and internally groaned as it clattered to the side and snapped shut. He shrunk himself and squirmed out by returning instead of blocking the next hit.

A short curse. Harlow forced himself not to pause and think about it, whisking up the lighter and throwing fire at the garage door.

The cycle repeated. Harlow gained distance and the person closed it. Harlow gained distance and the person closed it. Harlow huffed out some desperate strangle at the garage door, finally opening a melted hole.

He couldn’t focus today. His control was loose. He needed to leave.

Harlow grabbed the controller and pulled the cord taut once more, feeling the yank of it pulling out of the old console when the person tripped over it—again.

Blast of fire. Harlow snapped his lighter around the knife and tried to take the knife back. A sliver nicked its way through and Harlow made some weird muffled version of pain that reminded him awfully of home as the person took advantage of his fleeing motion to throw him against the desk. It moved maybe an inch from the force and Harlow let out a mostly silent whine with the release of air it brought. He heard his lighter clatter off somewhere to the concrete.

His back felt tortured. The rest of him was mostly limp enough to let the person pick him up by the collar and shove him flat across the desk, hopping up to hold him there and set the pocket knife’s blade over his throat.

Heavy breathing. From them both.

Harlow shut his eyes and gulped down the air lodged in his throat, crying out a quiet shit into the otherwise silent garage.

“What, that’s,” the person huffed awkwardly. “That’s it? I was starting to think you could have actually gotten away, I mean one more trick and…” Harlow opened his eyes enough to see some mode of wild gesticulation with the knife before it settled back over his throat.

He recognized that voice. That tone. He hiccuped out a laugh that very quickly became a cry.

Harlow had been tired.

So, so tired.

“Are you okay?”

“Rai,” Harlow weakly sobbed. “Rai. You’re alive.”

That knife was tossed aside and Harlow was wrapped into a standing hug faster than he could recognize he was being pulled off the desk. Harlow put his hands up and dug them into Raiden’s back and slumped so far forward he swore Raiden would fall over.

“Fuck, Urb,” Raiden started in relief, physically relaxing. “That’s my bad. Sorry. I should’ve figured it would just be you in here.”

He cried. Sobbed, wailed pathetically into Raiden’s shoulder and screamed and hiccuped tears into their shirt. One of Raiden’s hands stayed on his back and the other went up to his hair. Held him there for a while. Harlow completely broke down.

“I mean,” Raiden laughed at themself, “what kind of random weirdo enters a garage and just plays video games? I feel like one of us would know by now if someone got that ballsy. And the lighter. Like I know a lot of pyros probably need one, but the chances are,”

Harlow laughed into the crook where Raiden’s shoulder met their head.

“Oh, shit. Here, hold on.”

Raiden guided Harlow onto the couch and walked out of the garage through the hole in the sheet door, then came back in with a box and sat down with it. Waited for Harlow to gently swipe at his eyes and to go back and fix a contact that stung, waited for him to sniffle and blink and manage to collect himself enough to look over.

“Happy twenty-three?” Raiden half-asked. “I probably should’ve called, or something, but I assumed you would be maybe busy with Cinder or your mom and everything or that it would get complicated in general. I was planning to take the old console, leave these here, maybe a sticky note and some sharpie. I don’t even remember if we have those here.”

Raiden paused, backlit by the sunlight through the hole in the garage door, and snapped their fingers twice.

The light pinked several times before going back to its usual humming.

Loriann—his mother—had bought the garage back when she needed somewhere private herself. There was an outlet near the door that had already had a corded floodlight sitting beside it, not plugged in. Raiden had plugged it in pretty much immediately and that was how the light in the garage had been for a while before Raiden showed up with their light-activated lamp to use instead.

Raiden had rambled about their various ideas for a pyrokinetically-activated lightswitch for three hours while setting it up. Something about kinetic-related lab projects in one of their high school classes.

His mother hadn’t ever stopped making payments. To his knowledge.

Probably glad Harlow chose to hide away somewhere near red-light slumland district one instead of being at home on the other side of the city.

Home. Lying back on a bed that wasn’t his. Thin strips of light where the curtains ended. His face in the TV. A metal wire bin filled with discarded orange bottles covered in a layer of dust. Laughing from the dining room below.

“Two months?” Harlow finally said out of disbelief.

Raiden shrugged, handing Harlow the box in their hands. “Yeah.”

Bright, plastic, buildable yellow daffodils. Harlow didn’t realize he was holding an undying package of one of his favorite flowers until he looked up to Raiden half-sheepishly grinning at him.

“Where...” Harlow huffed out a weird laugh and swiped away building tears again. “Where have you been?”

Raiden opened their mouth and then clamped it shut, clearing their throat.

“Sorry,” Harlow said, putting a wrist to his forehead and flexing out the fingers. “Sorry. Storm had you, obviously.”

“About that,” Raiden started before stopping again. “Can you give me a ride? I’ll find a way to explain the brunt of it later, I got super preoccupied with grabbing the game console so I’d have something to do in the hospital I was in that I forgot how hard it would be to bring it, a controller, and a game or two back on motorcycle. That was why I came here—not that I didn’t remember it was your...”

Harlow let Raiden’s voice trail off.

Hospital?

“It’s complicated,” Raiden said. They were running a hand through their hair.

“Ride,” Harlow sighed, wiping his palm against his eyes one more time. “Right. I brought your truck here, it’s in the side lot like a block down. You can load that motorcycle into the bed. Should still have your cables there. I can drive you up. Or—I mean it doesn’t really matter who drives. But I can bring the truck back. I’m assuming you want me to take the truck back.”

Harlow took a deep breath in and held it there until Raiden spoke again. “Yeah. I’ll explain it on the way, I promise. There’ll be plenty of time.”

He nodded. None of this made any sense yet but he trusted Raiden’s ability to confide. Harlow wasn’t sure if there was anything Raiden deliberately hid from him, actually. “I’ll grab your truck, there should be a bag, probably next to the desk. You can put whatever game stuff you need in there.”

Raiden pulled Harlow in for another hug before letting him get up.

Alph recognized a building and suddenly began stumbling to form words. Urban was in the passenger and they glanced over enough to see him picking mindlessly at the corners and flap edges of the box of constructible flowers. Better than what they’d found to put over the shallow cut Urban had gotten somewhere in their fight.

Alph’s eyes looked back at the car in front of them when it began moving forward.

“I was put in a cell,” Alph relented. Urban looked at them in their peripherals. “Which is probably obvious. Uh.” Another silent hurdle in their throat. “I ended up with a lot of time to think inside of it. About the only thing I really could do. Storm started making—a lot of sense. Their goals are really similar to what mine always have been.” An awkward filler laugh. “Apparently my cell block division was a Storm ops test, for potential Cinder defectors. When I tried to break out after getting the binders off, Nacht ended up being there having some conversation outside with a bunch of the guards. He hurts a lot.”

“Tell me about it,” Urban laughed back, leaning forward and resting one elbow on the box in his lap. “While looking for you I ran into him. I could’ve just, died. No one would have known where I was.”

Alph smiled a little. “Yeah. But that’s why I’m settling in the Storm-lobbied hospital for now. Just in case there’s lingering effects. I decided to, you know, agree to join after getting showed up. It made sense and I figured Cinder had kind of just left me for whatever to happen.

“Obviously nobody outside of you and Storm is supposed to know I’m not rotting in a cell somewhere. Which is why I never turned on the light when I maybe should have.” Alph anxiously tapped the steering wheel with their index finger. “Storm’s refusing to let me do anything until I’m cleared of potential health problems to join their trainee program, so I just need to sit around and do nothing for a while. It’s killing me.”

It was killing me to be unable to tell you, Alph winced silently.

“So nobody is supposed to know that you’re… not imprisoned, anymore,” Urban said.

“Right.”

“And you’re not supposed to talk to anyone.”

“Yeah.”

Urban went quiet. Alph had to physically stop their finger from tapping the wheel before they went nuts. Nobody at Storm knew anything about the Cinder Callowary Apartments incident that had gotten Alph kidnapped instead of Urban besides the teleporter who had brought Alph in that kept saying they’d been left behind. It wasn’t like anyone would really care then, anyway, apart from their dad, Ty, and Urban. It was more difficulty than it was worth to try to explain where they were for two months. To return to their normal routine plus Storm’s.

Their missing persons poster was hung up on a grocery store corkboard. Alph had been a kinetic-enhanced officer-in-training.

Urban turned to look out the window.

“I’m sure I can convince Storm to let me talk to you, since you’re gonna know all of these random pieces anyway,” Alph said. Urban looked a little further to the side. “You just can’t, y’know, tell anyone. It’d be a huge favor to me if you could keep this quiet as long as you can. They’ll—Cinder will find out eventually, but it’s better if they don’t know for longer.”

“Right,” Urban offered reluctantly. “I can do that.”

Alph passed by the deli they assumed whoever brought them subs all the time went to for a bunch of different people. Alph figured they weren’t the only one with an absurd amount of the logo-filled wrappers frequently in their trash bin because of the size of the bag and amount of time the nurse spent searching through it for sharpied-on room numbers.

Urban made a face at it before turning back to stare at the box.

“They um,” Alph said after another minute. “I remember you liking daffodils. That was—I wasn’t making that up, right?”

“No, sorry, I just...” Urban held his mouth slightly open before sighing.

I don’t know, either, Alph told the silent end of that.

Another minute later and Alph was pulling their truck into the hospital parking lot and turning it off. Alph got out and, gentler than usual, shut their door while stealing a glance at the parking job next to them. Alph turned to the truckbed at a cable clicking off and getting thrown across the bed.

Alph got the cables off their side of the truck and unloaded the bike when Urban opened the door to the back seats and pulled out the console and everything else stacked on top of it.

They never found that bag.

Urban frowned and shoved his shoulder and back into the door before Alph locked it and put the keys in their jacket pocket.

“You’re not taking the helmet?”

Alph looked back in the truckbed and cursed themself, leaning the motorcycle against the truck to climb up and grab it. If they had actually cared about concealing their face, they probably could’ve kept it on after what they assumed was a floodlight turned off and just turned on the one they’d installed, but Alph has assumed they could fight at least decently well in the dark⸺

They’d put the helmet onto Urban’s head without really registering the action and earned a scoff in return.

Alph grinned and hopped back out, double-checking they shut the tailgate before grabbing the motorcycle by the handlebars and walking toward the garage. Fighting Urban in the dark was useful practice, anyway. Preparing for an unknown opponent and reacting was something Alph always regretted their lack of good experience with. Sparring with Urban did more for Urban than it did for Alph, there wasn’t much that their dad’s aerokinesis could do, Captain Anderson helped their focus over the years and Chief Kepler kicked their ass after they begged for two years. There was everyone else at the station, too, but those were all people Alph knew.

Flash Fire vigilantism with Urban was amateurish to unhelpful most of the time. Fighting off a random spur of kinetic traffickers with Liam⸺

Alph stopped moving and put a hand to their head.

“Rai?” Urban asked with a hum suddenly radiating in their ears. “Are you okay? Raiden?”

They blinked. Took a deep breath in, blinked several more times, held their eyes closed, and breathed out. Alph opened their eyes again to the ground where the console, controller, and games were sitting.

“Raiden do I need to grab someone? Something?”

“No,” Alph cleared their throat. “Sorry. I’ll be okay. Just dizzy.” It might not end pretty if Storm finds Cinder personnel here. For either of us.

Urban righted Alph before they comprehended they’d been physically held in an upright position and then kind of hovered until Alph shook their head off and gave a hard blink to the world.

He hesitantly picked the pile of game things back up and cocked his head at Alph in the helmet. Alph started walking to the hospital garage again and talking about whatever they came up with to talk about. Somehow they got to the point where Urban was explaining how Alph’s dad and Ty were doing by the time Alph was taking off the helmet on his head to put away in the easily robbable communal vehicle area.

“Ty didn’t really seem to understand the scale of you not being around. Which is alright, probably. I don’t know what he thinks, exactly, but he’s doing alright. Your dad is worried, as usual.” Urban ran a hand through his hair to remove the static and let out a laugh. “Worried is better than terrified.”

Alph nodded, distracted by someone that had wandered in. The longer Urban was here, the more dangerous it would get.

They traded the stack of game equipment from Urban’s hands for the keyring including the truck in their jacket pocket and immediately the controller clattered to the ground. The person swiveled to look over at the noise before turning back to what they were doing. Alph cringed and waited for Urban to crouch down and pick it up to put back on the stack.

“You sure you don’t want help bringing that inside?” he asked while putting the keys to Alph’s truck in his own pocket.

Alph semi-craned their neck and waited for the person to enter their chosen vehicle before responding. “Nah. I feel bad making you carry it here already. This place isn’t friendly to Cinder.’’

Urban frowned and continued to stare at Alph.

I don’t want to leave either, Alph thought while forcing themself to smile and nudge Urban back out the garage rather than into the hospital doors. Urban gave Alph a quiet tch and waved on his way out.

At the door, Alph looked back over their shoulder.

“Hey I’m,” Alph started half-shouting across the room. Urban turned back too. “I’m sorry I couldn’t make your birthday any, better. You deserve better than whatever bruises that sprawl formed. And also that I can’t, stay. Or go back, I guess. And that I threw all of this on you, all at once.”

“You’re good, Rai,” Urban said. “Not the worst I’ve had.”

A few seconds passed where they both just continued to stare at each other before Urban pivoted back to the open door. Alph swallowed.

“Urb, I think you should join Storm.”

next chapter | masterlist

/ / / / / | --- missing a content warning? let me know

SIKE i wasn't done with the rewrites, apparently. i read this chapter again and realized the two pyrokinetics were not acting like they were immune to a lot of degrees of fire so i kind of had to. sorry lmao

taglist (ask to go on or off): @madeoforgansandtissues, @fins0up, @kadjakat

[xarrixii]

been a long time since i've done one of these mid-chapter

[xarrixii]

well that would be why chapter 57 took me so long to write it's like six thousand words

for reference my average chapter length is like. 1.5k maybe. that's generous

sdfdsfndskjfndskjdskjfdskjfnajbioajdfia

[xarrixii]

wh, well, no, absolutely not. no. hell no. oh hell no. no i will not be surviving the abyssmally terrible movie designed to be pop culture reference porn The Last Sharknado: It's About Time where they break every rule of time travel and it saves the world. are you fucking kidding me? any time a side character is pictured on screen they are killed off. they are slaughtered instantly.

[xarrixii]

wasn't tagged but saw @tc-doherty do it and wanted to join

picking Amaterasu Wolford, Liam Bauer, and Patrik Collins (Harlow's grandfather) because i can

tagging uhhh. i don't know. i don't have anybody. freedom to join. here are some things my characters have done:

Killed Someone Under Orders | Had Someone Killed On Their Orders | Killed Someone In Self Defense | Spared Someone’s Life | Invented Something | Been Hungover | Kissed Someone | Slow-Danced | Been In A Long-Term Relationship | Had Sex | Had Sex And Regretted It | Had A One-Night Stand | Had A Threesome | Experimented With Their Sexuality | Had A Kid | Adopted A Kid | Wanted To Have A Family With Someone | Done Something On Impulse They Regretted | Gone Traveling | Had A Bounty Put On Them | Eaten An Insect | Been Groped/SA’d | Been Dumped | Dumped Someone | Smoked | Gotten High | Put Someone In A Headlock | Won A Bet | Lost A Bet | Forgiven Someone Who Wronged Them | Indulged In Petty Revenge | Hallucinated | Gotten A Noticeable Scar | Kneed/Hit Someone In The Groin | Had An Unattainable Crush | Laughed Themselves To The Point Of Tears | Been Kidnapped | Been Brainwashed/Hypnotized | Had A Recurring Nightmare | Been Bullied | Bullied Someone | Experienced Survivor’s Guilt | Been Tied/Chained Up | Given Someone A Massage | Received A Massage | Been Backed Up Against A Wall | Shot Someone | Stabbed Someone | Saved Someone’s Life | Cheated On Someone | Been Cheated On | Been In An Open Relationship | Had A Friendship With Benefits | Been In A Queerplatonic Relationship | Had A Stalker | Been Betrayed | Been A Traitor | Been Possessed | Been In A Bar Fight | Been Thrown Out Of A Bar | Been Arrested | Broken Out Of Jail | Been To A Funeral | Been To A Brothel | Had Surgery | Broken Someone’s Trust | Broken Someone’s Heart | Had Their Heart Broken | Broken/Damaged Something Out Of Anger | Broken/Damaged Something Out Of Spite | Gotten A Piercing | Gotten A Tattoo | Used A Fake Name | Been Beaten Up | Been Tortured | Tortured Others | Been Abused | Been Blackmailed | Gotten Away With A Crime | Framed Someone Else For A Crime They Committed | Shared A Bed Platonically | Been In Love | Suffered From Sleep Paralysis | Been Forced To Flee Their Home | Learned A New Language | Joined A Rebellion | Fought On The Losing Side Of A War | Fought On The Winning Side Of A War | Become A Godparent | Become An Aunt/Uncle

if you want me to do other characters i'm open to that. from any of the stories on my pinned post actually. please. ple

BLANK

Killed Someone Under Orders | Had Someone Killed On Their Orders | Killed Someone In Self Defense | Spared Someone’s Life | Invented Something | Been Hungover | Kissed Someone | Slow-Danced | Been In A Long-Term Relationship | Had Sex | Had Sex And Regretted It | Had A One-Night Stand | Had A Threesome | Experimented With Their Sexuality | Had A Kid | Adopted A Kid | Wanted To Have A Family With Someone | Done Something On Impulse They Regretted | Gone Traveling | Had A Bounty Put On Them | Eaten An Insect | Been Groped/SA’d | Been Dumped | Dumped Someone | Smoked | Gotten High | Put Someone In A Headlock | Won A Bet | Lost A Bet | Forgiven Someone Who Wronged Them | Indulged In Petty Revenge | Hallucinated | Gotten A Noticeable Scar | Kneed/Hit Someone In The Groin | Had An Unattainable Crush | Laughed Themselves To The Point Of Tears | Been Kidnapped | Been Brainwashed/Hypnotized | Had A Recurring Nightmare | Been Bullied | Bullied Someone | Experienced Survivor’s Guilt | Been Tied/Chained Up | Given Someone A Massage | Received A Massage | Been Backed Up Against A Wall | Shot Someone | Stabbed Someone | Saved Someone’s Life | Cheated On Someone | Been Cheated On | Been In An Open Relationship | Had A Friendship With Benefits | Been In A Queerplatonic Relationship | Had A Stalker | Been Betrayed | Been A Traitor | Been Possessed | Been In A Bar Fight | Been Thrown Out Of A Bar | Been Arrested | Broken Out Of Jail | Been To A Funeral | Been To A Brothel | Had Surgery | Broken Someone’s Trust | Broken Someone’s Heart | Had Their Heart Broken | Broken/Damaged Something Out Of Anger | Broken/Damaged Something Out Of Spite | Gotten A Piercing | Gotten A Tattoo | Used A Fake Name | Been Beaten Up | Been Tortured | Tortured Others | Been Abused | Been Blackmailed | Gotten Away With A Crime | Framed Someone Else For A Crime They Committed | Shared A Bed Platonically | Been In Love | Suffered From Sleep Paralysis | Been Forced To Flee Their Home | Learned A New Language | Joined A Rebellion | Fought On The Losing Side Of A War | Fought On The Winning Side Of A War | Become A Godparent | Become An Aunt/Uncle

[xarrixii]

hey there! first off i'm gonna tag @goodluckclove cause this is more their alley but second off

people are absolutely gonna be weird and strange about it and i don't know how the fanfiction world is myself because i only write original works (not that the fandoms put me off or anything i personally just don't have appeal for writing someone else's world) but i think you shouldn't let that stop you.

if you've written something and you want to share it, share it. for fanfiction i think most people recommend AO3/Archive Of Our Own (though i'm not sure about the state of that community). people are gonna have opinions and it's up to you how much you let people get into your head about it, and i think this is especially in the realm of already written characters as you seem to have noticed because a lot of people may have established these characters in their own way already.

it's kind of bullshit advice though. me personally if someone said to just not take it to heart if someone started insulting and nitpicking my thing in a non-critical or helpful way i'd maybe cry. i haven't learned to care less yet and i think it's important to always care a little

but if, not when--being bashed online is not an inevitable, IF you experience the hatred side of the medium you choose (fanfiction/original work), i want you to decipher where someone's hatred is actually coming from. is it sheer malice, lack of representation, or their strong opinion getting up and arms you have a different one? is it purely objective or are there biases?

that maybe is threatening in a school assignment way but your ability to engage with things might be--healthier? if it comes to be if you allow yourself to first see where a comment comes from.

i've kind of mentioned this on my blog already but people are very intent on being correct. i think school has trained a lot of people with this mindset. it's your story though. it may have originated from someone else's original work but you are the author of the words you're putting on the screen. IF, not when, IF someone is being a cucumber-tasting picklehead about your writing you can... politely block them. delete their comment.

i think in general i see a lot more love than hate. which is good. it's good that people like fanfiction more than they hate it. and you can put "do not criticize my writing" somewhere and if someone doesn't respect that it's their problem actually.

again i only write original fiction and do not interact with fanfiction at all. but if you choose to continue writing fanfiction i'm handing off my support that you keep writing and sharing in general because it's very fun to experience the joys and hells of the mind together with even the empty void.

basic advice: write for yourself. tell people how you feel about receiving criticism straight-up. learn to think critically about critical commentary IF, not when, it appears.

from me: IF, not when. IF, not when. write please write please write please write. it's so fun. keep doing what you like doing because you like doing it. people suck but writing is so cool. god it's so cool. his name is not in vain it's just so cool. you will find kind people. there are kind people that will interact with you at some point. even in the vacuum of tumblr there are likes. and the giddiness you feel at just one will be worth all the IF, not when crappery.

please write please write please write you want to write so write

Motivation needed...

I'm not trying to get too into this, and I originally wasn't going to at all. but can someone renew my enthusiasm to share fics? I used to write on wattpad like eight years ago and stopped around four or five years ago. I was starting to write again, on Tumblr, a couple of years ago then deleted the account on a whim.

Flash forward to now. I've been working on some pieces/stories and I was originally excited. I was looking forward to be apart of the community again but over the past few months I've been seeing a shit ton of, in my opinion, weird and/or entitled complains and asks of readers.

From people complaining about too much of an attribute in reader an au (like dumb!, vampire! etc [not the complained attributes but I'm also not trying to call people out]), too much smut being written, or now, someone complaining about writers saying that since not everyone can walk or run so they shouldn't say the reader isn't really described (if the write mentions said action). Like I said, I'm NOT trying to call anyone out.

It's also the weird ass hate I see people I follow get because they write a similar/same au as someone. I don't get that because every fanfiction writer is basing their work off of someone's original work. As long as no one is plagiarizing, what's the problem, here??"

But the complaints and nitpicking about shit just keep getting added to and I'm starting to lose sight of the appeal.

It didn't used to be like this. AT ALL. And I'm not even saying that people can't have opinions but a lot of them are SO rude about it. What happened to being kind?

I just really miss how it used to be and I'm just starting to think I'd prefer working on original work where I don't have to worry or see any of this negativity anymore. If I'm doing something for free, I might as well be working on something I could actually make money from, which isn't even the sole motivator or focus of writing in general, let alone here.

(tagging fandoms I'm active in, in hopes other similar writers can help me see the brighter side again lol.)

[xarrixii]

"Oooooh but I can't draw how am I gonna make my ocs :( I HAVE to use AI–"

Shut the fuck up and go to Gacha Life as god intended

[xarrixii]

saw something and had words to say but nowhere specifically to say it so i'll say it into this vacuum:

man i just. i still hate language arts classes in the american education system. and i think i finally figured out why more than just "don't like writing essays in dumb formats or in general"

analysis

like don't get me wrong i've known it's been something to do with being forced on some level to analyze things deeper than i would normally care to on my own. like obviously that's frustrating and i stopped actually learning things out of it in middle school--but the obsession with being correct is one i've just figured out

in my last language arts class (called Modern Literature, pretentious english for "read stuff and analyze it a bit") there was a unit that was about reading some short stories and taking a little quiz on them that was summative.

i mean generally writers can write things with the intent that they symbolize or are a certain thing, but it was so stifling to come up with my analysis of the situation and then hear the teacher talk about it the next day with a completely different interpretation and not opening it as any form of like, analytical wiggle room

like clearly when i read the story i was supposed to get x answer when i read it. i don't exactly remember one of the stories/poems/whatever we read in that class but i think one was about something to do with a dad working for their kid all the time and complaining about it.

my interpretation was, hey that sounds unhealthy. maybe he shouldn't be getting like, angry enough for his kid to notice that and affect them. i think it's easy to guess where i would get a thought process like that from

but the teacher walked over and went, paraphrasing from bad memory, "well you know it's traditionally seen as the female role to take care of the house and kids, but he doesn't have that so he has to do everything. he's a parent whose love for his children is taken for granted"

and i have to nod along. pretending like yes absolutely that should've been the only possible analysis i could've gotten. thank you for that. how could "Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden lines like, "blueblack cold" and "banked fires blaze" and "splintering, breaking" and "chronic angers of that house" and "what did i know of love" possibly mean anything else in the context of someone else's experience.

why was i forced to present your correct answer simply because that was the author's original intent? why can my own experiences not influence my interpretation? why are you stifling that so that i can be correct?

anyway tl;dr: can we stop forcing people to consume media in a specific way. can we let them breathe. it's stupid that we enforce a "being correct" culture onto kids. they should be learning that things have nuance not that the world is made of cardboard cutouts

[xarrixii]

i'd say personally that it's one thing if the catalyst kicks off the story--in fact that's the point. the point is that a thing, mostly coincidental and out of a character's control, begins this chain of events that becomes Story Worthy in the eyes of consumers.

it's another thing entirely, for me anyway, if the plot keeps getting built upon coincidences and chances. and like only that.

here let me demonstrate:

Normal Bilby Baggart was chilling in his living room when suddenly infamous supervillain Scoopy Scrapper blasts MegaLaser5000-AutoAimbot through his window and decimates his cat Kiptastic. Bilby Baggart knows he cannot defeat the MegaLaser5000-AutoAimbot but swears revenge on the 10% of his cat now gone anyway. While on the street doing normal mundane activities, he happens to trip and fall at the same time as Scoopy Scrapper's youngest and most beloved daughter Scarlettuce Scrapper who is upset by her father's death ray with aimbot, despite loving everything to do with death rays in the media. Scarlettuce Scrapper and Bilby Baggart team up to take down Scoopy Scrapper and have an epic training montage where Bilby Baggart's cat develops 1 in a million magical cat Instant Death Touch Powers. Bilby Baggart takes Kiptastic and with no abilities to dodge whatsoever manages to best the perfect aim of the MegaLaser5000-AutoAimbot and Instant Death Touch Scoopy Scrapper.

i don't want things to happen because that's how the world fell into place. i want the characters i'm following to directly interact and change the outcomes of things, to cause things. i want a character to survive because they have the skills to and not because the plot says they have to and makes everything else dumber to make sure that happens.

when i say i don't want a story reliant on chance, i mean that once it's begun i want the characters to be the reasons things happen the way they do. even if i don't know a character's name and even if they're the villain.

also clove, i also very much feel the "oh how convenient that the answer to this question they couldn't answer was dropped into their hands as soon as they needed it!" it feels like the person writing a story thinks their audience incapable of retaining information for later. especially when the suspense is purposefully heightened to Last Second Possible mentality. because the useless heightened suspension, the Last Second Possible makes the story feel more like the plot is forcing something to happen and not a character.

i want action and reaction. not just reaction

i want characters in my plot soup thank you

the most annoying people are people who don't understand storytelling. they be like "oooo how convenient that this thing happened to the main character in the very beginning". yeah no shit. that's why the story begins here

[xarrixii]

prev's tags

daily reminder that it does not matter who a person is or what they've done or how they act etc. you do not tell people to deliberately cause harm to themselves. this includes telling people to kill themselves.

[xarrixii]

conversation i just had with my boyfriend while he played skyrim:

him: "[...] homocidal rage"

me: "so, like, homicidal rage against specifically homosexuals?"

him: "it's not my fault the man i resurrected is homophobic"

[xarrixii]

hey update on the harlow/alph playlists or whatever um i will tag thy who left a note ( @kadjakat )

so that was. two months ago! you see, alph's has been done (probably) and i've certainly started harlow's, though i wanted to link them together when harlow's was finished.

uh unfortunately i didn't find the time to make harlow's playlist like--a cohesive mix of cool songs he would like? it's just kind of. breaking benjamin at the moment. i also wanted the playlist itself to feel like it was progressing because that seemed cool and very harlow-like to do

and i just didn't get. i didn't find time to sit down and listen to every song. lmao. so instead for now, i will, i will link alph's playlist and a non-breaking-benjamin song that i definitely want to be at the end of harlow's playlist somewhere

Alph Jury Roy-Wolford foo fighters, five finger death punch, rise against, and more

A Harlow Ferris Collins Song a song that looks grim at first glance but is quite optimistic actually

[xarrixii]

i am so desperate to talk about flash/burn right now i almost wrote out a post explaining one of the very important plot points later and the sheer ridiculous bullshit surrounding it that already happened and then i went nooooooooooo fuck i can't do that

[xarrixii]

me: very fond of the events of arc one. the later arcs feel weird and new and probably will need structural changes in a later draft

also me, rereading arc one chapters: ggggggggggggggggrggrrrrrrhhhhhhhhhhhhhghggggggghhhhnnnooooooooo what is thaaaat

[xarrixii]

had Boyfriend™ do this with his choice for character because he uses reddit (and also created. most of their original concepts. cough. they're just so fucking cool)

Tried to convince best friend to leave his job, AITAH?:

Hey guys, I have to leave out a lot of detail to keep everyone unidentifiable but here we go. My friend works at a big time company and is super talented. We used to work at the same company together, however I left after a couple disagreements with upper management. I now work for a grassroots organization and I feel like I'm actually making a difference for once and my skills actually mean something. Me and my friend have been friends for years, long before we both worked at this company, and I know they're experiencing the same difficulties and disagreements with management as I was, so I reached out and offered for them to come work at the same joint I do. I know our organization could really use and benefit from his skill set and he could really help others. The offer didn't go over well and I'm having second thoughts. AITAH?

if you're trying to get into the head of your story's antagonist, try writing an "Am I the Asshole" reddit post from their perspective, explaining their problems and their plans for solving them. Let the voice and logic come through.

[xarrixii]

my boyfriend stepped away to get ice for his soda and i pulled up my phone waiting for an ad on sharknado to end and see this??? my dear dear friend why are you spending your recovery time reading and promoting my Sad Speculation???? thank you??????

/YELLOW IS FEAR_teaser?

CW: mentions of suicide, mentions of suicide-related coercion and rituals, something equivalent to death, mentions of servitude, and suggested domestic abuse word count: 2.1k

I was the one who found her.

I had been up all night, face shoved deep into the pillow I had scrunched against my face, staring down with my eyes shut at the mattress, the floor, and the ground that was all beneath me and the nothingness it provided so I wouldn’t have to look at the colors bleeding through the walls. But I could still feel them there, rattling through me as I cried for it to stop.

Thankful at least that Dad had replaced the raised bedframe with one that had no open space beneath it, even if that took shoving and coercion.

There was too much. Too much color. All of it was there, all at once.

My mother was painting before I’d gone to bed that night, just like every other. She was a career artist and I learned to go to bed to avoid the color that bled every time she painted. Thankfully, she spent most of her time while she knew I was still awake each night gently stroking a wide brush across white canvas into a new color that was less nauseating and incomprehensible. Many times, that ended up being simply black.

My room was brown. My Dad liked to complain about how long it took Mom to pick a place she deemed "palette appropriate”—which meant brown flooring, brown walls, and a brown ceiling. Mostly brown flooring, the landlord let her paint the walls and ceiling because he just needed someone to pay him each month.

I remember shrinking away from the living room (she’d taken it over as an art studio because it had been collecting dust for a year prior) as I had come home after their latest heated argument. Flinching when she cracked open that first paint can and hurled it full-force at the white canvas. I remember even covering my ears from the sound similar to what I’d run away from earlier and squeezing my eyes shut trying to block out most of the reddish-pink that had already dripped onto the easel and floor mat.

She had apparently heard the door, or maybe I’d vocalized the attack of nausea it brought me, and had calmed down just enough to help me flick on the little blacklight that swathed the room darker and get me in bed.

Yet I had been up all night, shaking, crying, drowning in nausea and occasionally throwing up into a cracked ice cream bucket with a plastic shopping bag inside it we kept near my bed. We kept one in near every room of the house because Dad got sick of the noise of me rushing to the bathroom any time a color got to be too much.

After that first bucket I’d seen her throw, there was a wave of orange, orange, then yellow. Black. Blue—deep, deep blue, which had made me start crying, and then purple. And purple. And orange, and then purple. Blue, again, and then yellow.

Streaks and flashes of it had followed until it ended with a bitter spritz of white that made my mind go haywire the rest of the night unable to decipher it.

Mom’s art wasn’t exactly the kind of thing people were usually interested in. Sometimes, if she made a landscape painting by commission, she would refuse to paint anything but a starless night sky. Usually, though, she just made what all my school study/project partners called “modern” or “abstract” with the orange I’d figured out on my own to be more the disgust connotation than the pain humming out of them when they saw her paintings hung up around my flat.

Some level of, “oh, that’s… interesting.”

She also saw colors amplified on objects and radiating from living beings like I do—she was the one that taught me what each one meant from her life’s experience of it. Sometimes I still wonder how she could see all the same colors and still end up with a man like Dad had been before his lung cancer caught up with him.

When I finally worked up the courage to tip-toe out of bed with my puke bucket cradled between two hands at three in the morning to go ask Mom to help filter all of the colors out, I found only Dad’s purple seeping slowly into their mattress while he snored. Which meant she must have been in the mixed-up neon splotch forcing me to look the other way from her art studio.

I remember whining, some level of it anyway, and pivoting anyway to immediately need the bucket, squeezing my eyes shut and holding one arm over my eyes to dilute it by physical barriers.

In the middle of all the colors, yellow, red-pink, purple, blue, orange, red, a touch of blue-gray, black, and speckled white was a gaping void of color.

Like it vanished as soon as it came between my eyes and the body lying on the floor.

“Mom?” I vaguely recall saying, with careful steps forward. “I can’t…”

I threw up again. My Dad moaned, still pissed, from their bedroom.

There was just so much of it all. By now there was nothing left in my stomach by acid. I just wanted to sleep, to pretend I hadn’t stopped crying hours ago with nothing left to sob for help.

“Please,” I think I’d croaked.

Another loud snore.

When I had finally made it to where she was sleeping, step by step, I shook her. And then I shook her more, whispering into her ear, eyes watering dry tears at this point as I struggled back the nausea tearing through me, the colors tearing through my head and burning it alive.

“It hurts. Make it stop.”

I think I sat there for another two hours before my Dad woke up at five to get an early start to the fishing game, shaking her helplessly and begging her to make it stop.

I shouldn’t have wasted my time. When Dad saw he rushed over and carried me out of the house from under my armpits to a neighbor’s where I watched from the windows as the police sauntered up in the undercity lanes not big enough for cars, a motorized stretcher appearing.

The neighbors, I couldn’t look at them. The blue-gray, all that guilt was a swarming mass of more nausea. I could feel the world tint yellow with my own fear even in the black practicality of the emergency responders loading Mom on that stretcher and talking to Dad just in the doorway to the house where her painting continued to seep and bleed deafeningly into the rain-pelted street after her.

I think that’s when I’d finally started screaming, understanding, really. I had found my mother, probably dead, on the floor of her little art studio.

Six hours passed. Twelve. Twenty-four. A week. A month before Dad finally found the time to take me to the retrocognition clinic where she lie in a black box of a room with one of the stronger blacklights that made even Dad’s purple and now blue, as well, diffuse out.

My mother hadn’t told me much about retrocognition up to that point. She told me to be careful of directly touching anything that was bleeding too much.

I wish she had. An old man at the clinic had to sit me down and push out what he called emotional poisoning from me that he says must have been from whatever my mother had recogged on.

Recog is the shorter term for the thing empaths like me, my mother, and the old man do when we touch things with too much pent-up emotional value—retrocognition. A visual, full-body experience of the past that caused the emotion and therefore color to build up with a density high enough to cause one. Usually this ended up being things like murder, suicide, heartbreak, torture, a beat-down, what have you. Something that creates a strong reaction leaves behind a strong emotional footprint that an empath then touches and experiences first-hand from the person who left the footprint until they wake up in their own body again.

Unless, of course, they don’t wake up, like my mom. Retrocognition coma, recog coma for short or for people like Barrow who can’t be bother pronouncing “retrocognition” all the time and get their empath friends into the habit.

It was the first night I had been able to sleep in a month. Whenever people saw me they’d make a weird face, hound me with an onslaught of ugly blue-gray, and apologize that I had to lose my mother like that.

I didn’t really believe she would never wake up until I hit middle school, and by then the grief no longer made sense to anyone. I skipped a lot of classes and ended up teaching myself how to control all the colors on my own, dampening them, pushing them away, drawing them closer, amplifying. The recog clinic gave me the painting my mother had fatally recogged on, her last painting, and every time I touch it I still get the faint thrum of why each color was splat and dried on the canvas the way it was, layered and textured in a way the one the art appreciators couldn’t replicate on any of her paintings.

Of course, they’d only cared after she was considered recog-dead. A year or more under. I wish I could end her suffering. The knowledge that she had to keep reliving the night before streaking white paint in a downwards strike in the middle with her fingertips, again and again, over and over again as her brain struggled to process and decipher all of her own pain kept tinting the world green-blue every time I thought about it.

Empathy, my mother said that was. I didn’t see that often in the undercity. People didn’t empathize with me when my mother was carted away, or when my Dad died and I was forced to go it alone, or any time I would accidentally touch something and wake up sweating and crying.

Barrow did. Barrow gave off the beautiful color in waves every time she helped me up from the ground and told me how long I’d been down, a number that got smaller and smaller each time.

That and green were some of the colors deliberately excluded from her painting. I know because the cans were on the other side of the room before my Dad cleared it all out.

Sometimes I’ll stare at the gaping emptiness, the white that she left on that last canvas so deliberately in splotches and her final smear that my hand fits into now, and try to figure out what it means. My mother called it a secret of the magic law binding the world, that made a small percentage of people like me and forced them to experience nausea when someone got too excited, too much of anything.

Silan fits his hand into the white notches of that painting on my wall. His hand is bigger than mine and my mother’s. He closes his eyes and drags the tips of his fingers down, and I see the blue-green again, followed by a wave of light blue that only got slightly darker before stopping over his underlying layer of yellow.

It’s in my living room, behind the couch Barrow built with her own two hands when I claimed I didn’t need one. The reason she used the armchair instead.

I watch Silan’s wings flinch, snap, fold and unfold in slight increments. He turns to look, no, stare, at me, with a quiet ripple of yellow. Fear. Silan has every right to be afraid. I just took him away from, everything, everyone he’s ever known in an impulsive decision he warned me countless times to get away from even needing to make. I could order him to take his sword, or spear, or anything really, and tell him to put it through his heart and he has to.

Anything Barrow considers “Fare trying to get herself killed” on the whiteboard she has to keep track of my bullshit means a lot more when another life is magically bound to die with yours if you fuck it up.

His wings snap again while he looks at me. His face shifts. I decipher it by the⸺

I don’t decipher it. It’s white.

“Sorry, was I not supposed to touch”—he swivels his head to the painting then back to me—“this?”

“It’s fine,” I say.

“It’s complicated?” he seems to conclude more than he doesn’t by the tinge of purple.

I don’t know how to feel about being read like a book by strangers, non-empaths. I never managed to understand how anyone did it, how anyone communicated their feelings accurately. “My mother made it.”

An affirmative hum.

“I need a minute,” I say, mostly because I actually do. All the colors he’s giving off are going to give me a headache and his park-barred winged civilization didn’t have any caffeine to start my morning with.

hello if you are used to my writing you may say a few things like "woah you write in first person sometimes???" or "wow that's a LOT of reference to color good golly" or "you used the SAME silly little DIALOGUE TAG within FIVE PARAGRAPHS"

i love fare's narrative voice. i love it so much. she knows nothing of actual emotion and barely anything tone-wise. all she knows is rainbow