#look at my neuroses and brain problems boy

[carrionsong]

xime's inspiration/brain problems list :] JSVGNBYUS IS THIS ANYTHING.... does anyone understand. where am i

#.txt #si #xime #this looks like crap lmao. i could probably redo it bc its a lil wonky n uneven but WHATever its fine. #look at my neuroses and brain problems boy #xime tries so hard to be chill and normal/easygoing but hes a goddamn mess of unmedicated anxiety/adhd/depression u_u #doing sooo much to be dependable/kind/helpful. to hide how empty they feel all the time bc she doesnt know how to ask for help bc its so #overwhelming!!! but if they can be useful.... then hes not a failure. finding real happiness in a society that slowly kills u is so hard. #but maybe w/ these assholes' help... she can find it. one step at a time ;;; at least they r masc and hot. at least they have that. jsgvfys #sowwy its so depressing but yknow. the Horrors. #he gets lost in his own thoughts soooo easily. tends to spiral if left to themself. she needs someone to help bring them back down to earth #but usually theyre chill and can be a little smartass-y with the matsus bc its fun to mess with them :3 quiet at first but once something #helps them open up and he Floods someone w an infodump then they can unwind a bit around others ;3; #its 2am. GOOD NIGHTTTTTT AUUUUUHGHGHHHH

[cleverwordsandotherstuffilike]

Lucky Numbers by Catherine Deveney

Conversation, says Daniel Tammet, is like a dance: a dance for two people. You have to know the moves. We dance, he and I, in a simple room. A table. Chairs. Big windows. I tread carefully, listening only to the rhythm of the dance. But for Tammet, there is competing music, a background cacophony that fills his head against the main track. Colours, sounds, light, textures.

Right now, he's noticing the way the light streams through the window and hits the door. He's noticing the smooth, polished wood of the table, the noisy hum of the air-conditioning. When I move, he even hears the faint jangle of my jewellery. I take my bracelet off, lay it on the table in front of us with a clank, a sprawl of black and silvery grey beads that reflect the light.

Sometimes, when he feels almost assaulted by stimuli, Tammet holds something in the palm of his hand: a stone perhaps, a marble, a coin. It calms him. If very agitated, he walks in circles because the regularity of the movement soothes him. But perhaps I make him sound visibly odd, which would be wrong. You would walk by this gentle, slight, bespectacled figure in the street and not guess at his remarkable possibilities. But if you could open him up, if you could see inside his head and experience the world as he does, then you might be amazed. Tammet has Asperger's syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism. But he is also one of the world's few savants, a rare condition highlighted in the Dustin Hoffman film Rain Man, which makes him capable of remarkable mental feats. A television documentary film later dubbed Tammet 'Brainman'.

Tammet speaks ten languages; he can learn a new one in under a week. He can perform at lightning speed mathematical calculations involving the multiplication of three-digit figures in his head. And he can recite the number pi (the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter) to 22,000 places without getting a single digit wrong, a feat that takes five hours. Depending on how you look at it, Tammet represents either the untapped potential of the human mind, or merely a quirk of brain malfunction.

We are all of us to some extent trapped inside our own heads. Most of us can describe what it is like in there, in the way we can describe a familiar room. The nooks and crannies, the hidden corners, the colour of our mental walls. Some of us can even describe our own quirks and eccentricities and neuroses. But while people with autism often seem in a world of their own, ironically, they have little sense of 'self' and usually cannot describe their world. Autism has become one of those words, like 'dyslexia', that is overused and misused, a kind of shorthand label to cover a whole range of conditions. "There are as many forms of autism as there are people with the condition," explains Tammet. But, in general, those with both high-functioning and low-functioning autism will have communication problems that, to a greater or lesser degree, make it difficult for them to cope with the normal etiquette of social interaction: eye contact, empathy, listening and responding. Their language may be repetitive, their voices monotone. Signs of affection are often limited. They may have narrow fixations, be drawn to repetitive activity and resist change. But at the same time, they are often more sensitive to sights, sounds and smells than the rest of us.

Autism affects six times as many males as females, and Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, of the Autism Research Unit at Cambridge University, believes the discrepancy between the genders may be partly explained by exposure to the male hormone in the womb. "Prenatal testosterone levels, together with as yet unidentified genetic factors, may predispose boys to be more at risk from autism," he says.

Those with low-functioning autism may be affected by low IQ and learning difficulties that make communication difficult. But people with Asperger's will often have normal or above-average IQ. Over time, some, like Tammet, may be able to teach themselves skills they naturally lack. You wouldn't guess now, but as a child Tammet found eye contact almost impossible. "I used to look at the mouth when people talked because that was the part of their face that moved. It was a real effort for me to look someone in the eye because I found it almost a little painful, too intense or uncomfortable. I felt too much inside myself and it was too much of a release to look someone in the eye. You get such a lot of emotion in the eyes."

Shadow man. Emotions, he says, fall like mysterious shadows across him. He cannot always define them. He went to the cinema once and watched five trailers before the main feature, then burst into tears. "My brain couldn't filter them, couldn't cope with that much emotion. If I find something very moving, it won't be a gradual sensation of being moved to tears, I will just burst into tears suddenly."

The brain is the most exciting, most mysterious part of all of us. Tammet's is more mysterious still, even to himself. Savants and people with autism live in a remarkable world. Rarely can they describe it. But at the age of 27, Tammet has reached a stage where he can. It has not been without effort. He remembers as a child the first time that he went into a library and was confronted by thousands of books. All of them had a name on the spine. He spent ages searching the shelves, looking for the book with his name on it. "I thought," he says, "that I would find it and open it and understand who I am."

Tammet was different long before he knew he was different. As a child, his 'otherness' to his contemporaries was of no consequence. They simply did not exist in his very solitary universe. Even before he could read, he loved the books that his parents read. It was not just the silence they prompted, it was the fact that there were numbers on every page. He would take as many books as possible to his room and simply surround himself with them, "kind of like a numerical comfort blanket".

He has synaesthesia, which means he sees numbers in colour and has an emotional response to them. "People with synaesthesia will say four is green or five is black, but what makes my experience of numbers so unusual is that it's much more complex than that. Nine is not just a colour, it's a shape, a size, an emotional content." His favourite number is four because it is shy, just like him. "Numbers were my friends. Before I could relate to other people, I could relate to numbers."

But by the age of eight or nine, some awareness of loneliness kicked in. "I wanted to find a friend desperately." He would sit on his bed in his room and stare at the ceiling, wondering how a person got a friend. He had no idea. Other children were put off by his strangeness, his unusual fixations - at one point it was ladybirds - and his inability to follow the steps of the intricate dance of conversation. And then another unusual boy came to the school. "He was from an immigrant family and very intelligent. He loved numbers and loved language, and we got on for that reason. He didn't care so much that I was different because he was different."

He accepts his condition may be genetic. His grandfather suffered from severe epilepsy, his father from severe depression. Medical science at the time had no answers for his grandfather's condition. He was put in a home and his wife was told to remarry and forget him - he might as well be dead. And very soon he was. "I think," says Tammet, "if my grandfather could have known me, he would have been proud of me."

When Tammet had an epileptic seizure at the age of four, his father's own experience made him quick to act. His speed saved the boy's life. Epilepsy is common among those with autism, but Tammet outgrew the condition and has suffered no seizures since. But it has left an interesting question mark. He has no pre-seizure memories, and therefore no way of knowing if he had any savant abilities at that age. Some scientists believe Tammet may be an 'acquired savant', rather than a born savant, and that his abilities are in some way connected to damage caused by the seizure.

Dr. Darold Treffert, clinical professor at the University of Wisconsin Medical School, author of Extraordinary People and consultant on Rain Man, believes acquired savant skills suggest there may be "a little Rain Man in all of us". He believes savant syndrome may be caused by damage to the left hemisphere of the brain, with dramatic right-hemisphere compensation. "While savant syndrome is a malfunction of the brain," he explains, "perhaps it is that malfunction that releases dormant capacity as a back-up system."

But there is no conclusive evidence about savant syndrome. The idea of dormant brain function in all of us may be "romantic optimism", according to Baron-Cohen, who adds that "there is no consensus" about left-hemisphere damage. His interest in Tammet lies in discovering if there is something in the combination of synaesthesia and Asperger's that has caused Tammet's savantism.

Some savant abilities are remarkable because of the person's general limitations. Treffert describes them as "islands of brilliance" that float in a general sea of disability. The person might have a gift for drawing or for music or for calculation that is remarkable given their other limitations. But prodigious savants, as they are sometimes called, have gifts that would be remarkable in any person. They are very rare. What makes Tammet rarer still is that even prodigious savant skills often exist alongside very low IQ and serious physical handicap such as blindness. Leslie Lemke, for example, is blind, mute and has cerebral palsy. Yet the American can play an entire piano concerto flawlessly after hearing it only once.

It was for an epilepsy charity that Tammet recited pi to 22,000 places. The numbers, he says, rolled in front of his eyes like a moving numerical landscape. I tell him that reading his account prompted a strange sensation in me. I actually felt frightened, almost nauseous. He nods. He understands that? Well, he was too wrapped up in the numbers to have any sense of this himself. But he was told afterwards how emotional people in the audience were. Some were almost crying. Some looked very intense, others were simply fascinated. One who was interviewed afterwards said it was almost like a spiritual experience, like watching someone recite holy scripture from memory.

Tammet is not displeased with the analogy. "I thought, wow. The number pi meant such a lot to me, but it amazed me that the process of reciting it, of making it public, had touched other people as well. Pi is a very private number. Most people only know it to a few places, if that. I was able to unearth to the public gaze 22,000 places, a flow of numbers people had never experienced before."

Perhaps what prompted my fear was some uneasy feeling that it reduced the human brain - and the human condition - to something mechanistic: an accident, a malfunction. We were simply electrical circuits, and if the wiring went wrong strange things would happen. It was a paradox: it was both mysterious and yet it somehow removed mystery. But Tammet says his brain is not a machine. "Numbers are my friends. There is real emotion there. Machines can't have friends."

Interestingly, there is a spiritual dimension to his brain. It prompts his one criticism of the best-selling novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which is written from the perspective of a 15-year-old boy with Asperger's. The author, Mark Haddon, made a good job of describing anxiety, the need for repetition and the love of numbers, he says. But Tammet found the dismissal of religion as "illogical", a bit stereotypical.

His own belief in God began after reading the Christian writer GK Chesterton. (He can't help wondering if Chesterton was also a savant and autistic.) "For most people, religion is an emotional thing. For me, it is primarily intellectual, although there is emotion there as well. Life is a magical thing. The explanation of religion is crazy in a sense, but life is no less crazy. The mystery of it is just as weird and wonderful as religion's explanation of it. When scientists try to break everything down there's always a piece missing."

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given his reverence for numbers, the mystery of the Trinity draws him. One in three, three in one. But what sense does his brain, which makes concrete pictures even of numbers, have of an abstract God? "What is God made out of if he is not made of flesh and bones?" he muses. "He is, by his very nature, love and relationship. The process of loving somebody creates something that is separate from either person, the lover or the loved. Of course, if a man and woman get together, they can produce a child, and in a sense that is the human trinity. That is how I conceive of God, as a relationship."

It is not to science but to love that Tammet attributes the biggest breakthrough in his Asperger's. He met his partner, Neil, in 2000. Before that, of course, his parents loved him. But parents have no choice. Neil had a choice. "I had no idea if I was a person who could be loved," Tammet admits. "I had no sense of myself."

Afterwards, he realized how emotionally flat his life had been. His mother, for example, had been the woman who gave him food and kissed him goodnight, but he had given little back in emotional response. But Neil made him see the world differently. "Falling in love really sharpened my emotions, drew them out of me, made me realize emotions weren't my enemies, not things I had to wrestle with, but things that could actually bring me great joy and happiness and peace. They could take away the feelings of anxiety, of not belonging, of being disconnected from the world."

Tammet works from home running an internet-based teaching business. Practically, he is very dependent on Neil, who has to shave him because his co-ordination skills are so poor. But is he emotionally more vulnerable than most? Could he cope with losing Neil? "It's the thing I fear more than anything else. Emotions like grief are so raw, and I am frightened of experiencing them because I don't know how I would cope. Neil understands me totally and has no problem with the way I am. If he was gone from my life, I don't know how I would cope. It's a terrifying thought for me."

Tammet's favourite book is The Little Prince. He loves the idea in it that if you looked into a sea of a million people, it is the person you love that your eye would single out. This is how it is for him. "There are so many things going on in here, but if my partner walked in now, he is all I would see."

Finally, there will be a book with Daniel Tammet's name on the spine. And it will explain who he is. In Born on a Blue Day, both his difficulties and his awakening consciousness of himself and others are charted. The miracle is that he wrote it himself.

To scientists, Tammet represents a rare opportunity. "Most savants, you can see what they do," says Treffert, "but they can't describe what they do. Some people look at Tammet and say, 'We can see his ability, but where is his disability?' But when you read his book, you see that disability was evident earlier on. The good news is that some autistic features and behaviour can lessen."

Autism is such a sad condition for parents to deal with. Tammet likes giving hope. Just before he was born his mother had a kind of premonition that her son would be different. "Whatever happens, we'll love him, just love him," she told her husband, and then she began to cry.

Now Tammet is proud to be different. "If there is one thing my example can do for people, not just on the autistic spectrum, it is to show that being different is not necessarily a bad thing. Each person to me is unique and amazing," he says.

Life is messy. Tammet's story does not end totally happily. His father's depressive illness has deteriorated sharply and Tammet has been unable to speak to him for many months. "His illness has gone beyond the point where he is rational," he explains. His mother relied on her husband; they had nine children together. Now she, too, has depression. "I do everything I can to help her cope with losing my father, because I don't think he will ever come back." His empathy tells its own powerful story of how far he has come.

He has enough sense of self now to be comfortable being Daniel Tammet. He even sees why he might be loved. Love, he says, has no equation, and when you love someone that person is ultimately a reason for loving. "There is something in me that my partner can't see in anyone else. And it's the same for me." It's like when he recited pi, he explains. People asked why. And the only thing he could say was for pi's own sake: he found the number beautiful. A strange, quiet beauty, like Tammet's own.

[robininthelabyrinth]

for the prompts: NMJ/JC - Everyone with a functioning brain cell can see that JC just needs someone to tell him he’s doing a good job. And if WWX isn’t stepping up? Well, NMJ definitely will. (Preferably smut and/or fluff) Thank you! ❤️

Compliments - ao3

It started in anger, out of spite.

Traditionally, the world took this to be a bad thing, but in all honesty the vast majority of projects in the Nie sect were started that way – they inherited fiery tempers and spiteful personalities from their ancestors along with their saber cultivation traditions – and it didn’t always turn out badly. There were any number of buildings, techniques, or technological innovations in the Unclean Realm that had started life as a furious fuck you to someone and only turned into something worthwhile about halfway through, once the person involved had calmed down enough to think about what they were doing, realize they were already committed, and then shrug and carry on forward because there was no point in stopping a charge midway.

What Nie Mingjue meant was: there was precedent.

He liked to think it started with Jiang Fengmian, but if Nie Mingjue was being honest with himself, it started back in the Unclean Realm when Nie Huaisang had told him, quite casually over dinner, that he thought that the female cultivator in his class was very pretty and that he’d be happy to marry her.

“Uh,” Nie Mingjue had said, very intelligently. “Huaisang, you’re seven.”

Nie Huaisang had not seen the problem. Instead, he explained very forthrightly that it was only right that he start thinking early on about his marriage, as getting married and having children would be his great contribution to the sect on account of being useless good-for-nothing unfit for anything else –

“Wait,” Nie Mingjue said. “Who told you that?!”

Nie Huaisang claimed he had deduced it.

Nie Mingjue claimed that Nie Huaisang was full of bullshit, and also that he wasn’t good-for-nothing even if he wasn’t good at saber, and anyway even if he was a total good-for-nothing he was still Nie Mingjue’s good-for-nothing and no one had better say a single damn word against him or Nie Mingjue would bite them.

“I meant stab them!” he explained, far too late; Nie Huaisang was already rolling around laughing to the point of tears. “I have a saber. I can stab people! I’m actually very scary, you know!”

Nie Huaisang hadn’t believed him one bit and had carried on, seemingly at peace and forgetting everything, but Nie Mingjue had gone seeking advice from all of his elders and counselors and the more dependable senior disciples of his sect, abruptly terrified that he was permanently damaging Nie Huaisang by raising him the wrong way or something. Didn’t children need encouragement at that age? Weren’t they all young and tender peaches liable to be bruised at the slightest glance or young sprouts that needed to be sheltered from the harsh wind lest they grow up crooked?

Everyone assured him that children were hardier than they appeared, flexible and capable of bouncing back from just about anything. He'd pressed, though, pointing out that even the most flexible wood would eventually form a crack in the face of a vicious hurricane, and in the end they'd admitted that it was better to avoid applying too much pressure at too young an age, that a child squeezed too hard or not hard enough might develop neuroses that would hinder them in the future.

They mostly tried not to look at him when they said that, presumably thinking to themselves that Nie Mingjue was little more than a child himself and had already been subject to the worst pressures possible, which would undoubtedly result in who knows what future issues, but he hadn’t paid that part any mind. As far as he was concerned, his life was already a loss – he had sworn to take revenge for his father, to make that ancient monster Wen Ruohan pay with his life for what he had done and furthermore he'd sworn to pay back the blood debt in full before any of that burden passed to Nie Huaisang.

Letting Nie Huaisang grow up happy – that was what mattered.

Letting him be insulted when Nie Mingjue wasn’t looking played no part in that plan. If Nie Huaisang were going to be insulted, let it be by outsiders who he wouldn’t need to care about! Within their Nie sect, at minimum, he should be doted upon and honored, or else those responsible would have to explain themselves to Nie Mingjue.

Those dark thoughts still lingering in his mind, he had gone to the Lotus Pier for a discussion conference, and that, perhaps, was where it really started.

Rumor had already made the entire cultivation world aware that Jiang Fengmian had found the orphaned son of Cangse Sanren and Wei Changze, and that he had taken him into his home as his ward, allowing him to become a Jiang sect disciple – treating him almost as one of the family, even. That much was known, so it didn’t come as much of a surprise when Jiang Fengmian proudly introduced him or even more proudly showed him off, praising him to the high heavens.

What did come as a surprise was how little he praised his own son standing beside him, despite them being only a few days apart in age. It was as if Jiang Fengmian had simply forgotten that such a creature existed, much less that he had himself contributed to its spawning, and the constant looks of hope – invariably crushed – the child sent him made it clear that the present situation had been going on for some time.

Fuck you, Nie Mingjue thought, seeing red, seeing instead Nie Huaisang in his failed saber classes, struggling so desperately to keep up with the rest even though his body wouldn’t allow for it, being told he was useless and a good-for-nothing and fit for nothing but marriage. Fuck you, Jiang Fengmian.

He couldn’t say that, of course.

So instead he said, “Excellent stance,” to the child, who'd received the courtesy name Wanyin but seemed to be universally called Jiang Cheng. “Do you know the others in the set?”

Jiang Cheng, staring at him, very slowly nodded, and demonstrated them.

“Absolutely perfect,” Nie Mingjue said loudly, drawing attention to himself with his over-loud voice that everyone would automatically forgive on account on him being both a Nie and a young man. “You can see how hard you’ve worked at it, and it has paid off handsomely. You are very lucky in your son, Sect Leader Jiang.”

“…thank you,” Jiang Fengmian said, a little bemused at being interrupted. He’d been talking yet again about Wei Wuxian’s brilliance at picking up the sword again after years of living on the streets without practice, even though at the moment the smiling boy's admittedly impressive skills were still largely wild and undisciplined.

Nie Mingjue nodded, and said: “When exactly did you say the opening festivities would be starting?”

Jiang Fengmian had clearly forgotten about that in his enthusiasm, so he quickly hurried back to the actual subject at hand and the discussion conference was started in earnest.

It was almost enough to allow Nie Mingjue to forget the matter and put it behind him.

Or, it would have been, if only Jiang Fengmian hadn’t continued to insert praise for Wei Wuxian at every possible instance – it was as if he were the man’s first-born son, rather than another person’s child.

Irritated beyond belief, Nie Mingjue started complimenting Jiang Cheng every time Jiang Fengmian said something nice about Wei Wuxian, and he made sure to keep his compliments accurate: he was a hard worker, dedicated and sincere, thoughtful, clever, not overly arrogant…

“Wei Wuxian came up with his own ideas for a sword style already,” Jiang Fengmian claimed at one point. “You can see him on the training ground now, practicing it – take a look!”

Nie Mingjue picked up a stone and flicked it over with his fingers, making Wei Wuxian jump half a chi into the air and nearly fall on his ass.

“Weak foundation, and he over-commits,” he analyzed dryly, because it was true, and because no one else was saying it. He didn't make it any harsher than it had to be: he had nothing against the boy himself, of course; it was only that he knew from experience that it was much easier to be the one being complimented than the one not. “He’s got his head so high in the clouds that his feet are barely touching the ground – the weakest fierce corpse would knock him flat as a pancake with a childish style like that. He’d be better off sticking with orthodox or he’ll end up in real trouble one day.”

“Sect Leader Nie, really,” Jiang Fengmian said disapprovingly. “He’s only nine.”

“Old enough to pick up bad habits,” Nie Mingjue retorted. “Your son’s the same age and he’s as steady as a rock. If Jiang Cheng keeps going as he is, he’ll have a strong enough base to outlast the fiercest storm.”

“A rock has no imagination,” Jiang Fengmian said, and was he actually arguing that his son was inferior? Out loud, in front of outsiders? Did the man have no shame? “Mingjue, you’re young, but you must know that my Jiang sect prizes freedom and creativity as the highest virtue –”

“Would you rather build a house using a firework or a foundation stone?” Nie Mingjue asked, doing his best not to outwardly bristle at the condescendingly intimate use of his name by someone who might be technically his elder but legally his equal. “Tell me, Fengmian, does your Jiang sect’s acclaimed ‘freedom’ only allow for people to be as fluid as the river and not as steady as the earth?”

Jiang Fengmian faltered, clearly not knowing how to answer that.

Nie Mingjue raised his hands in a sarcastic salute: “As the leader of a sect whose style is based on a grounded foundation, I would be very happy if you would educate me in your wisdom. No doubt my peers would benefit as well.”

Perhaps it was at that point that Jiang Fengmian realized that his words could be misinterpreted as an insult to all the sects whose styles were less free-flowing than the Jiang – just about all of them except for maybe the Lan and their subsidiary sects, given their preference for techniques modeled on the wind over the water – and moreover that this was a discussion conference, where every word was political, and that a great deal of people were glaring balefully at him. He hastily moved the conversation onwards, and left the subject of his sons for another day.

Later that evening, Madame Yu came over to where Nie Mingjue was nursing a bowl of very fine wine that he didn’t especially feel like consuming. Before he could start worrying about the Purple Spider’s intentions, she said, voice stiff, “Your words regarding my son are too kind. His skills are still inferior; he has a great deal of progress yet to be made.”

“He’s only nine,” Nie Mingjue said, feeling mortified that she’d noticed his little temper tantrum, which he had belatedly realized was probably extremely obvious. “Anyway, I wasn't lying. He has a good foundation; he’ll be a fearsome cultivator one day, there’s no doubt. I only said what I saw.”

“You didn’t comment about Wei Wuxian,” she said. “You must have noticed his genius.”

“Geniuses don’t need to be praised overmuch,” Nie Mingjue said. He himself had been termed a genius by his teachers, and he’d hated every single moment of it – couldn’t he just be good at things without having people fall all over themselves to compliment him? He’d enjoyed it at the start, but after a while it had started to wear on him; he was expected to be a genius in all things, and being simply ordinary was suddenly seen as failing. “It’s the ones that have to work hard that do, or else they’ll be discouraged…comparing someone to another person’s child works as a spur to a certain extent, but after a while it loses its potency as a tool.”

Your husband is a fucking idiot, he didn’t say. It’s his own son! How could he speak like that about him? Shouldn’t he be holding him in his palms like a gentle flame, protecting him from the wind and rain? How can he bear to scold his son when he hasn't shown that the scolding is meant for his benefit?

“Perhaps,” Madame Yu said, but it was clear on her face that she wasn’t about to start taking parenting advice from a half-grown sprout like Nie Mingjue. “Nevertheless, your words were kind.”

She swept away after that, much to his relief. He shook his head and daydreamed about a magic tool that would make this whole nightmarish experience go by that much quicker.

In the end, it went by at the same speed it always did. It could have ended there, but Nie Mingjue kept up the habit of blatantly complimenting Jiang Cheng in future sect conferences as well, if only because it clearly irritated Jiang Fengmian – less because Nie Mingjue was praising his son and more because it was so obviously meant as an indirect critique of Jiang Fengmian’s skills as a parent or sect leader, and moreover it reminded all the other sects of that unfortunate interchange and made them less inclined to listen to him – and of course, because, well, once you’ve started a charge, you had to finish it even if you came to your senses about halfway through.

He made sure to keep it proportionate, of course, since there was nothing worse than false praise. He didn’t really mean anything by it, other than the half-formed thought that someone ought to be doing it – that the boy should know that someone looked at him and Wei Wuxian and remembered to praise him first. Nie Mingjue praised Wei Wuxian too, of course, since the boy often deserved it; it was only that he made a particular point not to forget about Jiang Cheng, either.

(He also made sure the other sect leaders saw how well the technique could be used to fluster Jiang Fengmian, an intrusion into his personal life that could be masked in perfect politeness, and several of them picked up the same tact, though less consistently than Nie Mingjue – Sect Leaders Jin and Wen, naturally, always looking for a weakness, but interestingly enough also Lan Qiren, who was normally above such petty maneuvers. Possibly he was actually just complimenting Jiang Cheng because he sincerely approved of him.)

He didn’t think much of it.

Nie Mingjue didn’t think much of it during the other discussion conferences, or when he came to the Cloud Recesses to pick up Nie Huaisang, who had – amazingly – actually managed to pass this time, although the expression on Lan Qiren’s face suggested the pass might have more to do with the other sect leader’s desire to never see Nie Huaisang haunt his classroom ever again.

“You know what, don’t tell me. Tell me….hm…how did Jiang Wanyin do?” Nie Mingjue asked, hand over his eyes as if it could forestall the headache. “He’s a bright boy, and knows how to put his mind to something when he wants. Tell me about him instead, it’ll be less depressing.”

“He’s very bright,” Lan Qiren agreed. “Very thoughtful, and very thorough. He sometimes errs towards conservatism out of fear of giving the wrong answer, but that’s just a matter of confidence; his thinking is very good. He’s very clear-sighted as long as the matter is logical, rather than emotional.”

“No surprise,” Nie Mingjue grunted. “He’ll be a sect leader worthy of respect, in his time.”

When he’s rid of that father of his dragging him down, he thought ungraciously, and he saw Lan Qiren bob his head in a sharp nod of unspoken agreement.

“All right,” he said. “I’m adequately fortified now. Tell me about Huaisang.”

Lan Qiren gave him a look of profound sympathy.

It wasn’t until much later, during the Sunshot Campaign, that it was first called to his attention – by Jiang Cheng himself, oddly enough.

“Why do you keep doing that?” he hissed, having stayed behind after one of their meetings.

Nie Mingjue blinked at him. “Doing – what?”

“You – you said – about me…!”

Nie Mingjue tried to recall what he’d said during the meeting just now. “That you – were doing an excellent job while facing much higher level of obstacles than everyone else?” he hazarded, because he had said something like that. “Or was it the bit about how if any of them had needed to rebuild their sect and fight at the same time, we’d all be doomed because they couldn’t multitask for shit?”

Yeah, it was probably that one.

“I didn’t mean any offense by referencing what happened to your sect,” he said, hoping to explain. “It was only –”

“I didn’t take offense,” Jiang Cheng mumbled. “It’s fine. I mean, it’s not fine, but – it happened, everyone knows that it happened, not talking about it isn’t going to make it not have happened. That’s not what I meant…why do you keep saying such nice things about me?”

Nie Mingjue blinked at him. “Because they’re true?”

Jiang Cheng’s cheeks flushed red. “You’ve always said nice things about me. Ever since I was a little kid – every time you saw me, at the discussion conferences, or the Cloud Recesses, or even in your letters to my father…”

He had in fact done that.

“I just want to know why. Is it – my father’s not around, you can’t be doing it just to piss him off, even though I know that was part of it. Why me?”

Nie Mingjue coughed a little, having not realized that Jiang Cheng had noticed. Or possibly even overheard, in regards to the Cloud Recesses. “I’m sure you’re familiar with the concept of the other person’s child,” he said, and Jiang Cheng nodded his head sharply, clearly thinking of Wei Wuxian. “You’re Huaisang’s.”

“Me?” Jiang Cheng seemed unduly vulnerable when he asked. “You compare him – to me?”

“It’s amazing he tolerated you at the Cloud Recesses,” Nie Mingjue said with a sigh. In fact, his brother had all but declared war on Jiang Cheng in absentia on account of all Nie Mingjue’s comments, only for his first letter home from the Cloud Recesses that year to be I see why you like him! He’s cute! A perfect match for you! because he’d apparently decided that Nie Mingjue had a crush on the boy.

Which he certainly hadn’t – at least not when he’d been that age, anyway. Jiang Cheng had grown up to embody every single one of the compliments Nie Mingjue had paid him when he’d been younger, especially with the maturity and natural aura of command that came to him after his personal tragedy.

“But why…you knew Wei Wuxian about as well as you knew me.”

Nie Mingjue snorted. “And that would have helped Huaisang how, exactly? If I wanted to compare him with someone who picked things up the first time they saw it, I wouldn’t need to go outside the Nie sect for that – I was also considered a genius when I was young. It’s no failing to be born without a vast and unending natural talent; Huaisang’s issue has always been his unwillingness to put in the effort.”

Jiang Cheng stared at him.

“Anyway, your father was so blinded by his adoration for Wei Wuxian that he overlooked your merits, which are different but no less impressive,” Nie Mingjue added. “As someone who was trying to figure out how to raise a child, it irritated me; I thought someone ought to make it clear to you that you were seen.”

“Yes,” Jiang Cheng said, his voice strangely hoarse. “Yes, you – you succeeded.”

He paused for a moment, meeting Nie Mingjue’s eyes intently, and then abruptly said, “I’ll be leaving,” and dashed out.

Nie Mingjue wasn’t entirely sure if that meant he should stop or not. Jiang Cheng had said he wasn’t offended…anyway, it was a fixed habit by now. He’d been doing it for over half his life! He couldn’t stop that easily! It would be like trying to stop his temper, or a charge – there was nothing for it.

Jiang Cheng would just have to live with a few compliments.

“Wow, you’re an idiot,” Nie Huaisang said when he told him about the incident, months later while he was lying in bed, recovering from the disaster that had been the end of the war. “I’ll fix this.”

“Fix what?”

“I’m going to tell him you’re dying,” Nie Huaisang decided.

“You’re going to do what?!”

“Stay in bed, da-ge! Doctor’s orders!”

The Nie sect chief doctor was an extremely terrifying person. Nie Mingjue stayed in bed.

Some time later, Jiang Cheng stormed in, face pale.

“Huaisang’s a rotten liar and I’m going to be fine,” Nie Mingjue said at once.

Jiang Cheng stopped mid-storm, and abruptly deflated. “Really?”

“Really. I would’ve stopped him, but I’m stuck in bed for the moment.”

Jiang Cheng took a seat next to him. “That sounds serious. You shouldn’t underestimate war wounds, especially given your sect’s tendency towards qi deviations...”

“Compassionate as well,” Nie Mingjue teased. “I’ll have to add that to the rotation of compliments.”

Jiang Cheng flushed red. “You’re…planning on continuing?”

“For the rest of my life, however short it might be,” Nie Mingjue said, because he was an honest person, even when it was inconvenient. He was going to explain about the habit, and the concept of stopping mid-charge, but he didn’t manage to start before Jiang Cheng grabbed him by the collar and pulled him up into a kiss.

After that, he figured that maybe explaining that part of it wasn’t necessary. He might be slow on the uptake, but he wasn’t actually stupid.

#mdzs #nie mingjue #jiang cheng #jiang fengmian #lan qiren #nie huaisang #my fic #my fics #compliments

[ladytemeraire]

I am very, very tired of my brain being broken.

(Today has been a particularly bad brain day, feel free to skip. CW for discussion of medical stuff and anxiety.)

I feel like the thing a lot of neurotypical people don’t realize is that those of us who deal with mental illness or other brain issues like ADHD are fully aware of just how absurd our neuroses and triggers are, and having to live with them is far more frustrating and exhausting than you could ever imagine. Like we know our brains are being dumb, we know it’s not logical or rational, and knowing it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference.

I thought I was holding it together okay given the state of things but hoo boy did today prove me wrong. Even with being very good about taking my meds and trying to get sleep and extending myself extra grace and self care, I’ve gone from maybe one panic attack a month to one or more per week.

Here is what prompted the latest one, transcribed as close to the frantic screaming in my brain as I can manage:

I had a blood draw yesterday (routine health screening, scheduled well before the world went to hell, the person came to my place rather than me going to a clinic or hospital and wore a mask to limit exposure) and it went fine but she couldn’t get a vein to plump up in my left arm so she had to use my right one and now it hurts and there’s a huge bruise and the fact that it’s my dominant arm means I can’t stop using it to ice it and make it better, which wouldn’t be a big problem except my piece of shit over-anxious brain can’t stop focusing on pain in the right arm as the symptom of a stroke or heart attack (particularly in women) and connecting that to how strokes and clots have been showing up in otherwise healthy young people as a comorbid symptom of COVID even though I have no reason to think I have COVID, not to mention that’s a thing to be concerned about in its own right, and it’s linking that straight back to the paranoia I thought I’d kicked years ago about clots and aneurysms and other silent medical issues.

(Also I really, really fucking hate blood draws in general so I was a crying mess during it and that only makes me feel like more of a baby about the whole thing.)

I literally had a sobbing panic attack on the couch for almost two hours straight this morning, and then another shorter one partway through the afternoon, and I can’t make it stop. My anxiety in general and medical anxiety in particular hasn’t been this bad since I had my breakdown in college. And it’s not entirely unfounded, but there’s nothing I can do about it, there’s no tangible way to soothe it, so all I can do is spiral.

I might call my PCP and ask if he’d consider prescribing Xanax or something, just to help get me through the extra stress brought on by The State Of The World, because clearly that’s been enough to push me from “a little stressed but managing and coping” to “two seconds from a breakdown at all times”. But that might require me going in for an appointment, and I really don’t want to do that right now, even though our governor in his infinite wisdom has started moving us to Phase 1 of reopening.

To be perfectly clear, I am not looking for medical advice, and I am perfectly aware of exactly how goddamn ridiculous this all sounds; I’m just venting into the void. I just want it to stop. Just make my brain shut the fuck up for five fucking minutes and let me live my life without having to fight with my own goddamn mental processes.

#life with ladytemeraire #mental illness #anxiety #I am so tired #cw medical #coronavirus #(only mentioned)

[tellywoodtrash]

ishqbaaz ep 400 - 404 lb

now, let’s see what fresh hell my idiot children have raised in the one week i left them unsupervised! 

ep 400 (30.10.17)

ok you know what, i reallllllly do not care about this lameass shivika plot. i didn’t care one week ago when i was watching in real time, and now one week later, i literally couldn’t give less of a fuck. ugh. already disgruntled at having to sit through this garbage. 

YOU FUCKERS SHOULD BE CONCENTRATING ON RIKARA, PAR NAHI, IDHAR BHI APNE AINVAYIII KE ISSUES. HONESTLY. THINK ABOUT SOMEONE OTHER THAN YOURSELVES FOR 4 MINUTES. AND IF YOU HAVE TO THINK ABOUT YOURSELVES, THINK PROPERLY LIKE NORMAL MARRIED COUPLES, AND GO BANG. GODDDDDDDDDDDDDD. 

ugh ok i really don’t care about anika’s nonsense mental issues when there’s literally so many other problems. fwding this bs. 

yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaas, rikara!!!!!!!! 

i am honestly so emosh rn. 😭😭😭

yaaaaaaas baby girl! call him out on his bs! 

ok can’t help but feel a little bad for kunal’s kamar in this scene. is it just me or is he ladkhadaayiing a bit? 

UGH GTFO SHIVIKA I DON’T CARE ABOUT YOU TWO RN UNLESS YOU’RE FUCKING. 

anika has legittttttttttttt lost her goddamned mind. honestly, what the fuck have they done to my girl???? 

IS THIS HONESTLY AN ISSUE???? LIKE???? I CAN’T EVEN WITH THESE TWO ASSHOLES RIGHT NOW. JUST GTFO MY SCREEN BEFORE I RAGE QUIT WATCHING THIS EP. 

lmao ok kunal ki saaas phul rahi hai, someone give the poor boy a sec to catch his breath. 

YAS GAURI ASKKKKKKKKKKKK HIMMMMMMMM 

pffffffft, don’t even talk about shivika’s ishqbaazi rn gauri, coz... i just can’t. 

“WOH DONO EK DUSRE KO NEECHA NAHI DIKHAATE KABHI.”

ok someone needs to sit gauri down and tell her all of bade bhaiyya ke puraane paap. 

and rudra’s just going snip-happy on ajay’s car like a toddler in crafts class. best. 

ok ruvya nonsense is what i care about least in this show so fwd fwd fwd. 

this trope of shit getting stuck in each other’s jewelry and what not is literally the worst. 

OK RUDRA NEEDS TO BE GIVEN ONE TIGHT SLAP. WHY THE FUCK IS BHAVYA EVEN PUTTING UP WITH THIS BS? SHE JUST NEEDS TO TELL SHIVAAY WHAT’S UP AND GTFO THE STUPID “BOND” CLAUSE. 

god i’m just so mad at heterosexuality rn. all these ppl just need to leave each other alone already, coz together, they just make each other and everyone else miserable as fuck. 

YAS GAURI. TEAR THAT DUPATTA. FREE YOURSELF FROM THE SHACKLES OF THE HEGEMONIC INSTITUTION THAT IS MATRIMONY IN THE DESI SOCIETYYYYYYYYYYYY

why am i being forced to watch this utter TRASH that is this shivika plot? it’s literally worse than the ruvya plot. #bloodyUNSAHIKKABLE (something for my southie peeps there.) 

never thought i’d relate SO MUCH with shivaay during an argument, but hey, here we are. matlab facepalm kar kar ke mera toh mooh hi laal ho gaya hai. 

ok what even is this editing? ffs, kuch toh transition effect daalo scenes ke beech mein. 

oh gauriiiiiiii, my baby girl, don’t cryyyyyyyyy. mera dillll jaltaaa haiiiiii. i can’t bear to see you like this. 😥😥😥😢😢😢

ok i can’t bear his crying either, but he deserves to cry a little, so dil pe patthar rakh ke seh loongi main. 

GOD SRSLY ANIKA YOU NEED TO GROW UP. 

great. usko bhi pakad ke taana and issue. shivaay just leave her be. let her go eat something and she’ll calm the fuck down in time and come find you. 🙄🙄🙄

i’m just fwding this garbage, because after EVERYTHING they went though, if she still doesn’t trust him, phir mujhe kuch nahi kehna. honestly, so done with this. 

ok just in case i didn’t hate men enough in this episode, ajay’s here to MAKE SURE ki koi kasar reh toh nahi gayi. 😒😒😒

okay fuckkkkk offf shitty ajayyyyyyy, with your crappy unibrow. 

OMFG HAATH LAGAAYA, SAALE KAMEENE HIMMAT KAISE HUIIIIII KAAAT KE GANDE NAALI MEIN NA PHENK DOON MAIN

ok this grownass man has been TOLD the issue to his face and he’s still like “idk why she’s mad at me?????” why are men like thisssss????? 

god why won’t this shitty ass episode enddddddddddddddd??? 400th episode my ass. 

waah, bhavya’s gonna solve the mysteries of the feminine mind for bhaiyya. 

lol this little golu molu baby sardar. what a cutie. 

this show really nails their casting of kids. highly surprising how all of them are non annoying. 

YOU KNOW HOW YOU CAN BRING BACK HER KHOYA HUA CONFIDENCE? BY SEXING HER. SO PLEASE. GET TO IT. MATLAB, TUM AADMI HO YA PAJAMA?!!?!

GOD FINALLLLLLLLLLY THIS DAMN EPISODE IS FUCKING OVER. HALLELUJAH. 

ep 401 (31.10.17)

aaaaaaaand golu molu is back. 

shivaay, don’t you have enough issues in your life???? ek aur issue ke beech mein taang adaa rahe ho???? go talk to your stupid wife.  

... is there a reason he got outta costume for this???? 

and god the ugly blue filter. hate. HAAAAAAAAATE. WHY DO THEY USE IT EVERY TIME THESE TWO HAVE A SCENE IN THIS LOCATION????? IT’S SO FUCKING UGLY. 

man do i haaaave to watch this???? he’s just gonna be all i promise ill love you when you’re old and blah blah blah physical looks don’t matter dil matters and blah blah. 

“i’m not trying, i AM cute.” 

pffffffffft. ek toh overconfidence ki hadh. you’re not even that cute. doosra, bebe!Anika is this close to taking off her chandni and beating all the cute outta you. 

my god i cannot be gladder than i am to be utterly single rn, coz jesus above, being in a relationship looks fucking exhausting. yahaan mujhse apne emotions aur issues jhele nahi jaate, and you have to be deal with someone elses’ neuroses too???? no thanks. 

i am baby!sardar and he is me. utterly sick of these ppl and screaming “meri jaan baksh do!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” 

called shivaay’s nonsense speech almost down to the word. not feeling particularly proud about it tho, coz that just means the writing of this show is just thaaaaat thakela. 

OMG ANIKA WHICH OTHER WOMAN WOULD EVEN WANT THIS STUPID GODFORSAKEN DEMON OF A MAN?????????? HAVE YOU EVER THOUGHT OF THAT????????? THAT LITERALLY NO OTHER WOMAN IN ON GOD’S GREEN EARTH CAN TOLERATE HIM????? 

ok i swear to god rudra needs to get hit by a bus or something. #freeBhavya

WHY WON’T THIS STUPID SCENE END OMG

fwding. don’t care. gimme gauri. NOW. NOWWWWWWWWWWWWW. 

OOOOH. WHY’S BULBUL COMING TO OMKI????? is she realising that she’d rather be married to repentant hottie shaayar rather than ugly unibrow handsy fucker???

ok. clue has been given that richa is the reason. use your goddamn brain now, omki. 

god his sexyyyyy agony whisper voice. it’s doing things to meeeeeeee. 😍😍😍

haaaaaye his face. be still my beating heart. 

of course. ajay is daksh 2.0, but not even half as entertaining. 

i miss daksh, man. after svetlana, he’s the most lolz delivering waala villain this show has ever had. 

OK WHAT EVEN IS THIS OUTFIT GAURI IS WEARING LORD ABOVE NA SAR HAI NA PAIR, JAANE KAISE TEEN CHAAR CHICHDE JOD DIYE HAI AUR USKO “OUTFIT” BULA RAHE HO

angsty sexyyyyyyyyyyyyy eyes are being maaaaaade. 😭😭😭

and ugly ajay is noticinggg and grinding his teeth all shivaay-style. 

ughhhhh ajay you’re the fucking worst. i really fucking hope the oberois go to town on you and repeatedly kick you in the nuts. 

ok shivaay’s outfit has actually made me go blind and i’m now watching this episode with my mann ki aankhein. 😣😣😣

shivaay still can’t understand the concept of consent and free will. honestly, i think this idiot needs to have the point beaten into him. 

aisi time par bhi isko shayari sooj rahi hai. emo!maxxxxx only my son is. 

“mujhse vaada karo hum aur kuch nahi karenge.”

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA BOY DO YOU NOT KNOW YOUR OBEROI KIN AT ALL??????? SHAADI KHUD KI HO YA KISI AUR KI, TAMASHA TOH KARNA HI HAI! 

omfgggggggg anika, COZ PYAAAR (woh bhi aisa ek number ka ghatiyaaaa “pyaar”) ISN’T EVERYTHING IN LIFE OK????  

ok anika just don’t give a fuck anymoreeee. 

aaaaaaaaaaaaand the wig is offfff.

why’s gauri shocked? she fully knew anika was here? they slept in the same bed??? 

ajay is the shivaay of bareilly. all authoritative and shouty and shiz. pity that the real shivaay is here, and about to teach him how it’s really done. 

LMAO MAAAAAAAAAA IS LIKE “I DIDN’T KNOW NOTHING! MAIN TOH ALLAH MIYAAN KI GAAAIII HOON!!” 😂😂😂😂

shivaay’s having a haaaaaard time controlling himself. teeth grinding and eye rolling to the max. 

lololololololol looks like ajay’s maa itself shall be cockblocking him. 

“THA NAHI. HOON.” 

daaaaaaaaaayum son! 

LMAO SHIVAAY’S FACE LIKE “I TRIED, MAN. I TRIED.” 

styyyyyylish and tadi-filled removal of pagdis and wigs. 

god kunal, tumhe koi haq nahi banta ki tum itne khoobsurat lago. NOT FAIR! 😫😫😫😫

lol nakuul’s champu hair, compared to the other two’s faaaaaahbulous, totally-unaffected-by-pagdi hair. 

obligatory ‘haaye my beautiful boys!’ waala shot. 😍😍😍

gauri be like WHY ARE MY SASURAAL WAALE SUCH FREAKSSSSSSSSSSSSSS OMG

EP 402 (01.11.17)

LMAO like whaaaaaaaat trip is ajay even on? she’s HIS wife, not yours. what “cheeeen lega” and all??? kuch bhi. chal hatt, chutiya kahinka. 

can’t wait for obros to hand ajay’s ass to him. coz he’s quite honestly asking for it. 

hee hee hee, i shall always get a kick outta shivaay jumping men who have like at least half a foot on him and trying to fight them. my smol fighty baby. 

OMFG OMKARA KO CHAANTA. AB TOH NAHI BACHEGA TU BETA. AB TOH TICKET KATAA HI LE WAAPSI KI. 

WHY’S RUDRA STOPPING SHIVAAY???? BRO, YOU’RE SUPP TO JUMP AJAY TOO???? MY GOD, NIKKAMMA KA NIKAMMA ONLY THIS IDIOT BOY IS. WHEN YOU GONNA START PULLING YOUR DAMN WEIGHT AROUND HERE, ASSHOLE???????????????

awwww man shivaay’s face is making me cryyyyyyyyyyyyyy. 😭😭😭😭

OMG OMG OMGGGGGGGG BULBUL CALLING OUT TO BADE BHAIYYE #MYBROTPLIVES #shivriHameshaAmarRahe

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAS BITCCCCCCH!!!!!!!!!!!!! 🙌🏽🙌🏽🙌🏽🙌🏽🙌🏽

ab baby bulbul ne aadesh diya hai tohhh... 

lol bulbul’s bloodlust will not be satisfied with just the one obro. she wants them ALL to go to town on these bareilly bastards. and that’s allllllllll the encouragement hubs needs. 

how awesome is this shot of bulbul and her three protectors tho! 🙌🏽🙌🏽🙌🏽

gimme some shots of anika and bhavya kicking ass too plz??? 

ugh no, they’re relegated to cheerleaders. how lame. 

LMAO GAURI’S HAPPINESS AT THE CHAOS, FADING AWAY AT RICHA/MUKESH’S WTF FACES HAHAHAHA

shivaay’s like bro i’ve had enough of this small town bs. can we gtfo here pls? 

god i realllllly hate gauri’s outfit. it’s drowninggggg her tiny frame. 

“hum waapas nahi jaa sakte.” 

lmao everyone’s faces like “behen itna maar dhaar karne se pehle nahi bol sakti thi???? phukat mein energy waste.”  

i really love how shivaay is having waaaaaaay more of a devastated reaction than om at gauri not coming back. 

protip to shivaay: just legally adopt gauri (like you did sahil), so she’ll be your sister no matter what the fuck goes on in the rikara marriage. 

... we’re back in OM? 

oh yes we are. unless shivaay authoritatively makes hot chocolate for ppl in others’ kitchens as well. 

ok that sleeved vest looks really bad under THAT kurta, shivaay. 

shivaay, ever heard of giving someone (anyone!) personal space? no? ok cool. 

CAN A MAN ANGSTILY MOPE IN THE DARK ABOUT HIS WIFE MARRYING SOMEONE ELSE IN PEACE? PLEASE???!?!?!!!!!!

heavy vibes of post-ishaana kadhi-chawal scene no? 

still one of my eternal fave obro scenes. (“main iss baare mein baat nahi karna chahta!” *talks about it for 2 hours*)

“hota hai.”

haan is ghar mein toh aksar hota hai, ki biwi kisi aur se shaadi karne chali jaati hai, lekin NORMAL LOGON KE SAATH aisa nahi hota. 

oh boyyyyyy, shivaay ke khurafaati dimaag mein idea. 

meanwhile gauri is doing full intezaam of bhaagna from there. 

gosh gauri, since when are you such a terrible liar???

maa is doing everything she can to cover bitiyaa’s ass. love it. 

ajayyyyy doesn’t even wanna marry her???? then why’s he so insistenttttt????? 

STOP LYING TO HER SHIVAAY. FOR FUCKS SAKE HAVE YOU LEARNTTTTTTTTT NOTHINGGGGGG. GOD. 

“shankar ji apni chiraiyya ka dhyaan rakhlenge.”

YUP. IN THE FORM OF BADE BHAIYAAAAAA. WHO’S FLYING OVER AS WE SPEAK TO SAVE HIS BABY BIRD. 

omg how daaaaaaare he LIE TO HER FACE LIKE THIS. BITCH, ONE. YOU A HELLA SUCKY LIAR. AND TWO. SHE KNOWS YOUR DUMB ASS BETTER THAN YOU KNOW YOURSELF. 

“WE GOT OURSELVES A BULBUL TO KIDNAP.”

god this asshole really going to fucking kidnap gauri. srsly, it’s like he learned nothing from his first wedding. 

“yaar hum raat ko ghee lene jaa rahe hai????” 

LOLOLOL

fuck, my hearttttttttttt. god i love these stupidass boys so much. 

ooooooooooh gauri is overhearinggggg. 

YAAAAAAAAAS BULBUL YOU BEAT THE F OUTTA THIS ASSHOLE. 

pffffffffft, oh nowwwww she wants to call omkiiiiiii. 

of course he won’t pick up. girl, this is why you should depend on no man. 

ugh the cgi for the helicopter is so terrible. 

lol gauri has emptied her whole wardrobe into making escape waali rassi. she’s seen golmaal (puraana waala, not the chutiya new ones) one too many times i think. 

pffffffffffft waise toh bada kidnapping ka plan bana raha tha??? karne ka time aaya toh shivaay is just standing there frozen and other two just pushed him to side and moved on. 

LMAO HER INNER MONOLOGUE I LOVE GAURIIIIIIIIIII SO MUCH 

LOLOLOLOL HE WAS GONNA BUST INTO A SHER AND RUDRA’S FRUSTRATION

“YEH KAISA AADMI HAI???? BHAABI MUBARAK HO, HUM AAPKO KIDNAP KARNE AAYE HAI.” LMAOOOOOOOOOO

be still my beating heart! 😍😍😍😍

omfg ommmmmmmmmm you idiot her headdddddddddd!

aaaaaaaaaaaaaand great. ajay and minions are here. ugh. 

obros exchanging “it’s go time!!!!!!” faces. 

wow. that was hella easy. 

ep 403 (02.11.17)

wow, gauri still hasn’t regained consciousness? maybe you shoulda taken her to a doctor for a ct scan or something first.

“bhaiyya, aur koi illegal kaam karna hai ya main sone jaaon?” LMAO 

anika’s detective dimaag is on during half-sleep also. AMAZING. 

but never fearrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr! billu’s here to romance it outta her. haaaaaaye.

ugh. fuck these two ridiculously attractive assholes who won’t bang and insist on killing me with sexual tension. 

uh ohhhhhhhh, billu made a boo boo! wife is on to him!

omg look how tiny shrenu’s feeeeet are! 

ugh my heart. can these two just be happy now... pleaseeeee. they’re the life raft i have to tie myself to now that shivika are... just... idk what. 

snort. fucking idiot. 

“japan mere zehen main hai kyunki it’s my favt. country. wahan ki jo mount fuji hai na, it’s a really good mountain! mujhe wahan ka khaana bhi bohut pasand hai!”

LMAO WHAT IS THIS A NIBANDH HE WROTE FOR INTERNATIONAL DAY AT SCHOOL????? 

omfggggg “sabudaana vada khaaya hai tumne japan ka???” hahahahahahaha

I NEED SPACE?????? BITCH GO MAKE AN OBEROI COLONY ON MARS THEN. BADA AAYA SPACE MAANGNE WAALA. 

IDGI???? WHY CAN’T YOU JUST TELL HER GAURI’S IN THE HOUSE???? WHAT DOES IT EVEN MATTER????? 

goddddd anika, why must you discuss all your marriage matters with some other person???? 

lol anika calling bhavya out on knowing rudra wasn’t home last night haha

ouffffff anika, you really need to get a hobby. like, take up watercolours. or knitting. maybe get a pet. horseriding?you need SOMETHING to distract you from the fuckery that is this house and your weirdass marriage. 

LMAO RUDRA “usually kidnapping ke baad phiroti ke liye call karte hai. main karoon kya???” 

“BIWI HAI MERI, GHADDE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” 😂😂😂😂

“we have to keep it under wraps”... MAYBE START BY CLOSING YOUR DAMN DOOR?!?!!?!? 

lolololol man i’m loving the return of omRu scenes. i reallyyyyy missed these two together. 

OMFG OM EK TOH SHE’S UNCONSCIOUS UPAR SE YOU’RE WRAPPING HER AND STASHING HER IN A CUPBOARD????

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand the sisters are here. with their shak waali nazrein. 

the face on an honest man who isn’t lying his pants off. amazing. 

oh hooooooo anikaaaa, you’re so annoyinggggg when you get like this. 

pfffffffft. brothers are here. ab hoga tamasha. 

LMAO AND TAMASHAAA IT IS. THE WAY HE FAINTED ONTO THE BED HAHAHAHAH 

ouff the amount of nautanki. 

LMAO THE WAY HE GOT UP ALL FINE AND THEN REMEMBERED HE WASN’T SUPPOSED TO BE AND FELL AGAIN LOLOLOLOL

lol for first time rudra is doing bagaavat against his eternal master bhaabi

OMFG THE WAY RUDRA JUST PICKED HIM UP AND TOOK HIM I AM DYING HAHAHAHAHA

ohhhhh boy she’s going back into om’s room. 

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand caught! 

OMFG HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA “DEKHO KAUN AAYA HAI!!!! GAURI! AA GAYI!” HAHAHAHAHHAHHA I AM FUCKING DYING OMG HAHAHAHAHA

ok, what exactly is anika’s problem here? she also wanted gauri to come back? matlab... i really don’t get her newfangled issues these days. 

kabhi nahi socha tha ki yeh din bhi dekhne padenge where i’d be on shivaay’s side during arguments. waah re prabhu, teri leela. 

gauri’s having a legit “main kahaaan hoon?” moment. 

great anika has taken her lecturebaaazi outside to the devars. she’s really getting on my last nerve these days. 

like i get her point and all, but behen, tum apne buddhi waale dhong se kaunsa usko izzat-o-aabroo se lene gayi thi???? matlab kuchhhhh bhi.

lmao anika ki toh tain tain phisssssssssssss ho gayiiii. 

and lolololol look at this idiot boy who’s not even hugging her back, he’s just like OMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMG WHAT DO I DO WHAT DO I DO SOMEONE TELL ME?!?!!?!?! 

lmao shivaay’s look of triumph. he’s literally likeeeee 

ouff ok gauri, heavy on the mythological references this early in the morning. 

lmaoooo shivaay knocking om on the back for the patti thing. matlab, when sso thinks you’re being a little extra, know you’ve gone truly overboard. 

ugh ok she forgave him already??? itnaaa bhi lightly nahi jhaadna tha matter ko. 

anika be like behen, y u no tell plan? ainvayiiii mein moral science lecture diye phir rahi thi.

ok i really thought the anika learns about gauri title was about the chutki secret, but siiiiiiiiigh. 

aaaaaand these two are fighting. 

“aise hi rehna hai???? sudharna nahi hai???” 

lol 1 crore ka sawaal pooch diya tumne anikaaaa

god you two, this relationship is fucking exhausting and i’m just a passive witness to it. I CAN’T EVEN IMAGINE BEING IN IT.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAND THERE GO THE PHONES. 

ep 404 (03.11.17)

servants of the house be thinking ‘itne din se kitchen achcha khaasa saaf-sutra tha. lo aa gaye phir gandh machaane.’

godddddddddddddd rudra’s besura singing.

shivaay’s being hella relatable these days.

ok i really don’t like this shakki biwi nonsense of anika’s. like, stop ruining my girl pls. 

awwww my chiraiyya and her bhaujai. 

um, why is this person dressed literally in pinky’s clothes??? 

ok i don’t caaaaaaaaare about this nonsenseeeeee. fwding. 

what even is happening?? you two have been married for like 3 hours and are still fucking up on a minute by minute basis. bade aaye rudra ko marriage advice dene waale. 

I HATE THIS GARBAGE TROPE OF MEN IN DRAG ON INDIAN TV. DAMN YOU KAPIL SHARMA FOR STARTING THIS NONSENSE. A PLAGUE UPON YOUR (ILLEGALLY CONSTRUCTED) HOUSE!

lol shivaay and om inspecting the custard in the bg as if it’s some huuuuge lab experiment or something. 

..... god anikaaaa, you’re a fucking idiot. 

lmao bhavya’s such an enabler. 

ouffff gauri, not you toooooooooooo. 

anika idiot, custard toh lekar bhaagti. 

he’s not gonna catch her. and this is gonna create a huge big raita. *siiiiiiiiiigh*

calllled it. 

bhavya, my sweet, please find yourself a better man. you deserve sooooooooooo much better. 

OMFG SHIVAAY PUT THE FUCKING PLATE DOWN. FUCKING IDIOT. 

GOD THIS IS THE STUPIDEST PLOT EVER ITS FUCKING 4 AM WHY AM I WATCHING THIS GARBAGE 

NOWWWWWWWWW WE TALKINGGGGGG 😏😏😏😏

oooooooooooooooh the chutkiiiiiiii photooooooooooooooo. 

SHE’S IN THE SAME HOUSE WITH YOU. SHE’S MISSED YOU TOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! MY BABIESSSSSSS!!!! MY TWO GIRLSSSSSSS!!!!!!!

EVERY TIME I THINK OF THEM BEING SISTERS FOR REAL, MY HEART OVERFLOWS WITH FEELS

abbe, seedha seedha custard deke jaa na; yeh senti waala lecture kisko sunna hai.

that custard is fucking LIQUID. matlab, set hone tak toh sabrrr karta bro???? 

GOD I HATE THIS NONSENSE OF THE GIRL SAYING SOMETHING WHEN SHE MEANS SOMETHING ELSE. I KNOW WE DO THIS SHIT A LOT BUT WE REALLY GOTTA STOP. MEN DON’T UNDERSTAND IT THE WAY OTHER GIRLS DO. THEY JUST DON’T. SO STOP IT. 

“400 episode ho gaye lekin anika abhi bhi yehi keh rahi hai ki SHIVAAAAY AAAP KYAAAA KAR RAHE HAI???”

i would laugh at the meta but i am too angry that you haven’t as much as made outttttttt yet. what the everlovingggg fuckkkkkkk. you ppl better bang before ep 500 so help me god. SO HELP ME GOD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

ouffffff rudra, ever heard of personal space? you’re the worst. dafaaaa ho!

oh haaaaaaaaaai abhayyyyyy, you hotass demonchild. how you been???? actually, fuck you, where’s my girl tanya and how’s she been???? 

THIS IS LITERALLY DOODH AND JAM THAT HE’S FEEDING HER. LIKE.... IT’S ANNOYINGGGGG ME YOUGAIZ. IT’S ANNOYING ME SO MUCH. 

dayummmm, omki making sex eyes at wife. will i get my tharak fulfilled here first????? will omki shomki and chutki maarofy baazi first?!?!?! 

OH SHIT!!!!!!!!!! I JUST MIGHTTTTTTT!!!!!!!!! 😯😯😯

OMG FUCK YOU RUDRA MAY YOU NEVER HAVE ANOTHER ORGASM IN YOUR LIFE EVER AGAIN YOU STUPID COCKBLOCKER 😡😡😡😡

lmaooooo om’s glee when rudra finally left. i love this idiot child so much. 

UGH BAATEIN?!?!?!!? WHO THE FUCK CARES ABOUT BAATEIN?????GET BACK TO THE MAKING OUTTTTTTTTTTTT YOU STUPID NERDS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 

#ishqbaaz #ishqbaaaz #ib episode liveblogs #episode liveblogs

[unfolded73]

This Graceful Path (5/19)

Summary: Emma has just moved in with Mary Margaret and started working as a deputy in the Storybrooke sheriff’s department when she meets Killian Jones, the town’s introverted harbormaster. When a prominent Storybrooke resident is found murdered, Emma tries to juggle solving the case with new friendships, parenthood, and romance. A Season 1 Cursed!Killian AU.

Rating: Explicit per CSBB guidelines (violence, sex); more of an M on unfolded73’s scale. The sex, when we get there, is not extremely graphic in nature. Same with the violence.

Content Warning: This fic contains two major character deaths, one canon and one not. (You’re already past them.)

Total word count: ~ 75,000

Acknowledgements: Thank you to @j-philly-b for betaing this monstrosity. Thank you to @caprelloidea for all of the read-throughs and cheerleading; not sure I could have written it without your excitement early on. Thank you to @teruel-a-witch for the original prompt on tumblr which sparked this fic. Thank you to @pompeiiablaze for the wonderful art which accompanies Chapter 3 and also will accompany later chapters. Thanks to the CSBB mods (@sambethe in particular, who had to look at my check-ins) for your support and for enduring my neuroses.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 – AO3 Link

Chapter 5

Regina Mills thought of makeup like armor.

She stood in front of her bathroom mirror, carefully drawing a black line across the edge of her eyelid, unflinching as the tip of the eyeliner pen traced from left to right. She repeated the process on the other eye.

Tonight was about power. The balance of power had undergone a seismic shift in Storybrooke the moment that Gold breathed his last, and Regina had spent too long hanging back and waiting for the new Dark One to show himself, to make a mistake. Waiting for someone else to take care of the problem for her, thinking that somehow the mundane law enforcement process of the Land Without Magic would deal with things without her having to lift a finger. Now was the time to stop waiting. Now was the time to go out and take the power while things were still in flux. Make it clear that she was the one who controlled this town now, curse or not.

She finished, as always, with lipstick: the most perfect red, the color of the apples that adorned the tree in her backyard. Pressing her lips together, she gave herself one more critical look in the mirror before she put her lipstick away and stepped out of the bathroom, armor in place. Running her hands down the form-fitting black dress she wore, Regina walked down the hallway and cracked open the door to Henry’s room, letting a thin shaft of light fall across his sleeping face. His chest rose and fell as he dozed on, unaware of what Regina was about to let into their house. Slowly and carefully, she pulled the door closed.

She detoured by the wine rack, selecting a Cabernet before moving on into the kitchen. Pulling down two wine glasses from the cabinet, she set them down on the marble surface just as she heard a tapping on the front door. Smiling her best smile, Regina walked into the foyer and opened the door to greet her late evening visitor. “Killian, how are you?” She stepped back and beckoned him into the house.

“Confused as to why you summoned me here, Madam Mayor.”

“Please, it’s Regina.” She watched as he looked around the foyer of her mansion, taking in the high ceiling and the grand staircase. “And I summoned you here because I thought it was past time to get to know the man that my son speaks of so highly.” She walked back toward the kitchen, expecting that he would follow. He did. “Would you like some wine? I was just opening some.”

He shrugged. “Don’t go to any trouble.”

“It’s no trouble. I like to have a glass in the evening, but I have no one to share it with most of the time.” She pulled a corkscrew from one of the drawers and smoothly twisted it into the wine bottle.

“Henry’s spoken of me, has he?”

Regina plastered on a sweet smile as she poured wine into the glasses. “He seems to admire you a great deal; your love of books, for example. I can’t thank you enough for lending him things to read. He’s a very solitary boy, as you’ve probably noticed.” She handed him a glass.

“Aye. Although he seems much happier since his birth mother came to town.”

Regina held her smile, feeling the wide bowl of the wine glass give slightly under her clenching fingers.

“It’s very big of you, allowing him to spend time with her,” Killian went on. Before she could respond, her cell phone started to ring.

She looked at the screen and rolled her eyes before accepting the call. “I’m sorry, Killian, I have to take this. Yes, Sidney.”

“Mayor Mills,” Sidney said, a slight tremor in his voice. “I got your message.”

She set her wine down. “Yes?”

“You want me to run for sheriff?”

“That’s what I said. I don’t make a habit of joking, do I?”

“No, of course not, but… I’m a newspaper man. I don’t know the first thing about being a sheriff.” His shaky, obsequious tone made her fist clench as she envisioned engulfing him with a fireball.

“You investigate things, don’t you? Then you already know more about it than Emma Swan does.” She drummed her fingernails on the countertop with impatience. “She’s a criminal, and inexperienced—”

“She worked as a bail bondsperson, that’s—”

“Don’t interrupt me, Sidney. You’re running for sheriff. Understood?”

There was a pause. “Yes, ma’am.”

“I have to go. I’ll speak to you tomorrow.” She ended the call and tossed her phone down. Regina took a sip of her wine, watching as Killian did the same. “I heard that Miss Swan questioned you about Gold’s murder; what a terrible business.”

“Aye, she had heard somewhere that I hated him. Can’t imagine what would have given her that idea.”

“Let’s be honest, Killian. We’re all friends here.” She took a step closer to him, her voice dropping. “A lot of people hated Gold, and a lot of people are better off now that he’s not in the world. Do you take my meaning?”

He set his glass down. “I don’t, actually.”

She smiled, her hand moving to touch his arm. “I mean, sometimes things like this happen for the greater good. Some things transcend the laws of this… pitiful world. It may be that, according to some higher law, the person who killed Mr. Gold deserves a medal, not a prison term.”

Regina watched his eyes carefully, but she could see no dawning understanding there, only confusion. “Well, when you find the person who did this, you can try to give him a medal, but I’m thinking Emma’s going to be more interested in serving up that prison term.” He took a step backward, putting some space between them. “So it’s a good thing I’m innocent. I’m not interested in either.”

Resisting the urge to pick up her wine and smash it down on the floor, Regina crossed her arms. “You are innocent, aren’t you? Or perhaps… unaware.” She stalked closer again, backing him into the countertop behind him. “Unaware of the dark power lurking inside you, hmm?”

The flash of fear in his eyes made her heart sing. “Why are you saying these things to me?”

“When you killed him, when you finally got your revenge on the Dark One after all those wasted years, what did you do with the dagger? Where did you hide it… Hook?”

He shook his head in denial, his hand starting to shake. “I didn’t do anything. I didn’t kill anyone. Not good form… It’s not good form.”

“Somewhere in that curse-addled brain of yours is the information I need. But how. To get. It out,” she said, punctuating every other word with a thump of her knuckle on Killian’s forehead.

He ducked away from her, his face going suddenly very pale, and Regina wondered with annoyance what she would do with him if he passed out on the floor of her kitchen. Perhaps if he went completely mad, she could lock him up in the mental ward of the hospital, she mused. That would at least get him out of her hair while she conducted her own search for the Dark One’s dagger. But it would also guarantee that if the curse did break, if Emma Swan really was who Regina feared she was, Regina would have made herself a powerful enemy. Better to bide her time, and keep this sniveling, pitiful, nascent Dark One on her side.

She plastered on her fake smile again. “I apologize, Killian; I’m under a lot of pressure lately, and it’s starting to get to me a little bit. You can understand that, can’t you?” She picked up his glass and held it out to him. “Here, have some more wine.”

“If it’s all the same to you, Mayor Mills, I’d just as soon take my leave of you. I’m feeling quite ill all of a sudden.”

“Oh, of course, Killian. You’re free to go.” For now.

~*~

He tossed in his sweat-soaked sheets, trying in vain once again to find his way into sleep. It was like trying to dive off the end of a pier: putting his hands over his head, leaning over and launching his body into the water, only to find himself sprawled out on the hard wooden boards a moment later, sore and broken from the attempt.

And then when Killian did manage to plunge into the water, it was filled with monsters.

His dreams were unrelenting, technicolor horrors that left him sweating and gasping when he could finally pull himself above the surface. He saw his left hand lying on the deck of a ship like some dying sea creature as blood spurted from his wrist in a red parabola. He held a woman who looked like Milah in his arms and watched as the light of life died from her eyes, felt the numb certainty that her death was the end of everything good in his life. He saw himself, drunk and ruthless and cruel, forcing a terrified man to walk off the end of a plank into the murky depths of the ocean. Saw himself sink a knife into his own father’s gut.

He stabbed and stabbed, glorious great flesh-rending gashes as the life of the Crocodile drained out of him. The dagger sat heavy in his hand, the intricate hilt marking patterns into his palm.

Some of the dreams made a sort of sense. He had lost his hand in a sailing accident, that’s what he was seeing. But why did he dream over and over of Milah in such unusual garments? Why were his dreams so vivid with men cowering before his command when no such thing had ever occurred?

Blood ran down the dagger, blood coated his hand and soaked the sleeve of his shirt. He held the dagger up in the dim light, saw it waver as the writing on it disappeared. Saw it replaced by something else.

“You’re cracking up… mate.”

Killian sat up, jerking away from the hallucination that had materialized in his bedroom. He wrapped his arms around his legs, pressed his closed eyes against his knees until he saw white spots bloom behind his eyelids. “You’re not real. Not real, not real, not real,” he repeated out loud.

“I’m in your head,” the creature said. “Not the same thing as not being real.”

He looked up and saw the beast that had visited him before: the scaly, iridescent skin, the yellowed teeth, the clawlike fingernails waving at him impishly.

“Hello,” it said.

“Begone, demon.”

“Not so fast. I need to tell you some things first.”

Killian dragged himself out of bed, giving the apparition a wide berth as he left the bedroom. The chill of the apartment combined with his sweat-damp t-shirt set him shivering. He stumbled over to the kitchen, pulling a tumbler down from the cabinet with a trembling hand. More rum ended up on the counter than in the glass, but after he drained his first pour dry, Killian was able to put more rum in the glass with a steadier hand.

“You may have no recollection of what you did, but the queen has your number. She knows, but she’s going to bide her time. We’ll have to deal with her eventually, but best to wait on that. You’re not strong enough to face her. Not now. Not like this,” the beast said with distaste.

“Not real,” Killian whispered, taking another drink.

“But there are other problems,” the beast continued conversationally as if it wasn’t speaking to a man who had lost his last connection to reality. “If the queen controls the sheriff, then she controls your fate. We need to put a stop to that.” The creature uttered a horrifying giggle. “Sidney Glass was born to be a pawn; we just need to take control of the pawn for ourselves. I think even you can manage that.”

Killian felt rather than saw the apparition disappear.

~*~

Emma’s eyes raked over the chalkboard menu at Storybrooke Coffee Company. She desperately needed coffee before work, and she was getting a little tired of the standard diner coffee that Granny’s had to offer. She didn’t have much discretionary income, but today a three dollar mocha felt necessary to surviving the day.

She was stirring sugar into her cup when David Nolan walked in. They eyes met, and she smiled awkwardly.

What do you say to the guy who broke your roommate’s heart? she wondered. It’s not like she and David really knew each other that well; they’d only spoken a couple of times. Aside from the fact that he’d been in a coma and was in an unhappy marriage, she knew very little about him. He wore a flannel shirt, jeans, and a pair of practical work boots, and he walked up to the counter with a charming grin for the barista.

While he waited for his skim latte to be made, he shuffled over next to her. “How are you, Emma?”

She shrugged. “I’m okay, I guess. Sleep deprived thanks to the hours I’ve been working. Did you have a good Thanksgiving?”

“It was fine,” he said, but she saw sadness in his eyes. “Did you spend yours with… Mary Margaret?”

“Yeah.” She realized she was still absently stirring her coffee, and she tossed the wooden stirrer in the garbage with an eye roll for herself. “I thought you usually got your coffee at Granny’s,” she said, remembering when he and Mary Margaret had both been arranging to be there at 7:15 in the morning just to catch sight of each other.

“I did,” he said, glancing around. “But I… was afraid people were starting to talk.”

Emma decided to change the subject. “You work at the animal shelter, right?”

“That’s right.” He smiled agreeably. “It’s not glamorous and it doesn’t pay much, but I find it rewarding.”

“Graham used to volunteer there,” she said, and she was a little bit horrified to realize there were tears welling behind her eyes. Oh right, the other symptom of her lack of sleep — sudden and unexpected sadness.

“He did,” David agreed. “He had a way with the dogs. I’m sorry about what happened.” His eyes pierced into hers, and inexplicably, Emma felt a little bit better. “He was a good man.”

“He was.” The barista called his name, and David turned and walked over to get his coffee. She watched him; a strong guy, built like a farmer, like he’d be able to hold his own in a fight.

“Hey, David,” she called as she tried to press the lid back on her coffee cup without losing control of it and spilling it all over herself. He faced her, his expression expectant and pleasant. “Have you ever thought about doing anything different? I mean, besides working at the animal shelter?”

“Sure, I’ve thought about it; they can’t afford to pay me full-time. Like what?”

“Like being a sheriff’s deputy?” She wrung her hands together, suddenly nervous. “With Graham gone, I need help. I mean, I could probably only bring you on part-time at first, but once I officially take over as sheriff, I might be able to make it full-time. If you’re interested.” She felt a twinge of worry that she was betraying Mary Margaret by asking David to work for her, but he was the only person in Storybrooke she had met who seemed like he would be remotely useful in the job. Mary Margaret would have to deal.

He grinned. “Well, sure I’m interested, but why me?”

“I don’t know, you seem like you’d be suited for it. And there’s a lot to do and I’m all by myself there; I mean Graham had only hired me a month ago and suddenly I’m in charge.” She clenched her fist, letting the feeling of her fingernails digging into her palm distract from the stress and sadness she was feeling. She forced herself to laugh. “So what do you say? Can I hire you?”

~*~

“I have to admit, I imagined a little more action with this job and a little less reading,” David said, rubbing his eyes with a thumb and forefinger.

“Yeah, sorry about that,” Emma said, stretching her back out and trying to find a position where it wouldn’t ache. “This is the only thing I can think to do at this point.” They were carefully going through all of Gold’s real estate holdings, matching them up against records of rental payments from the townspeople of Storybrooke to see if anyone owed Gold money. It was slow and terrifically painstaking work. Hours of reviewing documents had led to a very short list of names, and even those people had only been delayed in a few payments. No one owed Gold money for any length of time, which in and of itself was interesting; with so many tenants, it seemed likely that some fraction of them would have been delinquent in their payments. She wondered what Gold did to get the money he was owed so consistently.

Emma pinched the bridge of her nose, trying to stave off a headache, and flipped to the next deed. It was for a plot of land with a cabin on the property, and the address caught her eye for being quite different from any of the others she had been looking at: 10250 Rt. 83. That couldn’t be anywhere near the rest of the homes in town.

“David, do you see any tenant records for 10250 on Route 83?”

He flipped through the manila folders, then flipped through them a second time. “Nope, none.”

Emma pulled the plat map book that she’d borrowed from the town records office over and studied the index, then turned to the appropriate page. “Huh.”

“What is it?”

Standing up, she carried the book over to the detailed map of Storybrooke that was up on the wall of the sheriff’s station. “Gold had a cabin not that far from where his body was found. A cabin that he didn’t seem to be renting to anyone.”

David stood up and joined her at the map. “Do you think there could be a clue there?”

“Yeah, I mean, he was out there with a shovel, and we still don’t know what he was trying to bury. Maybe there’s a clue at the cabin that will help us understand what happened that day?”

Pulling his coat on, David grinned at her. “Well, what are we waiting for, Sheriff? Let’s go.”

“I’m not the sheriff, not yet. Regina’s already threatened to get someone to run against me,” she said as they climbed into the police cruiser outside the station.

He scoffed. “From what I’ve seen so far, you’re an excellent sheriff, Emma.”

“You’ve been working for me for two days, David.” But still, she couldn’t help smiling as they drove to the outskirts of town.

With David’s help navigating, they found the route to the cabin without too much trouble, pulling onto a dirt track that Emma probably wouldn’t have noticed if they hadn’t been looking for it. At the end of it, they found a rustic cabin, as well as Gold’s black Cadillac.

“Well, that solves that mystery at least,” Emma said. “All this time and no one knew where his car was.”

“How far is this from where the body was found?” David asked.

“Not far,” she said, studying the trail map she’d brought. “It’s maybe a quarter of a mile through those trees,” she said, pointing.

The inside of the cabin was extremely basic. Mostly just a single room with dark paneled walls decorated with deer antlers. Wrinkling her nose, Emma looked around. She couldn’t see any evidence that Gold had left anything here.

“I’ll go check Gold’s car while you look around in here,” David offered, and she agreed.

They found was one small bedroom and a bathroom, but both seemed as barren and unlived in as the rest of the cabin. She clicked the light on in the bathroom and took a quick glance around, and was about to turn it back off when something caught her eye. On the tiled floor, next to the sink, was a single, perfect drop of what looked like dried blood. Bingo.

Emma ran for the front door. “David? Get the evidence kits.”

Her hands shook as she pulled the nitrile gloves on, her palms sweating and making it all the more difficult to get the damned things on correctly. Finally, she managed it, and dropped to her knees, photographing the droplet of blood from several angles before she carefully scraped it up into a small plastic tube that she could cap and label. David watched her from the doorway to the bathroom.

“Wow, you really know what you’re doing,” he commented.

She laughed uneasily. “Not really, but I fake it pretty well. Do you see any more blood anywhere?”

“No.” They both looked around before agreeing that there were no more droplets of blood. “So what if it is Gold’s blood? He owned this cabin; what will that prove?”

“Nothing, but maybe it’s not Gold’s blood. Maybe it’s the killer’s blood. Maybe they fought and Gold managed to injure the person who attacked him.” Emma stood up. “Okay, let me spray the luminol.”

David handed it to her out of the bag. “Go for it.”

Emma sprayed the sink and the floor around the sink with luminol before handing it back to David, who held up the black light and turned it on. “Okay, here goes nothing,” she said, flipping off the light switch.

They both stared at the sink for a while. “Holy shit,” Emma finally said.

“I’d say someone washed off a lot of blood here,” David commented. The basin of the sink glowed blue. As did several spots on the floor. Emma took pictures of all of it before they turned the lights back on.

“So whoever killed Gold came to the nearest place they could to clean up, and washed the blood off their hands here,” she said, pacing back into the main part of the cabin and pulling her gloves off.

“Looks like it.”

“Okay, let’s back up a minute. Gold drove out here because he wanted to dig something up or bury something, right? So how did the killer find him? Was it someone Gold trusted, did they come in his car together?”

“Maybe the killer followed Gold out here in another car?” David asked, running a hand through his hair.

“That could be.” She took a breath and let it out. “So I just have to check every car in Storybrooke for any additional blood traces.” Emma dropped onto the sofa and put her head in her hands.

They searched the rest of the cabin but didn’t turn up anything else. The initial rush that had come with discovering the cabin and Gold’s car and the blood drained away, leaving Emma feeling tired and hollowed out. For as much as they’d learned, she didn’t feel like she was any closer to finding the murderer.

Chapter 6

#csbb #cs ff #captain swan ff #this graceful path fic #my fic

[littlewolfheart-blog1]

Healing, Being Healed, and How My Chiweenie Changed My Life

Waters have been flowing. Makes for tumultuous moods but all in all a good thing. Healing. Cleaning old debris. Confusion is a state of mind for me, a side effect of earnest growth. Water flows freely, is circular, not linear, vast & mysterious & everchanging...Frustration inevitable, perhaps. I don't fit into this world & its priorities at all. Work for promotions & ignore the people you step on to get there. The right clothes, makeup, shoes... One must project an image of success at all times. Conversations are contests for the greater accomplishments. New car & nice, clean home. Push away desires for deeper fulfillment: we simply contribute to the imperial powers of production... There is no time for empathy or enjoyment; there is no time & these are of little importance. I cannot live that way. That life is empty & repulsive to me. I will work in the background, plant my flowers of the heart, spread what light light I have... Recognition is not needed. There are drawbacks. Feeling drained sometimes. Pay not great. Body constantly sore and aching....I wonder if I should quit, but the rewards, their love & gratitude & trust. The impact on my heart of helping others in my daily life. I visited my first client & now beloved friend in the hospital yesterday, and he told his brother I'm like the daughter he never had... The word caregiver has become more than a job title for me; it is a vital part of me. The work is spiritual meditation in motion. I derive a great deal of self-worth from my job; no matter that others might look down upon it. Leading a blind man extends my vision. And oh, I do love him like family. I try to do what I can because he is an amazing person who constantly weathers obstacles with humor and grace. With all he goes through (numerous complicated health problems I won't go into here, but trust me, his life is difficult) he deserves all the support he can get. I am honored to be a part of it. Society, I have seen, often ignores elderly and disabled people: they don't have the time & so they avert their eyes, go around them, sometimes figuratively or nearly physically bulldozing over them...But my god, do they realize that we are all going to get old??? No, no, no, we must ignore all that... Eternal youth the goal---no matter how artificial, cruel, or destructive. But there is kindness in this world and people deserving of it.iN have been hurt & so I strive to help others who hurt. It won't buy a house or plaster my image with awards, but I create with my heart & my hands & I do what I can to heal my wounds & the wounds of the world. I can't do much, but I have the gift of a loving heart. There was that awful period that I felt so powerless, worthless, purposeless... I wonder what ifs, of course... My brain in other lives might be more grandly occupied. But I do use my brain, and the heart, and all the sensations they transmit to me. I am a seeker, always have been, always will be. My mind is multitextual shimmering colors rainbow waters hidden from the world. I hide with my beloved dog, Jasper, and sometimes we awkwardly emerge into society. There I tend to overshare, but I explode with sumptuous passion. For a little over two years now that circle includes my canine companion. When I bought dog food in Feeder's Supply the other day I gushed to the employees: :I have a little Chihuahua Dachshund mix. I adopted him at a bad timein my life & he changed my life." Okay, so I probably come off as kooky at best & likely full-blown crazy by a majority of the population. I really don't care. I live in my own world. And I do thank God Jasper is a part of it. Adopting him allowed me to detach myself from a toxic relationship & forge healthy ones. I attached myself to this loyal, gentle, and loving companion, found fulfillment in my work as a caregiver, and ultimately was to my husband. Jasper can be difficult, to be sure, and so can I; we come equipped with our neuroses & there is no one else like us, no manual to follow. We absorb & transmit exuberant sensations and can easily overwhelm the nerves of others. But Jasper & I, we understand each other & we stick together. There is such love, security, and trust between us. Obsessive as the partnership may be, I must praise the presence of the dear canine companion in my life. He rests at my feet now. He is nearly always at my side. A little separation anxiety, perhaps. He stays in part fit by following me up and down the stairs, into the bathroom, whines outside the door when I take a shower, and then he lays in a basket of my clothes until I come home. The sweet boy really wants nothing more than to love me. Jasper gave me love when I felt unlovable. Somehow with this little guy close to me I can cope. Several kindred spirits I am lucky to have: a husband who creates a safe and loving space for me, artist friends that inspire me, clients whose gifts to me by far outweigh anything I could ever give to them... A beautiful circle of love here. A husband and wife who needed a helper. That's me. I needed job. But more than that I needed comfort. Helping that provided (and continues to provide) that. And bonding with the dogs is a terrific bonus, for me, the dogs, and their human providers. And I love my giant snuggle buddy, an old yellow lab with the name of a poet and a love that greets me & warms me. And of course they gave me Jasper. All of us in need of love and care. And we find it in one another. Artists, patients, caregivers, creatures, planting growth with what love we have. There should be more of this, I say! I ponder smiling at the wondrous contributes that each of us makes. With colors, with hands, with brushes, with work of the heart we create better worlds.

[toseehowthestoryends]

A Different Battle - Chapter 9

In which Morgan le Fae finds out that her long-abandoned son has become the Dark One and comes to make amends. Years later, when Belle makes a deal to become the Dark One’s maid, she never expected to find his mother living with him. Morgan, however, will understand exactly what lies between her son and his ‘maid’, and her influence will change everything.

Or, the one where Rumplestiltskin’s mother shows up at the Dark Castle shortly after Cora breaks his heart, changing the course of future events forever.

Read it on AO3 | FFN

Chapter 9—“More Than They’ve Got Planned”

Three days passed before Morgan realized that her son was avoiding the maid.  Two weeks earlier, there’d been hints of a budding romance between the two, and now Rumplestiltskin was snappish and nasty when he did see Belle, worse than he’d been even in the beginning.  Morgan was half surprised that Rumplestiltskin hadn’t thrown Belle back in the dungeon, though she had no idea why he was so angry. Of course, given that she was rather displeased with the girl herself led Morgan to ignore the problem at first, but after another day of it, she realized that she was being a fool.

If Merlin is stuck in that tree, he’ll never be able to free Rumplestiltskin.  That only leaves one option…even if it’s a dangerous option at best.  Morgan knew that True Love’s Kiss could break any curse, but what manner in which the Dark One’s curse ‘broke’ had never been tested. Such a kiss could unleash the darkness to torment someone else, leaving Rumplestiltskin a powerless cripple once more, which he would hate.  Yet his soul would be free…if he and Belle could share True Love.  Morgan wasn’t sure if that was possible, even for a Dark One as full of love as her son, but there would be no way to find out if Rumplestiltskin kept avoiding the girl.

As usual, that meant it was up to her to knock sense into her boy, and Morgan strode into his tower with a purpose, noticing the three or four shattered teacups near the door.  “What in the world has angered you so, Rumplestiltskin?”

“Nothing.”

He didn’t even turn to look at her, keeping his eyes on whatever project he was working on like a petulant child or a distracted academic.   Only he could combine those two so well.  Morgan sighed.

“Two weeks ago, you were laughing and throwing snowballs at Belle.  Now you refuse to talk to her.  What happened?”

A long moment of silence passed.  “She’s a naive fool.”

“She was that when you started liking her.”  Morgan snorted.  “She has always been that.  I thought you found it endearing.”

That finally earned her a glare.  “She pretends to care for me.  She doesn’t.”

“I think she does,” she said softly, moving forward to stand at Rumplestiltskin’s side. Thankfully, he didn’t pull away; he only laughed bitterly.  “And she understands more than you might think.”

“Of course she doesn’t.”  A vicious snort.  “As if she could even understand the half of it.  She’s never known desperation in her life.”

The words were so close to the ones Morgan had uttered that it took her aback.  She let out a slow breath, forcing herself to be honest instead of just agreeing with her son out of spite.  “Nobility isn’t a shield against being a desperate soul, you know.”

Morgan had been born a princess, after all.  Yet she knew hopelessness all too well.  For all that she’d called Belle sheltered, Morgan wasn’t blind to the fact that she’d sacrificed herself to save her small kingdom from the ogres.  Being willing to do that indicated a serious amount of courage—not to mention a deep and desperate need to make a difference that Morgan recognized all too easily. Despite her words, she rather liked the young noblewoman; Belle was kind and smart, and she had brought a softer side out of Rumplestiltskin than Morgan had dreamed could exist.  She loved her son very well for what he was, yet she had never hoped he might love someone the way she was growing to suspect he loved Belle.

Unfortunately, he well and truly had his back up, now, and was hardly in a receptive mood. His scowl alone told the tale, particularly when he only snorted in response.

“She angered you.  How?” Something must have happened, but for the life of her, Morgan couldn’t figure out what.

“By existing.”

“Rumplestiltskin.”  She grated his name out, fighting the urge to shake sense into her son.  Or to hug him.  Trying to do so would be counterproductive, though.  Physical contact with Rumplestiltskin was always a chancy proposition; he craved it, but sometimes he reacted terribly.

He ignored her.

“You can tell me now or tell me later, but either way, I will know.”  Morgan fixed her best glare on the back of his head, but the effort it was wasted.  Rumplestiltskin barely twitched.

So she waited.  By now, Morgan knew her son. She knew his neuroses, and she knew that her stubborn silence would drive him mad.  He was perfectly capable of out-waiting her, yet he wouldn’t—not when he didn’t have a pressing reason to do so.  Seconds ticked by, and then minutes, with Morgan simply watching her son, until the words finally exploded out of Rumplestiltskin in a snarl.

“She insulted you.”  He turned to glare at Morgan like this was her fault, and after a moment, she began to wonder if it might just be.

“I can defend my own honor, thank you.”  Still, she kept the words more gentle than she might have otherwise; the fact that Rumplestiltskin was offended on her behalf touched Morgan.  “And I may well have deserved the insult, anyway.  What did she say?”

Her even tone made Rumplestiltskin twist to glare at her.  “She implied that it’s your fault that I’m the Dark One.”  A nasty giggle.  “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.  Or wait. Perhaps not.  Although it’s certainly close.  The girl has no brains to speak of.”

“Now you’re being ridiculous.”

“I’m being ridiculous?” Rumplestiltskin reared back, looking shocked—but his acting was comically terrible, even if he probably didn’t mean it to be.  “She insulted you, and you’re calling me ridiculous?”

“Of course I am.”  Morgan sighed.  “You’re acting like it.  And you care for the girl, so stop pretending you don’t.  She made a mistake.  Surely you know how easy that is to do.”

His glare turned poisonous.  “I don’t—I don’t have to put up with this, even from you!  If you think—oh, nevermind.”

Something broken flickered in Rumplestiltskin’s reptilian eyes before he stormed out, and all Morgan could do was sigh again as she watched him go. Chasing him would do no good; he’d worked himself up over this one and wasn’t going to back down any time soon. She loved him, but that didn’t mean she didn’t understand him, and Morgan could see what the source of his actual anger was.  Rumplestiltskin was hurting, feeling betrayed.  He is really starting to care for the girl, and my little spat with her has bled over to him.  She really had created a mess, hadn’t she?

Belle was half surprised that Rumplestiltskin hadn’t thrown her back in the dungeon. Her employer certainly had avoided her like the plague ever since he’d thrown teacups at her like a barbarian, and he’d barked at her to get out any time she came near him.  In her opinion, that was a ridiculous overreaction to the argument they’d had—particularly since he’d been halfway to drunk at the time!  She’d tried to apologize once, but he’d threatened to turn her into a teapot and then teleported away before she could say another word, so Belle had taken to avoiding Rumplestiltskin in return.  He hadn’t restricted her access to the library, so she stayed there as much as she could, taking her meals in the kitchen as days ticked by.  

Morgan didn’t seem inclined to speak to her, either, though, and Belle was beginning to find her life incredibly lonely.  At least she could understand Morgan’s anger a little better; Belle was smart enough to realize that she’d made quite a mess out of their last conversation, and then she’d compounded things by her assumption that Morgan had pushed Rumplestiltskin into becoming the Dark One.  She seemed so blasé about his darkness, though, Belle thought, thumbing through a book without really looking at the pages.  How could any mother accept that horrible evil festering in her son?

“I didn’t raise him.”

The voice made her jump, and then Belle turned on the settee she’d been sitting on to stare at Morgan.  The older woman stood in the doorway, looking tired rather than angry, and offered Belle a shrug when she stared in surprise.

“You didn’t?”

“No.” Morgan walked into the room slowly, staring blankly out the window.  “I left him with his father at birth.  I thought…well, I thought it was for the best.  I was wrong.”

Belle had to blink.  “I don’t understand.  Why would you do that?”  And why tell me? she almost added, but stopped herself  just time. Any chance to get information on her mysterious Dark One was worth jumping at.

“I am half fae.  I had hoped he would show magic of his own, so that he could come with me, but he did not.” Morgan’s grimace spoke volumes. “But it seems that magic runs in his blood, and he found his way to darkness, just as I once did.  Although Rumplestiltskin does seem to take everything to its possible extreme.”

“You can say that again.”  Belle almost chuckled, but the conversation was too serious.  And she wanted to know far too much to get derailed.  “So…what happened to him?”

“His worthless father turned out to be more cowardly than I expected.”  A mother’s grimace.  “I…well, most of it is not my story to tell, but Rumplestiltskin’s life was not an easy one.  And he grew desperate enough to take on the power you now see.”

“Desperate?”

“Yes.” Morgan sighed heavily.  “That is not my story to tell.  I left him, after all.”  She hesitated for a long moment as Belle watched regret and pain play over her face, and then finally whispered: “You asked if anyone had ever loved him unconditionally.  The answer is that few enough people have, and he has always suffered for it.”

Swallowing hard, Belle groped for words.  She could not understand how any mother could abandon her child, and yet Morgan clearly regretted that choice. Part of her wanted to yell at Morgan, to demand how she could have hurt someone so fragile so terribly, but Morgan was obviously berating herself for that far more harshly than Belle ever would. Now she could understand a little, at least.  The obvious love between Rumplestiltskin and his mother—not to mention his furious defense of her—indicated that Rumplestiltskin had forgiven Morgan for leaving him with his father, and that he didn’t blame her.  Still, this new knowledge left her with even more questions.

“Is this your castle, then?” she asked after a moment.  “I saw children’s clothes upstairs, clothes for a young boy.  I assumed they were his.”

“Oh, no. I came here only a few decades ago.” Morgan’s smile was faint but proud. “Rumplestiltskin took this castle off of a sorcerer who made even the Dark One look kind and gentle.”

“He often is.”  Belle said the words without thinking, and they made Morgan’s smile grow soft.

“With those he cares about, yes.  You’re not wrong about him; there is a terrible darkness inside him, driving him towards destruction and evil. But I have known many Dark Ones, and I have never known one to cling to love the way he does.  Most of them give up on the very idea, and seek to destroy it. Rumplestiltskin is different.”

She bit her lip briefly.  “Is that because of your being here?”

“Certainly not.  He has been this way from the beginning—a Dark One does not come back from completely abandoning light and love.” Morgan turned away from the window to study her, and it took all of Belle’s self-control to meet her gaze steadily and not look away.

Do you have feelings for him? The words hung unspoken between them.  Belle thought she knew the answer, but it both terrified and delighted her. Rumplestiltskin was complicated and unsure, unpredictable and terrifying, but she was drawn to him in ways Belle could hardly begin to describe.  There was light in him, she knew, and love.  Morgan had just confirmed that.

“What about the clothes?  Are they from some child he took?”  She felt that had to be important.  Belle hadn’t seen any children around the castle, at least not often.  Rumplestiltskin sometimes made deals for them, but she hadn’t known him not to rehome children quickly.  And they were always babies, not young boys.

“No.” Morgan’s eyes grew hard, but this time she didn’t snap at Belle for making an assumption.  “But if you want more details, you’ll have to ask him.”

“I don’t think he wants to talk to me.”  Belle couldn’t help the way her voice dropped; she felt bad for having blamed Morgan now that she knew the truth, but it was hard not to make assumptions when she lived with two people who were so secretive that they kept truths from one another.

Morgan snorted.  “Of course he does.  He’s quite fond of you, you know.  He’s only angry, but he’ll growl more than he’ll bite.”  

“Maybe you can tell him that you and I had a misunderstanding?”  Belle wasn’t a coward, but she wasn’t sure if bringing the same subject up again was a good idea.  At best, Rumplestiltskin was likely to break more of the china—though she’d noticed that he had at least spared the cup she had chipped in the beginning.

“If I meddle more, he’ll just clam up.  The fool boy needs to talk to you.”

Belle sighed. “I wish you wouldn’t call him that.”

“Oh, he deserves it.” Morgan rolled her eyes.  “But the moniker is entirely affectionate, I assure you.”

“I’m not sure his self-esteem is high enough to take that, to be honest,” Belle said after a moment’s hesitation.  “He’s so powerful…but so fragile.  Sometimes, I think words can break him when magic would just bounce away.”

“That’s because you know him better than you think.”  Morgan’s smile returned, gentler this time.  “Talk to him.  You might be surprised how receptive he is.”

Rumplestiltskin hadn’t been this happy in days.  In fact, he was contemplating a full on giggling fit, because this was just wonderful.

“I can’t believe this!” Zelena paced back and forth across her throne room, her magic smashing through anything that seemed to offend her.  “And you’re doing nothing!”

“Well, what would you have me do, dearie?” he trilled, enjoying every moment of her fury. “I wouldn’t want to interfere in matters of your little kingdom, after all.”  He gave her his most innocent smile.  “You wouldn’t like that at all.”

Zelena glared.  “You could stop your mother from teaching my useless little sister magic!”

“My mother does as she wills.  Surely you wouldn’t tell Morgan of Cornwall what to do.”  Rumplestiltskin wasn't about to tell her what to do, but he’d laugh uproariously if he got to watch Zelena try.

“She’s nothing special.”  Blue eyes flashed, and Rumplestiltskin snorted.

“Check your ego, Your Majesty.  My mother was royal long before King Leopold noticed you.”  He gave her a nasty smile.  “And it strikes me that most legends exist for a reason.  Don’t encourage me to stop protecting you.  She’ll eat you alive if you go after her.”

“I don’t need your protection!”

“Shall I depart, then?  Shall I stop our lessons and leave you to deal with your little stepdaughter defying you?”  Rumplestiltskin cocked his head theatrically.  “You’re doing so well at that already.”

A howl of frustration escaped Zelena, and Rumplestiltskin felt himself wiggle in delight. Most of the gleeful anticipation he felt was his own, but some of it was definitely due to his ever-unwanted internal passengers.  Isn’t her aggravation beautiful? Nimue crooned. He could feel her gloating in his mind, and the others with her.  You’ll get that curse cast yet, and perhaps you will then prove yourself worth to be one of us.

Oh, shut up.  Rumplestiltskin barely managed not to roll his eyes.  I’ve lived longer than any of you lot and learned more than you ever dreamt of.  I will find my son.  I don’t care about the price.  He was here for a purpose, to drive Zelena closer and closer to casting the curse. She was unstable, perpetually jealous and prone to fits of uncontrollable rage that drove him to insanity, but she was Cora’s daughter.  And even if Regina’s temperament made her far better suited to cast the curse—she would at least be less mercurial—Zelena was the tool he had to work with.

“I hate you sometimes!”

“I know, dearie.”  Dancing forward, Rumplestiltskin leaned in close.  “But you know you need me.”

Zelena turned to glare at him poisonously, but he gave her his sweetest smile. “Regina’s magic saved stupid Snow White from my trap.  And they stole my Huntsman’s heart back! How is that supposed to be fair?”

“No one ever said life’s supposed to be fair, you know.  The question isn’t how you complain about unfairness.  It’s what you do about it.”  Rumplestiltskin kept his wiggling to a minimum; Zelena needed guidance, so guidance he would give.  Even if she drove him insane.

And even if he was becoming slightly worried about whose heart she would use to cast the curse when the time came.  He’d hoped she’d want to use Prince James’, but the fool had gotten himself killed and replaced.  Zelena certainly lusted after the new ‘James’, but his chance encounter with a certain princess in the forest already seemed likely to derail any such opportunities on that front.  Besides, Rumplestiltskin needed the former shepherd to fall in love with Snow White, anyway, so he wasn’t going to let Zelena screw that up.   So, he’d have to put enough time in to keep her on the right track—and to find someone for her to fall for that wasn’t him.  I hate playing matchmaker.  Maybe Mother can help me find someone truly vile for Zelena. The Huntsman certainly wasn’t going to do.  Zelena viewed him as a wretched little pet, not an actual lover.

There were times he actually hoped that his mother would find another way to get to the Land Without Magic and find Baelfire.  It would certainly be easier than getting Zelena to cast the Dark Curse.

Belle hadn’t been expecting a visitor so soon after her conversation with Morgan, and her head was still spinning when she headed out to the garden to pick some peaches. In the beginning, Belle had been surprised by how much life surrounded the Dark Castle, but after a while, she’d come to suspect that Rumplestiltskin actually liked the garden and the many types of fruit trees. He’d never admit it, of course, but the Dark One could easily have destroyed the beautiful garden in a temper tantrum.  Except he usually breaks his own belongings, instead, she thought to herself, still mulling over what Morgan had said.

She supposed that she owed Rumplestiltskin something of an apology, but Belle still wanted to understand what had brought him to be like this.  Morgan had said his life had been hard, but how could that force someone to seek darkness like this? Belle could see glimpses of a good man hidden beneath all that evil, but how could a good man want to become the Dark One?  There was so much that she didn’t understand.

“So, you are the girl whom the Dark One has enslaved.”

The new voice made her spin around, almost dropping her basket of peaches in surprise. Then Belle found herself faced with an old man who wore long robes and had messy gray hair. His eyes were kind, however, and watching her without any malice or desire.

“I’m not his slave.”  Belle straightened instinctively, disliking the implication.  “I came here of my own free will.”

“My apologies, then.”  He gave her a slight bow that Belle found a little unnerving.  She still nodded in return, though.  “Still, I understand he has forced you to become a servant instead of the lady of your own castle.  That must be quite a shock.”

Belle shrugged.  “I made a deal with him.  Rumplestiltskin saved my people, and in return, I came with him.  Forever.”  She found a slight smile creasing her face.  “Besides, he does not treat me badly.  Not at all.”

There were moments when she wanted to throttle her employer, but that didn’t mean Belle actually thought he was the monster he claimed to be.  He was kind to her, so very kind.  He’d given her the library, a beautiful room of her own, and Rumplestiltskin actually cared what she thought about things.  He was the first man in her life who had ever actually listened to what she had to say.  Yes, he was volatile and she hated the evil festering inside of him, but he could also be surprisingly good and amazingly gentle.  When he wasn’t throwing teacups at her, anyway, a thought that still made her blood boil.

He could have hit me with any of those cups, though, and he didn’t.  I don’t think he wanted to, even if that doesn’t excuse his poor behavior.

“That is a surprise.”  The old man looked thoughtful, and then shook his head as if to clear it.  “Be it as it may, I can free you, if you wish.  I have the means and the power to keep you from the Dark One, and to protect you from him.”

“But I made a deal.”

“I would say you have certainly served enough time in this terrible place to pay the price of the magic used to free you.”

“Maybe, but that doesn’t mean I’ll break my word.”  Belle squared her shoulders.  “That’s not who I am.”  A part of her almost mentioned that Rumplestiltskin would surely avenge himself upon her people if Belle broke her deal, but she wasn’t actually sure that he would.  After all, the ogres were gone, and Rumplestiltskin did always keep his end of a bargain.

The old man cocked his head.  “Deaths can be faked.  The Dark One need never know.”

“Thank you, but no.  I will keep my promises, and that’s final.  I don’t need ‘saving’ from my own choices.”  If Belle spoke more firmly than she meant to, well, that was hardly her fault.  Rumplestiltskin might listen to her and care what she had to say, but this old man really didn’t seem to care for her opinion.  He kept pressing as if more reasons would make her forget her sense of honor and duty—or as if she wanted to leave at all!

Truth be told, Belle liked it there.  Even when Rumplestiltskin drove her mad, he was fascinating.  And…and he was kind.  When they weren’t fighting, she could talk to him for hours about books and history, about worlds he’d travelled to, or about great creatures and people he’d seen.  And Belle was more free in the Dark Castle than she’d ever been at home.  Here she would never be forced to marry an oaf who tortured ogre children, never forced to be a broodmare for his desired army of sons. Belle could be herself here; even at his worst, Rumplestiltskin never implied she should be someone else or change her mind about what she believed in.

“I see.” He pressed his lips together, looking displeased.  

Belle gave him a pert smile. “Is there something else you wanted?  Did you perhaps wish to visit with Rumplestiltskin? I can make tea if so.”

Of course he didn’t want to see Rumplestiltskin, not if he was offering to ‘save’ her, so Belle made the offer with relish.

“No, thank you.” Now he looked like the cat who’d been stuck catching the canary, and Belle felt a little guilty for enjoying his discomfort.  He’d meant well, hadn’t he?

“Have you changed your mind, then?” Morgan’s voice suddenly came from behind Belle, who found herself glancing at Rumplestiltskin’s mother and wondering how she knew this mysterious old man.

He shook his head.  “My answer remains ever the same, My Lady.  The Sorcerer’s magic cannot—”

“Bollocks.” Morgan glared.  “You could; you simply will not.  In which case, know that you are not welcome here.  And your presence will only make my son think of the one thing neither of us want him to consider.”

“If he attempts to take the hat, I will stop him.”  The old man drew himself up, but that only made Morgan snort.

“What hat?” Belle asked before she could stop herself, and the old man seemed to size her up with far less warmth than he’d spoken with before.

“That is not your concern.”

“Leave the girl alone, Michael.”  Morgan’s voice was strangely sharp.  “You and I are in accord on this.  That hat only heralds disaster, much though Nimue would convince my son otherwise.”

Nimue?  Belle recognized the name from some book or another, but she couldn’t remember which. She’d have to look it up later.

“On that, at least, we can agree.”  The old man—Michael, Belle supposed—shook his head and gestured at Belle.  “She does not belong here, My Lady.  If you have any means of control over your son, you should—”

“Oh, stop it,” Belle snapped, her patience at an end.  “I already told you that I don’t need saving, and I certainly don’t need you interceding on my behalf.  I am where I want to be.  End of story.”

Morgan snorted out a laugh as the old man’s eyes grew as wide as saucers.  “I do believe the young lady has spoken.  You’d best leave it alone.”

“She is young and impressionable.  You should know better.”  The old man made the words sound very disapproving, but Morgan just shrugged and let Belle respond.

“I would appreciate not being talked about as if I am not here.”  She glared, but the old man didn’t offer an apology.  His dark eyes only looked at her sadly, as if she was an idiot child and a lost cause all rolled into one.

“I will be on my way, then.”  A swirl of red smoke filled the air, and he was gone, leaving Belle to glare at the empty place where he had stood.

She hated being treated like she didn’t know what she was doing.  Her father had always cosseted her and tried to keep her out of decisions that needed to be made, even though she was his only heir.  All the men in the kingdom followed suit, ignoring Belle’s opinions and writing her off as ‘just a girl’.  But now she had had it with such treatment. She hadn’t realized how nice it was to be treated like an equal until she’d given herself to a so-called monster who listened to her like no other man ever had.

That said a lot, didn’t it?  And Rumplestiltskin was angry at her over a perceived insult to his mother, not over something she’d said about him.  At least he didn’t look at women as property, or as inferior beings.  And Belle and Morgan had come to an understanding. Surely she could do the same with Rumplestiltskin, even if he was determined to avoid her.

Belle would find a way.

A/N: Stay tuned for Chapter 10—“Something That Wasn’t There Before,” in which Belle’s curiosity leads her down interesting roads, Zelena plots to gain an advantage for herself, Regina meets a certain outlaw, and Rumplestiltskin and Belle finally have a heart-to-heart.

Also, this story has been nominated for the TEAs! If you’re so inclined, please vote for A Different Battle in categories of Best Courtship, Best Remix, and Best OC (Morgan).  Ruins & Battles, the parent series of this story and Ruins of Camelot, has also been nominated as Best Series.

#a different battle #ruins & battles #rumbelle fic #dark castle rumbelle

[kenttheatreblog]

Are actors and directors supposed to get along?

Directors are the staple of any production. After all, pretty much everything you see on stage was once merely a thought in the back of a directors mind, and while any production is a collaboration, whether it be costumes, set design, props, sound or lighting design, it is a director that glues these various factors together. It is they that deal with every part of the production and it is they who mould a script into a living, breathing piece. Despite this however, directors - like actors - can be either good or bad.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had experience in directing and it’s one I would rather not repeat. The stress is more than any actor can comprehend. Everything is your responsibility and everyone turns to you to fix their problems. You have to have a certain temperament to be a director, and I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t have that temperament.

But like I said, there are good directors and there are bad ones, and boy have I experienced both. The bad ones are very few and far between, but sadly it’s always the bad ones that seem to stick out in my memory. They’re not necessarily bad all the time but you have those moments with them that leaving you banging your head against the rehearsal room wall.

My first said experience was with a director who wasn’t necessarily awful, but he had one vice that left his cast scratching their heads, and that was that he never gave notes. No feedback whatsoever. At the end of rehearsal he’d just shout “Right everyone thank you see you next time!” and we’d all then just shuffle off home.

All actors crave feedback, we’re a sensitive bunch, and we need to know that what we are doing is the right thing. The risk you run by not giving notes is that the cast fall into a false sense of security. If you don’t get a note, you assume you’ve done a good job so you carry on as you are. This all came crashing down on me with this particular director. He decided, in all his wisdom, to not give notes at all until the final dress rehearsal.

A finger licking genius right there.

When I say the final dress rehearsal, I mean the final dress rehearsal, as in the next time we were doing it was opening night. My note was simply, “Andy, I can’t understand what you’re saying, can you slow down a bit please?” “Oh, right,” I responded slightly shocked, “Erm, what part can you not understand me saying?” “Pretty much all of it,” he replied indifferently.

That’s when it went dark.

How the hell are you supposed to get up in front of an audience after your director has told you almost immediately before that everything you’ve been doing for the last 3 months is nothing but a gabbling mess? I literally spent the whole day before opening night practicing my diction like I was doing a shit one man version of The King’s Speech. After the curtain closed on the first night, I ran out of the dressing room and to my friends and family in the audience screaming “Did you understand me? DID YOU UNDERSTAND ME??!!!” Thankfully they did and I could spend the rest of the run without the twitchy eye my director had gifted me.

As I said though, he was in a minority of whirlwind directors and he’s made it on to my “naughty list” of directors to avoid. However while the “naughty list” is very short but thankfully the “nice list” is quite long.

One of the directors on the “nice list” is a very lovely lady by the name of Valerie Galbraith. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Val as an actor on two occasions, once in Terrence Rattigan’s Flare Path and again last year in her production of For Services Rendered. I think most people who have been in one of her casts will agree with me when I say that it’s always a privilege to be apart of her shows. Aside from the exquisite attention to detail her and her husband Pete put into their productions as a whole, Val’s approach to directing actors is everything you could ask for when playing a role. She trusts her cast entirely and let’s you make the character your own before fine tuning bits of your performance.

A good director makes the production a collaborative piece and not a dictatorship. An actor should be made to feel comfortable in a role first and foremost, then the director helps you mould that performance into something that can be put in front of an audience.

I once had a director, who shall remain nameless, who seemed to nitpick on the weirdest things and had the brain of a goldfish when it came to giving notes. Once we were off book, he gave me this note: “Andy, Andy, Andy,” he always said my name three times before giving me a note like I was Beetlejuice or something, “you must put your hands in your pockets more, you need to look more relaxed. Putting your hands in your pockets will make you look a lot more relaxed.” Hearing that the first time, I thought fair enough and made a mental note of it.

The next rehearsal came and I made sure I put my hands in my pockets occasionally, conveying the relaxed state my director was so keen to see me in, and then we were called for notes. Low and behold my note was “Andy, Andy, Andy, you must never put your hands in your pockets, you look far too relaxed.”

Now, as I’m sure you understand, that bloody confused me. So I said “Oh, I thought you wanted me to put my hands in my pockets?” “No, no, no,” he said, “do not put your hands in you pockets please.” Very well, I thought, you’re wish is my command.

The following rehearsal, my pockets remained a hand free zone, and you’ll never guess what… “Andy, Andy, Andy. You must put your hands in your pockets. You need to look more relaxed!”

This pantomime went on for several rehearsals and I got to the point where I wanted to gnaw my hand off and launch it at him so I could slap him from the other side of the room. It was impossible to look relaxed because I had no idea what his idea of relaxed was. I came to the conclusion I was just going to do what the hell I wanted and if it felt like a hand-in-pocket moment, I’d put my hands in my pocket. Naturally what ever I did, his notes contradicted it, even to the point where on the last night of the 8 show run, I was told to do something entirely different and that was to fold my arms instead. I stifled the urge to say that instead of folding my arms, I was going just stick my middle finger up, and that he could politely go swivel on it.

I really think directors have better things to be doing than worrying whether their actor’s hands have been pocketed or not. Surely, they should be helping you play the thing and then your bloody hands will act accordingly?

A few years ago, I did a fantastic play called Underground. The director, Chris Howland, was really good at getting the best out of his cast and made you feel comfortable playing a part. He made you understand what was going on beneath the surface of a character, which as a result you felt less like you were performing a role but just being a person. Isn’t what all directors should be doing? Encouraging you to do your best rather than create neuroses that make you want to sob uncontrollably?

As I previously mentioned, I have dabbled in directing and while the experience was ultimately a rewarding one, I don’t think I’d want to do it again. While actors only have to worry about what their doing, directors concerns are endless and for those who undertake such a task, I salute you. My directing experience wasn’t by any stretch a bad one, as a matter of fact it was fantastic, but it taught me something that I now carry with me in every production I do and makes me considerate of every director I work with:

We actors can be a MASSIVE pain in the arse.

My directing experience was fortunately shared with a dear friend of mine, who without I would have surely had a nervous breakdown. We didn’t help ourselves much with this particular project, as not only did we decide to co-direct the thing, we also wrote it together and also gave ourselves supporting roles (as if we didn’t have enough to worry about). All this aside, and I know I would say this, but we had a really good show. Our cast were spot on and everyone involved really mucked in to make it a special show.

But there is always one.

There was a member of the cast who, because of the societies “all inclusive” policy, we sort of inherited and had to give him a part. Fortunately in the play there was a space for him so we wrote him in accordingly. It soon became very apparent to me that the man was undirectable. He said every line in a monotone voice, he kept facing the back of the stage when saying his lines, was always in the wrong place, and (I SWEAR this is true) he kept reading his stage directions OUT LOUD. Further to this, he hated being given notes and he would sarcastically respond to any feedback, no matter how minor, with “Ooo ok then, Mr Spielberg.” Naturally, as I’m sure you can imagine with a man who spent most of rehearsals ending his lines with “Crosses down stage left”, I was called “Mr Spielberg” rather a lot in our time together and quite frankly it got on my tits.

This was merely the tip of the iceberg, however. Having worked with him on a few previous occasions, I knew that he had a tendency of fishing the director to let him sing a solo in a show. To be clear, he couldn’t sing, he just simply read the lyrics in his monotone voice, but it didn’t stop him attempting to audition for The X Factor several times.

Much to his chagrin, our show was a straight-play so there was no singing. This didn’t stop him making a suggestion that unnerved me somewhat…

In the final scene of our play, the lead character kills himself after killing various members of his family, and with a bit of stage magic he appears at the opposite end of the stage to walk into the afterlife (it sounds crap, but in context, it’s awesome). It was quite a poignant moment in the play and ended it very nicely.

Prior to this final scene taking place on the opening night, Simon Cowell’s wannabe bestie came pounding up to me like a puppy and said, “Andy! I have a brilliant idea for the final scene!” I said, “Well seeing as we’ve opened now, I don’t think we can change anything but go on…” “Okay, well, you know how David kills himself in a bit? I was thinking, how about when he does that, I take centre stage and sing ‘Another One Bites The Dust’ by Queen?” I laughed out loud, but it didn’t take me long to work out from the look on his face that he wasn’t joking. “Seriously?” I replied. “Well… Yeah? He’s the fourth character to die? Another one has bit the dust?” He then gave me a look which was similar to one that you give your dog when you see it dragging its arse across your cream carpet. “I’m gonna say no.,” I said “but thanks for the suggestion.” He then let out a grunt of frustration and retorted with, “Well, Mr Spielberg, when I’m out there, there is nothing you can do to stop me from singing if I want to, is there?”

Now, I wasn’t sure if it was the fact he called me “Mr Spielberg” again, the fact he’d threatened to ruin the ending of the play me and my friend had slaved over for the last 6 months, or if it was my burning desire to protect the collective works of Queen, but I snapped, “You know what, you’re right. There is literally nothing I can do to stop you singing, but I swear to God, if you go out there and destroy the ending of this play with ‘Another One Bites the sodding Dust’ I will run out onto that stage and vomit on you in front of everyone. I will then find someone else to read in your part for the remaining shows and I will make sure it’s someone who hasn’t got the inclination to burst into song at any given moment.”

It was at that moment, I realised that I wasn’t directing material, but I got what I wanted and he didn’t sing the bloody song.

My point is that both directors and actors have faults, but we have to fulfil the job we’re given to the best of our abilities and work together to achieve an end result. A good director equals a happy actor, and a good actor equals a happy director. But if you ever work with me, please don’t mention my hands or sing 'Another One Bites The Dust’ to me.

I will sob.

#amateur theatre #theater #theatre #acting #directing

[themanicgalaxy]

SPN 5X11 Sam, Interrupted

wait Psych also had an interrupted episode the BRAINWORMS

So I have my presentation tomorrow whee

also I can't believe Misha Collins joined tik tok today, truly unparalleled

man I hope this one is chill

oh someone being hunted by a monster and people diagnosed her, but she can tell the difference

kinda like Anna but still Vibe

"there is no such thing as monsters" sir

look they're cliche, but the visuals are cool

oh god and she's dead

and no one believes her or them

it looks like a suicide jesus

seriously does no one clock the van halen

YES BABAR THEY CLOCK BUT NOT VAN HALEN?

"I'm a lil depressed doc, I started the apocalypse"

oh my fucking god oh my fucking god they just tell the truth

"oh an angel on your shoulder"" nono, his name's castiel, he wears a trenchcoat"

I LOVE THIS

"yeah can you fix him so we can go back to hunting monsters" i'M FUCKING CRYING

THEIR LITTLE HIDDEN PLEASED SMILES

ah so it's another one of Dad's Friends of course

ah Dean isn't coping with Ellen and Jo of course he isn't

people get old ig

ah so Dean doesn't believe them, Sam gives them the benefit of the doubt

man I miss the formula, at least a little

ah yes the dangerously codependent relationship

he sounded so sad though

ah jeez imagine being so panicked but no one believes you, jesus

where'd the narcissism come from, huh?

Dean dude I'm so fucking sorry

the matter of fact conversation is actually...very fun dialogue but also big oof

boy he's fucked up lmaOOO

ah yeah he didn't take therapy well go figure(unfortunatly I know what he means)

I cannot figure out how to spell that for the life of me it's fine

"back off Dean" also feels pointed

ohh right last episode

is it like...whoever saw it, it goes after them first?

oh GOD THAt's a deep cut

Sam what the ACTUAL FUCK

SAM THAT IS A BONE SAW

SAM THAT IS HIS BRAIN

Sam: Dean look! isn't this wack it's a brain that's been sucked dry!

Dean: SAM WE GOTTA FUCKING GO

weird boy Sam

Dean what the fuck that worked

"crazy works" sir

wraith?

it's the nurse isn't it

it IS a perfect hunting ground

oo nice shot

ah the mirror

"you think you have to save everyone" oof

thanks John

"how do you get up in the morning" "good question" :(((

and the heavily implied drinking problem

jesus that was horrifying

so the nurse is Sam this time?

this feels like...REALLY fetishy

"we know what happened in-"

dean's little "dude, why"

this sounds like Bobby

ah the knife

it's the nurse you guys I promise

DAMN dude you got a lot of anger you need to work off huh

they got it wrong, I tOLD YOU

LMAO THEY GAVE HIM STUFF

"you always were a happy drunk" that's right we rarely see him drink

"you've been at least half crazy for a long time" oof

"since hell" oh come on give more of that please

nah happy unangsty Sam is so cute

"I'm fine" sir

MEG?

how does she know about the GED and give em hell attitude I love that quote

oh god he's not talking to anyone?

oh good he's actively hallucinating

but she can't...cuz they acted her like...she was real?

ah fuck poor Dean

ah he's not delusional, he's angry

yeah that tracks

"barely even human" o p e that's the thing he's sensitive about

actually they're both just...good at hiding it

oh my god they're both hallucinating

ah fun he's having fun, he's just completely losing it

Dean is just panicking in a corner jesus CHRIST

boy they're all..so FUCKED

"yeah we'll get there eventually, but the Coincidence" dude come on just think about it

jeez this man has a hundred million neuroses him trying to focus is Insane

oh the Other nurse? yeah ok

sexy monster nurse is totally a fetish I swear

ah so it's the creepy nurse, good ok I was right

It was pretty clear but still

Dean is Not Having a Good Time

ah the blood spatter

sam and the restraints

bro she was so obvious

ah she checked them in didn't she

ah so there was ALSO a reason for crazy brain

"well I helped, but you were always angry" lmaooo

"you build your own hell"

"you think this is gonna go well for you kiddo" "no but I'm crazy so what the hell" lmAOOO

bro he is BARELY hanging on

OH M Y GOD HE RIPPED IT OFF

and she's dead so the visions stopped

"i'm mad at everything" oh poor guy

listen he got like no autonomy ever, he gets to be like this

poor selfless idiot

Dean do nOT BURY IT

THAT I S HOW YOU END UP LIKE MARTIN

YOU FUCKERS ARE TERRIBLE FOR EACH OTHER

ok so

1. Dean. Dean hides everything, he absorbs it, he keeps going because that's what he was taught to do

2. Sam. Sam's anger driven, and emotional, and more importantly, gets so little choice in anything, and is always just Fucked. good exploration of this dynamic, but unfortunately, it got written of as "eh it'll be fine," which strangely enough I don't think this was the point.

3. hunting BAD. Like this was very clearly a "how hunting fucks you up" thing, or how you have to be fucked up to do it, and how they'll end up crazy like that. Like this is so much Not Escapism I'm so confused by the message, it was a different writer probably.

4. ok but like cinematpgraphy was good and parts of this were like...ironically funny

5. the baddy was fun! like obvious but her villain speech was good, she was scary, there was logic for the crazy brain even! it was cool!

#pawswatchesspn #5x11 Sam interrupted #it was a very good episode #I just think it maybe muddled it's message?

[hillburn42-blog]

How Love Can Solve Political Turbulence

“This is not a time for personal weakness, but for strength,” writes spiritual author Marianne Williamson. “The only real strength is love; love makes us vulnerable, but in a way that makes us strong.” Williamson isn’t talking about love love. She’s talking about love as a political force.

For decades, Williamson has been a leader in the spiritual community. She’s also written more than a dozen (bestselling) books on spiritual guidance. And as an activist, her mission has always been one filled with compassion, prayer, and love. But today’s political climate and our failure to come together as a society are threatening our country, our people, and the progress we’ve made, argues Williamson in her new book, A Politics of Love: A Handbook for a New American Revolution. Her book is a rallying cry, a study of our humanity, and a warning of what will happen to us and to our country if we don’t find our way back to love.

With A Politics of Love, Williamson, who’s making a 2020 presidential bid, asks the country to be courageous in the face of hate, to lead by example, and to start doing the work to heal ourselves and our country. Explains Williamson: “There’s a way that our grace must be matched by grit. Our tenderness must be matched by a fierceness today. I think it’s happening, but we all need to step it up.”

For more from Williamson, listen to her on the “Who Are You in Crisis?” episode of The goop Podcast, where she and our chief content officer, Elise Loehnen, discuss compassionate resistance and real maturity.

A Q&A with Marianne Williamson

Q

What inspired you to write A Politics of Love?

A

I had written a book called Healing the Soul of America back in 1997. I revised it last year because so much had happened in the country and that book was resonant again; it’s just that the statistics were out of date—so many of them were even worse.

I also felt that because so much had changed in the country, it was time not just for a revision of the old book but for a new one. When I first wrote Healing the Soul of America, people in the spiritual community weren’t really interested in hearing about politics. And people who were political activists didn’t seem too interested in hearing from a spiritual author. But a lot has changed. The idea of an integrated model of healing our lives, that there are external issues that have to be addressed and internal issues that have to be addressed, people understand this now. It’s a mainstream impulse. We see how it applies to healing our bodies. We have to make internal changes as well as external changes, politically and socially, if we’re going to heal the country.

Q

What issues are you seeing in our country?

A

The problem is twofold. First, the problem is that such a horrific thing is happening. And an equally significant problem is that the American people don’t seem to care, that so many of us have looked the other way. For so many Americans, chronic disengagement from politics has gone on for so long that citizenship is like a muscle we need to rebuild. Internal muscles wither from underuse, just as external muscles wither from underuse. And there are attitudinal muscles.

There are many things we’re not noticing. For instance, millions of American children born right here are living in chronic trauma every day. There are schools without libraries. Schools where they don’t have the adequate funding and supplies to teach a child to read. If a child can’t read by the age of eight, the chances of high school graduation drastically diminish, then the chances of incarceration are drastically increased. Psychologists tell us that the PTSD of a returning veteran from Afghanistan or Iraq is no more severe than the daily PTSD that is present in these children.

Where are we? Where are America’s women? I have, for thirty-five years, been working very intimately with issues of personal transformation, and to transform our lives, a deeper inquiry needs to extend outward, beyond just ourselves. It can’t just be: What makes my life good? What makes my life transformed? It has to be: What makes the collective good? What makes the collective transform?

Q

Is this what you mean when you write, “We need a revolution of consciousness?”

A

That is what is happening now—the idea that we must rise up within ourselves. What is happening today with the Trump administration can be likened to an opportunistic infection. These things could not have happened had there not been a weakened societal immune system. Every citizen is a cell in our societal immune system. That’s what I feel is going on now, an awakening to a new contextualization in citizenship where we don’t disengage from it but instead we embrace it as an important dimension of a meaningful, well-lived life.

In Helen Schucman’s A Course in Miracles it says that your greatest power should not be to change the world; your power lies in your ability to think differently about the world. What you look at differently changes, and we can look at politics differently. As we look at politics differently, with a new set of eyes, then we can reenvision the country and really be on the way to repair as a nation, and we can experience, as individuals, the depth and the meaning of being a part of that.

There’s a famous saying, “All that is necessary in order for evil to triumph is for enough good men to do nothing.” There’s a lot that has developed in the field of personal growth where people talk about living big, meaningful, important lives, but if your life doesn’t serve anyone but yourself or your own tiny tribe, I think we might want to reconsider those words, meaning, and depth.

Q

How does personal transformation encourage political transformation?

A

Everything we do carries the imprint of our internal being. You could be going out there with the best of intentions and really trying to do something great in the world that serves other people, but if you’re carrying around your own unhealed neuroses, they’re going to impact the external work that you do. If you have problems in relationships with other people or you come across in a certain way that people don’t like, that’s going to impact your external work.

On the other hand, you can’t say, “I have to become a perfect person before I go out there.” Because it’s also true that being out there, you have the experiences that are what you need in order to work on those internal issues. It’s like marble ice cream. One day you will realize that, as it says in A Course in Miracles, “there is nothing outside you.” Every issue really is personal.

In A Politics of Love and what I’ve felt in my life and in my campaign is that politics is personal. There’s a level of maturation that occurs when you allow yourself to look beyond yourself into a wider field of collective concern. It keeps us infantilized when we don’t address larger political social and economic issues. I see this even in the world of higher consciousness and personal growth. There are too many women stuck at certain level of little girl. Too many men stuck at a level of little boy. Anybody who’s looking the other way and just hoping somebody else is handling it, saying, “I’m not really very political,” is not dwelling at the level of seriousness that we need to be at as women and men today.

Q

You mention chronic disengagement. What advice do you have for people who feel politically burned out right now?

A

Checked out and zoned out are very different than burned out. There are not that many people in our personal growth and serious higher consciousness community who are burned out. They’re checked out. They’re zoned out.

There is no public issue that will not ultimately get to your private door. When they are gutting the Clean Water Act, gutting the Clean Air Act, and overturning the ban on pesticides that harm a developing child’s brain, more and more the policies of a sociopathic, corporatist agenda affect all of our lives in ways that cannot be walled off, that we cannot wall ourselves off from.

There are people whose lives are deeply affected already by the policies of this administration regarding such things as what’s happening at the border. The fact that a certain something hasn’t affected you personally yet doesn’t mean it’s not happening. What then becomes operative is: Are you going to look away and consider it just not your concern? There is a karmic consequence to that. Not only are there karmic consequences to what we do; there are karmic consequences to what we don’t do.

Q

How do we resist the darkness and be compassionate toward people who don’t have the same political views or for those who spew hatred?

A

Martin Luther King made a comment about how God told him he had to love his enemies, but he didn’t say he had to like them. This isn’t a personal love. But this is a democracy. Every citizen has more than a right. We have a responsibility to draw the lines that we feel need to be drawn. It’s no different from drawing boundaries in personal relationships. The higher consciousness community is so into boundaries. It’s not negative to draw a boundary. When someone is hurting your child or any child with certain policies, it is the righteous thing to say, “Stop right there.”

There are many, many more people in this country who love than people who hate. The problem is that those who hate are very convicted. Conviction is a force multiplier. Racists and bigots and homophobes and anti-Semites and Islamophobics, those people are a minority in this country, and I believe a small minority, but they have gained political power. The issue is that those of us who love, let’s love with greater conviction.

Too many of us have thought of love only in terms of our own personal lives. It’s not that I don’t think we’re good, loving people, because I think we are. I think the Americans are good, loving, decent people. Over the last few decades, many people have been inquiring what it means to live a good life. A better life. Be a loving person. Be an ethical person. Be a person of character. The issue is that that conversation has become, for too many of us, circumscribed only within the personal domain or within a small group. We must think about what makes a good society.

So what do you do about those people who do not look at life that way? That’s their business. In a free society, nobody owes it to you to vote the way you would vote. The issue is they have become effective and organized and strategized. Now we must become effective and organized and strategized. That’s why I talk about a politics of love. We must operationalize love now the way some people have operationalized fear. We must put love in action collectively, just as we must put love in action personally.

In our personal lives we know this. Love is a participatory emotion in a personal relationship as well as in a social or political relationship. It’s not enough for me to just sit here and love you. I need to behave toward you in ways that are a conduit for that love, that serve you, and that show compassion to you.

Q

What are the steps that we need to take as a society to become one that is led by love?

A

We have elections in this country—that’s what a free democracy is about. We will be deciding in the year 2020 whether or not to continue with the current policies. All of us have to choose now whether to align with the politics of fear or the politics of love. I think that is the civic responsibility, and that civic responsibility is a sacred one this year, to listen very deeply to the candidates. If and when you find one who aligns with your heart and your deepest values, support them. Do everything you can. This is a very serious moment. Don’t let your ideas of what is possible stop you. Don’t let any kind of intellectual or personal laziness stop you. Get involved. We have a country to save.

Source: https://goop.com/wellness/how-love-can-solve-political-turbulence/

#read more #see more #check it out #interesting #learn more

[glumnet-blog]

via Vace

correct me if im wrong but i dont think u ever had to experience the mandatory joys of hebrew school. maybe u did i forget i dont want to make you too jealous here but  i went to hebrew school on thursdays and sundays from 7-14 years old.  hebrew school lasted for just a couple of hours but it felt excruciatingly longer than that.  hebrew school was just like going to school, on top of goin to regular, grade school during the week. that is a ratio of 2 schools to every 1 week!  only a generous masochist would send their child to 2 different schools right?   i think it was worse than regular school though, bc i simply didn't have friends there.  the only vivid encounter i remember with a peer before 5th grade was with Lucas in the second grade, whom my mom delicately tried to pair us together in order to have our conversational sparks ignite, over a luigi video game, like she was trying to start a fire in the wilderness out of uninterested rock and twig.  lucas had a 7 year old mullet and had a lot of confidence.  i didn't like either of those things.  especially the mullet shit bc i was a rat tail or die kind of 7 year old.  after my mom literally accompanied me to hebrew school for awhile and the other kids thought i had special needs, she tried the opposite approach.  she hired the UC berkeley student hebrew school teacher to come tutor me once a week for an hour. this was pretty fucking weird.  my hebrew school was pretty lax and progressive.  in retrospect i realize the institution of the temple sinai hebrew school is much more about socializing with other jewish kids and pretending to memorize the va'haf'tah (or actually memorizing it if you're hannah sternberg and like to impress the rabbi) then to actually embed the jewish youth into intense and arduous jewish centered academia.  so having hairy 21 year old Noam awkwardly sit next to me at my kitchen table and timidly correct my mispronunciations of hebrew words was all a wash if you will.  but my mom was a stubborn mom who wanted her son to carry on the 'teachings of our ancestors' a forcefully sentimental phrase that makes you feel like a melodramatic bible scholar whenever u say it out loud.  thankfully these at home sessions didn't last long because of Noam's scheduling problems.  so for the rest of the fourth grade i was free of hebrew school.  but sooner or later fifth grade rolled around and my parents threatened me with no screen time for a month if i didn't go in. no screen time was a punishment way worse than death so i relented.    

i think it was at this first day of fifth grade hebrew school that shit changed.  2 things changed specifically. 1) i made nate laugh and 2) i made julia laugh.  when i wrote earlier i didn't have any friends in hebrew school i mean like i didn't even have acquaintances.  like i lethargically walked into class, pretended to be invisible for 2 hours, hid the bathroom during break times and waited impatiently after class on the sidewalk scouring the downtown oakland avenues for the plain yet angelic white of my moms 1995 honda oddesey.  i had made people laugh before at regular school i guess .  but there was something different about making hebrew school people laugh... i had somehow broken the social engima of this institution i had distain for, for so long.  not only that... it was a different kind of laugh ... at least coming from nate. i didnt just make nate laugh i made that motherfucker crack up.  watching him laugh was like watching a firecracker go off. like i got him in trouble from the teacher he was laughing so hard and uncontrollably.  making julia laugh was different.  she didnt crack up like nate.  but her laughter was genuine nonetheless and just as euphoric. it felt like whatever i imagine heroin to be everytime i saw her begin to open her mouth and smile and vibrate her whole head because of something i had said.  within the space of 2 hours i had acquired my first hebrew school friend and first hebrew school crush.  i was a fucking social millionaire....i would call this period of time, 5th grade, the golden age.   i could make nate laugh consistently and julia was a similarly consistent vessel to validate my 5th grade ego.  i was closer with nate bc we were both boys , and julia already had a very insular and exclusive trio which was not accepting new members.  herself, hannah, and arielle (who demanded to be called ari which i always was irritated by  she was a fake ari.  her real name was arielle! she was a fraud, imposter! my full name is ari.  i am the real ari.  stupid aside)....time pushed forward and 6th grade began.  several important dynamics changed in 6th grade.  the friends of nate who went to his real, 5 day a week school (st pauls) had been assigned to our 6th grade class.  additionally, puberty was pretty vivaciously in affect and thus social hierarchies were further matured as well as a recognition of elementary sexual thoughts and feelings.  i continued to make nate laugh but i felt like my secret companion was bein taken away by his St paul friends.  in order to combat this i tried to befriend all his friends.  something i learned then and throughout my life almost never works.... attempting to pass as an insider in a group where u are and always be an outsider.   i could make nates friend laugh a little bit but they were much more fond of making each other laugh.  also because they went to school with each other nathaniel (different than my friend nate) and jackson had an air of superiority and seniorirty over me.  even in the 6th grade i think i could detect this kind of unspoken social heirachy at play.  and with julia other guys were starting to make her laugh at hebrew school.  if you want to talk about social heirarchy she was definetly the queen of our class.   as puberty progressed the less cool i became.   bc my only claim to fame socially was humor , but i didnt understand all the other shit.  like dressing cool, talking cool, walking cool., etc.   that otther shit became important in middle school if not the rest of my life... because of this, and the fact im just a fucking shmuck at the end of the day , made julia talk to me less.  and with less talking came less laughing.  nate and julia's laugh was to special to me during this time just less frequent... and therefore more rare.  so when i did get it  from them it felt all that much better.

thhere was a point there end of 5th grade start of 6th grade i looked forward to hebrew school. i looked  forward to sitting down in the creaky, plastic black chairs in room 04 and whispering to nate about how ugly our teacher was.  i looked forward to playing tic tac toe with julia in the art room instead of drawing menorahs, and arguing with her about who had the ineferior tic tac toe skills (she did i got XXX like almost everytime ok) .  i even started to like  the fucking moldy, bookish smell of the temple because i associated it with having good times with julia and nate.

in the 7th grade my connections with nate and julia fell apart uninterestingly and sharply .  my friendships were fading with nate and julia before the year even started ....but of course with 7th grade we entered mid'rasha.  mid'rasha is just hebrew school for teenagers, explained my mom on teh car  ride over to my first mid rasha class.  that may be true for my mom but for me mid rasha was a new world.  a world i did not want to reside in.  midrasha was different in many ways, it was at night, it lumped in loud, sparkly 17 year olds with unsure, gangly 13 year olds in the same room, it was a different bigger campus, it was off.  clqiues were formed immiedatly and it was obvious i was not in the st pauls group.  the group nate was in.  i didnt even see julia at all i think she was   being ultra extroverted befriending the royalty that was 17 year olds who wore sean john and listened to MGMT before it was cool ( this was 2007) .  i went to naybe 5 or 6 mid rashas but i understood the jig was up.  i was no longer a funny person in the room nevermind the funniest in the room.  the teachers were young  attractive college students who you couldnt fun of at all for being ugly.  i wasnt even in the same elective as nate anymore so i couldnt whisper ' ruby is ugly' even if i wanted to.   1 time i did have an art class with Julia.  but now as an ambitious and earnest 13 year old she tackled the assignment sincerely.  i saw her drawing these detailed portraits i thought were gross because they reeked of being  a try-hard.  i just wanted to play tic tac toe.

i stopped going to mid rasha and i didnt see nate or julia again for a while. i didnt see nate until i was a junior in HS and i took the SATs at the high school nate attended.  when we were all getting checked in i saw him at a circular lunch table with his st paul friends.  i walked by him to say hello.  we gave each other a stoic and cold ' whats up dude '  .

the next time i saw julia was at my high school school sponsored dance.  at the time i was nervous as shit bc i did not know how much i would have to dance with my then girlfirend, what kind of dance i would have to do, if i should get mad at other guys dancing with her etc.  a bunch of high school dance inspired neuroses were blossoming in my head.   i was suprised as a motherfucker when i walked into the high school lobby and saw julia sitting a dinky plastic table checking students in.   i remember my brain being blank with confusion.  i walked up to her to get checked in.  she said hi ari with a smile.  the kind of trained smile a social butterfly has deployed many a time.  it was an impersonal smile.  it was warm and cold at the same time.  i said hello took my ticket and left without any small talk or acknowledgement of our hebrew school connection.   i went on to dance with my girlfriend a little but to mostly stand around and pep talk boris into making a move on yael.

i have not  seen either of them since.  i had a dream last night i was in hebrew school in the 6th grade.  julia was sitting across the class room.  she was mad i was looking at her and mouthed for me to stop.  nate was sitting next to me like he normally did in the 5th and 6th grade.  but he wasnt trying to exchange goofy remarks with me about all the flaws of the teacher.  instead he was listening attentively.  i leaned into to whisper somthing but he waved his hand faintly.  he was not to be disturbed

in sophmore year of high school my 'mentor' relayed to me that she was getting reports from teachers that i was exhibiting disturbing and unproductive behavior. disturbing and unproduvtive behavior? i thought.   i was just tryna get motherfuckers to laugh.  i was trying to chase the high of the first time i made nate cry.  i was trying to recreate the time julia was so approving of whatever joke i had made she rubbed my leg as an appreciating gesture and said youre soooo funny.  i never was able to recreate those highs in high school.  that kind of blind temporary euphoria stayed untapped, stored in my memories of hebrew school. my mentor said it was problematic that i was so loud and disruptive in class.  she understood i liked to horse around but she argued ' thats not the real you ari.  we both know you are better than that.  the real you is working hard , studying hard, respectful of teachers and avoiding distrations in class.  this class clown act you put on isnt the real you'  

that kind of pep talk , even at the time , felt weird to me.  who are you , some distant authoratative figure i meet with twice a month , to tell me who i am and who i am not.  and much more importantly beyond that, you tell me my true identity is attached to some golden scholar who wouldnt dare partake in the low life humor of classroom banter.  everything about academia makes me ripe with disgust and disinterest.  the only reason why school has been bareable at all is the social aspect.  making people laugh

during junior year of high school i went through my first break up , i cut friends off , friends cut me off, i went to my first funeral, i had an anxiety attack in jerasulem (symbolic of my relationship with judaism....in my opinoin) i felt increasingly alienated from my wealthy and narrow minded private school brethren, started smoking weed every night before bed and so on .  my mood was bad all the time, i was tired, and the last last last thign i wanted to do was to go to school.  this i now realize is my first bouts of Depression (dun dun duuunnnn).  

it is senior year of highh school now.  the students check in for the first time with their mentors.  my mentor relays to me personal behavioral report -  teachers now view me as quiet and respectful.    teachers are somewhat cognizant of my general apathy towards what is in front of me, but complimentary of my willingness  to put my head down and do the school work given to me.  my mentor is smiling and exclaiming ' see ari you did it!  this is the real you.  this is the hard working and respectful guy i know you have always been.  you dont have time for distractions you have higher priorities now' .  i just wanted the meeting to be over so i nodded my head rapidly in agreement.  however in my mind i thought the current version of myself teachers are describing could not  be further from the real  me.  the real me is still at temple sinai room 04 sitting in those cheap, creaky black chairs.  the real me is shaking nate's arm bc i just thought of a joke about the how ugly the spoken version of hebrew sounds to a non native speaker.   the real me is singing stronger by kanye in an obnxious robotic way , parodying the chorus in order to get julia to chuckle.  the real me has not been seen for or heard from for a while.  the new me is content with surviving the day without any interaction with peers.  the new me doesnt want to be seen.  the real me is still poking julia's shoulder, waiting for her to turn her head

[burn-afterwriting]

I have £36 in my account right now. I need £15 for electric in the next two days, £10 for drumsticks if I want to play with my shitty band I don’t really like and whatever loose change is on the table for laundry money and bus fares. Then I have to worry about food because I have nothing in my house and my girlfriend wants to come over and I’m supposed to feed her. I feel completely worthless as a human being and really want to let her move on because I can’t offer her normal things like food nevermind taking her out or buying her things. My brain goes into overdrive when she says I make her happier than any other relationship she’s been in because how the fuck bad must they have been that this is a better alternative? Maybe being with me has finally killed her self esteem and I’ve dragged her down to my level and it’s so dark and empty here she can’t find her way out. I honestly feel like the admirable thing to do is to cut her out of my life until I have money and can afford to treat her right. 

I think the real problem is I’m so fucked up I can’t even begin to figure out where to start. I’m not fulfilled in any aspect of my life. Obviously this is largely due to not having money so I can’t do basic things like buy nice things or eat nice things or do nice things. I’m stuck in a loop where I constantly wonder who I would’ve been had I secured that lucrative job right after I left uni. Would the money have changed me? Surely I’d be living somewhere else. I’d maybe be able to drive and that would get me out of my own head a bit. Then I tangent through other possible realities where I still have a family and my uncle gives me advice every Saturday while we fix up old cars and talk shit about politics. Moments I’ll never have. 

I’m in such dire need of a change in scenery and a new layer of skin, but I’m still trapped, surrounded by the past. I made my flat pretty comfy with everything in its right place, but after a year it’s all grown stagnant and static. What am I programmed to desire? A bigger apartment I can fit more things into? A garage or shed where I can learn to tinker like a real boy? I don’t know how to grow or change as a person because I’m not sure who I want to be. I can never talk about my past without having to admit I had serious development problems that eventually cemented as serial self doubt and what feels like bordering schizophrenia or sociopathy. The ironic thing is that when I was younger I was so much happier, even though I was suicidal and self harmed a lot. Maybe that was actually a coping mechanism and I never really replaced it I just learnt to bury it. Maybe most of my current problems stem from going to university and realising how fucked up I was within the context of normal, middle-class, well adjusted individuals and running from my problems in an effort to seem like I’d left them behind. I still have dreams about killing my dad. I never tell them to anyone but my girlfriend still picks up on my daddy issues. What other alternative do I have but to be a man though? To stop focusing on the things I can’t change and move into a new future where I’m the hero of my own story. I don’t even like to write anymore because there’s a chance I’ll be in a better mood tomorrow and the thoughts of my previous honesty will hover over me and pull me back down. What use is there in being disgustingly honest about your neuroses when there is no immediate solution and all you can do is pave over it like an old road and try to keep on top of the maintenance. 

Sometimes the only path seems to be accepting my role as the bad guy, telling myself so what if I have a girl I don’t deserve, she’ll either figure it out herself or I’ll keep getting away with it. I hate the idea of personal happiness at the expense of others because it reminds me of my family saying I only talk to them when I’m looking something despite the fact I don’t look anything from them except a place to go sometimes and to touch base. In my head I have a script for every bad word people say about me but in reality I’d rather avoid confrontation because it’s a battle I would never win. I used to be an asshole and revel in it because I knew the pros of my personality would outweigh the cons, but now my life is such a piece of shit I think I try to avoid the cons just to help that ratio level-out by proxy. 

I’m so broke, financially and spiritually. I don’t like who I am and I have no idea who I want to be. It feels like purgatory here. I feel like a glitch in the system, an emotional tear that people can physically sense. I think I can take out £20, spend £15 on food, there should still be at least £15 for electric and the loose change will hopefully cover bus fare and laundry. I could be a leech and borrow drumsticks off a pal but even that feels too scummy so I’ll see if I can somehow double that fiver in my jeans pocket and buy some for myself. I want to say the struggle fuels me, I want to post a rant about how I’m barely surviving and nobody cares, but that’s the thing, nobody does care anymore, not even me. 

[fentonizer]

Identity Unrealised

I’ve been talking a lot with my partner about quitting my job.

If you’ve not read anything else I’ve ever written, then the one take-away from it all is that I am mad. I am full of anxieties and doubt, nihilism and narcissism.

So the seemingly simple question of “should I quit my job?” turns into a labyrinthine flow chart of possibilities, permutations and alternate realities.

First of all, the plan is to do the thing everyone says not to do, and that is quit before having another job lined up. You see, it’s no secret, at least to those close to me, that my job is eating away at me. It’s gotten to the point of late whereby I want to just leave it, because having no job is better than this job.

I’m also extremely lucky in that years of watching my money, never buying new clothes, having no friends, not having kids, and generally being cheap af, I have saved some money. Money on top of the actual, locked away- in case of emergency, break glass- savings. I also have no brand loyalty to margarine, and just buy the one on offer.

Being a depressive means not feeling like you deserve anything good that you’ve gotten, and I do honestly feel like I shouldn’t quit my job because I am lucky to have it. I’ve been here 10 years and when the thought of moving on comes to me, I get these feelings of “I’m not smart enough to trick anyone else into employing me” or “my skill-set is so narrow, that I was lucky enough to find this one job where using Excel and knowing some keyboard short-cuts makes me a god.”

Already, I know what you’re thinking. “Oh no, rich white boy doesn’t know what to do with himself, boo-hoo.” I totally agree. What a first-world problem, right? I should be eternally grateful for even being able to have this conversation, to not have to work 50 hours a week at minimum wage to feed my children. I do feel some level of guilt for having this stability and these opportunities, and still feeling like this isn’t enough for me. Hey, maybe I should quit so that someone more grateful can take my job? Checkmate, liberals.

I have stayed here for years on the (possibly) unfounded notion that this is as good as it gets for me, because I really don’t know how to do anything else. To be thinking that at 30 years old is frankly outrageous.

There’s a thousand trite platitudes about “life being what you make it” and a book called Eat, Pray, Love (which I assume is a historical synopsis of the Holy Communion). The general outlook of society is that you should do what makes you happy. The unspoken to subtext to that is obviously “so long as it is morally sound, within your means, and at an acceptable level of risk.” I should write a book called Eat, Spreadsheets, Existential Dread, Eat Again, Love.

If anything I should embrace my privilege. I should quit, for exactly this reason. I’m still young, I have no children and my partner is also in full time employment; I should make a big change and just go for it while I still can, before I truly am locked in by some unforeseen turn of events. I don’t want to be here at 35, or god-forbid 40, and think “wow, what did I miss out on?”

The fact that I’ve already been here 10 years should be the alarm. I started when I was 20, and although my role has changed and grown in that time, from lowly Quality Support all the way to Systems Manager, that last promotion was years ago. And 10 years in the same building, the same department, the same tea room, it’s surely time for a change?

But then the neuroses kick in... The job is stable, it pays me well, I get to work with autonomy, I get to use the internet at my desk sometimes, my manager is understanding of work-life balance... I could go on. I am afforded a lot of opportunities here to ensure my life as a whole runs smoothly. Should I let something small like “sometimes this job and the people here annoy me” get in the way of an extremely well-suited enabler of the kind of life-style I want?

It’s hard to know if this is realism or depression talking, and that’s something I always struggle with. It’s often hard to differentiate between your heart saying “this is a bad idea” and your faulty brain is saying “just don’t even bother, path of least resistance, my friend. Then we can go to bed and eat crisps for 5 hours.”

The other thing, and it’s kind of a big thing, so you’ll forgive the bad narrative pacing of this blog post, is that I want to quit to start a business.

This is already “not” “like” “me.” As above, I am either lazy or chronically depressed, but likely both. Giving up my cushy job that makes me enough money to live and buy these “video games” they have now, so that I can start a business and give up all of my free time, money, social life, etc, etc, seems like a very bold choice.

And that’s what I’m struggling with. It is a bold choice, and it will be hard work, and there’s a good chance it fails, so is it a risk worth taking? Is it worth upending my life, to do something that historically I have been bad at (working hard) when I can live a perfectly acceptable life doing the 9-to-5 at the office?Maybe people would look back on that and think “Jesus, that guy worked here for 40 years and then died in the middle of writing a VLOOKUP. What a life.” But this is what people do, isn’t it? They settle down, they make roots. Some people have been working here since the place opened in 1984. They have been here longer than I have been alive. What a life.

This all seems very metaphysical; I am, as a conscious being, asking myself how I see myself, and if there exists an idea of my identity unrealised. That’s what we would define as “happiness,” right? An idea in one’s mind about the life you’d like to live, and seeing that your real life bares a large resemblance.

And ultimately that is the answer. When I imagine this aspect of my life, and I see myself at my desk, doing spreadsheets and answering emails, I don’t see that as a life well lived. I don’t see myself being happy. When I think of myself running this business, doing the thing that the business will do, I think “that will be great.”

It was realising this that gave me the answer; I was waking up not happy, I was going home not happy, because my job, to me at least, is unfulfilling and rote. Sure, I could stay here until I’m 50, and in many ways that would be fine, because I would have money and a routine, none of which are inherently “bad things.” But I would look back on that and regret not trying something else, something that could be so much better than I dare even let myself think about deserving.

[unfolded73]

This Graceful Path (6/19)

Summary: Emma has just moved in with Mary Margaret and started working as a deputy in the Storybrooke sheriff’s department when she meets Killian Jones, the town’s introverted harbormaster. When a prominent Storybrooke resident is found murdered, Emma tries to juggle solving the case with new friendships, parenthood, and romance. A Season 1 Cursed!Killian AU.

Rating: Explicit per CSBB guidelines (violence, sex); more of an M on unfolded73’s scale. The sex, when we get there, is not extremely graphic in nature. Same with the violence.

Content Warning: This fic contains two major character deaths, one canon and one not. (You’re already past them.)

Total word count: ~ 75,000

Acknowledgements: Thank you to @j-philly-b for betaing this monstrosity. Thank you to @caprelloidea for all of the read-throughs and cheerleading; not sure I could have written it without your excitement early on. Thank you to @teruel-a-witch for the original prompt on tumblr which sparked this fic. Thank you to @pompeiiablaze for the wonderful art which accompanies Chapter 3 and also will accompany later chapters. Thanks to the CSBB mods (@sambethe in particular, who had to look at my check-ins) for your support and for enduring my neuroses.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 – AO3 Link

Chapter 6

The dart left his hand, tracing a perfect arc through the air and landing with a satisfying thunk into the center of the bullseye.

Killian blinked, surprised at the accuracy of the throw. He repeated the motion twice more with the other two darts he held loosely against his stomach with his prosthetic hand. They also landed in the bullseye, one above and one just a hair’s width to the right of the first dart.

A young man on his way to the bathroom  — Killian vaguely recalled his name was Sean — stopped and whistled. “Pretty good, man.”

Giving him a tight smile in return, Killian retrieved the darts and repositioned himself to throw them again. As Sean disappeared around the corner, Killian focused on the bullseye. It seemed to fill his field of vision, the sharp metal edges of the rings strangely bright and in focus. Throwing the darts into the bullseye again was as easy as dropping them into a bucket.

Rather than bringing a smile to his face, a cold chill ran up his spine, and he rushed over to pull the darts from the board before anyone else in the diner noticed his success.

In daylight hours, Killian’s nightmares and hallucinations usually seemed smaller, less significant. He had tried to convince himself that his lifelike imaginings of an infernal creature were a product of his exhausted brain and nothing more. If he could just get a good night’s sleep, he thought, the nightly visitation would go away.

He had taken to stopping in at Granny’s more often, glancing over at Emma and Henry’s accustomed booth and feeling his heart sink a little on the days they weren’t present. Today he had decided to linger at the dartboard in the hope that they might come in late. Killian tried not to think about the reason why he was so preoccupied with seeing Emma Swan.

His patience was rewarded. The door rattled, and Killian turned to see the woman in question entering alone. Emma approached him, holding out her hand for the darts as if this was a routine meeting between the two of them. Her blonde tresses tumbled in soft curls over her shoulders, and as he passed the darts over, he imagined what her hair would feel like sliding through his fingers.

“Where’s your boy?” Killian asked.

“He has an appointment with Dr. Hopper on Wednesdays,” she said as she threw the darts one after the other. Her form needed work, but she wasn’t a bad dart player. He sauntered over and retrieved the darts for himself.

“Are you off work already?” she asked him.

“Aye, there’s a storm coming, and all the fishermen came in early. I’ll go back by the harbor later to make sure nothing’s amiss, but for now…” He shrugged and smiled at her before throwing the darts in a tight cluster around the bullseye. Again. He’d always been good at darts, but this was getting spooky.

“You are insanely good at this,” Emma said as she walked to the dartboard.

Her next throw was a bit wild, and he could see anger in the set of her shoulders. “Picturing anyone in particular when you’re throwing those darts, love?”

Emma grimaced. “Regina has talked Sidney Glass into running against me for sheriff. You’ve probably heard about it. So I’m pretty sure I’m going to lose.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“Come on, Killian. I’m new here. My whole checkered past got revealed on the front page of the paper. There’s no way I’m going to win this election.”

“Sidney Glass isn’t the most popular Storybrooke resident, so I think you might stand a chance. If it helps, I plan to vote for you.”

Emma grinned. “Thanks. Hey, maybe no one else will bother to vote and that will win it for me.”

Killian took another turn with the darts, missing the center on purpose with two of them. “Listen, Swan, I’ve been thinking… would you like to go out with me sometime? For a drink, maybe?”

She blinked at him for a few seconds. “Like on a date?”

He rubbed his sweaty palm off on the leg of his jeans. “Yes, exactly like on a date.”

“Oh, Killian.” He could see his ultimate disappointment in the uncomfortable smile on her face. “You’re a nice guy and, you know. Kind of ridiculously good looking. But I don’t really… date. And especially right now, with Henry, and dealing with what happened to Graham, it’s not something I’ve got room for in my life.”

He shrugged, trying to seem unaffected. “It’s quite all right, Swan. Just a fleeting idea.” He went over and pulled the darts out to give himself something to do and tried not to feel too crestfallen.

“I mean technically you are still a murder suspect,” Emma added, but her smile told him she wasn’t really serious.

“Isn’t most of the town made up of potential suspects?” he asked her.

She heaved a sigh. “Yeah. That’s one of my many problems.”

“I’m sure you’ll figure it out, Swan,” he said, feeling the need to reassure her, to make her smile again. “A clever and resourceful person like you? You can’t fail.”

Emma’s eyelashes fluttered a little bit at that. “Do you really think so?”

“I do.”

“Thanks.” She gave him a tiny little smile. “I’d better get back to work. I’ll see you around.”

Killian watched her go, and then absently threw the darts at the dartboard before leaving himself. Just as he stepped out onto the street, the sky opened up and rain fell down onto his head in sudden buckets. “Perfect,” he muttered.

~*~

The rum burned its way down his throat. With a small shudder, he gestured to the bartender at the Rabbit Hole to pour him another. The dimly lit bar, permeated with the sour smell of stale beer, was almost empty on this particular weeknight. Killian ran his hand over the thick finish on the wood, index finger unconsciously probing at a cigarette burn in the otherwise unmarred surface.

He waited for the numbness the alcohol brought, the way it would blanket over all of his fears and disappointments with a gauzy nothingness. He couldn’t fall asleep properly anymore, but at least if he drank enough, he could pass out on his bed later in a drunken stupor, and his nightly visitor would not penetrate the alcoholic fog.

Killian flushed with shame at the thought of his conversation with Emma that afternoon. Her embarrassed face before she shot him down was not going to be easily forgotten. He didn’t know what he’d been thinking, that such an intelligent, striking woman would be interested in a man like him. Especially considering that she’d only just met him when she’d decided he might be a murderer. And then he had the audacity to ask her out on a date. With a groan, he dropped his head onto the bar.

“Having a rough night?” a voice to his left asked.

Looking up, Killian was faced with Sidney Glass sliding onto the bar stool next to him. He wore a well-tailored suit, his face shiny with perspiration.

Chuckling, Killian nodded. “You could say that.” He looked down and saw his glass was empty again. He flagged down the bartender.

“Same here,” Sidney said. The bartender came over to fill Killian’s glass, and Sidney ordered a vodka tonic.

“Your campaign for sheriff not going well?” Killian asked him.

“Oh, you heard about that?” Sidney asked. When Killian nodded, Sidney grimaced. “I’m supposed to be writing my speech for tomorrow night right now. Instead, I’m here.”

The bartender put Sidney’s drink in front of him, and Sidney held it up to Killian, who paused before clinking his glass against it.

“Sounds like a tough job,” Killian said. “I don’t envy you.”

Sidney swallowed half of his drink in one long swallow. “At least I have the mayor’s support. Miss Swan will never have that. Even if she wins, the mayor will never stop making her life hell.”

Killian took a deep breath and let it out. “Sure, but Emma’s got the stomach for it, I think. She’s a strong woman. She can go toe-to-toe with a suspect in a grizzly murder and she won’t back down.” He swirled his rum in his glass, considering. “It’s not going to be easy for whoever the sheriff becomes, these next few weeks. There’s a killer on the loose.”

Sidney fidgeted on his stool. “Of course.”

Killian leaned over closer, almost whispering in Sidney’s ear. “A killer who took a knife and plunged it into Mr. Gold over and over again, his heart’s blood gushing out onto the forest floor. Ripping until his entrails spilled out of his body. And now that murderer is out there. Maybe waiting to kill again. Maybe watching the sheriff to see if he gets close. After all, Humbert died, and he seemed to be perfectly healthy before he collapsed.”

Eyes as wide as saucers, Sidney leaned away and pulled at the collar of his shirt as if he couldn’t breathe. “Graham Humbert had a heart condition.”

Killian ran his finger around the rim of his glass and shrugged. “As far as we know, sure.” Standing up, Killian drained the rest of his drink. “Best of luck to you, Mr. Glass.” He threw some crumpled bills down on the polished wooden bar and walked away. It was only much later that he thought to wonder where those horrible words whispered to Sidney Glass had even come from.

~*~

When the townsfolk arrived to listen to the speeches by the two candidates for sheriff, they heard Emma Swan give a speech about her qualifications, how she’d overcome her past and was determined to do her best for the town, and how she intended to bring Mr. Gold’s killer to justice. Then Sidney Gold stood up and the podium and after a long pause, he said only one thing.

“I hereby withdraw from the race for sheriff.”

~*~

Emma awoke to the sound of the door downstairs closing softly. She glanced at the clock: 1:13 a.m. Another late night for Mary Margaret.

Christmas had been a fairly subdued holiday in Storybrooke. Several of the stores had decorated for the season, but there had been no government-sponsored lighting displays, no wreath on the door to the town hall, none of the things that festooned every other small town in America. Emma had thought it was odd but had found it somewhat refreshing not to be inundated with holiday cheer everywhere she’d gone.

With Henry on break from school and presumably confined to his house and Mary Margaret absent from the apartment more frequently than usual, Emma had continued to focus on her job, the job that was now officially hers: Sheriff of Storybrooke. She had returned to the crime scene and poked around in the dirt, continued to pore over Gold’s real estate and financial records, interviewed the few people who had ever made a late payment in rent to Gold, but everything was a dead end. She had even searched the pawn shop, and had been quickly overwhelmed with its seemingly infinite stock of strange items.

Christmas itself had come and gone with little fanfare; she’d exchanged gifts with Mary Margaret and the two of them had shared a big pancake breakfast and then had settled in on the sofa together to watch bad TV. Throughout the day, Emma had eyed the brightly colored wrapping paper on the gift she’d gotten for Henry, unsure of when to give it to him.

Now staring at the ceiling above her bed, Emma knew she needed to mind her own business, that what Mary Margaret did was not her concern. But in spite of her better judgment, she let curiosity get the better of her and found herself getting out of bed and going down the stairs to greet her roommate.

“Oh!” Mary Margaret exclaimed, her hand flying to her chest when Emma appeared. “You scared me; I thought you’d be sleeping.”

“The door woke me up.” She took in Mary Margaret’s smudged mascara and lack of lipstick, and the way her cardigan sweater was askew on her shoulders like it had been quickly pulled back on. “And no offense, but you could not look more well-fucked right now if you tried.”

“Oh God.” Mary Margaret covered her face. “Is it that obvious?”

“A little, but that’s okay. Also, it’s none of my business,” Emma said, wrinkling her nose. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Actually, would you mind staying up for a minute? I could really use a friend to talk to.”

“Sure.” Emma followed her and flopped down on her back on Mary Margaret’s colorful quilt-covered bed, watching as her roommate took her earrings out and dropped them in a jewelry box. Her bedside lamp cast a soft glow over the space, and Emma yawned. “I assume it’s not Victor Whale who’s keeping you out at all hours.”

Mary Margaret shook her head. “You know who it is.” She took a deep breath and let it out. “It’s David.”

“Yeah, I figured that. I saw the way you looked at each other when you stopped by the sheriff’s station last week.”

“How did we look?”

Emma snorted. “Like you were about to devour each other whole.”

Mary Margaret pulled her sweater off and sank onto the bed, pulling her knees up. “Oh.”

“So what happened to him trying to work things out with his wife?”

Tears filled Mary Margaret’s eyes. “He says he’s in love with me, and I… Emma, I’ve never felt this way about anyone in my life. He’s… being with him is like coming home.”

“Oh, man. You’ve got it bad.”

“I know.” She wiped a tear from her face in frustration. Emma got the sense that she’d cried a lot of tears over David already. “He’s going to leave his wife, he just needs to wait for the right time. It’s tricky right now because—”

Emma sat up quickly. “Mary Margaret, are you listening to yourself? You sound like a cliche. You sound like Carrie Fisher in When Harry Met Sally. Look, I like David, and he doesn’t seem like a bad person. Clearly, he’s been through a lot, what with the coma and all, and it’s not that I don’t think his feelings for you are real. But that doesn’t mean he’s not going to end up hurting you. And the longer you continue this affair with him, the more hurt you’re going to be.”

She wiped away another tear. “On second thought, maybe I don’t want to talk about this,” Mary Margaret said in a near-whisper.

Reaching out and taking her hand, Emma tried to give a reassuring smile. “I’m sorry. I know you love him, and I really do hope things work out.”

“You just think it’s unlikely they will,” Mary Margaret said with a sniffle.

“Anything’s possible.” Trying to lighten the mood, Emma added, “Hey, at least someone in this apartment is getting some.”

Mary Margaret responded with a watery laugh. “You’re working too hard, especially since the election.” She traced the seams of the quilt on her bed. “Ruby mentioned that you’d been talking to Killian Jones in the diner a lot recently.”

“Ruby needs to mind her own business.”  

“Not much chance of that. So there’s nothing going on there?”

“Nope.” Emma watched as Mary Margaret narrowed her eyes. “He asked me out, but I said no. I don’t want to date him.”

“Why not? I always thought he seemed nice. And he’s…” She raised her eyebrows.

“Insanely hot?” The two women shared a smile. “I know. But seriously, I don’t date. And even if I did, I don’t think I would date Jones. He has issues.”

“We’ve all got issues, Emma, us included.” Mary Margaret slapped her hands down on her knees and shook her head back and forth quickly. “Do you know what we need, and soon? A girl’s night.”

~*~

“More shots all around!” Ruby gestured to their waitress, a wide grin on her face.

“I don’t know if I can drink with you like we used to, Ruby, my tolerance is shit after having the baby,” Ashley said.

“I’ll have yours, then. Or the sheriff will, right Emma?”

Emma took a swig from the beer bottle clutched in her hand and shrugged. She was trying to stick to beer because she figured she couldn’t get herself into too much trouble that way. The Rabbit Hole was crowded tonight, and she was sure not a few people had clocked that their newly elected sheriff was sitting among them, so she really needed to be on her best behavior. But the evening had that feeling to it, she thought as she watched Mary Margaret expertly pour the contents of a shot glass into her open throat, Ashley giggling and Ruby hooting and making a ‘raise the roof’ gesture with her upturned hands. That feeling that more often than not led to fuzzy memories and stumbling attempts to get home. She'd never had this many friends before, and it was making her feel good and a little bit reckless.

“I’m so sick of being needed all the time,” Ashley was saying. “Sean is working two jobs, and I’m spending more time with his laundry than I do with him. And the baby, I mean I love my baby, but babies need you every minute of every day. It’s like my body isn’t my own, you know?”

Emma looked down at the table, focusing on the wood grain and not of the fact that she most decidedly did not know because she’d given her baby away. Desperate for something to distract her, she downed the contents of the shot glass in front of her.

“Doesn’t sound any worse than being needed by Granny all the time,” Ruby said. “I’m basically on-call 24/7; I almost never get a break. And nothing I do is ever good enough for her.”

“No one you do is ever good enough for her,” Ashley supplied, giggling into her rum and coke.

“I don’t want to talk about sex or men,” Mary Margaret said.

“Who says I limit myself to sex with men?” Ruby said, her teeth flashing between red lips. “But fine, okay, what do you want to talk about?”

“Any progress figuring out who killed Mr. Gold?” Ashley asked Emma.

“I’m not really supposed to talk about that… but fuck it, there’s not really anything to talk about. No, I haven’t made any progress. My half hour of interrogating Mo the flower shop owner led me to the groundbreaking discovery that he’s been seeing Mrs. Hendricks who runs the bakery in town.”

“He has?” Ruby said, rubbing her hands together. “I didn’t know that.”

“You didn’t hear it from me,” Emma said. “The point is, I have no leads, and Regina wants to have my head on a platter for it. I mean, she wanted that already, but now she really wants it.”

“You’ll figure it out, Emma,” Mary Margaret said.

“Do you think I could get an uninterrupted night of sleep in prison? Because if so, I’ll confess right now,” Ashley said.

“How’s school, M. M.?” Ruby asked, sipping her drink through the tiny stir-straw.

“You know, it’s weird. My students have been really… different lately.”

Emma frowned, thinking about the fact that Henry was among her students. “Different how?”

“I don’t know, I can’t really explain it. I have this feeling that they’re changing, and I need to adjust my curriculum to keep up. It’s like things that have worked for me for years aren’t working anymore.”

“Ooh, look who just walked in, Emma,” Ruby said, excitedly kicking her under the table. Emma turned to look and saw Killian sit down at the bar.

“So what?” Emma responded, trying to keep her features blank, and ignoring the fact that her heart rate picked up a bit at the sight of him.

“Come on. He comes into the diner way more than he used to now that you’re there on your afternoon breaks. I can tell he’s disappointed when you don’t show. Sometimes he plays darts and oh-so-unsubtly watches the door until you show up. He really likes you.”

Emma snuck a glance at him again and then turned back to the table. “I’ve been with guys like that before. Full of angst and self-loathing, usually with a dark secret and a drinking problem. No thank you.”

“A Byronic hero,” Mary Margaret offered before taking a sip of her drink. The other women looked at her blankly. “It’s a literary archetype.”

“Whatever, he’s hot and he’s into you,” Ruby said, refusing to be derailed. “If he’s trouble, then use him and lose him.”

“That’s easier said than done in Storybrooke. I’m trying to be an upstanding person for my kid, I can’t go around having one-night stands with people, not with the way everyone is all up in everybody else’s business in this town.”

“Yeah, for instance, I just heard Mo is dating Mrs. Hendricks,” Mary Margaret said with a smirk.

“Shut up. My point is, I’m not going to sleep with, date, or in any way encourage Killian Jones. It’s not happening.” If she glanced at him a few more times during the night, admiring the way his ass filled out his tight jeans, well, you couldn’t blame a girl for appreciating the view, she told herself.

Chapter 7

#csbb #cs ff #captain swan ff #this graceful path fic #my fic

[lukebennett-blog1]

Hey guys! Sammy here!! Someone needs to stop me from doing this because I love making characters way too much, lol.

Before I get into the outline!!

Luke is a Family Man but is recently divorced due to his ex-wife’s gambling problem. He raised Kennedy alone, not allowing her mother to see her until she gets a grip on her addiction.

He came back to Port St. Lucie, his roots, so that he can get a fresh start and hopefully figure out how to move forward.

ORIGINS & FAMILY:

Name: Luke Bennett

Nickname: N/A

Birthday: October 22nd, 1991

Age: 26

Gender: Male

Place of birth: Port St. Lucie, Florida

Places lived since: Chicago, Illinois & back

Parents’ names, backgrounds, occupations:

Mother: Jennifer Bennett, Librarian

Father: Robert Bennett, IT Manager

Number of siblings: None

Relationship with family: He used to be close but he drifted apart from them after his marriage

Happiest memory: The day Kennedy was born

Childhood trauma: His father had a gambling problem

Children of his own?: Kennedy, age 8

If so, relationship with their mother?: Recently divorced

Age he became a father: 18

PHYSICAL

Height: 6′3″

Weight: 176lbs

Build: Slim

Nationality: American

Disabilities: N/A

Complexion: Dark skin

Distinguishing facial features: Eyebrows

Hair color: Black

Usual hair style: Just how it is

Eye color: Brown

Glasses? Contacts?: Neither

Style of dress/typical outfit(s): Casual if possible

Typical style of shoes: Sneakers if out of the office

Health: He has a strong immune system

Grooming: He tries to look nice to set an example for Kennedy but there are days he chooses not to shower in exchange for getting other things done.

Jewelry? Tattoos? Piercings?: He still hasn’t taken off his wedding band

Accent?: The same as everyone in Port St. Lucie

Unique mannerisms/physical habits: He tends to tap a lot

Athletic?: He played basketball in high school but hasn’t played in many years. He goes running sometimes.

INTELLECT

Level of education: He graduated high school and is currently in college for computer science after transferring back from his school in Chicago, Illinois

Level of self esteem: He used to be much more confident than his is now. I’d give him like a 5/10

Gifts/talents: He makes a mean omelette.

Shortcomings: His temper

Style of speech: Loud

“Left brain” or “right brain” thinker?: Slightly more Left Brain

Artistic?: Meh, he’ll make Kennedy shaped pancakes on Sundays

Mathematical?: Very, he’s always been good at math

Makes decisions based mostly on emotions, or on logic?: He tries to focus on logic but his emotions are very strong

Neuroses: N/A

Life philosophy: “Everything will be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end.” --John Lennon

Religious stance: He was raised Christian

Cautious or daring?: Cautious

Most sensitive about/vulnerable to: Don’t say shit about Kennedy

Optimist or pessimist?: In the middle

Extrovert or introvert?: Extrovert

Level of comfort with technology: High

RELATIONSHIPS

Current marital/relationship status: Divorced

Sexual orientation: Bisexual

Past relationships: Ex-Wife

Primary reason for being broken up with: He’s too focused on his work

Primary reasons for breaking up with people: Gambling problems

Level of sexual experience: He has a child

Story of first kiss: Him and his ex-wife were at a school dance

Story of loss of virginity: *cough*Prom*cough*

A social person?: He used to be very very social but has become less so in recent years. It hasn’t helped that he had moved away.

Most comfortable around: Kennedy

Oldest friend: TBD

How does he think others perceive him?: Positively

How do others actually perceive him?: Mostly confusion

VOCATION

Profession: Student & Cashier

Past occupations: ^^

Passions: 

Being a father

TBD

Attitude towards current job: “It’s fine.”

Attitude towards current coworkers, bosses, employees: He doesn’t mind them, but he doesn’t consider them friends

Salary: Enough to pay the bills

SECRETS

Phobias:

Needles

Heights

Life goals: 

Being a good father

Finding love again

Greatest fears:

Losing Kennedy

Being Alone

Most ashamed of: His temper

Most embarrassing thing ever to happen to him: Admitting that he and [EX-WIFE] were having a baby

Compulsions: Checks all the locks 2 times each night

Secret hobbies: Singing

Secret skills: Doing Kennedy’s hair

Past sexual transgressions: Ex-Wife

Crimes committed: Minor vandalism in high school (not caught)

What he most wants to change about his current life: He wants to not be single and to not fuck up Kennedy’s life

What he most wants to change about his physical appearance: Probably his ears

DETAILS/QUIRKS

Daily routine:

Get up

Get ready

Get Kennedy up

Do Kennedy’s hair

Get Kennedy to school

Go to School & Work

Pick Kennedy up from school

Make supper

Get Kennedy to bed

Go to bed

Night owl or early bird?: Early Bird

Light or heavy sleeper?: Light

Favorite food: Steak (Medium Well)

Least favorite food: Broccoli

Favorite book: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Least favorite book: Anything else

Favorite movie: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Least favorite movie: RomComs

Favorite song: Car Radio by Twenty One Pilots

Least favorite song: Taylor Swift anything

Coffee or tea?: Coffee

Crunchy or smooth peanut butter?: Smooth

Type of car he drives: Honda Pilot

Lefty or righty?: Lefty

Favorite color: Green

Cusser?: Yes

Smoker? Drinker? Drug user?: No / Socially / No

Biggest regret: Marrying his ex-wife

Pets?: Kennedy wants a dog but he’s not convinced

#galena:intro