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anntoldst0ries · 3 years

Text

Coda (Ethan x MC)

Book: Open Heart 3, Chapter 7 Pairing: Dr Ethan Ramsey x F!MC (Dr Noelle Valentine) Word Count: 3.1k Rating: 18+ (NSFW) Summary: Things got heated between Dr Ramsey and Dr Valentine during Bloom’s event. Will they finish what they’ve started?

Warning: This fic contains adult content, don’t read if you’re a minor.

A/N: Happy Easter, folks! So, let’s pretend this horror of a dress (which, let’s be honest, even Bloom’s PA wouldn’t wear) never happened. Also, this is my first time ever publishing NSFW fic, so please be understanding 🙈 That being said, I always appreciate feedback and am forever grateful for all of you, because you help me grow 💜

Huge shoutout to Bree @jamespotterthefirst who was so lovely to pre-read it and actually encouraged me to post, girl you are golden and I just cannot thank you enough! We are all so lucky to have you 🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼😍

Even though he was trying to be sensible about this, every molecule of sense left him during his left palm’s chance encounter with Noelle Valentine’s bare thigh.

But has anything about their touching bodies ever been truly accidental?

Although, if he was honest, this was just the culmination point.

His rational mind’s death by a thousand cuts.

It all started when she entered the premises of the venue in her provocative dress and he had to blink rapidly a few times, thinking that his eyes were deceiving him, breath trapped in his throat.

Cut.

Her every step gracious and light, as if she’s been the human embodiment of a wood nymph.

As if she’s stolen the world's entire allure.

Cut.

Her silky waves, cascading like a waterfall - he wanted to dive into them, lose himself in them.

Drown in them.

Cut.

She was a prodigy, a goddess descending from mount Olympus, who, for some mysterious reason, decided to grace the mortals with her overwhelming presence.

Some guests were standing agape, the others smiled wide and showered her with rain of compliments; a few people had tiny lightnings of jealousy flickering in their eyes.

But no one was left indifferent by her grand entrance.

Strangely, Ethan didn’t feel jealousy.

In fact, he couldn’t be more proud.

His eyes, like x-rays, have relentlessly been reminding him of the perfect shapes hiding under the layers of the sophisticated, silky material. In this regard, he envied everyone else. Unlike him, imagination was all they had.

He knew. He touched. He teased. He tasted. He caressed.

Sometimes, ignorance was truly a bliss.

Today, ignorance was certainly not going to help him get through this evening.

* * * * * *

He almost lost it on the balcony.

Then, the sudden appearance of musicians interrupted them.

He wasn’t startled.

He was angry.

Freaking Bloom and his jazz band, he thought to himself. How on earth was he constantly able to rain on Ethan’s parade, even when they weren’t physically in the same room?

Noelle’s pearly laugh dissipated all thoughts in an instant, her impossibly beautiful face now turned to him. Entwining their hands, Ethan knew he had no choice but to play along.

Inside, he was laughing out of the other side of his mouth.

They were coming back to the room full of buffoons and right now her presence was as comforting as it was driving him further into insanity.

Before he was even able to sit down, someone has already slipped a drink into his hand and when Ethan was ready to sigh and curse the fate that sent him to Bloom’s 4th circle of hell*, a sudden realisation struck him.

This evening wasn’t lost yet.

In fact, it wasn’t lost at all.

And as he was thinking, a small smile ran past his lips.

The answer was right there in front of him.

* * * * * *

“Dr Ramsey, you’re still here?” Ethan had heard the unwanted and all too loud voice, followed by an even more unwanted pat on the back, accompanied by his nemesis’ reddened face and alcohol breath.

He plastered a fake smile, mustering the remains of politeness.

“You didn’t strike me as a party type, I thought you’d be making excuses a long time ago.” Leland grinned like a Cheshire cat. For a second, an outsider could have almost thought these two hold each other in high regard.

Almost being the key word.

“This is the most pleasant surprise.” Leland continued. “You see, I am rarely wrong, so it’s one of these moments when not only am I wrong, but also being wrong actually makes me happy.” He laughed as if he’s just delivered the best punch line in the world.

“Well, we are representing the hospital after all and I wouldn’t be too much of an example if I left before the rest of my team.” Ethan put on his best charming smile, not without a superhuman effort.

You don’t play the game, you play the opponent, he reminded himself.

“It looks like we are finally agreeing on something, doctor.” A sleazy smile ran past his lips, as he left to mingle with another circle. Inside, Ethan shuddered. There was just something about Bloom that didn’t add up and he was yet to figure what it was… but now his focus shifted to something else entirely.

Just like he predicted (or diagnosed, if you will) with every sip, every passing minute, the guests were falling deeper and deeper into inebriation - the excellent staff made sure that every time someone emptied their glass, a new dose of liquid happiness was ready for them. Dr Ramsey knew this must have been Bloom’s doing.

They may have had money and resources but during these events, they were like wild animals held captive and then suddenly let loose. Their problem was that they thought money could pay for everything, but it certainly couldn’t buy back dignity, redeem bad manners and erase terrible first impressions.

Tonight, he will use this flawed logic to his advantage.

* * * * * *

Noelle was sitting across the table, not even trying to hide anymore that whatever the tech moguls were trying to sell, she wasn’t buying.

Neither their fancy apps nor their bullshit.

Ethan finished yet another glass of scotch and stood up, his height towering over everyone else at the table.

“Well, it’s about time I was moving. Thank you for a very… revelatory evening, gentlemen.” The other table occupiers didn’t even pay too much attention and murmured something, shifting their focus back to the beautiful female doctor. “Dr Valentine, can I offer you a ride home? That is, if you were planning to leave soon…”

“That would be great, thank you, Dr Ramsey.” If her eyes could speak up, they would have definitely thanked him for throwing her a lifebelt.

“Fantastic, meet me outside in 10 minutes then? I have…one more business to attend to beforehand.”

She wasn’t exactly sure what it was — the look, the pause between words, the accentuation - but something told her that whatever business he meant, she was very much a part of it.

Her suspicion has soon turned out to be justified, as his tall figure wandered off and disappeared around the corner.

A corner he had absolutely no reason to disappear around.

The younger doctor waited a minute before making her excuses and assuring her companions that a future partnership with Edenbrook couldn’t look any brighter, Noelle turned around and followed the man in black suit.

Walking as fast as her hurting feet and long gown were allowing her, Noelle entered a long corridor at the back of the fancy restaurant and had to admit that even this place, which must have simply led to different utility rooms, looked spectacular and stylish. Almost like those fairytale corridors, which lead to other dimensions.

But only if a voice summons you and guides you there.

Just as the thought popped into her head, a firm grip tightened around one of her wrists, making her jump.

When she turned around, his index finger was on his lips in a clear message.

Quiet.

They only made a couple of steps before he cautiously opened the door and rushed her into a room. It looked like a sophisticated pantry or a wine cellar and she thought the stock must have been worth more than her annual salary.

The room was dark, bar for the little window, which wasn’t much helpful with providing the light, given that the world outside was hugged by the arms of the night.

“Ethan, what’s goi—“ She never had a chance to finish the sentence, before he took her breath away with his lips, not for the first time this evening. He didn’t stop there, pushing her towards the counter, like a famished animal backing its victim into the corner.

“You said you’ll be looking for an encore, didn’t you?” She was trying to accustom her sight to the darkness, the gleam in the blue of his eyes her only reference point.

“Although, if I’m not mistaken and my opera knowledge is still sharp, I think coda** is actually the word you’re looking for.”

She stilled, a shiver running through her spine, the electric feel both hot and cold. An audible swallow filled the silence that lingered after his words, not for long as he continued his monologue.

“And I’m sorry, Dr Valentine, but I’m not a patient man today…I’ve exhausted all my patience on senseless endeavours this evening.” Almost as if to prove the sincerity of his words, he started moving towards her, his every gesture deliberate; there was no space for randomness.

Every word hit her like a wrecking ball, her remaining senses overkeen. She couldn’t rely on her eyes anymore and her hearing, smell and touch suddenly became heavily heightened, almost supernatural.

She couldn’t reflect on this for too long though, as he backed her further towards the counter, blocking her moves.

“H-how… how do you know no one’s gonna come in?”

Even in the dark, she could see the corners of his lips going up, in a smile which wasn’t affectionate. It was dark, almost sinister.

And hot as hell.

Ethan leaned into her and dropped his voice even lower than she thought was humanly possible, whispering straight into her ear.

“I don’t, but… my diagnostic instincts rarely fail me, Noelle Valentine. Plus… that’s a part of the thrill, isn’t it?” He paused for a second to gloat upon the effect his ministrations had on her. Dr Ramsey enjoyed controlling the situation - more than he’d care to admit.

“Look me in the eye and tell me you haven’t fantasised of this, of losing yourself in me completely… except you couldn’t, because of a tiny detail, a stubborn question in your pretty head… what if someone walks in on us? What if it happens when you are overwhelmed by pure ecstasy, knowing there is no coming back, that the only way is forward…”

Ethan knew immediately that these words hit the jackpot. If she wasn’t before, she was definitely shaking now, her treacherous body betraying her in all ways possible.

That’s how she knew all these months ago. Maybe her mind could, but her body could never lie to Ethan Freaking Ramsey.

Ethan’s hands started roaming her body, discovering his favourite promised land, as if he had not been touching her on that balcony earlier, as if he’d never touched her before.

Because for him, every time with her was first and last. And he hoped things would always feel this way.

“Who are you and what have you done to Ethan Ramsey?”

She couldn’t see the smirk that appeared on his painfully handsome face.

“If I were you, I’d be more worried about what’s to be done to you, Dr Valentine.”

With this, he lifted her up by grabbing her ass and sat her on the counter, pressing her back against the cold wall, which felt strangely warm against her body.

Or not so strangely, given there was a fire inside of her.

Securing her neck with his palm, he pulled her closer for a long, wet and greedy kiss, the obscene sounds of their mouths filling the otherwise silent space.

“Touch me.” A silent plea fell off her lips, her voice a quiet sob. Usually, he’d enjoy teasing her forever, playing little games, checking how far she would go to get what she wanted. But not tonight.

Tonight… he’s gonna give her exactly what she wants.

Because he wants it even more.

His middle and index finger slipped past the silky material of the dress and the band of her underwear. Noelle parted her lips slightly and drew a shallow breath, waiting in anticipation. Her wish was granted a couple of seconds later, when he ran up and down her folds, eliciting a small, guttural moan, which he was sure would forever be his favourite sound in the whole world.

Before she was even able to get used to the feeling, he pushed 2 digits into her without warning, making her eyes wide with amazement. But the movement stilled a second later. Maybe he couldn’t not tease her after all.

“Please.” The sound that came out of her was almost inaudible, yet extremely high pitched. Even if he tried, Ethan simply didn’t know the words that could come close to describing what these reactions were doing to him.

“You know I will give you the world… I will give you anything you want, Noelle. You just need to tell me what it is that you desire.”

She didn’t know what was the biggest turn on - his sultry voice dripping with desire, the feeling of his digits inside her or the well thought out choice of words. But it gave her an answer immediately.

“Fuck me with your fingers, Ethan.”

There was something shy and yet confident about the way she said it, he couldn’t explain it. Whatever it was, it made him even harder, which, at this point he thought wasn’t humanly possible. Although he was painfully aware of his own desire, he couldn’t rid neither her nor himself of the pleasure of watching her come undone on his fingers.

“As you wish, my naughty girl.”

His fingers started moving in come-hither motion, first slowly and teasingly. Just when she opened her mouth to beg him again, his thumb circled her swollen clit and pressed the sensitive bundle of nerves with precision, sending her mind into overdrive. She had to bite her own shoulder to suppress what she was sure would turn into a scream.

“Fuck… yes, right there.” She was an incoherent mess, while his fingers curved and touched places that made her eyes roll. “Faster, Ethan.” She commanded weakly as his fingers picked up the face, going in and out of her furiously.

She was pleading and moaning for god knows what and her hands were desperate to grip something, just anything.

Soon, he knew as well as she did that the peak was close, for her body kept moving and shaking on its own accord.

“I’m…this…you…” She cried, making even less sense than before.

“I know. Let go… let go now, Noelle. I know you needed this so much. Come for me now, baby.”

Sinking her teeth, this time in his shoulder, and tightening her grip on him, Noelle clenched around his fingers, the feeling so arousing that he thought he’s going to explode himself. He had to hold her with all the strength he had in his free arm, as she was all over the place, trembling, cursing, riding out what must have been one of the strongest orgasms she’s ever experienced.

When the feeling settled, Ethan slowly loosened his grip over her and slid his fingers out, bringing them to his lips. The taste of her astounded him every single time.

“In case I haven’t told you before… nothing can compare to the way you taste. Maybe apart from the way you feel, but I need to check to be certain.”

Before he was able to do so himself, she reached for his belt and unbuckled it hastily, letting his pants pool at his feet. Ethan hissed when she was ridding him of the last layer separating them, his throbbing member oversensitive to the slightest touch. He responded in kind, slipping her thongs down.

He stared at her as if he’s forgotten how to blink before saying:

“If I were you, I’d hold on tight.”

She grabbed the edge of the counter and tightened her grip, leaning onto her other arm, palm pressed flat onto the surface. Ethan positioned himself in front of her and the moment his tip met her sex, a wild lust overtook him completely, from top to bottom. He pushed hard, their bodies finally connecting.

He didn’t waste time to make himself or her feel comfortable. Right now, he wasn’t a guest - he was the invader, the intruder, the conqueror.

“Fuck, it’s impossible you’re still so tight.”

In answer, she clenched her muscles around him even more, earning herself a throaty sound.

“You little minx.”

She was going to be the death of him and what an epic death it would be.

“Ethan, fuck me like you mean it.” Noelle bit her lower lip, knowing the effect this tiny gesture always had on him. He didn’t need anything more. The sound of fast thrusts soon filled the air, making it thick and dense. The race started, two lovers chasing their gratification like it was the last thing they were ever going to do.

This wasn’t vanilla.

It was chilli, whiskey neat and flames.

A dance of carnal desires, intense and salient, leading to the grand finale. Nothing finesse, quite the contrary - a satiation of the most primal of human desires.

Ethan kept thrusting into her so deep that she felt blood when she had to bite her lip, trying to stop the animalistic scream trapped in her throat, begging to be released. She felt every vein, every nerve inside of her, every place he was reaching. Her hands and arms hurt, but her mind, currently controlled by Ethan’s cock moving in and out of her in killer pace, has overridden any physical sensations other than pure pleasure.

“So…so close.” She panted weakly, rolling her eyes as waves of pleasure kept crashing on her.

Leaning into her, he caught her earlobe and as he kissed her ear, Ethan groaned. “You’re so,” thrust, “fucking”, thrust, “hot”, thrust, “when”, thrust, “you come.”

And with that, she came.

Her whole body arched and hot white pleasure turned every cell of her body into bliss. It was like jumping into the pool on a sunny day, submerging yourself completely and then just… floating.

Ethan followed her instantly, her climax triggering his own. They were holding onto each other for dear life, compounding the intensity of their sensations and silently praying for this moment to never, ever stop.

When their breathing returned back to normal a few moments later, the older doctor pushed aside strands of her hair that stuck to her face and then cupped her cheeks.

“You ok?” The tenderness in his voice almost made her heart stop.

As if she hasn’t already been dead.

“Ok? No, I’m not ok. I am pretty fucking great.”

“That you are.” He smiled wide. “You are pretty fucking great.”

“Well you are not too bad yourself. How are you feeling?”

“I feel like I died and was reborn, all at the same time.”

They laughed at each other’s choice of words, still in a tight embrace.

“Ready for the next part, Ramsey?”

“Next part?”

“Now we need to sneak out of here for real.”

* * *

* This is a reference to Dante’s poem “Inferno” from “Divine Comedy”

** coda - The final part of a play, film, or narrative in which the strands of the plot are drawn together and matters are explained or resolved

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#Ethan Ramsey x mc #open heart #open heart fanfiction #ethan ramsey #play choices #Ethan x noelle

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dramaticviolincrescendo · 3 years

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Rewatching Shameless and i just watched 6x1 jail scene. Can I request a meta if its not too much trouble? I feel like reading a really good meta about that scene and you're one of the best we've got so.....

It’s never any trouble at all! That’s so sweet to say—thank you so much! <3 Kind of coming to terms with the idea that anyone cares about my opinion over here. You guys are too much!

This scene is actually extremely important to me because it and the response to it were what made me start writing Shameless fanfiction, specifically when I saw that my views regarding Ian’s behavior and how Mickey received it were so vastly different from what I initially read. (Insert shameless plug for “That Milkovich Reputation” here.) Now, I know you’ve told me not to do this before, but based on the controversial position in which this scene resides, I feel the need to present a couple of disclaimers for our audience at large.

I first fell in love with Shameless last March, a couple weeks before quarantine began. I didn’t know what it was prior to that and therefore was not present when Noel left the show, so I didn’t experience the disappointment of a beloved character leaving in a potentially permanent way and didn’t engage in the fandom or see how deeply upset people were by that until after I finished the series. I also don’t subscribe to the theory that there was something going on behind the scenes or any animosity between Noel and the creators, as I have not seen any relevant evidence from reliable sources to support that what happened was anything other than decisions made in pursuit of career goals on both sides. As such, my analysis of this scene has only ever taken the content and context of the story and characters into account. I have no interest in speculating on the motives of people I do not know in writing it or portraying it this way, and even if I did, this scene made perfect sense to me as it was written and performed.

I understand and appreciate that this is not a popular position to take and urge everyone to pass this post by if my position on that matter is offensive or upsetting to you. I do not mean to tell anyone what to think or believe, only to explain how I view this scene and the context in which I do so.

That said, let’s begin.

When Last Seen: Mickey

As in all things, context is important. Prior to the prison scene, the last time we saw Mickey was when Ian broke up with him and Sammi interrupted their heartfelt moment, which basically sums up her character in a nutshell. That was a rough couple of days for Mickey. He saw how devastated Ian was to hear his family talk about him as though he were just like Monica; was distressed in his own right to return for him and discover that he’d left the base with Monica; buried his frustration and sadness by sleeping around with other people, which seemed to exacerbate those emotions because those people weren’t Ian, nor had he and Ian broken up when he did it; and came running when Ian called him, only for Ian to end their relationship.

Mickey is a very sharp man—we know this. He can read people like books and manipulate or intimidate them accordingly. He knew Ian had feelings for him in s1 when he showed up on his doorstep seeking comfort rather than going to any number of other people he trusted. He was well aware that Ian loved him in s3, and that made what he felt he had no choice in doing that much more painful. He heard what Ian said and knew what he was doing in 5x12. Of that, I have never had any doubt. It wasn’t like Ian tried to hide that he didn’t want to break up but thought that that was what would be best. In fact, the way he initially framed it always made me think that one of his highest priorities was not dragging Mickey down with him, especially in the aftermath of being called “destructive” and similar to someone who “put them through hell.” That’s why Mickey’s response wasn’t to call him an asshole or get angry or beg. It was to reassure Ian that he was there for the long haul, that he loved him and wanted to take care of him no matter what that meant—and that they could make that work. All the sentiments Ian had tried to communicate before he got married, Mickey was reciprocating in his own way. Had they not needed to temporarily write Mickey out of the story and Sammi hadn’t shown up right that second, I believe that he wouldn’t have given up so easily. We do have confirmation of that being the case in the prison scene, but we’ll get to that shortly.

When Last Seen: Ian

Ian isn’t a selfish character. We know this, too. However, Ian needed to be selfish by the end of s5. What he had to come to terms with wasn’t something that anyone could fully help him with, much as Mickey desperately wanted to. To Ian, the enemy was within. It was inside him, in his brain, telling him what to do even if that destroyed himself and everything he loved. It’s terrifying. I’m not bipolar, nor do I suffer from any other diagnosed mental illnesses, but I admire and respect everyone who wakes up every morning and tackles these things. They’re heroes every single day. But by the end of s5, Ian doesn’t feel much like a hero. Instead, he feels like the villain, and he’s lost touch with who he even is anymore.

That’s not a healthy mindset to have in a relationship. Relationships require a level of give and take, and that used to be something that Ian and Mickey already struggled with. Ian gave more in s1-3 because he was able to, while Mickey had a limit on what he could openly give because of the environment in which he lived and the manner in which he was raised. In s4-5, those roles were reversed: Mickey was able to give so much more, but Ian was gradually falling apart. Neither of them are at fault for any of those situations. It is what it is, and they have a stronger relationship for it. Ian is a giver, though. He’s always been a giver. To be in a position where he doesn’t feel like he can give anything to Mickey because he doesn’t even know who he is was truly heartbreaking for him, and objectively, he needed to take a step back so that he could focus on himself. He knew it. Based on Mickey’s understanding of Ian’s reasons after watching him deny that he had a problem for so long, I think Mickey knew it too. This hurt both of them—Ian to say it and Mickey to hear it—but they’re not fools and they’re not naïve. In some ways, they know each other better than anyone.

Jimmy said that when you’re on a plane, they tell you to put on your mask before you help anyone else with theirs. Ian needed to put on his mask. His heart can’t keep beating if his lungs don’t work.

Starting Season 6: Mickey

Unsurprisingly, Mickey has settled into prison life just fine. We’ll focus on his interactions with Ian in a bit as that’s the meat of the scene, but there are major implications inherent in his discussion with Svetlana beforehand.

1. Mickey has accepted that this will be his reality for the foreseeable future. What else is he supposed to do? Besides, he’s known for a long time that the likelihood of ending up in prison was pretty high for him, as he alluded to in s2. He was a street thug. He stole from local stores, sold drugs, ran guns, operated a rub ‘n’ tug, created scam companies, and was a generally violent presence in the neighborhood for years. He was in juvie twice during the show, perhaps more beforehand. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that it would have been more surprising if Mickey didn’t get locked up at some point than that he did.

2. Ian has visited Mickey before. We won’t get too deeply into this yet, but he thanks Ian for “coming back.” The other times, he wasn’t even paid to do it. So, as far as Mickey can tell, nothing has changed. Ian is focusing on himself right now, but his love for Mickey hasn’t dulled at all. That’s an encouraging thought, and it certainly puts a smile on Mickey’s face.

3. Ever the opportunist and entrepreneur, Mickey really is doing just fine in prison. He runs a business, if you will, that appears to be quite lucrative already. This isn’t surprising either. Sadly, it’s a bad move. He’s already going to be in prison for somewhere around a decade, give or take a couple of years depending on his behavior. But his behavior isn’t good. He’s hurting people for money, and if he gets caught and brought up on more charges, not only will he serve the full fifteen years, but he could get more time added onto that.

4. Ian is aware of this arrangement. He has to be if he’s been going there with Svetlana, and they weren’t exactly hiding what they were talking about. Ian has been very consistent throughout the series: he’s not as concerned with the moral implications of Mickey’s behavior, just how it could potentially impact their ability to be together. He still cares about Mickey at the start of s6, and Mickey can see it on his face when he won’t say it out loud. (More on that shortly.) Once he’s in a better spot mentally, maybe they would have gotten back together had Mickey been on the outside. I’m of the opinion that they would have based on the context of the situation. It isn’t an option, however. This is Mickey’s reality, and he’s not doing everything he can to get out earlier. If anything, he’s tempting fate on not being released at all. (This, in hindsight, sounds rather similar to the issues they’re dealing with right now in s11.)

So, this is where Mickey stands at the start of the season: a prison hitman who is quite pleased that the man he loves has come to see him again, even if the latter is visibly not in a very healthy mental state.

Starting Season 6: Ian

Ian isn’t in most of 6x01. What we do see of him is typically sad or colored by his frustration, outside Carl’s welcome home party at the end of the episode. Even then, there’s an aura of discomfort that accompanies the family’s knowledge that things have changed. Carl came out of juvie a different person—they’re all different people after s5, and they’re not sure how to handle walking on eggshells around each other.

From the very start of the episode, we see that Ian is still struggling even though he’s had enough time to at least partially adjust to his medication, especially if he’s been on and off of it. It’s so sweet how Fiona gently wakes him up—it’s also a bit different. What happened to banging on the bunk bed and yelling for them to come down for breakfast? After behaving pretty normally with Debbie at the bathroom door, she’s almost handling him with kid gloves, and the punches keep coming when she reminds him that he (1) has to get up for work at a place he despises and (2) needs to remember to take his meds.

The kitchen scene is extremely telling of where Ian is at this point, and it partially shows why he’s somewhat standoffish by the time we reach the prison scene. Most of the family is gone or different. Fiona is repeatedly on him about meds and getting to work on time—Ian, Mister Responsible himself who was out of the house before anybody woke up to get to work on time as a kid. Lip is at college. Debbie is absorbed in her unconfirmed but likely pregnancy. Carl is in juvie, and Liam is playing with the switchblade he found under Carl’s pillow before they take him to pre-K. His entire support system is either gone or treating him like he’s broken. All he has is Fiona “going Fiona” on everyone. It’s clear that this is impacting him because he actually derails the conversation to say that they should go visit Carl the following weekend, which was the position Debbie used to be in when Fiona was in jail. Just like Lip shut her down, Debbie shuts Ian down, and he doesn’t say another word as he drinks his coffee—which he can’t finish because Fiona is once again on him about work, so he trudges out the door to another day of being a busboy with no dreams instead of a soldier who has a future.

Work isn’t much better. Svetlana wants him to go see Mickey when he’s determined to stay away. (We don’t have confirmation, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that he wants to distance himself if Mickey is doing something that will potentially get him into even more trouble, especially given some of his reactions at the prison.) Sean is sending Fiona to nag him about not moving fast enough when the diner isn’t even busy. When Otis is chased down by the cops and slammed against the front window, Sean rather condescendingly tells him to, “take your rag and wipe the blood and snot off the window.” Ian—West Point-aspiring, ambitious, courageous, caring, intelligent, hardworking Ian has been reduced to wiping up someone’s snot by a boss who’s living in his house with a sister that’s treating him like he’s shattered glass and a family that is growing further and further apart these days.

That is the day Ian has had before he even arrives at the prison. Odds are that that is how most of his days have gone for quite some time, minus the blood and snot. …Maybe.

The Prison Scene

Now we come to it: what you actually asked about! It’s taken this long to get here because we can’t possibly interpret this scene effectively without incorporating all of what came before it. Mickey’s position is regrettable, but he knows that Ian still loves him and is at least handling his situation with all the grace and competence that we can expect from him. Ian is a bit of a mess who’s had a bad day and is now faced with the man he loves, who he is telling himself he can’t be with, sitting behind glass—where he’ll be for a good long while.

I’m going to divide this analysis into two sections. For a scene that many prefer to forget, to me, it’s a masterpiece of storytelling.

Physicality

The body language in this scene is remarkable—phenomenally blocked, phenomenally directed, and phenomenally portrayed.

When Mickey first appears, he’s visibly chomping at the bit to get to the visitation area. He’s peering out there while he’s still behind a locked door, and he only diverts his gaze to the guard because he’s waiting for him to unlock it. He’s cool about the whole thing—he’s very cool—but he’s obviously also here for one reason and one reason only. That reason is where his eyes go the moment he sits down at his stall and spots Ian’s coat where the latter is pacing behind Svetlana. Throughout their entire conversation, we see his eyes darting to Ian as he attempts to get the business out of the way so that he can indulge purely in the pleasure. It doesn’t matter to him that Ian is visibly tired and reluctant to be there or that he plays with Yevgeny instead of actively joining their conversation. It’s Ian, and all Mickey has to look at in here is a bunch of fellow thugs he hasn’t loved since he was too young to know what that meant. Damn right, he’s going to shamelessly watch him.

In Ian’s pacing, where we can’t see his face, I find it interesting that he keeps himself angled away from the glass. We see more of his back even though he’s moving side to side rather than away. He doesn’t want to see this. He doesn’t want to be there. In s7, he told Mickey how hard it was to see him behind glass—that wasn’t an excuse. He wasn’t falsely trying to make it sound like he was suffering at their separation just as much as Mickey was. We can see that that’s the case right here in 6x01. Ian has never had a problem sitting still through difficult moments, not even when a potential court martial that would further ruin his life was on the table. But this? He can’t sit down. He can’t face that.

The first time he turns directly towards Mickey’s location is so that Svetlana can hand Yevgeny off to him, and Mickey is visibly loving the view. His expression gets a bit softer, and he ducks his head a little so that he can catch a glimpse of Ian’s face. He follows Ian with his eyes even though Svetlana tries to get his attention. What a blast from the past, right? Ian there with his son, taking care of him while he and Svetlana figure out their business? And just like before, he offers Svetlana all of the attention and input that he deems her worth—next to nothing. Ian’s over there. Ian’s keeping the kid entertained, playing with him and rocking a bit in their seat and leaning over his little shoulder to make sure he’s doing okay—but forget that, Mickey’s eyes are examining him from red hair to beat-up shoes. He only glances back to Svetlana because he has to in order to get the information for their next paycheck. Even then, he’s still back and forth, up and down.

And Ian? He can’t keep pacing. He can’t stay turned away, but he won’t look. He occupies himself more than Yevgeny because now he’s low enough that he won’t just see an orange jumpsuit—he’ll see Mickey, and he’s had a bad enough day with his family making him feel more alone than ever without adding that pain on top of it. (This is the third time Mickey’s been locked up for something directly or indirectly related to Ian. I’m sure it’s not unreasonable to suspect that he also feels somewhat guilty about that, especially when it happened right after he broke it off.)

When Mickey asks if Ian is going to sit back there the whole time and not interact with him, Svetlana turns around and presumably says something to get his attention. Their eyes meet, and Mickey gives him a look that clearly says, “What the fuck, man?” This isn’t the behavior of a man who is heartbroken at their relationship ending or questioning Ian’s love for him. This is the behavior of a man who wants the love of his life to get his shit together enough to come say hi to him—or at least look at him—because he can’t pretend that he doesn’t want to see Mickey as much as Mickey wants to see him. It’s impossible to hide that when Ian has let Mickey see so much of his heart over the years.

Ian’s response is so fascinating because he does meet Mickey’s eyes, and he holds that connection for a moment. Then, reading what Mickey is trying to tell him, he actually turns further away again so that Mickey gets his shoulder. This sets the stage for the rest of Ian’s development from now through s9. He’s doing what Ian does: he’s compartmentalizing. He’s taking the emotions he can’t deal with right now, wrapping them in tissue paper, and neatly stacking them in a box that he’ll put up in the attic where he can pretend they don’t exist. But they do. They really do.

If they didn’t, he wouldn’t have spent their entire conversation trying so hard to focus on literally anything but Mickey, because as we saw in the Hall of Shame flashbacks and as has been obvious since their first fight-turned-fuck, once they look, the battle is lost.

Dialogue

I’m going to be real with you guys: I adore this scene. I’ve watched it more times than I can count even though I haven’t rewatched much of the season in its entirety. There was so much said with so few words, and while I was sad at the end, I was also hopeful. This was an impossible position to be put in on both sides, and I truly believe that this was the best resolution they could get at the time. And yes, it hurt. It was painful. But why was it painful?

Because they’re so visibly, obviously, irrevocably in love.

Mickey’s tone when he tells Svetlana to leave because he wants to talk to Ian isn’t as harsh as it’s been for the rest of their visit. There’s such a disconnect between his words and tone: roughly telling her to scram while actually sounding a bit younger at the idea of speaking directly with Ian. Svetlana could tell. It’s so clear, and her smirk is super knowing. In that moment, we’re seeing the woman who stood in the doorway of what was supposed to be her bedroom and watched him make eyes at this unconscious boy she didn’t really even remember. Not in the tears and realizing she was in big, big trouble if he left her, but in the understanding that his heart isn’t in the body on the other side of the glass—it’s sitting behind her. There are a lot of things I don’t like about Svetlana as a person (as a character, she’s amazing), but since they reached their agreement in s4, she’s never had a derogatory thing to say about the love those two share, and I respect that. It’s actually a bit cute how she takes her time and is almost teasing in giving him what he wants. A bit.

As I have this scene running on repeat so that I don’t miss anything in writing this, I paused to type and ended up on such a meaningful glance at Ian’s face. Svetlana just took Yevgeny from him, and he hasn’t gotten up yet. He’s staring straight at Mickey, and he looks hesitant. Scared, almost. Then he looks up at Svetlana, nods a bit, and reluctantly moves into her spot.

Is it overkill to take this one exchange at a time? Probably. Am I going to do it anyway? Hell to the yes.

1. “Thanks for coming back.”/”Yeah… Svetlana paid me.” – I know that people hate this line and think this is painful. I know that it objectively is painful. I still laugh every time. Not because Ian agreed to come if he was paid. (He’s got medication to afford and no insurance. I can’t begrudge him wanting to make a few extra bucks any way he can.) Not because of the words, but because of what accompanies them. Ian will not look at Mickey—he’s lost so many battles lately, and he can’t lose this one too. Not when he started this one himself. He’s hemming and hawing, not looking up from the countertop and then twisting around to see if Svetlana is still there or anyone else is listening. It’s so stupid, because literally no one cares, but it gives you this sensation that Ian sees himself as being under a microscope the whole time. That’s his life anymore, at home and at work and now here. And Mickey? He doesn’t look terribly broken up about Ian accepting payment in exchange for coming. He gets this expression that I interpreted as, “Seriously? You’re playing it like that?” Then it settles into disappointment that Ian won’t open up or look at him like he normally would—that the glass interferes with the magnetic pull between them. But don’t worry, children. Uncle Mickey has just the thing to fix that: himself.

2. “You look good.”/*awkward silence* – I mean…what do you say to that? I actually felt so bad for Ian there because what must he have looked like these last visits if Mickey is telling him that he looks good now? What kind of mess was he then when he’s still sort of a mess today? And he can’t even return the sentiment because how can he? Mickey is in prison. He’s in a jumpsuit looking at being here so long that he’ll probably have a few grey hairs starting to grow in when he gets out. I don’t know how to respond when people tell me I look good on an average day, so I can only imagine how that must have felt in his position. And still, he won’t do more than glance in Mickey’s direction. Well, if that didn’t work…

3. Mickey chuckles and says he got a new tattoo. Ian’s eyes immediately shoot upwards, and Mickey slouches a little so that he’s in their direct line of sight—to hold them there, because once they look, the battle is lost. And Ian does lose. For a while there, he can’t look away again. First, because Mickey is courting some pretty nasty illnesses with his improper use of needles. Seriously, Mickey, a beautiful gesture but holy crap. Second, Mickey has his name (or a very close approximation to it) tattooed forever right over his heart. Ian had asked if Mickey was going to marry him, and Mickey told him to fuck off, but everything he’s doing points in the opposite direction. He promised sickness and health; now he’s made a permanent mark on his body for everyone to see. Mickey, who wouldn’t be seen in public with him once upon a time, has plastered Ian’s name onto his body. Ian tries so hard not to let that impact him, but it’s over. He’s lost the battle already, and he falls further and further. He’s smiling when he tells Mickey it looks infected, he teases him about the misspelling (which I think says more about how much that tattoo must have hurt than any inability to spell on Mickey’s part—I’d have a typo too), and he laughs at Mickey’s irritation that he messed it up. And it’s this sweet little laugh, not cruel or hurtful or mean. The wonderful thing about humor is that it can be used to cope with difficult emotions. We’ve seen a lot of people on the show start laughing when they’re in a bad place. Ian has been trying so hard to accept his life as it is even during the shitty day he was having. He tried so hard not to let himself fall into the trap of letting his love for Mickey rule his actions in the scene so far. That’s a lot. That’s denying himself to the point where I’m sure it hurts. And so he laughs, because Mickey did this crazy, absurd thing for him and yeah, it came out wrong, but he did it. This was all Ian wanted once upon a time (minus the felony), and now he has it—but he can’t have it. So he laughs. He immediately moves to hide it, but he laughs. He smiles more and has to bend away to pretend that he’s not—and Mickey lights up like a goddamn Christmas tree. This is the moment that keeps me from seeing this scene or Ian’s actions as being cruel. They’re both hurting, and this is an awful position to be in. But Ian loves him so much, and Mickey was doing everything he could to make him show it. Not exactly how he saw that going, I’m sure, but he’ll take it.

4. “Been thinking about you.” – Knowing that he lost that one, Ian looks away again. While the end of this scene will hurt for both of them, especially Mickey, think about the pain he must be feeling in that moment simply because he’s not. He’s not hurting. For the first time that day, he feels good. This can’t last. Mickey isn’t coming home with him when time is up. This wonderful emotion that filled him up enough for him to laugh and smile after such a bad day will be gone the second he hangs up that phone. Then he’s going to go home and have Fiona breathing down his neck with nobody else for support. And Mickey will be here—behind glass. He can’t handle that, and he pulls that box out again and starts tearing off the tissue paper. He has to get rid of this feeling. He has to be the one to put it away before it kicks him to the curb. He’s stubborn, and Mickey can see him shutting down but also knows that he’s knocked enough bricks out of Ian’s walls to say something softer, something emotional and closer to the heart. Something he is willing to say where the other inmates can hear, which I don’t think is lost on Ian since he immediately looks up again. He doesn’t look away either, not even when Mickey asks if Ian thinks about him. He glances to the side and opens his mouth a bit, but nothing comes out. Mickey knows the answer.

5. “Gonna wait for me?”/”You’re here for fifteen years.” – There’s this thing Mickey does after he first says that. He chuckles, because he knows that that’s pretty unreasonable to ask and has already predicted Ian’s response. His comment about being out in eight is lighthearted, a serious matter spoken as a joke because…this isn’t juvie anymore. They’re not going to see each other in a few months. This is Mickey’s version of what Ian was just doing, only where Ian tried to withdraw and escape within himself, Mickey is making it more humorous. He’s always done that, make light of pretty serious things to avoid looking at just how messed up it is. But I didn’t get the feeling he was really asking for Ian to wait that long. Instead, I got the feeling that he was testing the waters, seeing if Ian would shut him down—which he didn’t. He offered the bullshit excuse that Mickey tried to kill a member of his family, and Mickey saw through that immediately. I think he knows that he can’t ask Ian to seriously wait and never be with anyone else for fifteen years, or even for eight. I think he knows what he’s saying is a touch absurd. He also knows that Ian’s excuse is extremely absurd, and he doesn’t buy it for a second. It gives him a little courage to do something…well, a bit absurd.

6. “Will you? Wait? Fucking lie if you have to, man. Eight years is a long time.” – I think the important part of this isn’t that Ian says he’ll wait when he doesn’t mean it, which is the popular take. For one thing, I don’t think we can ascribe that level of calculated behavior to Ian in this instance. There are a few things about this part of the scene that mean a lot to me: (1) Ian doesn’t get up and go. He doesn’t even move in that direction. He sits there with the phone after the buzzer sounds and before Mickey tells him to lie. His mouth opens and closes like he’s not sure what to say. Because what can he say? If Mickey serves the maximum, Ian will be in his mid-thirties by the time they can be together. At that point, he was either nearing eighteen or just turned. I still can’t fathom what I’ll be doing in my mid-thirties, and I’m a whole lot older than that. Ian looks just a little terrified here, and that’s because he knows he loves Mickey but has no clue what he’s supposed to do with that in the impossible circumstances they’re operating under. (2) Ian can’t even see himself moving on yet. He’s still trying to figure himself out, not think about a relationship. He has a job he hates, and his family is a different brand of chaos these days. He feels alone, yes, but not in a way that has him openly desperate for a relationship. Based on what he says to Mandy about Caleb, I think it’s pretty safe to assume that he doesn’t think he’ll ever be in a serious relationship at this point or even in a position for more than casual sex anytime in the near future. How can he say that he’ll wait when he doesn’t know where he’ll be whenever Mickey does get out? Maybe he’ll feel better. Maybe he’ll be out of his mind, roaming all over the place like Monica. Maybe he won’t just be standing on that bridge. It’s a huge question, one that has a lot of ramifications no matter what his answer is, and Ian clearly has none. He’s blindsided by that, which Mickey sees. That’s when he gets serious about those eight years, about how absurd their situation really is. That’s perhaps the first and only time in this scene where we can see that, for as successful as he is at navigating prison, his freedom means something to him. His freedom means he wouldn’t have to coax a glance out of Ian—he could kiss his dumb ass and make him stop being stubborn about how much he loves Mickey. But he can’t. He won’t be able to for a long time. And I think that is what really breaks his heart in this scene, not…

7. “Yeah. Yeah, Mick, I’ll wait.” – Did anyone else notice how Ian swallowed hard before he answered? How his voice gets hoarse when he first speaks? I paused again to type, and the video is sitting on his face staring at the counter before the second part of what he says. He looks like he might cry. He looks like his heart is breaking just as much as Mickey’s is, because he can do what he’s asking this time—reassure him with a lie. Not because he doesn’t intend to wait, but because he is buried so far under what life has piled on top of him that he can’t see the light these days, and he doesn’t see waiting or moving on. He just sees the daily struggle of being this shell of a person. Of being without Mickey even if they’re not technically together. (Admittedly, I think he knew they would be if Mickey weren’t in prison at that moment. Ian has no real self-control where he’s concerned. Lip told him as much, and he’s self-aware enough to realize it, hence his behavior in this whole scene.)

When Ian hangs up the phone, he doesn’t get up immediately. He looks at Mickey—really looks at him—and each of them watches the other’s heart shatter. I don’t see it the way a lot of people do, though. On Mickey’s side, I don’t see it as being because Ian lied. I think it’s so much bigger than that.

Ian looks at him when they can’t hear each other anymore, and if he didn’t seem ready to cry before, he looks it now. Why? Because there’s nothing he can do for Mickey besides that. Ian, ever the giver, can’t give him anything. At that point, he couldn’t even help himself. He can’t be what Mickey needs in that moment, just like he couldn’t be what Mickey needed while he was sick, and it kills him. It kills him to know that by the time Mickey does get out, he’ll be older than he can fathom being and has no idea if he’ll even be around that long. It kills him to feel like even if he is, he’ll still have nothing to offer because, in his own words, this is where he lands. And it kills him to have to walk away and leave what he loves most behind glass.

Mickey is watching this. He knows Ian, and as painful as it was to get exactly what he asked for, it’s even more painful for him to see what him being here does to Ian. Where Ian is a giver, Mickey is a fixer. He makes things better. When stuff is broken, he puts it back together. When there’s a problem, he resolves it. Ian was going to leave because he couldn’t be an unacknowledged number three in Mickey’s life anymore? He jumped to solve the problem by coming out. Ian was acting strangely and wouldn’t get out of bed for so long that Mickey realized something was wrong? He immediately went to hunt down Lip, who he knows is closer to Ian than anyone else in his family. Fiona tells him that Ian is sick and needs to be cared for? He jumps in to do it, even to the point where it did more harm than good. Sammi caused a problem that Mickey couldn’t solve? He fixed the problem of her being there at all. But here he sits, behind glass, watching Ian that whole time and knowing that he was trying to maintain some emotional distance—and, because it’s Mickey, knowing why. There’s nothing he can do about this. He can’t fix it. For the first time since s3, Mickey is absolutely helpless to fix a problem. He takes a breath as Ian walks away as though he’s about to say something, but what can he say? What can he do? Nothing. He can do nothing but hang up the phone and weather the storm.

In the end, the heartbreak in this scene isn’t about them hurting each other, from my perspective. It’s not about Ian being callous and cruel or purposely trying to hurt Mickey. They know each other too well for that. They’ve been through too much. To me, this is about two people who love each other more than anything not being able to be what the other needed when they needed them—and that’s a whole lot more painful.

#shameless meta #ian gallagher #mickey milkovich

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chappedandfadedvds · 4 years

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Nov 26th, Thursday 23:17

„I thought you’d be in bed already?“

Jens had just finished the dishes, ready to head to bed, after he spent hours trying to get all his notes for his french test ready next week. He wasn’t worried that he would fail. Perhaps a little worried.

His mother stood in the doorway to her room, when he reached the last step, causing him to watch her perplexed.

„Me too, but it looks like my side of the bed was taken before I had a chance.“

Curious Jens went up to her, sticking his head over her shoulder. Lotte was his mom’s bed, sleeping peacefuly despite the lamp on the night stand lighting the room.

They just stood there for a moment and watched the little girl. Til his mom took a step back, weak on her feet. He helped her get down and joined right after. Causing them both to sit side by side, propped up against the wall across the stairs. He had his legs pulled up, his arms hugging his knees as he stared straight ahead.

„Lucas is my boyfriend.“

It just bursted out of him, the first thing that had come to mind. He probably should have said it sooner. He didn’t even know why he hadn’t done that til now.

„No! Really?“ His mother exclaimed shoked in pretence, nudging him lightly as she chuckled.

„What reaction do you want? Strict parent, or not understanding mother, or perhaps I could tell you, I always knew you weren’t as hetero as you believed. Even though that would be a lie.“

Jens bit his lip to contain his amusement. Instead he tilted his head as if he needed to consider her words. Jens definitely knew who was responsible for his personality. Even though they only had gotten as close and on par with each other since the diagnoses. She wasn’t just a parent any longer to him. He wished they had been like that earlier. They had fought rather often. Certainly him having been to blame for most of it. Sneaking out to meet Britt and later Jana, or getting caught coming home high and drunk. Perhaps he had to change first to get to this point.

„How about your genuine feelings?“

He therefore asked, not much worried that she would dismiss his boyfriend. It took her a second to think about it before she spoke.

„Obviously I like him a lot, and I’m glad you have him, you always seem happier with Lucas around. He is very kind. And he can keep up with your assholery.“

„Assholery?“ He snorted.

„Yes, hush! You can really suck sometimes. And regarding him being a boy. I don’t care. I just want you to be loved, respected and supported. That’s all that is important to me.“

Lucas was that, wasn’t he?

„I just wanted to actually tell you this, you know, in person. Out loud.“

His mother nodded, grinning at him, as they both had turned their heads while talking. Though he brought his eyes back onto the banister of the stairs infront of him, pulling on the ends of his hoodie’s sleves.

„Don’t you think it’s unfair to him?“

„What is?“

„This. Like I know I’m his real first relationship. And I had Britt and Jana and, like, other girls before him. I feel like I’m keeping him from something. I don’t know what exactly. Dating around. Hooking up casually. Not remembering the girl you drunk kissed last night at a party.“

„Speaking from experience, I take it.“ His mother sounded gleeful as she said it. She wasn’t wrong. Not that he would actually tell her that. She knew anyway. So he went on.

„Just something that makes him regret it in the future, if he stays for all of this that is my fucking life.“

„You haven’t talked about this with him?“

Jens stayed silent. They both knew better than expecting him openly talking about his personal feelings. Late night talks with his mom though made it easier.

„I think Lucas is at an age to decide that for himself. In fact you are both graduating soon, just enjoy the time you two get to have. You are both teenagers. Nobody expects this to last forever. You are dating for what? A month? Don’t worry about what’s after, and talk to him, tell him what you think. Take it easy.“

She concluded, reaching over to place her hand on his knee. Her thumb brushing over it in light circles.

„I don’t know.“

„Then what do you actually know?“

Sometimes his mother murdered him in cold blood with her quips.

“Hey!” He exclaimed accusatory. She was his mother. She had to love him unconditional. Not be mean to him.

They both were nonetheless enjoying the quiet banter and even the silence that followed when the two of them were each sunken in their own heads.

„I’ve written your father.“ His mother suddenly said, making his head spun round. He hadn’t known they were in contact. The last two years went completely by without any message nor a mention of his dad.

„I don’t have his phone number, but his mail adress, and so I’ve told him today about everything that is happening right now. He is still the man I had planned to grow old with, the man I’d die next to. Even after all these years I can’t quite forget about him. He should know at least.“

She sounded saddened as she spoke, her voice low and resigned.

„I’m not gonna let him come back here and take Lotte.“

It was all Jens honestly cared for, even if it was cold to ignore his mothers remeining love for his father. He knew that his parents were officially still married. To his knowledge neither his father nor his mother ever hadn’t gotten into a serious relationship after they broke it off.

„Let me finish, okay?“ She interrupted his thoughts. „I also did it to send him a form Alex gave me for him to sign, and waive his position of choice as the legal guardian. I thought you may not want to talk to him yourself. It’s also one less thing for you to worry about it.“

„Thank you.“ He was greateful for that, honestly. He should have stopped at that, yet still found himself asking: „Why did you let him do this to you?“

„What?“ She looked at him puzzled, perhaps retracing her words to figure out what Jens was getting at.

„Let him leave you.“ He expanded on his question. Something he realised he had thought about since his father had left them six years ago. Jens probably should have asked this years ago in order to understand, because he never could figure it out. His father was just gone for months on end, and one day for good.

„It wasn’t something that came over night. We both knew since we began dating at university. He had always talked about his plans and ambitions. And I always reminded him that I wanted children more than anything else. So he gave me you three to love and I gave him his freedom.“

„Aren’t you regretting it?“

„Letting him go?“

Jens nodded. Yes exactly. Like how can you merry a person you know will leave you at some point. Maybe even a fixed point as his father began his expeditions and travels right after his phd.

„No. Well sometimes. When you three drove me crazy. Especially that one day you decided to give your baby sister the cream jar, for her to smear all over the living room, herself and you included. I had to bath you three for an hour to get everything washed out. Cried two more hours after. And the armchair, the poor armchair had to be thrown out.“

She laughed, as she indulged in her reminiscence. He couldn’t help but smile at her. They really had done some dumb stuff when they were younger. How his mother had managed to keep Lies and him in check while tending to Lotte was a mystery to Jens.

„But no I don’t regret ever having had all of you. Nor having let him follow his passion and do his work. I think he would have stayed had I asked him to. But he would have come to resent me for it one day. Sometimes you have to let people go because you love them.“

„Sounds stupid.“

His mother just giggled at his blunt response. She rose her hand ruffling his hair, ignoring his complaint as leaned away to escape her teasing.

„Maybe you are right.“ She admitted sheeply. „I am your mother, but I really don’t know shit.“ She grinned brightly at him as he watched her amused. „To let you in on the secret of adulthood. You just have to wing it most of the times and hope for the best.“

His groan could have probably woken his sister if she wouldn’t be such a deep sleeper.

„This sucks.“

„It does.“ She agreed without hesitation, trying to comfort him with a kiss to his forehead. It helped a little.

„So what are your plans?“

„For what?“

„I don’t know.“ She shrugged, leaving him none the wiser on if she was playing at something. Maybe Lucas had talked to her today?

„Senne invited us all for christmas to go to his grandparent’s cabin in switzerland.“

„Really?“ He hadn’t expected her to look so happy while surprised.

„Yes.“ The confirmation was just a little whisper. He was uncomfortable to talk about it. Jens knew she would want him to go. And he knew he couldn’t just leave her at home, and enjoy his holidays, knowing his mom’s declining health. What kind of son would he be?

„Wow now I’m very jealous.“

„I’m not going.“ He cut her off, before she could say anything else. Of course it was already to late, her cheery expression already faltering.

„Why? Come on, Jens, tell them that you will join their trip.“

„It would be our last christmas.“

He only had to send her one look, to make her understand and sigh.

„I know. But I’d rather have you spend some weeks away from all of this. Get your head free a little, get distracted. I had planned to go see my mom in Brussel anyway, if I can, before... You know. So you could drop off Lotte and me on the way and then see your friends. Sit in front of a fire with them. Kiss your boyfriend on a mountaintop. I don’t know. Just enjoy your time, before you’ll have your little sister tag along on any other vacation for the next couple of years.“

It sounded so easy when his mother said it. As if he could just turn his brain off for a moment and not think about her all the time when she wasn’t around. But he supposed she had a point. Especially at the end of her little monologue.

„Geez. You might be right.“

„I always am. So you are going?“

He kinda hated how bold she smiled, knowing she had made him consider it and probably accept Senne’s invitation. Damn her.

„I’ll sleep on it.“ He sighed once more, while he rolled his eyes especially hard.

„Good enough for me. We should probably head to bed as well. When will Lucas be here with his mom for breakfast again?“

Oh. That reminded Jens of what he actually had wanted to do after dinner, when he had stood in his room questioning why he had made the trip upstairs in the first place He definitely had taken his phone off the charger and down back to the kitchen, didn’t meant he had actually sent the text.

„Eh... Shit, should probably message him. I forgot. What was it? Nine thirty? Ten?“

Lucas had said something before he had left.

„I can’t believe I am leaving all of this and the responsibitliies to you.“

His mother cluck her tounge, as she shook her head. Her expression definitely amused.

„Funny. Come, I’ll help you up.“ He said getting to his feet first before he extended his hand for her to take. They both needed a moment to recover, stretching in place after having lingered in the same position for a while. And on the hard floor as well.

In turn it was her now reaching out for him, to nudge him towards her room. Both squeezing in on the free side of the bed. His mother only reaching over to turn off the light and call it a day.

__ __ __

tagged: @odi-et-amo85, @tayspots

#week 5 #wtfock #skam #vds #jens stoffels #lucas van der heijden #chapped and faded #mama stoffels #i'll miss writing these #one of the last easy talks between them

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trombonesinspace · 4 years

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Typhoid Mary: feminist femme fatale?

“Season 4 was going to be Typhoid Mary, Alice Eve [who played the role in Iron Fist], we were doing a kind of...I had a much different version of her than what Raven [Metzner] had done in Iron Fist. I was kind of rebooting what she was going to be like, and we were going to do a, you know, kind of a warped love story/murder mystery kind of femme fatale, but kind of a modern-day, feminist version of it, as opposed to kind of the older, sexist kind of femme fatale archetype.”

-Erik Oleson, in conversation with Steven DeKnight, SaveDaredevilCon

As I said yesterday, I have some thoughts about this! If you want some opinions nobody asked for, about a storyline that may never come to pass, you’ve come to the right place! Let’s dive in.

A femme fatale is a character type with quite a history, that can take various forms. She is always an attractive woman who brings ruin to the man who gets involved with her. But sometimes she is deliberately manipulative, while sometimes she is more a victim of circumstances. She may be evil, or she may be sympathetic/tragic. But whatever her moral alignment, she has two defining traits: sexual allure, and some form of negative consequences for the hero as a result of his involvement with her.

A woman who schemes against the hero, and succeeds in harming him, but without using feminine wiles? Not a femme fatale. The Marvel TV universe has featured several examples on different shows: Madame Gao, Mariah Dillard, Alexandra. And, ironically, the version of Typhoid Mary who appeared in Iron Fist. (We’ll get there.)

A sexy woman who tries to manipulate/damage the hero, but fails? Also not a femme fatale. I wish I could give some examples, but sadly I can’t think of any, in dramas at least. Our current media culture loves a sexy manipulator, no writer ever seems to introduce one into a dramatic story without making her succeed in her schemes, to some extent at least.

Which is unfortunate, from my perspective, because I loathe sexy manipulators. It’s a character type I really dislike, whenever I encounter her. As soon as she shows up, I know the hero is going to fall for her bullshit like a chump, and I’m going to end up respecting him less as a result. I could try to unpack my feelings about this a bit more, but that would probably make a post all on its own, so for now I’ll leave it at that.

This doesn’t mean I hate all femmes fatales—it really depends on her motivation and her behavior. If she isn’t trying to harm the hero, and it happens due to circumstances, then I might like the character, but the story becomes a tragedy. Which is not necessarily bad. Just, you know. Tragic.

Anyway! Let’s talk about Typhoid Mary.

Mary Walker is a woman with Dissociative Identity Disorder (multiple personalities), and high-level combat skills. In the comics, she is also a mutant with mental powers. She appeared in the Daredevil comics starting in 1988.

In this original version, her personality fragmented due to childhood abuse, leading her to vow as an adult that no man would ever hurt her again. Her personalities are: Mary, who is timid and gentle; Typhoid, who is adventurous, lusty, and violent; and Bloody Mary, who is even more violent, sadistic, and hates all men.

Mary becomes romantically involved with Matt Murdock, who is cheating on his girlfriend, Karen Page, to be with her. At the same time, Typhoid is trying to ruin him, having been hired to do so by the Kingpin. Matt can’t tell they’re the same woman, because when she switches personalities all her bio signs change (voice, scent, heartbeat, etc) so much that he can’t recognize her. (Uh, sure.) She may also be using some of her mutant powers to confuse his senses. I haven’t read the comics, I’m relying here on what I could learn from the internet.

Eventually Typhoid drops him off a bridge, but then Mary finds him and gets him to a hospital, saving him. Karen is with him when he wakes up, but he breaks her heart by calling out for Mary.

This storyline...does not thrill me. As I said, I haven’t read it, but comics writing about mental illness is generally neither nuanced nor accurate, and comics writing about women circa 1988 is also not great, by today’s standards. And comics Matt’s disastrous love life is legendary—cheating on your girlfriend is bad, Matt! Don’t do it!

I have, however, watched season 2 of Iron Fist, where we get a different version. This Mary Walker is a US army veteran, special ops, who was captured by the Sokovian military. Her personality fragmented due to the brutal abuse she received from her captors for nearly two years, until she finally escaped. She got a medical discharge from the army after being diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder.

Her personalities are: Mary, who is innocent and naive; and Walker, who is a ruthless, coolly efficient mercenary-for-hire. The existence of a third, ultraviolent personality, previously unknown to either Mary or Walker, is revealed near the end of the season.

Mary meets and befriends Danny Rand, while Walker is hired by his enemies to stalk him, and eventually capture him so they can steal his Iron Fist powers from him. She later changes sides, getting hired to bring down Davos, the season’s main villain, by Joy Meachum, his former ally.

There are clear parallels to the Daredevil comics storyline, albeit in less extreme form—Mary befriends the hero, but isn’t romantically involved with him; her more violent personality works against him and fights him, but doesn’t try to destroy him.

I enjoyed this version of the character more than I expected to, for a couple of reasons. For one, she is never the out of control, “crazy” stereotype of a person with mental illness. Both Mary and Walker are more-or-less functional adults, managing to live a strange hybrid life, aware of each other’s existence even though they don’t share memories.

But what I especially like is that she isn’t sexualized, at all. It’s incredibly rare, in my experience, to see a young, female antagonist opposing a male hero, and not have her be sexy. Older women are exempt from this obligation (see my list of examples above), but the young ones always vamp it up, and I am so tired of it. I am not opposed to sexy women, but I am very opposed to the requirement that all women must be sexy. (Unless they’re old.) Male antagonists aren’t required to be alluring, so why should women be? (Yes, I know why. I just don’t like it.)

There’s also a lot of potential YIKES in sexualizing a woman with a severe mental illness, which was caused by (among other things) repeated sexual violence. Could it be done in a way that isn’t super problematic? It’s possible, sure. Am I assuming that most television writers would give the subject the respect it deserves? NOPE!

I’m really glad they chose to just not go there. Walker is extremely good at what she does, takes no shit from anyone, and (almost) never gets riled up. After everything she’s been through, nothing in her present life has the power to faze her, and none of the men around her have the power to intimidate her. It’s pretty great!

She isn’t the least bit coy or seductive, and, equally refreshing, none of the men try to sexualize her or hit on her. Everyone Walker talks to knows she is a highly skilled professional, and they treat her accordingly. Or, when someone does disrespect her, it’s never gendered as far as I can remember, and it stops as soon as she calmly states what she’s going to do to him if it doesn’t.

As for Mary, although she has a more feminine appearance than Walker (hair down and loose, makeup), she is also not sexualized. Her friendship with Danny, who is in an established relationship with Colleen Wing, is platonic, and no one else tries to hit on her that I remember.

So this is the version of Typhoid Mary that Erik Oleson was going to reboot, into a femme fatale. Only, you know. A feminist one.

I...have some questions. What does that even mean? What does feminism mean to Erik Oleson? Let’s be real, the idea of a woman becoming an ultraviolent, sadistic man-hater as a result of sexual trauma would have been seen as feminist in some circles, back in 1988 when that version was written. So what, exactly, did he have in mind?

As I said before, sexual allure is a necessary component of a femme fatale. So she was definitely gonna be sexy. And you know now how I feel about sexy female antagonists. As for the “warped love story” part...Matt wouldn’t be cheating on Karen, since they aren’t together (please, for the love of mercy, don’t have them get together right before he meets Mary, we did that once and I do NOT want to see it again), but I am still not a fan of Matt/Mary as a couple.

Her Dissociative Identity Disorder raises some serious issues around consent, and even if the show chose to ignore that, there’s still the issue of past sexual trauma. Unless Oleson’s reworking of the character was going to include a completely different back story, a Matt/Mary relationship would mean Matt unknowingly having sex with a woman who has suffered brutal sexual abuse in her past. Not to mention, having sex with her that only one part of her personality actually wants.

Is it possible for someone with Mary’s past trauma and present mental illness to have a positive sexual relationship? In reality, of course! In the hands of writers with only a layman’s knowledge of psychology, on a show that loves to torment its hero, I wouldn’t bet on it. How do you suppose our poster boy for Catholic guilt would react when he inevitably finds out the truth?

Plus, aside from any issues around Mary herself, Matt starting a relationship with anyone other than the handful of people who already know his secret identity, means a whole new round of Matt lying to someone he cares about. Does anyone really want to see that? I know I don’t. Sure, maybe he’d tell her eventually, but how long would they have to date before he decided to trust her with the truth?

I’m not opposed to the Mary Walker from Iron Fist appearing in Daredevil, if the writers could come up with a new story for her (i.e, don’t just have her repeat all the same plot beats with Matt that she already did with Danny). But bringing her in as a femme fatale really doesn’t sit well with me. We’ve already seen Matt in an ultimately destructive relationship with a sexy, violent, morally grey woman. I really don’t want to watch Round 2: now with multiple personalities!

Of course, maybe we never will. The quote at the beginning of this post is from just a couple of weeks ago (July 25 2020), so Erik Oleson still seems to think it’s a fine idea. But obviously we don’t know yet if there will ever be a season 4, or who the show runner will be if there is. He may never get to make the story he was planning.

So yes, I realize I’m merely speculating about a completely theoretical story that may never happen. But I wanted to write this anyway. I had a strong “ugh, no” reaction to the idea of a feminist femme fatale Typhoid Mary, and I wanted to go deeper and pick apart my reasons for not liking the idea.

To the three of you who have read this all the way through to the end (this post is nearly 2000 words, yikes), thank you for indulging me! These are, as always, my own opinions, and YMMV.

#daredevil #typhoid mary #femme fatale #long post #oh look I wrote a dissertation

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greenjacketwhitehatdocmui · 5 years

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Frozen WIP--Confession in the Park

Okay, that’s a terrible title, but it’s what came to mind. This is a modern AU with my OC. Many people have been writing about Canon Elsa and her depression. I decided to take another approach with fluff and angst.

(This is actually part of a larger work in progress. If I ever finish it, I’ll post it up.)

Enjoy!

--Doc

There were times when Elsa questioned why she even had a social life. After all, for most evenings, she was perfectly content to sit on the couch and play with her cats, Olaf and Marshmallow. Anna, of course, always had something to keep her busy.

That didn’t mean that she didn’t get lonely, though. So, on a whim, she called an old friend for dinner. Daniel had always been kind to her and, wonder of wonders, actually listened to her.

This procession of weekly dinners and lunches (not dates, because she wasn’t the dating type) led to an odd comfort between them. He never pressed or assumed. He just listened and it was a very gratifying feeling.

It had been about two years after their first, casual dinner that she mentioned that she loved him. It had slipped out, but she’d meant it.

She was very surprised to find out that he felt the same way. No, he’d loved her ever since they’d been teenagers, before they parted ways.

There was, however, one significant stumbling block. Before they were to go any further, she had to tell him a secret. It had been looming over her life ever since she was young.

She wasn't sure how he'd react. It was a chance she had to take.

It had been September when she'd screwed up enough courage to tell him. She decided that it was only right to do it in person. Even if Daniel had reacted badly (which she was pretty certain that he wouldn't), he deserved to know.

They sat on a park bench one Saturday afternoon, a few weeks before his birthday. She always appreciated that he knew when she was working something out. He didn't jabber just to fill in the space.

"There's something I need to tell you," she began. "It's...something that isn't easy for me to say, and I need you to not say anything until I'm done."

He lifted an eyebrow in concern. Taking a deep breath, he nodded for her to speak.

"I...have depression and anxiety," she said, the last few words rushing out. "It runs in the family; Papa was diagnosed with it when he was younger."

Daniel nodded, but said nothing. There was no spark of revulsion in his eyes, however. He was patiently listening to her.

"I was eight when it started," she continued. "I couldn't figure out why I couldn't feel like I used to. It really scared me. It scared Anna too, because one moment, I couldn't muster the energy to get out of bed. The next moment, everything was too loud, too fast, just...too much. I didn't know what was wrong with me."

She chanced another look in his eyes. There was neither pity nor disgust in those patient brown eyes of his. He was merely taking it in, waiting for her to finish.

"I felt like I was drowning. I felt like I was nothing. I started crying over the tiniest things. I remember crying to Mama and asking `what is wrong with me?'"

Daniel nodded, but said nothing. She was grateful for that.

"They took me to a doctor and he ran some tests," she continued. "They told me about my conditions and how I could live with them."

She sniffled. She'd hardly told anyone about this, but he deserved to know. What he did with this knowledge was up to him. Honestly, she wouldn't have blamed him if he wanted out of their relationship.

Wordlessly, he handed her a handkerchief. She was reminded about how much she loved his little gestures of kindness.

"I am living with depression and anxiety," she said. "I take medication every day. I see a psychiatrist every week. I have good days and bad days, but...I'm living with it. And if you don't want to be with me because of this, I'll understand."

Daniel frowned. "Are you done?"

She nodded. "I'm done."

He took a deep breath. "Well, then, my question is this: Why the bloody blazes would I leave the strongest woman I've ever known?"

"What?" She barely heard herself speak. "Didn't you just hear me? I have depression and anxiety. I'm damaged. I'm not normal!"

He shrugged. "Normal is...subjective," he said. "And yes, I heard you the first time. You know what? I still think you're strong."

"I...don't know how you could come to that conclusion." Wasn't it obvious that she was messed up? How could he be so calm about this?

"You knew something was wrong," he said patiently. "You reached out for help. When you get down to it, you just have a chemical imbalance in your brain--one that you are actively seeking help for. That's more than I can say for a lot of people in your position. A lot of people would be too afraid of the stigma and...self-medicate or something else daft. You are taking care of yourself." He cracked a quick smile. "And you still think you're not strong?"

"You're...okay with this? With me?"

He tried not to roll his eyes. "'Course I am. If you ever need help, please let me know. Your brain chemistry doesn't affect your heart or your soul--at least, I don't think it does."

"So...you want to stay with me? Just to be clear, you understand," she finished hurriedly.

"I've been doing it for two years," he reminded her. "I don't see any reason to stop."

She wasn't sure when she'd leaned on his shoulder. She wasn't sure when he'd given her another handkerchief. She was fairly certain that her makeup was a mess and that Anna was never, ever going to let her live this down.

"I love you," she murmured.

"I love you too," he returned, his voice catching. "Now don't look unless you want to see a grown man cry--blimey, I said not to look!"

"Fair's fair," she returned.

#frozen #elsa #my writing #frozen fanfiction

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lululawlawlu-writes · 5 years

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Softly Stained with Spring

Part 5: Memento

note: This fic was written for @lawlu-week!!

rating: T

tags: canon universe, fluff and angst, hanahaki possible trigger warning: mentions of death, dead bodies

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“You ever hunt beetles?” Luffy asks, his feet shwish-shwishing back and forth over Law’s thick, weighted blanket.

Law doesn’t begrudge Luffy for having followed him back to the Polar Tang, to his room, to make his bed his own for the night. Conveniently enough, it will make it easier for Law to scan his body for spores once he falls asleep. Law just wishes that he would sleep so he could get to it.

“No,” Law says simply, sitting on the corner of his bed. He runs his fingers through Luffy’s knotted hair, muses around the thought of disguising his scan as routine medical procedure, though now is neither the time nor place. He can’t give Luffy any undue anxiety, knowing how grim his situation may read.

“Don’t worry Torao, I’ll show you how to find the best ones.” Luffy’s smile curves wide across his face. Anxiety—what a strange thing to have to diagnose Luffy with. He just has no other plausible explanation for the mysterious pains that have been plaguing him even before he’d eaten the flowers.

“How do I know you won’t just give me bad advice to make sure I don’t find the biggest one?” It’s hard to resist the urge to engage in banter if Luffy will go along with it. Luffy inspires this kind of lighthearted feeling to slip into his words, his actions, his life.

“I wouldn’t do that.” Luffy’s smile flips into a slight pout.

“Sure,” Law teases, doing his best to subdue a smile. He catches himself still stroking Luffy’s hair, and it suddenly feels a little too soft, too intimate. He ruffles his hair instead, ends the physical contact there.

“No, you-“ Luffy’s words seize in his throat. His smile twists into a grimace he holds just long enough to tip Law off that something’s not right.

“You feeling alright?” Law jumps to ask, ignoring the topic of beetles.

Luffy hums in thought a minute before answering with “I’m okay.”

Law’s personal involvement may have his judgement clouded, but he feels that Luffy shouldn’t have needed to think about his answer. He can hear Luffy's shaky breath as he sits there tracing the hem of the blanket beneath his fingertips, suddenly so much less chatty. Law wants to say something to cut the awkward quiet, do something to make Luffy feel better.

“This blanket is heavy,” Luffy notes then, crawling under it.

“It’s supposed to be,” Law explains. “It‘s a weighted blanket,” he adds, leaving out the part where he confesses that it gives him a feeling of security, eases his own anxieties. It helps to keep away nightmares that would have him relive his past. Maybe it could help Luffy too.

Luffy squirms, turning this way and that until he finds a comfortable position. “It’s like it’s hugging my whole body,” he notes.

“It’s nice, isn’t it?” Law confirms, crawling in beside him. He wants to hold Luffy, comfort him with his own embrace. He inches closer to the possibility of more physical contact, no matter how nervous the prospect makes him.

“Hugs from you would feel nicer than the blanket,” Luffy presses.

“How about this then?” Law asks, slipping an arm around him.

“Yeah,” Luffy confirms, “all hugs from all sides. A kiss would be good too.”

Law’s already so close. The tips of their noses are nearly brushing. He can almost taste the sweetness on Luffy’s breath. He’s aching to kiss him back with the same kind of passion Luffy showed him earlier, but only if Luffy’s really alright now, his pain subsided. It would be so easy if Law could just quit overthinking enough to act.

“I’ll have to win another one tomorrow,” Luffy chuckles, and Law’s will to act falls away. The moment dismissed, there’s no way he can try to kiss him now.

His thumb smooths over Luffy’s shoulder. His eyes follow the curve of his face, count the few sparse freckles that dot his sun-kissed skin. Luffy just blinks at him slowly, tired eyes full of shared emotion still too fragile to put into words.

He should probably be thankful that Luffy assumes kisses are only part of their game. It buys him time to completely consider the implications of getting in too deep with an ally, but he doesn’t need it. Even though he’ll never admit it, Law’s already in over his head.

Luffy curls into him, tucking his head in the nook of his shoulder and Law wills time to slow, wishes he had that power. This time they’re sharing in private, however fleeting, is sacred and precious. It should be terrifying how much Luffy has warmed his way into his heart, but it feels natural, feels right. He can’t resist placing a soft kiss on his temple. He hopes Luffy will forgive him for bending the rules.

… … … … ...

The morning sun wakes Law before he realizes he’s fallen asleep. Thankful for the wakeup call that comes with having the sub surfaced, he wastes no time summoning a room. He shambles himself out from under Luffy, gets right to initiating a scan with his powers.

Scanning his body for spores isn’t as hard as anyone might expect. Law’s so well versed in anatomy, he could even construct a human from the marrow up if given the right ingredients. It’s so easy for him to locate foreign presences, signs of things that shouldn’t be. His ability is so great it’s almost shocking even to himself—almost as shocking as his evident ignorance.

His oversight could cost Luffy his life.

Law has been careless. He’s been stupid. He’s a doctor and he should know better. He should never have been dismissive about Luffy’s symptoms. The situation is now deadly serious and he’s to blame. The spores have already rooted themselves into the walls of Luffy’s lungs. They’re so well fused now that he’d have to cut out the majority of the organs themselves.

His quivering hand reaches for Kikoku, his mind racing to come up with options. He considers for a moment swapping Luffy’s lungs out for his own. Not simply changing whose body they are in, but actually transplanting them. He’s not sure it’s possible for him to even do such complicated procedure involving himself without passing out, but he can’t stand the thought of how much pain Luffy must be in. It’s his fault for acting like some lovesick youth around Luffy instead of a medical professional as he should have.

It will do Law no good to obsess over his mistake, but he’s finding it difficult to focus on anything else. He has to fix this. He’s going to fix this before it gets any worse. What he needs is more knowledge about the illness in order to cure it. He just hopes Luffy won’t be too disappointed if he heads out to the island first. He’s going to seek out the religious devotee they’d met before instead of hunting beetles anyway.

The forest is already awake and lively with birdsong and chirping insects by the time he reaches it. Morning dew soaks through his pant legs but he’s far too preoccupied with his thoughts to really care.

Law’s instincts had cautioned him not to trust Luffy when he said he was okay. He was not okay—not in the least. Law should have picked up on it before now. He should’ve taken into account that he was dealing with Luffy of all people—Luffy who hasn’t let being beaten, poisoned or stabbed hinder him. This is the Luffy who he’s had to put back together, who even after suffering vicious wounds, was still more concerned with his brother over his own pain. Law of all people should know well Luffy’s ability to bear pain—that Luffy’s own judgement may be skewed. He’s got to be suffering badly whether he fully recognizes it or not.

He’s too busy thinking of Luffy, he doesn’t consider what he’ll do when he reaches the clearing on the hill to find no one there except the stone gods. He has an impulse to vent his irritation by slicing them up, leaving them in ruins, but that won’t help him cure Luffy.

There aren’t any flowers offered to those gods yet this morning it seems, so he can’t even take a sample to study. He’ll have to find their source if he wants to take one. He hadn’t seen any of them growing along his way up even though he’d run into the odd religious woman on his way the first time. She’d had an armful of them then.

Law backtracks down the hill, through the trees, looking for subtle signs of a side trail. The birdsong trills overhead as if they’re laughing at his expense. It makes him think of how he’d been lied to, lead to believe that poison was the least of it. It irks him to consider how much of an idiot he’d been for not taking Luffy’s symptoms more seriously.

He uses his haki to sense for life around him, picking up only on the native creatures skittering about, wary of him. He can’t find any indication of a human presence, but off to his left there does seem to be a void—a strong force either repelling of any kind of life or blocking out his haki. Evidence of a trail is still lacking, so he follows his senses, brushing aside briars and undergrowth as he goes. The forest seems to be growing dimmer, dark clouds gathering over the canopy. Wind carries a chill through the air, picking up a faint, metallic scent. The closer he gets, the more the scent starts to sour his senses, turning sickeningly pungent as rotting flesh. The rain finding its way through the canopy does little to diminish the smell.

Red catches Law’s eyes through the trees. The vibrant display entices him in on fixation alone. The colour spills out from a small fenced-in area on the petals of crimson flowers. They drip red, dying the rainwater that pools in their centers. It trickles out over the petals, bleeding onto the ground.

A tiny stone structure—almost like a house of some sort sits opposite him on the property, flanked by two hooded stone figures much like the gods on the hill. The atmosphere feels so abstract, otherworldly. It’s as if the flowers have crept into the garden to choke out anything else that may have been growing there, and the residents have simply allowed it, or even encouraged it. The sight of it feels all the more foreboding in light of the ever-present stench.

A chill crawls its up Law’s skin from fingertip to the nape of his neck, making his hairs stand on end. He can sense death in this place. This place is heavy with it even if he can’t see it. His instincts prickle against him, warning him to be afraid. Law smirks—after the life he’s had it’ll take far worse to get him to run.

His fingers tighten around Kikoku, ready to call on her the moment there’s trouble. He cautiously crosses the fence into grounds, paying no mind to the flowers he’s trampling. He almost takes pleasure in it as a kind of petty revenge. His footsteps sink into the soil, unsettling. He’s no gardener but he’d imagine such loose ground would be too unstable, though he hasn’t uprooted any flowers.

His heels slip, uneasy against the slick foliage, sending him reeling forward. He can’t hope to find balance over the slippery foliage, tripping forward, catching himself on hands and knees.

Tinted rainwater splashes against his jeans, staining them bloody-red. The loose soil beneath his fingertips yields something solid, yellow-white. He feels with his fingertips to unearth it, feel the curve of it—unmistakably bone.

“Careful or you’ll unearth the bodies.” It’s the woman’s voice—the one from before, the religious devotee he’d wanted to meet. She’s lying among the flowers just out of his reach.

“Bodies?” Law questions.

“The ones buried here,” she offers as way of explanation. She sits up, long hair falling in her face, making her look near-ghoulish.

“Seems like an extreme thing to use for fertilizer,” Law says, rising to his feet. His fingers curl around Kikoku’s hilt.

“Don’t disrespect the dead or our customs,” she barks, standing to face him. “Especially when you’re the one trespassing in our cemetery. You damned pirates have no manners.”

“How about you tell me about those customs then?” Law proposes coldly. He won't confess neither his ignorance about not realizing this place is a cemetery, nor his oversights as a doctor. He’s short on time and needs information.

“You’re not interested in why we bury the unloved here,” she accuses. “By the way, how’s your friend?”

How dare she—the smug look on her face is all too telling. She gives as much of a shit about how Luffy’s doing as Law does about her people’s customs. She probably wants him dead. She probably wants to bury him here, to let the flowers that are growing in him to consume him. She likely thinks he’d deserve to rot in her cemetery for having defiled her gods or some such thing.

“Is he really resistant enough to the poison?” She asks stepping forward.

“You liar.” Law seethes, his hands shaking as he forms a room. “There’s not really any poison in those flowers, is there?”

“Well, legend has it this flower, the Lover’s Curse, is poisonous,” she says apathetic, turning to walk away from him, “and people really used to think so”.

The audacity of this woman, sparing no thought to how badly this plant is affecting Luffy—how he’s suffering because of her. Law strips the blame from Luffy for having eaten the flowers, from himself for having dismissed them as a threat. Instead he arms himself with it—the blame, the fear and the rage that stem from his oversight.

He affords himself no time to revel in his enemy’s fear. This woman likely wouldn’t give him the satisfaction anyway. She appears unsurprised, unbothered at being at his mercy, having her heart safely in her chest one second, and in Law’s hand the next.

He ought to crush it, make her feel the pain Luffy’s feeling tenfold. He ought to murder her nice and slow and merciless, but something’s not right, hasn’t been right. She looks back at him like she’s more curious what he’ll do than worried for her life. It’s because she’s really not concerned for her life in the slightest. The heart in his grasp, it’s still. It’s cold. It’s dead.

“Oh look, now mister Surgeon of Death has stolen my heart,” she speaks, patronizing. “You want to keep it as a memento to remember the time you let your ally die?” she asks.

“I could still-”

“Cut me to pieces? You’d better not. That would ruin your chances of me helping you save him,” she states with a frown, her eyebrows drawn together.

“What do you want in return?” He asks cautiously, unsure if he’ll play to her wishes, short as he is on time. She’s going to trying to manipulate him, but he’s not guaranteed help elsewhere. The locals who had been friendly when they first arrived had later leveled heavy stigmatization at Luffy for being afflicted. Their hospitality turned to whispered pity. Nobody had offered help.

“Your heart,” she says. “You trade your heart for my help to save his life.”

“Why should I trust you?” He doesn’t think he should agree to the deal, but Luffy’s suffering is getting worse. He’s dying. “You’ve already lied to me once. About the poison.”

“Nobody else on this island knows as much as I do about the Lover’s Curse,” she speaks, snatching her heart back. “Everyone else wants to stay as far away from ‘the curse’ as possible. They don’t even come here to visit the unloved dead.”

Law isn’t wholly convinced, but he has to act quickly. Luffy might not last much longer. His illness is already beyond something Law can handle alone whether his pride wants to let him outright admit it or not.

“Make your decision now,” the woman demands.

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Sorry but updates will happen when the happen since my brain keeps trying to abort itself... err I mean the chronic migraines have been more troublesome than usual lately. So pls be patient and thanks for reading~~

#lawlu #lulaw #lawlu fanfic #lawlu fanfiction

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parasite-core · 4 years

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@aggressivewolfstarshipper Thank you so much for the OC questions :) I hope you don’t mind I answer them here, it got a bit long to answer in chat.

When does each OC go to bed?

Aiden: Is a morning person by necessity. He goes to bed early and gets up early. He had a lot of work to do daily, starting early and lasting for much of the day. He would fish early in the morning at dawn, help with mending tools and making new ones, and lend a hand with farming or hunting when needed.

Lyra: Is a deep sleeper who would be a night owl and late riser if she could get away with it, but is generally woken up early to help with chores around the house, sewing and mending, and taking care of the animals.

Ceron: Huge night owl. He loves nothing more than the quiet hours in the dead of night when nothing is expected of the few people still awake, and he can peacefully read his books or work on his research uninterrupted.

Dawn: Neither a night owl nor an early bird by virtue of living underground with no sense of day or night. Her people simply sleep when they’re tired. The fact that different people have different natural sleep cycles works in their favor, since some people will always be awake when others are asleep, so there’s always someone with eyes open for a possible Diaske attack.

Where do they live?

I’m going off where they grew up, because a few of them end up unable to return home early in the story so some of this changes early on.

Aiden and Lyra: The Valentia siblings grew up in a small coastal village called Grymora. It’s a self sufficient little village that doesn’t have much contact with the larger cities to the north due to the danger Diaske raiding parties present to travelers moving between towns. Much of their livelihood is made from fishing and farming.

The village is kept safe from the Diaske raids because once a decade they draw lots and sacrifice a dozen people between the ages 16-60 by throwing them into the Abyss for the Diaske to take. These sacrifices keep the Diaske appeased. It’s considered the highest act of cowardice to run away from your duty if you’re chosen, and it’s also the most noble act to volunteer to be chosen. Those who volunteer exempt the rest of their family from the lot for that decade’s drawing, and this is often chosen by people nearing 60 who don’t want to put their younger family members in the line of danger.

They’re led by a council of elders, who are all people who have lived past the age to be eligible for sacrifice. ‘Strangely’ it seems some families make it to this age more often than others, which has created an unofficial ruling class within the village.

Ceron: Ceron grew up in the largest human city on the continent Tymprase. It’s been able to reach a higher level of prosperity than the smaller villages because it’s under the direct protection of the Twilisk, who keep the Diaske raiders at bay. Unlike the smaller towns, people in Tymprase can travel to trade with other human settlements, as followers of the Order of Twilight can get members of the Twilisk to escort them safely outside the city walls. The city is dedicated to learning, science, and the growth of humanity.

In exchange for their protection, the people of Tymprase follow the edicts of the Twilisk. While the majority of people in town are just regular people going about their business and casually following the Twilisk as much or little as they feel is socially acceptable, there’s a very large portion of people fully dedicated to the teachings of the Twilisk, and anyone with any sway in the city is a follower. The Order of Twilight is the most powerful group in town, the Shineblood at the head of the city’s temple is the closest thing to a ruler they have. The goal of members of the temple is to master themselves enough to be seen as worthy to ascend by the Twilisk, to be taken to the Isle of Twilight to become Shineblooded themselves, and return as something more than human. Only a select few have ever been chosen, and even fewer have ever returned, but the promise of self actualization and power beyond human comprehension keeps people reaching for this goal.

Dawn: Dawn is from The Abyss. Specifically a small settlement called Jra’Starr, settled by Shadowblooded rebels who call themselves Elves, in reference to an ancient story of a race of immortals said to have been sent by the Twilisk at the dawn of time to drive the Diaske to the Abyss. This settlement is made up of former humans who became trapped in the Abyss for one reason or another, and who eventually succumbed to becoming Shadowblooded out of their hatred and desire for revenge against the Diaske in the Abyss who tortured and hunted them at every turn. They took the name of those who bested the Diaske once before, and swore to become the avengers of humanity within the Abyss. The majority of them have no desire to return to the surface anymore, in part because they fear their new forms will be hideous to former loved ones, and in part because their desire to destroy the Diaske has become so integral to their being that the idea of leaving the fight to return home isn’t even an option in their minds.

Jra’Starr has little in the way of commerce or sustenance, as a rogue settlement in the heart of the Abyss. The elves primarily scavenge and hunt for food, although there are some edible fungi and roots that they’ve cultivated within their village to help ease the need for dangerous scavenging missions. All members of the elven people old enough to learn a weapon are trained as warriors and hunters by necessity, as they’re a small settlement in the heart of enemy territory, always one attack away from being wiped out.

Which ones have mental disorders they refuse to address?

This is a tough one, in part because these characters haven’t fully settled so answers to something like this might change, in part because I’m not neurotypical so I don’t think I’ve ever written a single wholly neurotypical character in my life (although I don’t always have the knowledge to say what a character would have in reality if they were to be diagnosed with something), and in part because of the setting. They’re not in a setting where mental disorders are treated well, especially in the human society, so even if they knew and had the right language for it, it would be difficult to seek legitimate help. A lot of this is because of humanity following the Twilisk, who believe emotions are a weakness and a poison, so many mental disorders are waved off by followers of the Path of Twilight as the person’s weakness and inability to better control their mental state, rather than being taken seriously as something they have no control over.

For instance Lyra and Aiden’s mother has severe depression, but is considered anywhere from lazy to cursed rather than being given the sympathy and help she needs, and as a result Lyra ends up in some difficult situations without her mother’s help, because her mother isn’t in a fit mental state to be the mother Lyra needs. This also causes Lyra and Aiden to mask any similar symptoms they might have, in fear of being treated the same, which wears on a person over time.

Ceron has a lot going on in his head and wouldn’t go looking for help for any of it. He was raised in the Order of Twilight temple, so he was submerged from a young age in the teachings that emotions are dirty evil things that humanity needs to purge to ascend to greater heights. He isn’t good at controlling and masking his emotions at all, he wears his heart on his sleeve whether he wants to or not, which causes him a lot of self loathing and guilt, because he’s trying his hardest to live up to the Twilisk’s edicts but still falling short. He feels like anywhere from a failure to a monster depending on the day, which makes him try even harder to hide his feelings, which in turn inevitably leads to his emotions exploding when it’s too much and him circling back around to feeling terrible about ‘losing control’.

Aiden and Ceron both have some level of anxiety. Ceron’s is more generalized anxiety, while Aiden’s is more about how others view him. Aiden has a great deal of self doubt he masks by trying to act tougher and braver than everyone else, because it tears him apart to even think someone might think he’s a coward like his father. Lyra and Aiden both have some level of abandonment issues from their father leaving. Aiden shows it more, becoming a bit clingy with people he gets close to and stressing when they leave, whereas Lyra bottles it up and gets distant when she starts getting scared she’s going to be abandoned. Essentially beat them to the punch of cutting ties, make it on her own terms in her perception.

Dawn is probably the most well adjusted of the main cast, but she was still taught as a child how to be a warrior and that fighting the Diaske is the most noble cause she should always strive for, so there’s definitely still some issues there. Probably some PTSD from fighting and killing from a young age, and a bit of a dangerous hero complex, if nothing else.

#long post #into the abyss #oc questions #Imm sorry for the long post I’m on mobile and I apparantly don’t know my password anymore #and I used an old enail address to make this accoubt #so I can’t log in on my computer anymore to put a read more on my posts D:

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rebekahgaveup · 5 years

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most embarrassing story? GO!

Bold of you to assume I only have one. Okay, sit back anon bc the first one that comes to mind is, I am terribly sad to say, a real doozie.

Okay, so here's the thing you need to understand about me. My craydar, as I like to refer to it, is on point. I can smell a crazy person from all 50 states away. I can catch a whiff of insanity from across the Atlantic Ocean. When given the task of analyzing A Telltale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe in Sophomore year, I did so with a rigorous passion, and by rigorous passion I mean I narrowed his symptoms down to three possible diagnoses and highlighted potential symptoms in different colors based upon which diagnosis they matched up to. In short, my craydar is never wrong.

My gaydar, as I have heard it called, on the other hand, doesn't work for crap. As in, my best friend was bi, wore a bracelet in the colors of the bi flag, and the gay flag, and it was not until about 3 years into our friendship that I discovered (upon being told) that they were, in fact, bi. You cannot possibly imagine my shock. It was disappointingly astronomical. As my best friend pointed out, I was truly boo boo the fool.

If you have guessed where this is going, darling reader, it pains me to say that you are correct.

Within my first two years of high school, I fell prey to the same thing most Freshman/Sophomore girls do. I had an embarrassingly huge crush on a guy who was about 2 years older than me, which in undergraduate terms is perfectly reasonable, but in high school terms meant I didn't have a chance.

However, starry eyed little 15 year old me was NOT to be deterred. Oh no.

I spent most of my time daydreaming about this mediocre teenage boy who knew full well that I existed and just simply did not care, despite my delusions of him perhaps someday doing so. I imagined, as most teen girls do (I sincerely hope) that he thought what I had to say was interesting on the rare occasions that I could get him to listen to me speak. I was thoroughly convinced that he had the faintest inkling that I was interested in him and entertained it, which I now fervently hope was not true, and when I think of this I pray that he had not the faintest idea of my affections. I, in the most Jane Austen-esque way imaginable, read Jane Austen and imagined myself to be like one of her charmingly clever heroines, with a love interest who eyed me from afar when I was not looking, and that was why I never caught him looking at me. I went to great lengths to impress this boy, pretending I liked things he liked (I did not), pretending I wanted to talk about things he wanted to talk about (I did not), pretending I had the same or at least similar beliefs and hopes and dreams (which I most certainly did not).

My poor, poor reader, if you have not guessed where this is going by now, neither had my 15 year old self, so rest easy in the knowledge that you are not alone.

If you have guessed, my next reveal will come as no surprise to you, but I would ask that you pretend to be surprised anyway.

That's right, everyone unfortunate enough to lay eyes upon this post. The boy I longingly sang Teardrops on My Guitar about was, in fact, very, very gay. Had a boyfriend and everything very gay. Had a boyfriend I had seen him with, kind of gay.

Now, in the defense of 15 year old me, at the time I very first began to fall for him, he was bi. This did not mean I had the faintest inkling of a chance, nor would it have mattered if it had since I was also not aware of this fact. However, I use that to comfort me late at night when I sometimes think about this and bolt awake.

Tl;dr my first love was a gay man and I had no idea until somebody was kind enough to tell me

Edit: Oh and to add insult to injury it was my best friend's brother which is just cliche

#asked & answered #love letters only

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wanderandwondertogether · 5 years

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Be Still

It isn't easy to talk about our weaknesses. We often feel vulnerable when we do. We keep up the appearance that we have it all together. We're scared to let others see the truth that on the inside we're falling apart. For a while now God has laid something on my heart. I need to be more open about my struggles. I need to share my testimony of what God has brought me through. This isn't a ploy for sympathy or attention. I am sharing this with you in hopes that you will get a glimpse of the love and hope that Christ offers. But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is perfected in weakness." Romans 12:9.

I was a quirky child. Some things never change haha! I was very shy, hid my emotions, and I worried about things most would never think of. Irrational things. This is embarrassing to admit but for example: I was afraid the wind chimes moving in the wind would encourage a tornado. In my mind if I didn't do certain things like take those wind chimes down, natural disasters would occur. I laugh about it now but being young and worrying like that was miserable. I felt isolated. My mom talked to my doctor about my quirky behaviors; how I went around unplugging everything, straightening the shoes in a perfect line, saying repetitive prayers, and blowing kisses to God. Yes, I did all that and more. I was diagnosed with OCD.

OCD stands for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. It is a mental disorder that consists of obsessive thoughts and urges and/or compulsive repetitive behaviors. It is not solely about being neat and organized. It is chronic, long lasting, uncontrollable, and can interfere with everyday life. The cause is unknown and there is no cure. However, it can be treated with therapy and medication. Times were different back then and I sought neither because we didn't have the knowledge and resources that we now have.

My worst obsessions were not consistent so things looked up for a long time. I still had some quirks but nothing too consuming. All that changed after I had my daughter. About five months after Lily was born I began having intrusive thoughts. This is a very ugly and distressing part of OCD. Disturbing thoughts that I didn't want to have, nor did I have any clue as to where they were coming from. I started to believe them and started questioning if I was a good person or not. They disturbed me so bad that I would start doing compulsions to alleviate the stress that they were causing me. Ruminating on those thoughts caused me to give those thoughts power. Therefore the intrusive thoughts intensified. It was a vicious cycle. I didn't know what was real anymore. I was trying to relieve my worries and figure it all out on my own, by doing so I severely damaged my mental well being.

This is what still breaks my heart. I let this continue for three years. Three years! My obsessions consumed hours out of my day, everyday for three years. I missed out on so much during that time. I missed out on Lily's milestones. I was physically present but not mentally. One of my best friends lived two minutes away at the time. There was so much fun to be had and memories to be made but I was too consumed and now she lives in another state. I wasn't present and I wasn't me.

I took my eyes off of the one true hope I had, Jesus. If I had been still and looked at myself the way He looks at me, I wouldn't have believed these lies my brain kept telling me. Instead I let fear take over and I was left paralyzed, feeling isolated, and in a mental prison. In all of this though, God is so good. Even though I took my eyes off of him, He sought me out. He was there whispering hope into my days. I barely had the strength to stay awake. I wanted to sleep a lot to escape my thoughts. I was very unproductive during this time. I did what I needed to take care of Lily, did my job, and nothing much else. One thing that God encouraged me to do though was to get into His word everyday. If it wasn't for Proverbs 31 Ministries I don't know how I would have been reminded of the truth. Their devotionals got me more into God's word than I had ever been and at the time I needed it the most. It encouraged me to seek Him more and more each day. I was so painfully slow at it but I started to hand over these issues to Jesus. I remember going to a Women's Conference and they had ushers that would pray with you. I went up and wrapped my arms around this stranger and bawled into her shoulder. At that time I didn't see her. I saw myself being at the feet of Jesus holding onto his garment. Like the woman with the bleeding. For she said to herself, "If I can just touch his robe, I'll be made well." Matthew 9:21.

Jesus was my answer all along. I had been so consumed with the what ifs and being in control that my negative thoughts took over. I didn't even recognize it as the lies of OCD. It sounds crazy but my mind didn't even process that I had OCD. I needed to let go of my certainty and choose instead to trust God and His oversight for my life. Thank you Jesus for showing your love for me and speaking truth to my heart during that time. When I finally let go and was still enough to look at Jesus and see His love for me and that I was His is when these thoughts lost their power. I was able to see them for what they were, an ugly symptom of my OCD.

Looking back I can see all the times Jesus was there interceding on my behalf and comforting me through others. The time I was so consumed with fear I was up all night shaking and throwing up, Shane stayed by my side and held me. My best friend going to my parents and all three of them interceding in prayer for me. The messages at church that were just what I needed to hear. The friend who said God laid it on their heart to pray for me while they were washing the dishes. God you are so so good!

I share this so that someone may find hope. Mental illness is still sometimes seen as taboo and kept hidden. I pray that anyone who suffers with it will seek help and not be ashamed. There are many resources out there and people have more understanding of it now. I let the cycle last way too long. My intense struggle with OCD has left me damaged. I now have to take anxiety medicine daily, even if I am not obsessing. I created so many negative pathways in my mind that it is now constantly on alert. I still have to daily remind myself of God's truth. I have two notes that I carry around with me and look at frequently. One is biblical insight to OCD, the other is a list of God's promises. I can say that I am back to feeling like myself and life is good. Freedom truly comes when you let go of control and rest in the One who holds all things!

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bluejaytaco · 6 years

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Superhero AU (7)

‘m gonna go back and number these suckers. Anyway, not a fan of the Tumblr format? Read it on AO3. Also, this is part seven; here’s everything else under this tag!

I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it!

“The world is about to get much more dangerous. The powers of Anubis are slowly waking up.”

“You know where Anubis is?”

“....No. I can just feel them. I think you could too if you would just allow yourself to search for him. But I think you're still afraid of him, aren't you?”

Atem had growled at Ra. His pride was wounded by the other in the mask.

But he could hear the smile. “Don't be afraid, Horus. I would trust you to overcome the fear to subdue him again. He needs you to help keep him in check just like before.”

Atem didn't want to think about it anymore. He just wanted to wake up and let things go back to the days before Bakura. Why wasn't time manipulation in his list of abilities?

He opened his eyes as he was lifted. He barely realized he'd even fallen asleep. Without the adrenaline, everything caught up with him.

He reached up and gently pulled the mask off his face. “Please... no stasis.”

He could feel Kaiba pause at his request. The arms tightened slightly. “You'll heal faster in stasis.”

Atem hugged the mask to his chest again.

“You're afraid I won't come back to wake you up.” He spoke softly at the realization.

He didn't respond.

Kaiba pushed through the door. The house was dark; most of the staff had gone home for the night and Mokuba was probably in one of the rooms upstairs. Kaiba headed down into the basement.

Atem's eyes slipped closed. This was it. He would go to sleep and possibly wake up a day later. Or he would wake up twenty years from now and have to figure out how to live his life with that knowledge. It was anyone's guess just how long he would be kept in there but he was too weak to fight the other on this.

The eyes shot open again when Kaiba placed him on the old cot in the room.

“I imagine it's hard.” He turned away from Atem and to the counter on the far side of the room stacked with medical supplies. “You go to sleep at the age of three and wake up to find yourself nineteen with everyone you knew gone or dead.”

Atem sat up and stared at Kaiba's back.

“To be kept in there, starving. The malnourishment clearly stunted your growth.”

His lip twitched at the jab. “I'm not that short...”

“You're tiny, get over it.” Kaiba turned back to Atem, still looking serious. “I'm not the one who tried to seal you away. I won't ever be him.”

His grip on the mask loosened as his eyes softened. “Kaiba...”

“I understand your fear, Atem. Don't try to explain yourself.” He placed a small pouch of tools on a table near the cot. He sat down in a chair next to Atem and gestured for the other's arm.

Atem put out his arm for Kaiba. He watched as Kaiba gently pressed a small piece into the gold cuff and popped it back off. Immediately his right eye blinked back to life and diagnosed every problem from the time it was shut down to that moment.

In the meantime, Kaiba began unwrapping Atem's wounds to properly clean them.

“I believe it's safe to assume Bakura is Anubis. We can pay him a visit once you're healed.”

Atem winced at the look of one of the deeper wounds on his left arm. It was nearly to the bone; without the tank, it would have to be stitched. But that was the least of his worries. “I wouldn't be so sure.”

Kaiba cleared the blood from the wound and raised an eyebrow at Atem's response.

He didn't need a cue to continue. “Anubis was mute. Bakura talks far too much.”

“He was a toddler when you knew him. He could have figured out a way around it. Ryo maybe.”

Atem hummed, still unsure.

“He took the mask for a reason. I'm willing to bet if he isn't Anubis he at least knows where to find Anubis.” He pulled a suture from a sterile plastic bag and began to thread.

They both sat in silence as the needle entered Atem's skin. After a few stitches, Atem spoke up. “So... We'll confront him?”

Kaiba didn't speak. He just gave a nod.

Sugoroku found himself in the storage area of the game shop shortly after Horus was dragged out of his house. He wanted so badly to just return things to normal. He and his grandson could live out the rest of their days without this thing hanging over their heads.

But, by the sound of footsteps and a person standing a few steps behind him, he knew this wouldn't be the case.

Sugoroku turned, his back tense and one hand in his pocket. “How are you doing, my boy?”

Yugi just stared at him. The tension of the room grew.

Sugoroku frowned at him. “...Yugi...?”

“What aren't you telling me?”

The old man relaxed ever so slightly. “There's so much.”

“Then we better start now, right?” Yugi stepped into the room. “How do you know the Pharaoh? Why did you call Kaiba to get him? How did you know Kaiba would?”

Sugoroku put a hand up to stop the questioning and shook his head. “This isn't the place. Let's go back upstairs.” He carefully walked around Yugi. He knew the boy would follow him right into the house. He sat down on the couch and Yugi followed suit.

Sugoroku sucked in a deep breath before he looked back at Yugi. The young man was waiting patiently in silence. He was always such a good boy.

It was too bad he would have to hear this story.

“Back when you were just a baby, I had a job with Kaiba Corp. I was a scientist in one of the more.... secret parts of his weapons manufacturing. You see, the man had stumbled upon this woman with amazing and deadly abilities that were passed down in her bloodline. She... was pregnant when he took her in. And she was afraid of what she might bring into the world. Her brother had shown signs of instability for years. She didn't want that to be true for her child as well.

“Gozaburo Kaiba convinced this woman to allow him to take care of her son. He would help the boy suppress his abilities in a way neither the mother nor her brothers ever could. He... He lied to this woman. His plan for the child was not to suppress the abilities but rather to hone them. He called the child Subject Horus and it was the beginning of a true Hell for a group of children.”

Yugi shifted in his seat but said nothing as he waited for Sugoroku to continue.

“There were many children in that project. They found a way to pull from Horus and inject each child with the abilities. Many of them took to it well and would play with it as children do.

“One of them... did not. They called that one Anubis.” Sugoroku's eyes darted to Yugi's. “Anubis... murdered two of the children and even attempted to take out Horus himself.”

“...What happened to the rest of them?”

Sugoroku shook his head. “I never got to find out. I disagreed with Kaiba on the moral aspects of this experiment. I spent the better part of two years fighting with him about it and I was relieved of my position shortly after the deaths. It wasn't until years later that I learned of the project's shutdown. I was under the impression he laid the rest of the children to rest. I never thought I would ever find Horus in your bedroom.”

Yugi snorted and smiled. But the smile slowly faded. “So... the Pharaoh's name is Horus?”

Sugoroku nodded.

“And you want me to keep away from him because...?”

“Because he's still dangerous, Yugi. None of us knew what he went through to get here now. It could be only a matter of time before he becomes everything his mother feared. And I will not have you in the middle of this mess.”

Yugi stared at his own hands for a moment. He thought about Horus. The usually bright red eyes he could read like a book. The way he moved. The deep demanding voice.

He didn't need to speak to Horus, per say. There was another way.

“Do you understand, Yugi? I only want you to stay safe.”

“Yes, Grandpa. I understand.” He was beginning to understand perfectly.

It was a few days later when Atem returned to class. He still had a few wounds healing but he definitely had the energy to return to the world as if he were just another normal student.

But every time he looked over at Yugi, he found the other boy staring. And he didn't look away; his eyes continued with an unwavering gaze. He was onto something; Atem could tell. But he was also a little afraid to find out. There was a heat from that look which burned its way into his temple. It felt like he was being studied again.

Atem shifted uncomfortably under it.

As they were dismissed and Atem put away his things, he felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned and blinked at the intensity and closeness of those violet eyes.

“Can we talk?”

Atem's heart was suddenly in his throat. He allowed Yugi to take his hand and guide him through the halls. He allowed the boy to lead him outside and dart into another, older building. And he watched as Yugi stopped and his hand slipped from the other's grip.

Atem just stared at Yugi's back for a moment.

“You have another name. Right? They call you Horus?”

Atem frowned. He nodded slowly. “Yes.”

“And you're also the Pharaoh, right? The masked vigilante?”

“...Yes.”

Yugi finally turned. His eyes had begun to well up with tears. “I'm sorry.”

Atem blinked.

“I... I couldn't even begin to process everything that's happened to you.” He hugged himself. “How could they do all of that to a child? How could the world be so cruel?!”

“...How do you know all this?”

“My grandfather worked for Kaiba Corp. He was on the team that...”

Atem sighed through his nose. That explained the coldness from the older Mutou. “Yugi... None of this is your fault.”

“I know. But... I just,” he sniffled and wiped at his face, “I want so badly to take it all away and make it okay for you. But that's crazy, right?”

Atem didn't say anything.

He looked down at the ground. “I... I didn't mean to meddle in this. I really just wanted to let you know we can talk about it if you want... But maybe I'm sticking my nose in a place it doesn't belong.”

“No.” Atem moved a little closer and took a hold of Yugi's hand. “No, you're fine. I'm eternally grateful that you would put yourself out there like this. You've already helped me much more than you could possibly know.”

Yugi stared at Atem. Before he could help himself, he threw his arms around the other in a tight embrace. For a minute, Atem stood completely solid. Then, he slowly started to melt into the hold. He buried his head into the crook of Yugi's neck.

“Thank you.” Atem gripped the back of Yugi's shirt tightly. There was a slight waver in his voice.

Yugi wondered what his grandfather would say if he could see this side of 'Horus.' Maybe he wouldn't see him as such a monster.

Atem pulled away from him reluctantly and wiped at his right eye. The eye was once again red in color without any sign of the black depth Yugi saw in his bedroom. He didn't want to pry too much; calling Atem out on being Horus was already crossing a few lines. He was sure of it.

But what happened to him to cause such a situation?

He doubted Atem wanted to relive any of it.

“What's on your mind?”

“Huh?” Yugi blinked.

Atem tilted his head and smiled. “You're staring.”

“Oh! Uh, well... your eye.” He pointed to his own. “The other night it was like it was over dilated.”

“My eye.” Atem reached up and touched it. It took him a moment to realize what Yugi probably meant. “Oh. No, it wasn't online. Kaiba forced a shutdown for it in hopes it would keep me from... following someone.”

Yugi blinked several times in confusion.

Atem frowned. “Maybe...” It couldn't hurt to fill him in on everything now that he knew this much already. He tapped his wrist and brought the projection back up. The files now were of the class moments before. “It was a gift from Kaiba Corp. Further enhancements to try and better control my natural abilities.”

Yugi looked at the projection. He watched as the screen continued to cut from the professor to Yugi staring, then back to the professor. In the corner, he could also see a small monitor that covered a number of Atem's vitals.

His heart rate continued to increase.

The projection was cut short as Yugi turned and looked at Atem.

Atem forced a smile. “I can't be one hundred percent sure what Kaiba was planning for me but I imagine it wasn't simply to hone my abilities and send me on my way. Now, I just use the eye for everyday tasks.”

“It's a computer.”

Atem nodded. “More or less.”

Yugi frowned. “Can Kaiba link to it?”

“Y-yes. I can shut him out but I don't doubt there's a way he can override it if it's for a reason he deems important enough.”

And with Yugi's luck, it would be when he was finally confessing something to Atem. Or, dare he hope, in a more intimate setting. If that becomes the case though, then he deserves whatever he sees.

He turned back to see Atem staring at him. The other boy was smiling.

“Is there anything else you'd like to know?”

“Oh, uh, not right now. I'm sure I'll think of something later.” He paused and looked away. “But.. you're sure I'm not intruding or anything, right? And you'll tell me if I am.”

The smile widened. “I doubt there's any way you could ever intrude on me, Yugi.” He leaned in a little closer.

Yugi felt as if his body was on fire as Atem's body brushed against his own. He couldn't tell if the other knew what he was doing and how this closeness was affecting him.

“Oh, hey! What are you two doing here?”

The closeness didn't leave at Anzu's voice. That told Yugi all he needed to know.

Atem blinked. “Anzu, you have classes here?”

She pointed down the hall. “I have dance classes a few times a week in the gym.”

“Huh, this school really does cater to everything...”

Anzu looked between the two. She suppressed the urge to smile at the situation she caught and, instead, continued to speak to Atem. “Anyway, I'm glad I ran into you two. I'm hosting the first Monster World campaign this weekend. Atem, you should come!”

Atem nodded and moved away from Yugi just slightly. “Absolutely!”

She grinned. “Great! I'll text you all the details.” She paused with another thought. “And, you know what? You think you can drag your cousins along?”

Atem blinked. Yugi matched his look of confusion.

“I can see what I can do but I can't make a guarantee.”

Anzu nodded. “I'm sure they'll come if you ask.” She backed up and headed down the hall. “I'll see you guys later!”

Both waved after her, still confused. Atem turned to Yugi. “Why would she want the Kaibas there?”

Yugi's lip twitched, unsure. “I'm afraid of what that answer might be.”

Atem returned home that night to Kaiba already ready to answer. When he walked into the office, the eyes were already pinned on him.

“No way in Hell.”

He didn't need to ask what Kaiba was rejecting. He narrowed his eyes at the other. “You know, it's rude to look through someone's files and memories without permission.”

The statement was ignored in favor of him letting out a growl. “You're supposed to be staying away from Yugi, not becoming a part of his group.”

“Isn't that even more of a reason for you to come? So I'm not doing anything you might deem 'too dangerous'?”

“No. That's a reason for neither of us to go.”

Atem looked at Kaiba flatly. He plopped down in one of the office chairs and stared at Kaiba.

Kaiba didn't look at him. He refused to look away from his computer even as Atem crossed his arms and legs stubbornly. Even as those eyes drilled holes through his head and demanded to look at him.

He wouldn't look.

He wouldn't give Atem the satisfaction.

“How about we settle this in a game. If I win, we all go. If you win, we don't.”

Kaiba finally looked at Atem. He could see his lip twitch as he fought the urge to smile in satisfaction. “That's not nearly enough of a win for me.”

“Then state your terms.”

“If I win, we don't go and you stop hanging out with that whole group.”

He frowned. “That's quite a reward for you.”

“Those are my terms. Also, I pick the game.”

That got a laugh out of Atem. “I'll get my deck.”

“Your eye has to go offline for this. I won't have you cheating again.”

“Whatever you say, Kaiba.” He was sure it was more than that. Maybe he wanted to make sure there was no proof of how he was defeated. It didn't matter; Atem would win this. He had to win this.

“C'mon, Seto. It won't be that bad.”

Kaiba snorted and crossed his arms as Anzu opened the door. He glared at the girl as she looked at the three in pleasant surprise. This was her fault, after all. Had she not brought up bringing them to Atem, he would be here alone.

But, by the look on her face, it was clear she wasn't completely expecting this. “Welcome!” She leaned closer to Atem. “How did you convince them to come?”

Atem smirked and opened his mouth to speak.

“I came on my own accord.” Kaiba was quick to interrupt and push passed Anzu to get inside.

Mokuba followed after his brother with a quick “thank you for having us.”

Anzu sent a dirty look to Kaiba's back. “At least one of them's polite.” She turned back to Atem. “How do you stand living with him?”

He shrugged. “You get used to him. Thank you for having us but... why?”

She sighed and stepped to the side for Atem to walk in. “It was a request from someone who would like to remain anonymous.”

“I don't understand.” He frowned and followed in behind the brothers.

“That makes two of us.” She followed in behind Atem.

Everyone else was already there including two people Atem had never met before. A young girl about Mokuba's age and a raven-haired lanky man discussing something with Honda. The girl was already talking with Mokuba and gesturing to Jounouchi as the blond did his best not to look at the newcomers.

He was talking to Yugi who looked over at them, gave Atem a grin then returned to his conversation with Jounouchi.

Before Atem could find his way over to the two, Ryo caught his eye. He was setting up a large board on the coffee table and placed a few small figurines on the board. Upon closer examination, he noticed they were made for each person there.

He looked closer at one who looked like him. “This is a very detailed game.”

Ryo blinked up at him. “Oh, you've never played before? This should be fun then!” He smiled. “Bakura is usually the Game Master. He likes the build the pieces for everyone. I'm filling in for now.”

Atem flipped the little figure around. It was almost creepy the amount of detail put into it. His eyes narrowed when he noticed the little figure's right eye was painted black. “Where is Bakura tonight?”

“He has a late shift at work. He said he might drop in after to see how things are going.” Ryo took the little figurine from Atem. “You haven't created a character yet, right?”

“Uh, no.”

Ryo grinned and turned his head. “Yugi! Atem needs help making a character!”

Yugi blinked and looked over at the two before he smiled as well. “Okay!”

Atem turned back to Ryo to see he was still grinning.

“We can hold off until you're ready. It shouldn't take too long; Yugi's a good teacher.” Ryo handed Yugi a blank character sheet and gestured towards the kitchen where there was an empty table. As the two walked off, Ryo looked down at the Atem figurine. His smile faded as he looked at it.

“Guess Bakura forgot to finish it.” Anzu frowned at it. “That's not like him.”

Ryo forced a smile for her. “He's had a lot on his mind lately.” It was something the two of them would have to discuss later.

“So, then you take this number and divvy it up between all the different attributes. And that all depends on the way you want to play.” Yugi smiled softly as his companion studied the sheet.

“I see.” He tapped the page softly as he thought about where to place his points.

While he did that, Yugi found himself studying Atem. He watched the very subtle way his eyes narrowed as he thought about what he was doing. For a moment, he thought he could see what looked to be lenses twisting. Maybe it was only his imagination.

His imagination could occasionally get the better of him. His eyes darted to Atem's lips and he wondered about what the other would do if he just-

“You're staring again.” Atem's amused tone cut through his thoughts.

Yugi blushed and looked away. “Uh, right! Sorry.” He focused instead on the other room. Where Jounouchi and Kaiba were, for the first time in months, standing next to one another. Maybe that was the plan Anzu had in place. Things were on the upswing when Jou and Kaiba were on good terms with one another. Then, that so suddenly ended.

Yugi frowned. What could have possibly gotten in their way?

He turned back to Atem to find the other's eyes on him.

He smiled. “Oh, so you're allowed to stare?”

“I'm not staring. I'm studying.” He grinned back.

Yugi snorted and looked away to hide his blush. “Right. Studying.”

“Also, I never said you weren't allowed. I'm just curious as to what you're thinking about when you do it.”

The blush deepened.

“Hey!”

Both snapped around to see Mokuba standing in the threshold with a bag of chips in his hand.

He grabbed one and narrowed his eyes at them. “You guys done? We got a game to play!”

“Right! Yeah, we're coming.” Yugi pushed himself to his feet and smiled at Atem. “C'mon. I'll help guide you.”

In all honesty, Atem could simply find out all the information he wanted on this game. But he liked the way Yugi's eyes lit up at the prospect of teaching someone about a game he enjoyed. He wanted to see that light continue to glow in the other.

So, he smiled back and stood as well. “Right.”

They walked into the living room to see everyone already gathered around the coffee table. Mokuba was forcing his brother into a seat next to Jou while the blond was talking animatedly to Honda. Everyone in the group had found their seats, leaving two right next to each other on the couch.

Yugi guided Atem over to it.

The game was easy enough to pick up on and getting into it was surprisingly easy. Atem was a little surprised to find everyone, including Kaiba, already had a character for the game. And his cousin seemed to fit in very well once he relaxed.

“I'm going to seduce the dragon.”

“You can't try to fuck every dragon we come across! Right, Ryo?”

“Roll for initiative and charisma.”

“Stop enabling him!”

The dice rolled and Ryo let out an impressed hum. “The dragon was so enamored by Kaiba's advances, she just allowed everyone else through.”

Kaiba smirked. “Naturally.”

Jounouchi rolled his eyes. “You and your dragon fetish, man. I swear.”

“Don't try to take the high road on this one.” Kaiba eyed him.

The look made Jounouchi freeze for a second before he appeared to rethink his options. “Fine. You won't be hearing any kink shaming out of me.”

Yugi snorted and shook his head.

Anzu shot a look towards her friend. “You out of everyone in this room are the last one who should be shaking his head at a fetish.” She gestured to the collar around his neck.

Yugi blinked and touched the leather. “It was a gift from my grandfather.”

“How does that make it better?!”

Ryo laughed softly. “As much as I love a good kink shaming, we should probably move this forward. Honda? What do you want to do?”

“I'm gonna just run the dragon through with my sword.” He reached out for the dice.

“I'm pretty sure Kaiba already has that covered.”

Everyone turned in surprise as Atem casually took a sip of his drink. He looked at everyone over the rim of his cup and frowned as he brought it away from his mouth. “What?”

Nearly everyone in the room laughed. Even Kaiba let out a soft snort while Atem just blinked dumbly. As it became clearer he didn't understand, the laughter continued to increase. He felt Yugi press his forehead against his shoulder as he tried to control himself.

It was at the touch that Atem began to feel the humor and let out a few soft chuckles himself.

As the laughter slowly died, Ryo shifted in his seat and picked up his own dice. He wiped a tear from his eye and cleared his throat. “So now that we're fighting the dragon, we-”

The world froze for a moment. Atem and Kaiba tensed in their seats as if they were bracing for... something.

Ryo let out a breath and closed his eyes.

A split second later, the coffee table holding the board was in pieces. The couch was torn through as if to purposely separate Atem from Yugi, and a man in an Anubis mask loomed over Yugi.

Yugi couldn't do anything. He couldn't move, he couldn't breathe. He could only stare at that mask as a high pitch squeal rang in his ears. It echoed in his head and made it throb worse than any headache he'd ever experienced. Yugi covered his ears and fought the urge to scream.

A twenty-sided die beamed Anubis in the temple. “Hey!”

The masked man turned to Ryo's glare. Before he could do anything more, Atem slammed into Anubis and knocked him away.

Yugi blinked, the ringing still in his head and interfering with his thoughts.

His eyes focused on Anzu as she grabbed his shoulders.

“...yugi....”

She sounded muffled.

“Yugi, we have to go.”

It came in a little clearer.

“Yugi!” She was screaming now. “Come on!”

The urgency finally hit him. He scrambled to his feet with Anzu's help and allowed her to guide him away from the fight that was breaking out.

Yugi looked at Atem. He could just barely see a snarl in the other's features as he narrowly avoided Anubis. He acted as a distraction as Kaiba gripped the opponent by the head. Yugi could just barely make out the dark tendril-like shadows finding their grip around the three as he was rushed from the room.

“Looks like you're fully functional today, Horus. I think we should correct that.”

That voice. He knew that voice!

Ryo rushed everyone out of the building. From inside, they could hear things breaking and bodies being slammed into objects in the small home. He wanted to apologize to Anzu for the disaster being created in her house but couldn't for the life of him figure out a proper way.

As far as she knew, he was in no way responsible for this.

“Where's Katsuya?”

Yugi looked around as he finally snapped out of his dazed state. Quickly, he did a head count then joined Shizuka in her panic.

They all looked back at the house in time for Jounouchi's body to break through a window and fall into the street. He trembled and groaned in pain.

Yugi and Mokuba were at his side in an instant. Shizuka moved to follow but was pulled back by Anzu.

The ringing came back as Anubis charged forward. He stopped short as Ryo stepped in the way and glared at the masked one.

They stared at each other in silence.

Just as Anubis began to relax, Kaiba jumped out through the broken window. The skin of his hands was pitch black and his eyes glowed with a burning rage as they zeroed in on Anubis.

Anubis turned back to face the other. He froze and glanced back at Ryo.

Ryo shook his head ever so slightly.

There was a soft growl from the jackal before a dark portal opened again. But, before Anubis could walk through, Atem dove out and wrapped an arm around the other's waist.

Anubis snarled. “Let go, you pain in the ass!”

Atem tightened his grip. “You are in no place to be demanding anything from me!”

Horus.

Atem blinked as his heart stopped for a moment. He heard a voice. But.... he couldn't place whose.

Let him go. Your friend needs medical care.

Atem turned his head and looked at Jounouchi. The blond had stayed behind to help them fight with Anubis. He'd taken a direct hit for Kaiba when he shot out of the window. And the impact from the fall as well as the leftover effects clearly made it so Jounouchi was completely out of commission.

But his body was beginning to thrash even as Yugi and Mokuba tried to hold him still to keep from hurting himself.

Atem let go and rushed over to them. He didn't care that Kaiba just barely missed a point-blank attack on Anubis as the masked one slipped away through one of his portals. They would run into him again.

But if they didn't do something right now for Jounouchi, the blond would die.

He knelt down next to Mokuba and pressed a hand to Jou's chest. He could tell without the use of the eye that the other's heart rate was much too fast. His eye picked up on a foreign energy inside him, most likely from the blast that shot him out of the house.

Atem tried to summon it to himself but it only caused the spasms to become more violent. He pulled his hand away as sirens rang through the air. He couldn't be sure what this was. What could be inside Jounouchi? Was it always there and he just began to notice it?

He could only hope it wouldn't kill him in the end.

#puzzleshipping #puppyshipping #violetshipping #atem #ryo #seto kaiba #mokuba kaiba #sugoroku mutou #yugi mutou #anzu mazaki #jounouchi katsuya #honda hiroto #shizuka jounouchi #superhero au #writings #ygo #ygo fanfiction

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dalet-us · 3 years

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I Believe!

** Jonah and the Whale, Pieter Lastman 1621

My dear friend,

Perhaps you are thinking to yourself that I do not cherish and love my wife, and I suspect that there are many others that are thinking the same thing. When I published my post, “A Riddle?,” I figured that it would cause a bit of a stir, and it appears that it did. What was I supposed to do, pull a Jonah and disobey God by running off to Tarshish? You have heard the story before, no?

“1Now the word of the LORD came unto Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, 2Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness is come up before me. 3But Jonah rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the LORD, and went down to Joppa; and he found a ship going to Tarshish: so he paid the fare thereof, and went down into it, to go with them unto Tarshish from the presence of the LORD. 4But the LORD sent out a great wind into the sea, and there was a mighty tempest in the sea, so that the ship was like to be broken. …”

“15So they took up Jonah, and cast him forth into the sea: and the sea ceased from her raging. 16Then the men feared the LORD exceedingly, and offered a sacrifice unto the LORD, and made vows. 17Now the LORD had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.” – Jonah 1:1-4 & 1:15-17 KJV

I would rather not attempt my circumnavigation in the belly of a fish, thank you very much!

God instructed me to post that message, and so I did … verbatim. The only thing that I did that was not in complete obedience was that I added the line, “All praise and glory and honor unto our blessed Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” Everything else in that message was exactly as God instructed – to the letter! Besides, if that message has anything to do with my own wife, let God be the judge.

Thus, I think that it is important that you understand more perfectly how much I do cherish and love my wife. I would not want any untruthful rumors making the rounds. May God have mercy on our disobedient hearts!

I would love to tell you the whole story right here and now, but as with the topic of circumnavigation, it is not a story that I can tell in a single blog post. Therefore, I will do my best to spread it out in colorful sketches.

Before God inflicted me with my gastrointestinal disease, I met my wife in a nightclub of all places. Neither her nor I wanted to be going out with our friends to nightclubs that night. Yet both of us relented to the pressure of our friends and suffered ourselves to their shameless urgings. We and our friends all ended up in the same nightclub, a place called “Popeye’s.” As we later discovered, we were both very discontent to find ourselves at Popeye’s with our cheeky friends. Neither one of us was in the mood to be dealing with the typical meat-market personas. When I saw her on the other side of the dance floor, I was captivated with her gracious countenance, and she was very fair to look upon, with her long flowing blond hair and her Amazonian stature. She was as the Lady Galadriel among the women of Bree . She was like no other woman I had ever seen before. Why it is that she accepted my invitation to dance is beyond me.

** [1] The Lady of Shalott, John William Waterhouse 1888

I soon learned why she was so different. She came from a family of upstanding rapport, out of the mountainous farmlands of Montana. She was a true down-to-earth Montana breed queen of virtue, and she had the beauty to match her distinguishing heritage. Her father and her late mother were both very fine, upstanding, and highly respected citizens of her hometown in Montana: hardworking, genuine Spirit-filled Christians, moral, ethical, gracious, warm, loving, caring and humble people. How could I not fall in love with her, especially when she regarded me with such great respect and adoration?

When my father was murdered in 1993, she was an extraordinary source of support, comfort, and understanding. I could never have asked God for a better friend and companion during that difficult trial of my life. Shortly afterwards, she unofficially became my business partner. I left my position at the headquarters of Tower Records and became an independent contractor. Of course, my contracts with Tower Records accounted for over ninety percent of my business.

Essentially, I was installing all of the low-voltage electrical systems (audio, video, telecom, & datacom systems) that I had designed when I was still an employee at Tower Records. Tower Records was at the peak of their heyday, opening about 40 new stores each year. My wife (girlfriend at the time) was my financial/accounting expert. She was so amazingly good to me, and patient beyond measure.

Only a few months before my father’s death, I used up one of the twenty or thirty some-odd lives that God has blessed me with. (A cat has nothing on me. By the grace of my Lord and Savior, I have at least three times as many lives as a cat!) I am sure you have heard me tell this story before, of how I nearly drank myself to death when I was working in Mexico City. (That is a story for another day, however.) Nonetheless, it was that incident that began all of my gastrointestinal issues. Over the years, my gastrointestinal problems gradually became more difficult, more problematic, and an ever-greater impact to my ability to live and to contribute to a rich relationship and marriage with my wife. Regardless of all of my short comings, she has always endured and supported me with the utmost mercy and provision for what I lacked (financial security in particular). It has ever been her goal and purpose to have a sure retirement.

** Dale w/ the co-owners of the Tower Records, Niza St., Mexico City

Immediately after we were married in 1997, my gastrointestinal symptoms began to become an impact to my livelihood, especially at work. It also began to limit my ability to eat certain foods. In the beginning, there were only a few restaurants that we had to scratch off of the list, for instance, most of the Italian restaurants. Despite the changes to my diet, the symptoms continued to get worse, and I became more aggressive in my search for answers from the medical profession. The problem was that none of the doctors that I had seen were able to provide any help or any solutions. In fact, most of them thought that the problem was largely, if not entirely, psychological.

I have lost count of all the medical professionals that I have seen over the years. Some of them have proved to be a hindrance and/or antagonistic. Others have been nothing more than a waste of time. A few of them have blessed me with a little bit of insight on my problem, and only one of them has provided genuine help in solving the gastrointestinal disorder. Unfortunately, that man passed away about ten years ago. At this point in time, I have found that there are very few medical practitioners that possess more practical knowledge about my condition than myself.

Perhaps you have heard this explanation before, but the big problem now is that I am not especially confident that I can find any medical practitioner that will actually be able to supply a solution to my problem. It is a three-fold problem: I would need to find a practitioner that has the genuine ability to diagnose and to treat the condition; I would need to subject myself to the numerous months of testing required for that practitioner to diagnose the condition; and I would need to undergo the numerous attempts to treat the condition in search for a treatment that actually works (assuming that they would even be able to devise a successful treatment). More than likely, I would need to subject myself to several potential practitioners. (There is no shortage of practitioners that think that they know what they are talking about, when in reality they are simply full of hot air.) It would be a miracle to find a competent doctor in less than a year. Then it would be no less than six months for a diagnosis. Finally, our experimentation of treatments would begin, and what would it take to find a successful plan of attack? … 12 months? … 18 months? I could easily be at this whole doctor shopping exercise for the next five years, and still be without a solution. This is how dire my problem is!

There is not a chance that such an approach would fit into God’s plan for me to circumnavigate the Earth. By that plan, I would be lucky to be in the early stages of my treatment plan at the time I am supposed to embark out of Singapore. Therefore, God clearly has something entirely different planned for my deliverance.

I will let you in on a little secret. I have not the slightest inclination of what God’s solution for my affliction could possibly be. Yet, with all my heart and soul I believe that God is going to provide a solution, just exactly as I believe in you! With all my heart and soul, I believe in you, as God has given me reason to believe. Love Always, Dale 😊

Read this post on my own personal blog Website dalet.us

1. Those of you that are Lord of the Rings aficionados may be wondering why I chose a picture of the "Lady of Shalott," instead of a picture of Galadriel herself. I simply liked this picture better than those that I could find of Galadriel. It is thought that JR Tolkien may have modeled the character of Galadriel after the Lady of Shalott, in part. Looking at this picture, I can see how that could be said.

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airanke · 7 years

Photo

Pretty boy Vol’jin aka Ahaztuta Vol’jin and some tid-bits about the Ahaztuta tribe under the cut (the Ahaztuta tribe are from my WoW rip-off story and yes they’re all pretty af).

And I needed my Volita fix leavemealoNE---

I initially had Ahaztuta info first but I put that under so that if ur only interested in Vol’jin stuff here it is:

Was born in a time where males were actually valued.

Has a mildly rebellious side, insisting that he be taught how to fight as he was dissatisfied with always being protected. As a result, he was allowed to begin training as a Priest (not Shadow Hunter. There are Reasons™ for that). He naturally wears robes (and much less flashy accessories), and wields a glaive/naginata as his weapon of choice.

His beast spirit is a Peacock Phoenix.

As comes naturally to the Ahaztuta, he enjoys getting all dressed up, and enjoys taking care of himself and his appearance.

Tends to sneak off with Amita, his designated “body guard”, despite the knowledge that their antics could get the two of them in trouble with the Matriarch.

Is aware that others find him attractive and has been known to use that to his advantage, either to get himself out of unsavoury situations or to catch someone off-guard.

I think that’s all I have on him for now... and I’m still not sure about Ahaztuta Amita??? But yeah... tribe info below (and a better explanation why they could get in deep shit for running off together sometimes HAHAHA //sweats;;;)

Ahaztuta tribe

Matriarchal tribe that, until recent years on Ether, practiced genital mutilation on male children. Male children were considered worthless unless they were diagnosed to have particularly strong genetics, at which point they were kept alive and made into a king (re: breeding king. As in his only purpose was to sire children. This does mean that he was treated very well, but also tends to lack the basic skills to take care of himself). Prior to the practice of genital mutilation, male children were discarded like trash, because again, they were considered worthless.

In regards to the male children that were mutilated, they can neither have sex nor bear children. They consider themselves nothing but meat shields and are the first to sacrifice themselves in combat to protect other members of the tribe.

There was, of course, flaws in these practices, and they have been bought to a slow halt. This is especially due to the fact that, given the low percentage of males in the tribe to females, it was common for a female to mate with her father and/or brother. The current Matriarch identified this as troubling, and now the tribe will also jump at the chance to mate with different races as well. This has led to an surge in half-breed children.

Sex is considered only viable on the grounds of procreation. Females are placed on a roster that rotates every year to ensure that only a specific number of females are pregnant at a time. A small number are also permitted to mate with males from other races, so long as the male is willing. Sex for pleasure is strongly discouraged, and on some occasions, punished if the two involved are caught (so basically Vol’jin and Amita are being VERY BAD AND ABSOLUTELY NAUGHTY AND THEY COULD GET IN BIG MASSIVE TROUBLE).

All members of the Ahaztuta tribe are physically stunning, and at first glance, almost all are mistaken as female. The only telling factor of whether one is male or not is the size of the tusks. Because the males in the Ahaztuta tribe do not regularly engage in combat, they let their tusks grow, unlike most other troll tribes on Ether, whom keep their tusks short.

Females in the Ahaztuta tribe are viciously protective of their Kings to the point that they will become immediately hostile toward anyone who shows interest in their males. SHOW INTEREST WITH CAUTION YA’LL THESE BITCHES WILL FUCK YOU UP---

Kings, by extension, are known to use the females’ protectiveness to their advantage, especially in dangerous situations. They are known to deliberately put themselves in harms way, knowing full well that the females will come to their defense. More often than not, this has saved the lives of many helpless villagers. Kings are slowly being allowed to join the fighting ranks, but it is difficult for the females to willingly allow the males to fight. Their instinct to protect the Kings is very strong.

High elves descended from the Ahaztuta tribe, which is why male elves are often thought to be female at first glance as well.

I think that’s everything for now, minus where they live and their general appearance and their chieftain (well, in this case Matriarch), and and basically a lot of stuff aaaaaaaaaa;;;;; Thanks for reading this far if you did....

#Trollvember #WoW #World of Warcraft #CHAMPIONS #Vol'jin #WoW troll #Air's art #Amita Dakini #//screams softly #I fucked myself #I'm so screwed I should not be up this late..... aaaaaa....#Good thing I have meds that can knock me out and like 8 alarms :' )#AUGH i'm so happy #With the accessories #One day I'll finish this and make it look pretty #or I guess prettier

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readyaiminquire · 4 years

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Part 3 - Unimaginable by design.

This is the third part on the rewrite of my thesis, from 2019. Here I take a slightly different approach, and rather than rehashing the same arguments from my previous works, I instead use the same data to argue for something new, and novel. Hopefully this will be as enjoyable, if not more so!

You can find the the introduction here, part 1 here and part 2 here.

How does someone build something that, for all intents and purposes, they are incapable of imagining, or visualising? This is at the core of Mark Fisher’s work on cultural hauntology, itself derived from the work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Our current experiences are haunted, it is said, by our past experiences, and our future anticipation. However, losing the ability to fully anticipate a future in which substantial change has taken place would imply the inability to also bring such a future into being. Looking over my experience working with transhumanists, biohackers, tech-enthusiasts, self-avowed futurists, among others, in Sweden, made me think about not only whether Fisher’s cultural diagnosis might have been correct – which, to be up-front, I do think he was correct – but perhaps more importantly, how to break out of such a cultural impasse. Fisher himself states that to fix this disjointed time, we must first recognise that it is indeed disjointed, and from there attempt to find solutions to put it back together. It dawned on me without realising it at the time, that this is what these Swedish techno-utopians were working towards, though likely not consciously. Their focus on building a new future, a better future, while remaining notoriously vague as to what this might entail came into new focus. The trust put in new technologies, while maintaining a high lack of knowledge of the future (as neither they nor I own a bona fide crystal ball), I would argue is exactly the point. What is being built, in other words, is not the future per se, but rather a new context: to create opportunities to experience the world in ways that are currently unimaginable, and through such experiences, also imagine new futures.

Robotic eyes to see the world in a new light.

Stagnation, cancelled futures, and how we go from here.

Mark Fisher’s work on hauntology is very clearly rooted in Jacques Derrida’s work, the man who coined the term itself. Derrida observed that we never truly experience anything as fully present, but everything that is, is always coloured by past experiences and anticipations of the future. Music paints a very clear picture of this: a single note holds no melodic quality, but is simply a note. It gains these qualities only when understood in the context of the preceding notes and in anticipation of future notes. The melody is thus ‘haunted’ by that which no longer exists, and by that which does not yet exist. This interplay, Derrida argues, exist across all our experiences. We always experience them as an interplay between past, present and future.

Fisher’s use of hauntology is much more specific, though. He refers to a type of cultural hauntology, in which the phenomenology – or the feeling – of time itself is disjointed. The past (and often the futures imagined in the past) bleed into the present, making it evermore challenging to delineate between ‘past’ times, our experientially present time, and anticipated new futures. To borrow a phrase from Fisher, the future has been cancelled. This cancellation, Fisher is careful to point out, was not sudden, though he argues that it started sometime around the 1980s or 1990s (indeed, pinning an exact date on such a sociocultural development will always be folly). What Fisher does observe, however, is the emergence of neoliberal capitalism and the beginning of this slow cancellation of the future. Neoliberalism, he argues, makes all other developments subservient to its own profit motive, as a means of reproducing the system itself. While this doesn’t make the system completely impervious to change, it does make change much more unlikely to take place organically.

It is important to understand that developments as a whole have not stagnated, but rather there exists a systemic and cultural stagnation. The phenomenology of time is that of standstill. For example, while digital technologies have made enormous strides, these new technological capabilities are, by and large, not deployed to do anything new. Rather, they remain subservient to neoliberal logics, and therefore operate instead to make already established processes and sociocultural modes faster, and by extension more efficient. Examples of this in practice is the digital addition of crackle to music to make a digital file sound as if it is played on an LP (an largely obsolete piece of technology) or to produce nostalgic movie remakes from the 1980s or 1990s. Marx famously wrote that all things in history appear twice, first as tragedy and then as farce, and with cultural forms, they appear first genuinely, and then as nostalgic pastiche. As a result, truly new futures become harder and harder to imagine.

How might such a cultural impasse be broken? It is important to delve deeper into what the phenomenology of time is. German historian Reinhart Koselleck once argued that what makes people experience a historical period as distinct is its tendency of existing within a complex knot of new developments and easily anticipated repetition which constitutes a “specific historical temporality”, or specific experience of the now, as different from the past (and indeed, different from an anticipated future). This is, in effect, why the 1970s might feel like an era in itself, distinct from both the 60s and the 80s, and themselves distinct from another such era, on a phenomenological level. Koselleck places much emphasis on the “surprise” (Überraschung) as the process through which one era comes to experientially feel like another. Once these surprises have been lived through in their original uniqueness, they become part of a framework of repeatability, and is therefore added to a kind of “horizon of expectation”. What makes different eras feel different is, according to Koselleck, the result of a process of accumulation.

Fisher himself wrote that to break out of his diagnosed impasse, he emphasised the need to first recognise the impasse itself, though he prescribed no clear roadmap, highlighting instead the importance of local contexts. Koselleck’s focus on the surprise, I think, serves as a good framing. It is not far off Alain Badiou’s capital-E Event, what he identified as the driver behind cultural change. Badiou defined the Event straightforwardly as the moment after which the world can never be the same again. The parallel between an Event and Koselleck’s Überraschung is clear, and serves as a useful framing for how such a cultural hauntology can be circumvented: to discover the ability to once again be surprised.

Future

I met with Patrick, an older gentleman, in Stockholm. He worked out of a shared workspace focusing very much on start-ups, aiming to connect ambitious entrepreneurs and to foster innovation. The offices themselves felt like they had been modelled on something from a cyberpunk novel: stepping in from the grey and rainy Stockholm streets (one might even be reminded of the opening lines to Neuromancer: that the sky above the city “was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel”) through a corridor leading to a lift, that took me to the heart of the building. Irregularly shaped, with a platform suspended in its centre, the ceiling a skylight, people milling around, a lot of buzz. I eventually met Patrick, perhaps in his mid-60s, a stark contrast to the hive of otherwise young entrepreneurs buzzing around us. We moved through the building, past meeting rooms encased in glass, until we finally found a quiet corner in which we could speak – and within an amicable distance of a coffee machine (this was Sweden, after all). “Everything in the building is linked to our key cards; from meeting rooms, to the locks, lifts, and even the vending and coffee machines”, Patrick told me, excited to be working in a space that seemed to really lean into integrating technology even more in our daily lives. “Coffee?” he asked, waving his hand by a machine; it powered up.

Patrick looked delighted, as I was there to speak to him specifically about his apparent Jedi-coffee powers. See, beneath the skin of his left hand, nestled in the soft flesh between his thumb and forefinger, was a small NFC chip – and this is what I had ostensibly come to speak to him about. I suppose the question on my mind then is the one I often encounter when I reveal my own implant: “why?”. Patrick: “It’s an inevitable development, isn’t it? Technology just keeps getting better and bigger and faster”, and that “with modern medicine, and later computers, it was only a matter of time before this [gesturing at his phone] would be integrated in the body!” This ‘argumentum ad inevitability’ is one that many of the people I have worked with bring up, in one form or another. The logic goes, in a nutshell, that technological innovation, by definition, solves problems. Therefore, as technology grows and improves it will solve more problems: the implication being that technology will eventually be all-encompassing. I will not dwell much on this here, as I have discussed this elsewhere. Instead, as Patrick very much believed, I want to unpack the notion of this technologically driven future. What will it be?

Here we reach a degree of vagueness which permeated many of my conversations with these Swedish techno-utopists. From the logic outlined above, this imagined future was largely understood to be a good future, or perhaps more accurately as having the potential to be good. Indeed, much of their present efforts are directed towards ensuring the ‘correct’ use of future digital technologies (again, something I have discussed at length previously). Nonetheless, the perceived or imagined goodness of this potential future is worth dwelling on, specifically because of its vagueness. Another informant I spoke to, Jacob, made sure to highlight the importance of working on these kinds of projects because he wanted to “make sure my little ones grow up in a better world than this, and sure as hell not a worse one”. Yet another informant put it very succinctly with: “there is no inherent end goal; it’s all fluid. It’s fluid because we don’t yet know what it is we can do”. These approaches are all teeming with an inherent positivity towards technology and its potential.

Yet, beyond this positive feeling towards technology, this view of its seemingly limitless positive potential, as long as all get invested and channel some of Gilles Deleuze’s wisdom that, “there is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons”, there is a stark lack of clarity as to what exactly this future might look like. This in stark contrast to the potentially horrific outcomes of technology gone awry, on which ample articles, books, lectures, and presentations have been written. Thought experiments with names such as The Paperclip Problem, or other such clearly defined (yet to a casual listener) seemingly absurd in scope and specificity exist. During my three months conducting fieldwork, the clearest vision of the future presented to me was at a Transhumanist conference here in London: TransVision 2019, at which the organiser merely described future as having the potential to bring about a world of plenty.

Yet, no-one offers much clarity as to what any of that means.

The futures that never came to be.

If the future, such as my informants seem to imagine it, cannot be described with much clarity, some answers may be found in the past, where (presumably) the inspiration for these projects lie. Fred Turner reminds us that the metaphor for digital technologies as having inherently liberating qualities is a relatively recent one, and did not fully take root until the 1980s or 1990s. It was thus simultaneously surprising and not that Ethan, a university student at Lund and probably my youngest informant cited the video game franchise Deus Ex as a key inspiration. Deus Ex, solidly a piece of cyberpunk media, often frames the conflicts and risks associated with human augmentation: the division of humans into different groups, the ‘pure’ versus the ‘augmented’ and so on – deep-rooted risks, and issues which, in one shape or another, we tackle in contemporary society, though with different categories and labels. When pressed, Ethan, surrounded by lab equipment in his student dorm, highlighted the potential that he saw in the technology: that despite the bleak world presented by Deus Ex, he focused more on what could be instead. Deus Ex, and cyberpunk as a genre, a cautionary tale, should one read it as such.

Not surprisingly, many informants cited science fiction as a source of inspiration – the famous drive from science fiction to science fact. References, beyond the one mentioned above, was Star Trek, or Star Wars, as well as many comic books. This, again unsurprisingly, was deeply dependent on their age group. While Ethan referred to a contemporary video game franchise, Jacob referred to the Iron Man comics he read as a kid. However, despite such gaps, the takeaway was always very similar if not the same: not to focus on what technology was used for in these various settings, but rather what it could be used for instead. The clearest, and perhaps on the nose, an example of this came from a speaker at the transhumanist conference, quoting Arthur C. Clarke’s three laws:

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

This opens for a discussion around inspiration taken from the past – from many different pasts! – but it is also made very clear that the futures in the past are not compatible with the future my informants are seeking to build as a contemporary one.

This drive to want a new type of future, or one future that feels like a new era in some sense or another, is articulated especially strongly in sentiments around the importance of involvement, and put very bluntly, doing things within the various communities. This is a longstanding pillar among several techno-utopian groups, especially those focusing more heavily on grassroots involvement. My informants all showed how they valued the importance of direct involvement, from decrying a general lack of investment in maintaining broader community relations and events, to phrases such as “theory is nothing if you don’t put it into practice”. Returning to Ethan, who is exemplary of this stance:

“Some people come on the forums, or in a YouTube-comment section or whatever, and just talk about how amazing this or that would be. Well, have you done anything? No? Your ideas aren’t that original, so at least try to make something with them. Try to make a difference, so that these things can actually become reality.”

I have mentioned before that my informants hold themselves to an ideal initially put forward by architect, futurists, and many more things, R. Buckminster Fuller. Bucky Fuller put forward the idea of the comprehensive designer, as someone who can put bluntly ‘step outside’ of the current system and structures to therefore view it from a novel position. These comprehensive designers are by definition hard to classify because the very idea is to not be classifiable; flexibility from societal illegibility. These are, in theory, the type of people who hold the potential to be true innovators. Though this is a problematic ideal for many reasons, the notion of attempting to live up to a broader ideal to change and build something new for the future does highlight a certain, at least implicit, understanding of the current cultural predicament à la Fisher.

Old habits die hard

There is the fundamental problem of imagining yourself as being able to ‘step outside’ of a system to view it form some neutral point in nowhere. If there is anything my favourite raccoon-cum-philosopher has taught me, it is that we can never step out of our ideology because it is, by definition, inside of us. As he says, we are “already eating from the trashcan all the time”. This predicament becomes painfully clear among my informants. One of the most prevailing ways of speaking about innovation, and building, testing, or disseminating new technologies is squarely through the lens of the contemporary entrepreneur, both in practice but also in aesthetics. It is telling, indeed, that my earlier vignette was centred squarely at one of these entrepreneur centres in Stockholm, and it is far from the only time where this became relevant, or even central, to my experience with the people I worked with.

Three of my main informants, Harrison, Jacob, and Samuel own their own companies focusing on selling and implanting the microchips in Sweden. Harrison, in addition, is a quite prolific speaker on the subject of transhumanism both in Sweden and in Europe, while Jacob is heavily involved in other forms of body modifications. Much of it is, very clearly, centred around an entrepreneurial sphere. The same can also be said about many of the people I met. Out of the two chipping events I attended in Stockholm – both organised by Samuel – many of the attendees spoke about the commercial applications, potential, and excitement of their implants, while others yet again referred to the implants as really useful PR stunts either for their own personal brands, or within their wider professional life (I remember that one of the only two women I managed to speak to used it as a way to leverage her image within an otherwise deeply male-dominated field).

This also became abundantly clear when attending TransVision 2019 in London, where all speakers either had their own book coming out, owned their own companies, and some attendees even attended to find start-ups worth investing in. Going back to my conversation with Patrick, he went as far as to compare the modern entrepreneurial spirit with the spirit of discovery among scientists in the 20th century. The new discoverers were, as it was told to me, the likes of Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and indeed anyone who has the grit and drive to commit to new technologies and finds ways to push these out into society. In addition, other informants, Ethan among them, spoke of future developments in very clear market-logic and metaphors. Specifically, when discussing the risks of creating an ‘underclass’ of non-augmented humans, the response was very much “sure, as the technology develops, only the rich will have the resources to make use of it, but as things go on, the technology will become cheaper, and more accessible. That is nothing but a temporary step, and the future past that will be better than today”.

The entrepreneurial metaphors really just highlight how deep the neoliberal/capitalist logics run, what other writers have called the “Silicon Valley ideology”. This, again, is closely tied to Bucky Fuller’s ideal, but it also inherently serves to undermine it. Though some individuals may have the appearance of stepping beyond the bounds of what is believed to be possible (refer back to Arthur C. Clarke’s rules), the inherent ideological framing remains, and such an operation still takes place very much within an established socio-political hegemony. The fundamental framing is still capitalist – and this without going into a discussion about, say, Elon Musk the symbol, and Musk the person.

Spoiler alert: he’s not Tony Stark.

Purposeful unclarity

It is worth returning to Fisher here. Our fundamental predicament as he saw it is not difficulty of imagining a future, but imagining new futures. In an oft-quoted line attributed either to Žižek or Frederic Jameson, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. The future, of course, remains, but it remains painfully constant. Herein lies the issue for my informants in Sweden, and likely many others within the same groups and communities: how to create the space in which a sense of newness can emerge. I argue that it is not surprising that their ideal futures are so ill-defined, for lack of a better phrase. The lack of clarity is indeed the point.

Given what he been outlined above, there emerges a clear tension between the will to create a new future, one better than today, a future of plenty, so to speak, and how this future is articulated. Either an image is painted with disappointingly few pixels, or the means through which the future might be created come through already well established and at times problematic logics. The entrepreneurial ideal, the comprehensive designer, and what is at its very base a neoliberal logic, is still extremely clear across all these movements, not only in words but also in action. Not only are the new discoverers and inventors compared to successful entrepreneurs, but most people operate within what can broadly be called a start-up space.

However, turning this perception on its head, it would not be unreasonable to think that these groups themselves have a feeling that they do indeed struggle to imagine a new future, at which point vagueness becomes a necessity. They do not stop believing in a better future being possible, but they recognise the difficulties they’re faced with describing what one might look like. The rejection of a clear view of the future is, to some extent proof for the accuracy of Fisher’s diagnosis, but it is also extremely telling of how such a cultural impasse may finally be broken.

Fisher himself told us that perhaps the only way to break the current loop is to recognise that time itself is out of whack, and once recognised deploy appropriate measures to “mend” time. Based on my own fieldwork, however, it appears this step isn’t entirely necessary. My informants have not explicitly recognised there being a hauntological component to either their day-to-day life, nor their ideology. Nonetheless, they move past this as a matter of course and instead begin to focus on creating this (admittedly) undefined future.

The problem with this approach is how it simply pushes the envelope. If we don’t know what to build, what do we build? A shift in focus becomes key here: it is not about creating a new future, but rather to create the context in which a new future can develop. What Koselleck called a surprise – Überraschung – is what is sought after, as what surprises us is also what delineates the phenomenology of time itself; what separates the feeling of one time from another time. The technology they strive for: human augmentation, human-computer interfacing, AI, and so on, are technologies whose outcomes we cannot quite predict and much less truly imagine. Replacing the human eye with a cybernetic eye capable of seeing more than just the visible spectrum of light create a fundamentally different way in which we interact with the world at large, and imagining the impact it will have it near-impossible: it would literally require us to imagine a new colour.

While the true aim is a new future, the practical aim is more about creating a context in which a surprise can take place, to create the context in which society can broadly move forward into a new phenomenological era of time; to not only move into a future, but to move into a new future.

Conclusion

Mark Fisher declared that the future has been cancelled; that as a result of neoliberal logics, the cultural capability to imagine anything new from what already exists, socioculturally speaking, has been lost. Time is a funny thing in that respect, as it is often thought of as linear, one era leading to another. When Fisher says that time is out of joint it is not that time does not keep flowing, of course, it does. Today still turns into tomorrow. The phenomenology of time, on the other hand, has stalled: time might keep flowing, but not much changes. In fact, the past is capitalised on and repackaged and resold as a product of nostalgia and pastiche. Time keeps flowing, but culture almost feels regressive. German historian Reinhart Koselleck argued that how we perceive history is contingent on a horizon of expected experiences, and what breaks such an experience is the introduction of that which has not been expected, a surprise – the Überraschung. This mirrors the work of Alain Badiou and the capital E-Event. What produces change, or at least the feeling of difference from yesterday to today is how we might be surprised by something. This is what I argue my informants work to bring about. While they use the language of “the future” to position their aims, what such a future is remains painfully unclear. Even with such a lofty goal in mind, the language, the articulation of their work, and many of the spaces they inhabit remain (perhaps painfully) mundane. They are entrepreneurs, they are public speakers, they have their own start-ups or book deals. In a word, they attempt to capitalise on this vision. Despite these shortcomings what cannot be denied is the drive to continue forward, and to keep developing their ideas, and how internally these communities and groups place a high premium on those practically involved in developing new ideas or technologies. The lack of clarity for the future is somewhat purposeful; there is an acceptance that they cannot imagine what lies ahead, perhaps because they recognise their own inability to look past contemporary ideologies. What they recognise, most likely implicitly, is that they require surprise. Something that cannot be imagined, that throws the world on its head and forces new perspectives to emerge.

How do you build what you can’t imagine? You don’t; you build that which allows you to imagine something new.

Key references

BADIOU, A. 2003. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Translated by: R. Brassiered ). Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

DELEUZE, G. 1992. Postscript on the Societies of Control. October 59, 3–7.

FISHER, M. 2009. Capitalism Realism: Is there no alternative? London: Zero Books.

FISHER, M. 2012. “What is Hauntology?” in Film Quarterly 2012 Vol. 66:1, pp. 16-24.

FISHER, M. 2014. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. London: Zero Books.

SCUCCIMARRA, L. 2008. Semantics of Time and Historical Experience: Remarks on Koselleck’s “Historik” in Contributions to the History of Concepts 4(2), pp. 160-175.

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