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iwishicanbeagoodpianist · 3 years

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the Wifilcon and the Winter Router

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x OC/Reader Summary: When Bucky learns that his neighbor has been stealing his wifi for months. Warnings: None A/N: I'm not a fanfic writer at all, this, like all my stories, are adaptations to fanfics. My original stories are not written in english, so this is also a translation. please do not repost my work

For an instant, Bucky thought that the knocking he was hearing was coming directly from his head, I mean, it wouldn't be the first time his mind played tricks on him, but he realized that the sound was actually coming, unluckily for him, from his apartment door. Oh no no no no no no no, I just got back from putting up with Sam for almost 6 full weeks, I don't need interaction with more people for now.

Bucky thought for a minute to ignore the sound, to wait for the person to give up and leave, anyway he didn't spend many days on this apartment, almost no one had seen him leave or enter the building and he had no contact with the neighbors, only with the lady on the 7th floor who once lost one of her cats, which ended up in Bucky's apartment, accidentally. Not that I found the cat in the alley and actually brought him to my apartment, it doesn't mean that I stole the cat, he was in the street by himself, I rescued him.

When the banging on the door stopped and Bucky thought he could breathe calmly again, a voice between altered and annoyed was heard all the way to the living room where he was sitting trying to overcome his third panic attack and fourth existential crisis of the day .

-"I know you're in there! I saw you coming in a few hours ago! I've been waiting for days for you to come back!"-

More out of instinct than anything else, Bucky pulled out the knife hidden in his right boot as he slowly backed away from the door. Do I really have a spy as a neighbor? Should I call Sam? Is he in danger too? Never mind now, you need an escape route Bucky, concentrate, third floor, window to the alley, 2 minutes max, the bike is parked far away, I'll have to run, but to where, rendezvous point, safe place, think....

- "for God's sake, open the door, I need you to pay for your fucking internet plan, I'm in the last season of my series and I need to know if Carolina died or not!"-

- "The internet?"- Between the andrenaline from escaping and the shock of not understanding what was happening Bucky spoke louder than an assassin, with over 60 years of experience, should have spoken. Oh, shoot.

-"Yes! Your wifi, I need it to finish watching my series"-

Whispering "wifi" to himself, Bucky tries to remember where he has heard that word before, this is what I get for never listening to Sam when he talks to me. But before he can continue his mental analysis of all the conversations with Sam about such stupid things as his favorite American Football team, the New Orleans Saints, that I remember, to how Antonio could possibly leave María on the last episode of the 6 o'clock telenovela of which Sam is a fan, his apparent "neighbor" spoke up again:

-"Jesus Christ, can you open the door? So we can resolve this like adults"-

Bucky resigned to the fact that he has given his position to the "enemy", walks to the door and opens it waiting for his death. Well at least if I die I won't have to listen to Sam again talking about Antonio and María. But on the other side of the door, there was a woman, who in her pajamas, very unthreatening but cute, was watching him as if he were a ghost but still with defiance in her eyes, in one breath she introduced herself and continued her speech about her complaint to Bucky:

-"As I was saying, I need you to pay for your internet"-

-"I'm sorry, but I'm not sure I understand what you mean"- mumbled Bucky.

- "Good Lord"- To Bucky's surprise his neighbor, pushes him and enters his home, well not so much a home home, more like the headquarters of his secret club, of which he is the president, vice president and only member, the point is that it is his place, where he can (and wants to be alone), as she lives here. This must be a dream, maybe I hit my head too hard in the last mission and I am unconscious in the hospital.

Crossing the room, Bucky's unwanted visitor looks around searching for something while whispering the words "I see you are quite minimalist, but maybe this is too much, someone urgently needs to look for some inspiration on Pinterest". She stops abruptly in front of the shelf where, in theory, a TV should go, while shouting: "EUREKA", she bends down and picks up a white device which has two antennas and like a million little blinking lights, damn, that looks like something out of a spaceship, I'm being watched by aliens? I'm being spied on by Kree?

-"This is your router, this is where the internet signal comes from, which I need you to pay for so I can finish watching my series"-.

Bucky, still in shock for the third time in less than 15 minutes, as he processes the idea that perhaps Thanos' unknowing twin is spying on him for a second invasion of earth and revenge for his brother's death. He can only nod to his now more relaxed and happy neighbor.

-"Perfect, thanks! I need to check the food I left in the oven, I'll talk to you later"- and as quickly as she came she left through the same door, leaving Bucky with more doubts than answers, peeking down the hallway, he realizes that she is the neighbor who lives next door, to his right. When Bucky comes out of his initial stupor, still not fully understanding what is going on, he decides to take his cell phone out of his pocket and call his own personal Google to solve his doubts about this century: Sam Wilson.

-"Hey Buck! What's up?"-how does he always manage to sound so happy? focus Buck.

-"What the hell is a router and why do I have one in my house?"- somehow Bucky manages to formulate, although maybe his voice cracked a little on the last words.

-"That thing's been there for at least two months and you didn't even notice it? Have you even paid the bill?"-

-"You put this in here? Without telling me????"- maybe Sam is also a Kree? Who can I trust now? It's all a trap?

Listening to Bucky's accelerated breathing, Sam tries to explain to him slowly, that in this century life without internet is not life, but obviously as Bucky does not even know how to set the alarm on his own cell phone, he was in charge of buying the router and creating the contract with the company so that, the 106 year old man could have his personal network at home. He had given it the name but he had not given it a password so that Bucky himself could set it up later. "I am an excellent friend, I mean co-worker, if I may say so"

-"Sorry man, after all that happened, we got called for a mission and I forgot to tell you, do you have your laptop over there? I'll help you set up a password, so your neighbors won't steal your internet anymore"- and with that comment everything started to make sense in Bucky's slightly screwed up but functional mind about the events with his seemingly non-spy and harmless neighbor.

Meanwhile Bucky was trying to remember his own password to unlock the laptop in front of him, also courtesy of Sam. "Bucky, when you learn about online banking and that you can pay your rent, electricity, phone and everything with a click of your computer, you will thank me". It should be noted that Bucky hasn't used that laptop once, like a good 100 year old grandpa he goes to the bank to make his deposits and pay his debts, which obviously consisted only of electricity, water, gas and phone because the man had no idea that there was a device in his house that spit out internet, apparently only his next door neighbor knew this. Buck tells Sam how he thought his router was an alien device and how he thought his neighbor was a KGB agent coming to kill him. "Relax Buck we all have undesirable neighbors that steal our internet signal sometimes", well undesirable is not the word I would use to describe her but ok.

When Sam finally explains to him how to connect his computer to the internet, Bucky can finally see the name that his wonderful co-worker, not friend, because he could never be friends with someone so stupid as to think that the name "THE WIFILCON AND THE WINTER ROUTER" was a good name.

- "my god Sam, you're such an asshole!"-

-"HEY! That's a great name!"- Sam responds with as much indignation as possible, he's the best at naming everything from dogs to wifis.

- "I can't believe you're Captain America, I can't believe we're even friends"- Bucky really can't understand his luck to have friends, well, co-workers whatever.

- "Well excuse me but we're co-workers..."-

- "Well, take this call as my formal resignation, bye"-

-"Wait a minute Buck..."- Bucky ended the call, to finish -his self-imposed- punishment of listening to Sam Wilson talk for over an hour. At least I asked him how to use the bank's website to pay for the internet. Suddenly, without warning and without explanation, the memory of his neighbor is lodged in his head, her hair in a ponytail, her reading glasses, pink shorts, her sweater from some university of which he can't even remember the name because he was watching out for other things... that she wouldn't kill me obviously, he was watching out that she wouldn't pull a knife out of her back and kill me right there. The message on his laptop indicating that he can now set a new name and password to his wifi distracts him enough to stop thinking about his sweet and cute non-spy neighbor and how she would look with her hair down and her glasses off.

Still with the sweet feeling in his chest and the desire to see her again he writes as the new name of the wifi, while laughing:

"If you want free internet, you owe me at least one free dinner"

After paying the internet debt and closing the laptop, Bucky gets up hoping to find something edible in the kitchen, while leaning over to look inside his fridge and analyzing how bad it would be to eat a fried egg with pasta and sriracha, he hears again a knock on the door, but this time it does not cause Bucky the anguish and anxiety that caused him the first time, but quite the opposite.

-"Open the door Winter Router! I prepared chicken pot pie for dinner"-.

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vaguely-concerned · 3 years

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Any tips for a TF POV fic? I want to write one because I too went through a time in my life when I let feelings bounce off cuz that was easier, but I feel like that's not quite on point for him 🤔

God I have SO MANY THOUGHTS about this and they’re all so wordless and frustratingly evasive to me yet (I am in the process of writing a looooooong T.F. POV fic and it gives me much more trouble than Graves POV, probably because as a person I’m quite a lot more like the T.F. Type in real life lol). But yes, here we go, let me try to express some of what I personally try to have as my hm ‘anchor points’ for his perspective. (Heavy disclaimer that these are just my personal & disorganized little musings and by no means the only or ‘correct’ way to read the character!)

- First of all I agree, the image of ‘bouncing off’ doesn’t feel quiteright -- it’s in the right neighbourhood but the wrong address sort of thing, but it’s really hard to come up with a way to explain how I feel the nuance here.

*insert three hours later spongebob meme here* Okay, so the metaphor I came up with is: T.F.’s relationship to emotions is a direct parallel to his relationship to water/the ocean: it’s scary down there, it’s dark, it’s dangerous, and if he should ever be dumb enough to try to go in too deep it’ll kill him dead because boy oh boy on so many levels this man just did not learn how to swim. As far as he’s concerned any sensible person would simply bob along on the surface in a sturdily built boat and try not to think too much about the weird shit that lives down there in the depths. (In this metaphor the layer of artifice and performance so habitual it’s basically integrated into the fabric of his soul is the boat. Y’know, the part that’s Twisted Fate and not just plain ol’ Tobias. I’ll hasten to add that I think both parts of his identity are equally ‘real’ and equally him, but the Twisted Fate part is like… protecting the Tobias part. Keeping him from drowning, as it were. I’m not sure he’d think of it like that himself for the longest time, though, I suspect he has more of a ‘that man is dead’ attitude towards the Tobias part after Graves is gone)

I think what I’m trying to get at is the idea that to him, raw emotion is as hostile and unknowable and unnavigable an ‘environment’ as the deep ocean. (And the only time we see him willingly go there, physically and otherwise, is for Graves, so you know let’s jot that down first of all lol.)

- He seems to genuinely quite like and be interested in people – how they think, what moves and motivates them, their secrets and foibles. So I tend to try to keep the uh ‘detail work’ in his POV focused in that direction. Priority going like 1) people 2) people’s valuables 3) the relative availability of people’s valuables at this moment if you have clever hands and a very charming smile haha

- One of my favourite things about T.F. is that he seems, I don’t know… quite genuinely good-natured beneath it all? If you back him into a corner some sharp and dangerous things peek out (he has survived in his line of heh ‘business’ for like thirty years, and a lot of it on his own), but for the most part and when unthreatened he has a sort of mildly amused and intrigued live-and-let-live attitude to the world even as he’s conning it that I find deeply charming. Which to me ties in with:

- T.F.’s first instinctive reaction to danger (perceived or real) the majority of the time seems to be ‘Flight’. Confrontation and violence are basically his ‘when literally everything else has failed’ options. (As seen prominently in Burning Tides, where he just keeps running and running and the only time he actually starts throwing punches is when he has to because Graves is in immediate danger and they’re backed into a corner. Which feels like it means something huh lol, I often think about what could actually make T.F. angry enough that he would openly express it and that seems to be the most likely angle for it in my eyes.)

- My take on one of the fundamental differences between Graves and T.F. is that Graves has A LOT of feelings but doesn’t quite know it (or more like can’t quite conceptualize it I should say) – he has a hard time identifying or finding vocabulary for feelings that aren’t some shade of anger. Meanwhile T.F. KNOWS he has feelings, he just doesn’t like it, ardently wishes he didn’t, and will do pretty much anything to run away and not have to engage with them haha.

Another important difference: when brought out of equilibrium Graves gets angry, and T.F. gets scared. I have the feeling that beneath it all he’s scared a lot, and it’s why his persona is so oriented towards gaining control in ways where people don’t realize it enough to even think try to take that control away from him until he’s already long gone. Misdirection as a way of life babEY

- This might be too deep in the ‘my WIP/process specific’ territory to really count as general analysis, but I think it’s there in canon too – there’s almost a feeling that he implicitly feels like he has to make up for some fundamental flaw or lack he has at the core? (Not a weird thing for him to end up feeling, considering what happened to him as a kid.) All the rest of him, all the cleverness and style and charm, is there to ‘make up’ for how at the end of the day he’s… wrong somehow. As Graves, who knows him better than anyone, focuses right in on, a coward. And that is CERTAINLY not the whole truth and even Graves in a full rage relents when he sees the effect the accusation has on him and once he gets the actual facts of what happened. But I think that sense of deep unworthiness is what’s stuck with him emotionally. His people left him because there’s something fundamentally lacking and immoral about him. He lost Graves because he’s not good enough, because he’s a coward who leaves people behind. He deserves to be alone. Mix in a ton of survivor’s guilt to taste, and I think you have the like… core emotional wound he’s constructed around.

There’s also something here about fear of profound powerlessness specifically in situations where words, generally his strongest card that’s not a literal card (har har har oh we do have fun here), simply don’t work right at the moment when he needs them to the most – he tried to beg for his people not to leave him behind, he tried to convince Graves to get the hell out with the rest of the crew… and it didn’t work. (In Burning Tides you see he’s given up even trying to explain himself, he just wants Out in whatever way leaves both him and Graves tolerably in one piece, even if he won’t be understood or heard or less alone afterwards. It takes him until like half way through the entire chase to even THINK about just telling Graves the truth. In all fairness to T.F. it probably wouldn’t have worked at that moment, but it does vaguely crack me up that he didn’t even consider it until all of Bilgewater harbor was already burning merrily behind them fhsajkfa)

- He has a little bit of a (perfectly justified considering his background honestly) chip on his shoulder, especially when it comes to powerful or arrogant people. There seems to be a special satisfaction in outsmarting and robbing specifically rich assholes (which would also be the people who have the most to steal, so y’know good times all round). From his short stories and few places in his bio you almost get the feeling that he has a funny sort of Robin Hood-esque sense of lopsided justice about it. (Robin Hood-esque only so far as to define ‘the poor’ as the eternally hard-strapped ‘T.F. & Graves Waistcoats and Cigars Fund’, of course lol)

I think T.F. both has a mind that tends more towards analyzing the big picture and also has more direct experience with like… structural/systemic powerlessness and oppression. So the cons they pull are probably partly how he channels the emotions that arise out of that (and the rest he just represses, like the relatable guy he is haha)

- Graves being back would cause some IMMENSE internal conflict in him, I feel – of course all the feelings of relief and attachment and love, but also… so much of who he is now came about specifically to find a way to deal with Graves being gone, with seemingly just shutting down the entirety of his need for real human companionship or closeness for like a decade, things that are suddenly starting to be brought online again and must be tremendously stressful to deal with when you’ve had it completely suppressed and deadened for so long. He’s put so much into trying to be fundamentally unattached to anything, anywhere, anyone (and there are some things here about perpetually being an outsider his whole life that I can’t quite put into words, but that’s a dimension too.) That sort of psychological self defense mechanism doesn’t just contentedly nod its head and go away just because something good happened one time haha. Probably a work in progress there huh (at least he’s not alone in it now <3)

PLUS some bonus Graves POV observations because man. I love writing him, he’s just a marvel of a man

- I know I call him a dumbass all the time, but in a street smart way I think he’s actually quite clever haha, he just has a bad tendency to get hung up on an idea and get tunnel sight. (I’ve based this a lot on the short stories but see also more recently his Sentinel skin voice lines for good examples: he’s incredibly straightforward in that ‘well obviously if it doesn’t affect me personally I ain’t gonna give it that much thought’ way, but you also have glimpses of surprising insight/shrewdness and… I don’t quite know how to put it, but something like an ability to get to the bottom line of something without getting caught up in the details. (I suspect T.F. does find himself lost in the details quite frequently, he’s much more attached to the decorative curlicues of the world.) Graves clearly & frequently has no idea what’s going on, but he strips things down to the essentials very quick: Lucian’s story as a direct thematic mirror to Viego’s, Is There A Sun Lady – Oh, I See, all of this is weird and creepy and needs shooting, and maybe most crucial of all: Isolde doesn’t want to be with her husband anymore so what he’s doing is just like. Extra shitty. He gets what he needs to get and then just barges ahead heedlessly with that. Icon.)

- He’s actually pretty darn eloquent in a gruff sort of way and uses some quite sophisticated vocabulary! And the way this is contrasted with the tendency to slip into blunter coarser language just as readily -- like when he takes the time to describe the monster that takes down the Prince’s ship in such poetic terms as ‘gargantuan’ and ‘the behemoth’s immense, distended jaw’ and it having ‘pallid dead eyes the size of the moon’, and meanwhile during his swim at the beginning of the story we get bastard cold and bastard dark and full of bastard jellyfish and crabs – brings me such immense and unending delight

- He’s more eloquent in his internal voice than he is when speaking (especially noticeable in Destiny and Fate; he does have a tendency to fumble his words when talking lol), and he gets quite easily lost in his own meandering reflective musings in a way I find incredibly endearing. I’d almost call it whimsical at times, honestly, hilarious as that is? Like when he’s literally so absorbed in a line of thought he forgets which way they’re rowing and T.F. has to remind him. (I think T.F. generally has more of a grip of what’s going on around them than Graves does lol)

- There’s an important distinction to be made that Graves actually does, by and large, read T.F: very closely and seemingly also pretty damn accurately. He’s good at (and clearly very interested in) reading his moods, spotting what tactics he’s using interpersonally, when he’s being genuine and when he’s being dissembling.

What Graves is actually bad at is understanding his own emotions, and to not bleed those emotions into other people’s motivations and behavior, especially when he’s upset or in heightened states of feeling, like he is all the way through Burning Tides. He can only name his own feelings in a vocabulary of anger, when it’s pretty clear from the subtext that there’s a whole bunch of other stuff going on there, and he has incredible trouble divorcing those feelings from what other people’s got going on with them right then. He feels hurt, betrayed, and undone by everything that’s happened to him, so the intention to hurt, betray and undo must live in the other person who he feels caused it. In less drastic cases you see him do this a bit when he feels like T.F. is being evasive with him – taking it as a form of rejection rather than realizing T.F. is just lost in his own thoughts, sort of thing. There’s a real improvement in this one between Burning Tides and Destiny and Fate, though, so maybe he’ll have an easier time of it with some time and practice.

Sorry it took so long to get back to you on this and that it’s a bit of a rambling mess, words have been real hard recently. Or rather I have too many words, all the time, left and right, I just can’t put them into the right orders to make any sense hahaha, I hope there’s some useful point in this somewhere for you at least!

#hopefully this makes some kind of sense my brain is in... a state but it was actually really nice to just focus on some character analysis!#tf x graves #league of legends #twisted fate

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emmylarsen · 3 years

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Land on Your Feet: a K Howard deathday fic

Katherine Howard was too afraid to cry.

There had been tears—so many of them—over the past forty-eight hours, since she was manhandled out of her apartments at Syon and wrestled, screaming, into the river barge. Her face had been constantly red and puffy, if not outright dripping, for weeks.

But now the tears were gone, maybe forever, because the fear coiling in her gut was too overwhelming. It had always been there, a frozen stone dropped through her stomach; but now the stone was dissolving, worming its way into every crevice of her body, flitting in between her organs and into every crack in her skin, and it had begun to constrict, to squeeze like a python, forcing the breath from her and making every vein in her body so, so tight. She could feel the tension squeezing her toes all the way up to her face, where her muscles were clenched so tightly that her tear ducts were blocked and she could not cry for the fear.

The block wasn’t helping. She had asked for it, to be sure—asked for an executioner’s block to be brought to her chambers so that she could practice, so that she would know just how to fold herself over it when the time came, so that there would be no chance of adding insult to injury or of making an irrevocable mistake that would increase the humiliation of her last public performance. She had knelt over it for hours, now, practicing how to walk over to it, how to kneel (right knee, left knee, flex your feet, tuck your dress under your shoes), how to lay her head precisely in the divet in the block, how to wrap her arms around and cradle in her palms the rough wood of the closest thing she would ever have to a coffin.

Some time ago, she had suddenly lost the energy to stand back up; the constriction of the fear had gotten too overwhelmingly painful, the exhaustion from the constant crying had sapped all the energy from her bones, the knowledge that it would all ultimately be meaningless twelve hours from now had infused her with insurmountable apathy. And so now she was just crouched on the floor, still folded over the block in the position she lacked the energy to move from, eyes closed, struggling to breathe. God, all her muscles were ablaze with the fear, tensed so tight it stung; how was she going to get through twelve more hours of this?

It was quiet in her chambers, with everyone gone, with her ladies-in-waiting dismissed (except for Jane, in the room next door, awaiting a similar fate), with her husband God-knows-where—so very quiet that when the voice spoke, she yelped in startled fear, even though it was barely above a whisper.

“Katherine, darling. You have to stop that.”

She tried to jerk back, but—kneeling as she was—her feet caught on the long hem of her dress, and she tumbled backwards onto the ground. Her face burned with the humiliation, and her eyes burned especially, and the tears threatened to return, because she had nothing left, no scrap of pride, the fear was worthless because she had nothing left to lose, she was helpless and sprawled on the floor, the hollow shell of a forgotten queen—

“Oh, Katherine,” came the voice again, this time layered with even more sorrow. “Don’t cry, love. Everything is okay.”

Katherine tried to look around, but the room was dark; the moonbeams slipping silently through the windows illuminated uneven scraps of the floor. But there, the candles on the far wall were illuminating a slender figure, perched on the edge of Katherine’s bed, cloaked in shadow and all the scarier for it.

Katherine barely had the air to speak. “Who are you?” She had to give herself the credit for getting it all out without her voice catching, stumbling, sprawling into cracks.

“You know, I think,” the voice said softly, and the figure stood—melted, it looked like—and slipped off the bed to rise to its full height. In the silhouette, Katherine could see a middle-aged woman, slender but poised; and then the figure moved into one of the puddles of moonshine and Katherine caught a glimpse of her face and realized that she did know.

“Queen Anne.”

The woman dipped her head in assent. “Queen Katherine.”

She squeezed her eyes shut, painfully aware now that she was still sprawled on her back on a dirty stone floor in the Tower of London. “I am not so much a queen anymore.”

Anne shrugged, ever so slightly, as if indifferent. “No less than I.”

Katherine lowered her gaze to the ground, where she could see hazy scraps of floor through Anne’s shoes. “How are you here?”

Was that a tiny smile flitting across Anne’s face? It was gone too quickly for Katherine to be sure. “The supernatural—has its ways. It is not often safe, nor prudent, for us to visit the world of the living; but some days warrant an exception. Some people warrant an exception.”

“Then—why me? Why today?”

When Anne spoke, it was gentler, soothing. “I thought you might like some—company, tonight. I thought you might not want to be alone. I know I didn’t.”

Katherine wanted to speak, wanted to thank her, wanted to say anything, but her throat was sticky and it caught her words before they could reach her mouth. She felt the shame collapse back over her—what kind of a queen couldn’t even respond when spoken to?—but Anne seemed to understand. “It’s okay, Katherine. Don’t speak. Get up from the floor, now, and come sit with me. Over here, my lovely.”

Anne stayed there in the moonbeam, waiting with divine patience as Katherine took in a shuddering breath, got to her feet, and made her way over to join Anne. Up close, Katherine could see even more clearly that Anne was ghostly, that she was not solid; half of the bedroom cell was visible through her chest. And yet somehow Anne’s arm, when she wrapped it over Katherine’s shoulder, was warm, not misty at all.

Anne guided her gently over to the bed, settling her down on the mattress with her back against the headboard and her legs stretched out on the bed, and then sat down next to her. “Katherine, it really is wonderful to see you all grown up, though I hoped I wouldn’t have to see you again for awhile.”

Beneath the numbness of the morbid horror, confusion sparked dully in Katherine’s brain. “Again? Have we met?”

And Anne giggled lightly. “A few years after I came to England—1526, I want to say—I paid a visit to your father, who had been—shall we say, aggressive in his correspondence with me. I got to meet you just after I arrived. You probably don’t remember; you were perhaps three years old at the time? But you were ever so proper, even then; you gave me a curtsey and complimented my hood.”

Katherine almost—almost—smiled. “I’ve always adored French hoods.”

“And they look so very lovely on you.”

“What high praise, from the woman who brought them to England.”

Anne chuckled weakly. “Mary—Henry’s sister—is the one responsible for that, I’m afraid.”

“Really? Everybody at court says it was your doing.”

“Well. We both know, I think, that what ‘everybody at court’ is saying cannot always be trusted.”

And just like that the grief—which Anne had so momentarily banished—was back on her, as she thought of court and remembered her household collapsing around her, remembered each of her ladies-in-waiting methodically condemning her (except Jane Boleyn, who had said she would follow Katherine anywhere and would tomorrow follow her to the executioner’s block). She was overcome again with a flash of vertigo, which had never really gone away; they called it a fall from grace for a reason, she supposed, but her stomach had not stopped feeling hollow and swooping since they mentioned Mannox’s name. She was falling through the bottomless infinity of space, unable to stop, and now she was beginning to see the ground beneath her, but that was not better because it would crash into her and drive the life from her body with a single smack. Katherine squeezed her eyes tightly shut, willing her breathing to calm, to little avail.

“Katherine.” Anne’s voice was a little hollow, and Katherine was afraid to look up at her, expecting a scolding or worse—Anne was such a towering, legendary figure, and Katherine could do nothing in front of her but cry—but Anne began stroking her back lightly. “Oh, Katherine, I am so, so sorry.”

***

It had been hours, and they had barely moved; Anne didn’t feel there was any need to make the child get up, and, besides, there was nowhere to go. Some time ago she had checked with Katherine, just to be sure that Anne’s suspicions were right and that Katherine had no plans to sleep tonight; Katherine had confirmed this with a weary nod and slipped into silence.

Anne had begun, some time ago, to braid Katherine’s hair, twisting it into complicated patterns and then undoing it to weave it into something else. It had begun as a ruse to get Katherine’s French hood off of her head so she wouldn’t have to do it in public—Anne remembered that humiliating moment of having to take off the ermine-lined hood at her own execution and replace it with that horrid white cap, and Katherine was certainly not in a state of mind to think of proactively taking off her hood herself—but the braiding had become soothing. It was something rhythmic, routine, engaging but not hard for Anne to do with her hands; and Katherine was leaning into the touch with an ease and an eagerness that made Anne wonder when she had last felt unthreatening hands on her.

The moonbeams were receding across the floor, snaking back out the windows; the moon was setting. The sky outside was gray now where before it had been black, and it wasn’t morning yet but it would be soon. Katherine would undoubtedly be escorted outside as soon as the sun was bright enough for everybody to trust that the axeman could see his mark clearly enough.

Still, though, it was not yet light enough—not quite—and so when the knock came on the door, Anne was shaken to the point of fear. Who was at the door? It shouldn’t be the executioner, not yet; it was not morning yet, and so who—?

The same fear had obviously electrified Katherine; her hand flashed out and grabbed Anne’s, squeezing in a vice grip, and a whimper escaped her lips. She was looking up at Anne with undisguised terror, and seeing her fear somehow tamped down Anne’s: she had much less to be afraid of than Katherine, and so she had to—would—be the strong one, the brave one, the one to answer the door. And so she rose to her feet.

But Katherine was shaking her head, fully panicked now. “You have to hide!” she cried breathlessly, her voice so tight. “You can’t let them see you!”

Anne felt a gentle smile rise to her lips. “No matter,” she told the child. “I have the power to decide who gets to see me; they will look straight through me if I want them to. I am invisible to them.”

Anne watched Katherine’s face relax, but only very slightly, and she would have swooped over to soothe but there was no time. She could already hear the deadbolts on the other side of the door being undone, letting in whoever wanted to come torment Katherine.

And then the door swung open to reveal three heavily-muscled, heavily-armed Tower guards. They were sneering. The man in the middle stepped forward to speak.

“Lady Howard,” he drawled, and bile rose in Anne’s throat, nearly choking her, at the sickening contempt in the guard’s voice. “His Majesty King Henry here to see you.”

And Anne was nearly bowled over by the shock; and then a sick adrenaline began churning in her stomach. She turned back to the girl huddled on the bed, pleading with dreadful desire. “Let me let him see me,” she breathed. “Katherine, please. Tell me I can show myself to Henry.”

Katherine’s face was twisted, crumbled, overtaken by terror and anger and total bewilderment and Anne couldn’t begin to identify what else. She stared openmouthed at Anne, seemingly entirely confused, and then she nodded. Anne felt her face curl into an almost cruel smile, relishing in the sheer power she felt coursing through her veins: she was going to get up in Henry’s face, to scream at her for what she’d done to the bouncy three-year-old she’d met when she first arrived to England who was now a sobbing teenager in her last hours of life—and he wasn’t going to be able to touch her.

She hid herself from him when he first walked through the door, going fully invisible, so that his face, when he entered, locked straight on Katherine and Katherine only, who was curled in on herself. He was so much fatter than he had been when Anne knew him, and his skin was beginning to sag, and his ulcer-ridden leg smelled disgusting; but the gleam in his eyes was one Anne knew only too well. It was the look that contorted his face when he played his sickening mind games, when he slowly and methodically twisted the perception of the person in front of him until they collapsed in on themselves, and it made Anne sick. It made her want to vomit. Especially because it was directed now at the girl on the bed, at Anne’s baby cousin.

She stepped right in front of Henry and she let her figure materialize; she let him see her face appear in thin air less than a foot away from his. She smiled; and when Henry yelped, screeched so loudly that the sound bounced off the walls and echoed crazily throughout the room, Anne let herself laugh.

She had wanted to let Henry speak first, but the way he was gaping, openmouthed and horrified, at her made it clear that he would not initiate conversation, not for a while. And so Anne let herself chuckle and ask, “I take it you didn’t expect to see me here?”

He gaped, stared, spluttered—and then he watched his eyes shutter and his face go hard and blank, blocking out all emotion. It was a look Anne knew well; it was, in fact, the last look she had ever seen on Henry’s face, on the scaffold barely five years ago.

Henry’s voice, when he spoke, was as emotionless as his face, hard and firm. “Move.”

Anne raised an eyebrow. “I don’t think I will, no.”

“I’m not here to see you.” He shot out an arm, aiming to shove Anne out of the way; but she let her ghostly body go misty and his hand passed right through her. He stumbled, off-balance, and his face went beet-red.

“I know you’re not here to see me,” said Anne, “but I am here to prevent you from seeing her. I am here to prevent you from ever looking her in the eyes, ever again.”

“That is not”—and Henry grunted again, trying unsuccessfully to shove a ghost—“your decision. This is not your place! Move!”

Anne smirked; a bitter giggle escaped her lips. “No.”

“How dare—”

And hearing his bitterness, his anger, cut through Anne’s restraints and opened the floodgates to her own bitter outrage. “How dare I? How dare you, Henry? How could you? She is younger still than your own daughter. You marry this child and you condemn her to death for being still a girl, and then you come here tonight to laugh at her, to rub it in, to frighten her more just so you can see her cry again? How dare you?”

Henry had apparently not learned that he could not touch Anne—had not learned that she could make herself misty, let his hands pass through her—and so when he brought his open palm down in a vicious slap and he made contact with nothing, he was pulled off his feet. He stumbled sideways twice, and then he landed heavily on his left leg, oozing pus and unusable from the ulcer; he gasped at the sudden weight and then, unable to support himself on the rotted leg, toppled to the floor with a cry.

Anne smiled, at Henry’s predicament and at the awed gasp from the bed behind her; her grin only widened when Henry finally, with lots of stumbling and cursing, got himself back to his feet. His face was bloodshot at the humiliation; he opened his mouth, gulping like a fish a few times, before abruptly turning on his heel and stalking out without another word.

Anne watched his retreating form with a smirk; and when she turned back to look at Katherine, still huddled on the bed, the child was shaking with silent laughter.

***

Anne’s diversion had been pleasantly distracting, and Katherine was grateful for not having had to speak to Henry—god, even imagining such a confrontation left nausea snaking through her stomach—but it had of course Anne’s control had been temporary. And if Henry was awake, it meant it was nearly morning, and that meant it was nearly—time.

And so she was quiet, again; she did not have the strength or the bravery to summon words. Anne didn’t seem to mind; she seemed to understand. Katherine was tucked under Anne’s gentle arms, cuddled up in a side hug against Anne’s warm body.

After perhaps too long, she wondered how Anne could hold her so tightly, so safely, when Henry’s hand had passed through her so cleanly. She licked her lips a few times, looked up at Anne, and garnered up the courage to ask.

Anne smiled gently, reaching out to tuck a stray lock of hair behind Katherine’s ears; Katherine shivered at the contact, touch-starved. “This—substance—is the form I take when I choose to visit your world. I can control it fully: who can see me, who can touch me. I didn’t let him feel me; but you I want to hold. No matter. I use this—body—rarely; I am nearly always… elsewhere.”

“Heaven.” It was not a question.

“No.”

“No?” It was what had sustained her, just barely, through the panic, knowing that there was a safe place waiting for her once she got through the terror. If not—if Heaven was not there—she felt her breath quicken, and suddenly the tightness in her heart was no longer bearable—

“Katherine, Katherine.” She heard Anne’s voice just faintly. “Focus on me, love, you’re okay. It isn’t the Heaven you’re picturing, but there is somewhere safe waiting for you. I promise, sweetheart, you will be warm and safe afterward. You will be with me.”

Anne’s voice was getting clearer; Katherine finally felt herself suck in a whole breath. “You promise?”

The arms around her tightened. “I promise.”

Katherine nodded, and slipped into silence. Anne had shattered her entire understanding of the world—how could there not be a Heaven?—but she was still here, holding her with warm arms, and if Katherine would soon be where Anne lived most of the time, then that was okay with her.

She lapsed into silence again, leaning into Anne; Anne cradled her and began to stroke softly across her hair. Katherine just buried her face in Anne’s shoulder and tried to breathe, tried to keep the oxygen flowing uninterrupted. Time passed; she could not guess how much, but it was warm and safe in Anne’s arms, and that was enough.

And then—and then. Heavy footsteps, faraway, growing closer.

Katherine bolted upright; leaving Anne’s side, the cold shot through her. “They’re coming.”

And she watched Anne close her eyes and nod. “They are.”

The lack of any denial sent the panic, which had been coiling in her gut, spiking up through her chest to stab her heart. “They’re coming to—to—to take me—and—”

Anne took her hands, which she had not noticed quaking, and held them tight, quelling the spasms. Anne’s ghostly hands were somehow miraculously warm, and the skin-on-skin soothed Katherine as much as anything could have. “I know. I—I know, Katherine. Just keep breathing for me.”

A sharp retort shot through Katherine’s brain—something about breathing and not being able to now and soon not being able to ever again—but she tamped it down. Anne was trying to help. And she was trying to comfort her, she was holding Katherine and stroking her back, she was here—and that in itself was soothing. Suddenly Katherine couldn’t imagine what she would do when Anne left.

And so Katherine just swallowed, and when her voice came, it was a whisper. “Will you—I mean, can you stay with me?”

“Of course, sweetheart.”

“How long?”

“Until the very end, Katherine.”

“You promise?”

“To the scaffold and to the block, Katherine; and I will see you immediately after. I promise.”

Katherine’s heart lurched, seized: it was suddenly twisted so tight. And it was painful with panic, but it was also painful with the intensity of the love for Anne that was overwhelming her. The love and the panic were inextricable—she didn’t think she could feel such a deep immediate love if it wasn’t triggered by the gratitude she felt for Anne comforting her, bringing her back from the edge of sheer hysteria—and all of it together made a sour cocktail in her heart. Her chest was painful, bitter; but it was bearable, because it was capped with adoration for Anne, and Anne was still here.

But the footsteps were getting louder, and she could hear voices now, and she couldn’t breathe; she could feel her entire body trembling from the oxygen deprivation. And then Anne grabbed her, seized her by the shoulders so their faces were an inch apart, and stared straight into her eyes.

“Katherine. Be brave. You have to be brave. I know how scary it is, I know how afraid you are, and I know there is nothing that will make it even the slightest bit less frightening. But you need to tamp down that fear for half an hour—half an hour, Katherine—and then it will be over and you will be safe and you can cry and I will hold you and you will be with me forever. Shut off the emotion for now. Separate your mind from your body; keep yourself calm. Go through the motions. I will stay by your side, but you have to be brave from within your own self. I know you can. I know you are strong. Show me, Katherine. Show me your courage.”

And then, with hellish timing, the door opened. Anne didn’t let her go, just kept staring at her. Katherine nodded. There were things more important than fear right now—things like honor and dignity—and she could already feel the terror draining from her, replaced with a sense of inevitability. There was no other ending now; she might as well submit with grace.

And so when the door opened, when the guards who stood there just looked at her and beckoned, she got to her feet by herself. Anne slipped off the bed beside her, still clutching Katherine’s hand; the guards looked right through her. Instead they slipped into a circle behind Katherine, not touching; they would grab if she fought, but she wouldn’t, not now. There was no point in fighting; there was no other ending. Better to leave this world with dignity, and enter Anne’s composed.

Anne squeezed her hand slightly as Katherine made her way, surrounded by guards, down the back steps of the Tower, into the courtyard. Katherine swallowed and cast her a glance, and then felt her lips turn slightly upward when she saw how widely Anne was beaming. “You’re doing so well, Katherine,” she whispered. “So well.” And Katherine nodded. The fear was gone; her chest was cold; she felt brave.

And then she saw the scaffold.

It was just there, rickety yet imposing; her ladies were there, and Jane, and—god—the executioner all in black with his axe, and the scaffold’s floor was covered in hay to soak up the blood that would spurt everywhere when it happened—to soak up her blood because there would be so much of it—god, her blood spilling everywhere, her blood, her blood, her—her—her—

“Ten minutes, Katherine,” came the whisper in her ear. “Be brave, my darling. I’m right here.”

Her entire body felt numb; she couldn’t feel her legs. But when Anne guided her to the scaffold and stepped up onto the first step, Katherine felt herself following, chilled to the bone. “Look at my eyes,” Anne whispered, and Katherine did, barely aware of her own body following Anne, step by step, up to the scaffold, until the steps ended on the flat platform.

The man waiting there nodded, then turned to address the crowd. “The Lady Katherine Howard,” he announced dryly, “to be executed for treason, in accordance with the laws of the kingdom of England and by the consent of the Royal Parliament and of His Majesty King Henry VIII.”

She knew what she had to do, and yet her mind had gone strangely blank—empty—paralyzed; and so she just stood there staring numbly until Anne nudged her and whispered, “Your speech, Katherine.”

She gasped; she nodded; she shook herself. She spoke. She was a wretched sinner, she had undermined Henry, a beheading was too merciful for her. Her throat caught on the very last word of her well-rehearsed speech—“death”—and she realized with a morbid chill that it would be her very last word ever.

Anne must have felt her shaking, because she snaked an arm over her shoulder. “Pay the executioner.”

This, too, she had forgotten; it came back in a rush, that she must pull out her own coin purse and make her very last purchase, compensating the axeman for his services. Her fingers were shaking so badly that coins spilled everywhere. Nobody moved to pick them up.

Finally she had pressed the sum into the executioner’s palm—so warm, so sweaty—and Anne squeezed Katherine to her side. “Now, Katherine.”

Anne drew back slightly to let Katherine to kneel in front of the block, and a chill shot through her as her cousin’s form—invisible to everybody else, yet so clear to her, so warm—left her. She had practiced this; she would get it right. Her heart was hammering so loudly, thunderously drowning out everything else, but she did not need anything else. She did not need to think. Her muscles knew what to do; they would never need to know how to do anything else.

Right knee, left knee, flex your feet, tuck your dress under your shoes.

Tilt your head to the side—cheek against the wood—so your neck is exposed.

Anne reappeared in her field of vision, kneeling on the side of the block; she reached out to adjust Katherine’s chin, so very slightly, so that their eyes were locked. “You’re doing so well, Katherine. So very well. Keep looking at my eyes.”

She nodded faintly; nothing in the world could compel her to look anywhere but Anne’s soft eyes, she told herself. Nothing could make her want to look away.

But it was never as easy as what she wanted, and when the executioner’s form, shadowy in her peripheral vision, shifted violently and raised the axe, she could not help but jerk her eyes over to watch him. For the briefest of moments her eyes caught his face, cruel and stoic; and then her gaze was drawn to the axe, the blade, glittering so brightly as it reflected the early morning sun, and that blade would soon be slick and red with her blood and oh god—

“Ah-ah-ah,” Anne chided gently, and her chilled fingers brushed against Katherine’s chin, readjusting her gaze so she had no choice but to stare straight into Anne’s face. “Eyes on me, Katherine. Nowhere else. Look at me. Keep looking.” And she kept her hand there, against Katherine’s face, so that when shadows danced in Katherine’s peripheral vision and figures loomed over her, just out of sight, she had no choice but to fight the urge to care about them and stare instead into Anne’s steady eyes.

And even though her heartbeat was drowning out all other sound, and even though she was choking on terror, her gaze stayed locked on Anne, staring unmoving into her cousin’s face as the world moved around her—until her neck erupted in pain, her vision lurched sickeningly, and the world went black.

***

She was disoriented before she even opened her eyes, like the way she felt whenever the court moved to a new palace—like the way she’d felt the first time she woke up in Henry’s bed. Her whole body was achy, especially around her neck, and her head was tight and throbbing; but more than the pain was a disoriented confusion, one that was made worse by the blackness. And so she forced herself to open her eyes.

And there, right where they’d been when her vision cut out, were two familiar green eyes, just like they’d promised. Katherine hadn’t felt how tense she was until she deflated, relaxed. “Anne.”

“Oh my darling.” Those gorgeous green eyes were wet. “Oh, Katherine, you’ve done so wonderfully well. You’ve been so brave.”

“Anne.” She couldn’t say anything else.

“It’s okay, my lovely, it’s okay. Take your time. You have nothing but time.”

Katherine nodded. Still not trusting herself to speak, she instead let herself look around. The room was shadowy; she was lying on a couch in a warm puddle of candlelight. And just on the edge of the light were other figures, other women.

Some were unfamiliar, but one—she had seen her face in portrait after portrait, still dotting palace corridors, and she was breathless, almost starstruck. “Queen Jane?”

Her thin lips widened and the woman dipped her head. “Queen Katherine.”

She flinched; she wanted to ask for them to please not say that, but she didn’t know how. She was so tired of it, of the title, of being reminded over and over again that she used to be Queen but she was no longer, she was disgraced now, and lost—

Jane must have seen something in her face. “Would you not like to use that name?”

Katherine bit her lip, because how did you explain you didn’t want the title of utmost respect? “I—”

“If it is the word Queen you dislike,” put in another woman—a figure Katherine had only barely noticed, her face half-shadowed—“that is understandable. Anne dislikes it as well.” Her voice was powerful, regal, but heavily accented; Katherine knew at once this woman was Spanish and knew just as immediately who she was.

“I think,” she got out slowly, shaking with the tension of trying to avoid any further humiliation in front of her predecessor, “that would be preferable.”

The woman nodded. “Of course. What would you like to be called, then? Just Katherine? Or you may choose something new entirely—I am a Katherine too, after all—whatever you would like.”

“I—” She stuttered, stumbled, felt her face burn.

“Take your time,” Jane soothed. “No need to answer us right away.”

Katherine nodded. She was comfortable here, safe, but—something was missing, something was odd. She was lying down with the others clustered around her, and she suddenly felt very cold, and very apart, and very alone, and—

“Anne?” It was barely a whisper, and it was almost embarrassing—she would have been embarrassed about such vulnerability in her past life, but she was so far past the point of humiliation now—“Anne, will you sit with me?”

“Of course, darling.” Katherine tucked up her feet to let Anne join her on the couch, then twisted around so she could put her head against Anne’s shoulder; Anne just wrapped her up in a hug.

Anne’s hand strayed to Katherine’s hair and began to stroke; barely a second later she drew back with a surprised laugh. “Your hair is so soft,” she giggled; “I couldn’t feel it quite the same before!”

Abruptly there was another hand on her hair and another soft laugh, and she looked up to see Jane Seymour stroking her hair next to Anne. “So soft,” Jane agreed in a low murmur, and then: “Comme caresser un chaton!”

Anne giggled, and Katherine caught her look straight at Jane, as if sharing an inside joke. Katherine felt her nose wrinkle: did they think she didn’t know what they were saying? “Je peux te comprendre, tu sais,” she told them: I can understand you, you know. I speak French; I understand when you say my hair is so soft that it’s like petting a kitten.

“Ah, un chaton intelligent!” It was playful and it was lighthearted—“ah, a smart little kitten!”—but the ease with which it slipped from Anne’s lips made Katherine wonder if, perhaps, this playfulness was the more real side of Anne, when she did not have to be the comforter to a teenager about to die.

“Un chaton du monde,” Jane added, and it made Katherine tear up, because she had never thought of herself as worldly, as well-traveled; she had never been outside of England, and her French had always felt stilted for it.

“Je me sens plus comme un chaton—piégé,” she told them, and there was an instant outpouring of soft, sympathetic denials from Anne and Jane—no, don’t say that, it’s not true anymore, you’re safe now—and she almost sobbed at the gentleness of their words and the strength of Anne’s squeeze.

And then the other Catherine spoke. “Forgive the intrusion, but would somebody mind informing the non-Francophone what on God’s green earth you all are saying?”

Katherine felt a surprised laugh jolt from her without her permission; she clapped a hand over her mouth (laughing at Catherine of Aragon? How dare she? How could she?) but Catherine just looked amused. Exasperated, yes, undeniably—but lightheartedly so.

And Anne and Jane were grinning too, not remotely frightened, and Anne said, “I was just mentioning how soft her hair is, and Jane said it’s like petting a cat, and—well, then it went a bit odd—but the point is, she said she felt trapped, and—”

“Pardon. Who said this?” Catherine interrupted, eyes bright with what Katherine could only identify as concern. “Who felt trapped?”

“Kitty,” Anne said simply, unthinkingly, and then she recoiled and shook herself. “I mean—Katherine—I—”

But now all of them were laughing, except Catherine, who was staring at them with a look of bewilderment. “‘Kitty’? Where did that come from?”

“I—it just did—but I—I’m sorry, Katherine, I don’t know why that came out. I’m sorry.”

But Kitty was smiling, and her face was softer and more relaxed than it had felt in awhile, and her whole body felt light in a way that it hadn’t since November—maybe since her wedding. “No—no, it’s okay, Anne. I’d like to try—Kitty, maybe? Just for a little, just to see?”

“Of course.” Anne’s arms were warm around her, and Jane Seymour settled on the couch on the other side of her, and Catherine of Aragon came to sit at Kitty’s feet (the rightful Queen of England, sitting on the floor!—it took Kitty’s breath away for just a moment, and she pulled back instinctively, so as not to touch Catherine with her shoes; but Catherine just gently brought Kitty’s feet to rest in her lap, and it was somehow soothing). “Of course, mon chaton, my darling. Oh, lovely, you’ve been so brave today, so very brave. I’m so proud of you.”

And she had heard that before, she had heard people say they were proud of her—Francis Dereham, when she stole Henry Manox’s letter; and her grandmother, when she was sent away to court; and her uncle, when she married the King—but she had always felt bitter when she heard it before, undeserving or uncaring or unwilling to take the praise. Now, for the first time, she relished it, leaned into Anne’s touch; and maybe Anne realized it was a sentiment that had been lacking, because she just burrowed her hands into Kitty’s cat-soft hair and leaned down to whisper in her ear.

“You have done so wonderfully well, darling. I am so proud of you—so proud, my Kitty.”

***

Also posted on AO3 here; please comment if you enjoyed. Happiest of deathdays to Lady Howard.

#katherine howard six #six fanfiction #anne boleyn six #katherine howard beheading #@sixfanficarchives #six #six the musical #six fanarts

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chaoticevilbean · 3 years

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Atla Youtube Au, Sokka-Centric

1/?

“What’s up, ma dudes? Time for another session of What My Friends Have Put Me Through. This time will feature Lady, Warrior, Gurl, and Princess.” The male was wearing his Southern Water Tribe facepaint, and from his background, it seemed he was indeed in one of the Water Tribes’ territories. His hair was white for this particular video, long and pulled back into a tail. His irises were bright blue, and once again left no clues as to whether it was the real coloring or just contacts.

“Alright, so this story is a bit strange, as per usual. As you all know, my friends are activists and Lady takes that to the extreme. Well, they did it again. What do I mean, you new viewers ask? I mean they started another rebellion. Now, maybe it’d officially count as just a bunch of protests, but I personally believe that once the number of protests in a single city is more than five in as many days, it’s the start of a rebellion. And yes, I did say another. I’ve got it all in a playlist if you wanna look.”

The background behind the videographer changed as he presumably walked around as he spoke. Snow and a clear sky were shown, and there didn’t seem to be any other people in sight.

“Now, it all started because of a previous thing my wonderful Lady did. If you’ve already watched the video, noice. If you haven’t, pause this and find the one labeled ‘Lady Vs Old Coot’. Very inspiring. Anyways, so they came back here and thought that maybe at least that Old Coot had changed, but no. No, instead there’s been no change. Or there hadn’t been. We all came as a group, but only myself, Kuzon, Lady, Bluey, Princess, Gurl, and Warrior. Bandit, Ballerina, and Knife would’ve come, but they were all busy. Or Ballerina and Knife were busy. Bandit hates it here cause there’s no land. Nothing to see.”

“So, we’re all here, and we spend the day touring and exploring and stuff, and then we meet up for lunch. Well, Lady starts ranting about how they’re so disappointed in everyone, especially the Old Coot, and demands that we do something. Immediately, Gurl, Warrior, and Princess all pledge themselves to the cause, and then guess what they do? Guess what they flippin’ do?” The Youtuber gave a sarcastic and slightly pained chuckle, dark seal markings emphasizing his features as he looked around a little.

“If you couldn’t guess, they asked me, me, to help them plan their course of action. Now, these are my friends. Basically my family. I’ve been through a lot with them, from overthrowing corrupt organizations to taking down drug rings to literally being Kuzon’s father one time. And through all of these things, I’ve somehow become known as the one who’s really good at planning. But they asked me to help plan a stinkin’ rebellion. I do it, obviously, but the fact that they even asked.”

“But then, apparently they told all of these people who’re following them in protest that I helped organize everything. And no one decides to tell me this, so I keep helping from the sidelines. We reach day three of protests, and it’s lunchtime, so I think I’ll just walk on over and bring some food to these people who’ve been standing outside the Council all morning. I get there, and I get mobbed. Everyone’s either thanking slash congratulating me, or they’re complaining about the protestors. It takes me an hour to find Lady and ask them what the Spirits happened because of all these people just crowding around and yelling at me.”

“Lady apologizes, but the damage is done. The warriors are asking me to end the protests. I tell them I can’t. They get mad because I’m supposedly the one in charge. I am not the one in charge. I am the one who the people in charge asked for a favor and got dragged into this mess. No one seems to get it. Then the heckin’ Council calls me in and tries to make me end it all. I kept trying to say that it’s not my fault there’s a rebellion. It was the will of one person, aided by the wills of three other people, that inspired the hopes of everyone who’s protesting. I just helped them do the most damage so they have a big impact and this doesn’t take a year.”

“So here I am.” The camera turned around, and started panning to show the barren ice devoid of any life. “I’m currently out here attempting to hide from everyone. I have enough supplies to last me a week on its own, three if I make the most of it all.” The screen showed several bags, including a green Earth Kingdom satchel, a blue Water Tribe satchel, a black Fire Nation duffel, and a yellow Air Nomad backpack. A few items are attached to the duffel and backpack, though it’s unclear what. “I’ll wait out the protests, since Bandit’s giving me a play-by-play of the progress. Once that’s done, I’ll just head back and hope that no one’s still under the delusion that I’m in charge.”

“Thus ends this day’s session of What My Friends Have Put Me Through. I’ll be back in an hour after I figure out what else to video and get bored enough to post again. Hope y’all like junk food, cause that’s all I’m serving. That being said, I’m signing off. See ya.”

The video cut to a picture of a boomerang with ‘Boomeraang’ written in calligraphy on the flat side. The entire vlog was titled ‘Lady’s 75th Revolution’.

True to his word, another video was posted about an hour later, this one titled ‘Furry Friends and Shock’.

“Sup, dudes. I’m back as promised, and this time, I’ve brought friends. Say hello to Fluffster, Rookie, and Baby.” The screen flipped, and three wolves were sitting like trained dogs in front of the Youtuber. “The biggest one’s Fluffster, since he’s obviously the floofiest. The smallest one’s Rookie, he’s pretty young. You can tell because his paws are a bit too big for him. He’ll grow into that. Then Baby’s this lovely little gal, and she’s super sweet. Took forever to stop her from licking my face.”

The three wolves wagged their tails as their names were spoken, and people who had watched that far were already commenting about how either it was impossible to tame wolves, the canines were incredibly cute, or disbelief at how it’d only been an hour and he already did something weird.

“Now, these beautifuls are strong predators. Usually, they’ll avoid humans, but I’m alone and my facepaint makes me seems less like a threat. They approached me pretty casually, not stalking or anything. I didn’t even notice they were there until I looked around again. And they’re much more tame than most wolves would usually be. Again, it’s likely because I seem unthreatening. Please do not try to do anything like this without training. I literally just did this by chance. I named them and they understand their names, but most animals wouldn’t. I mean, Foo Foo Cuddlypoops didn’t. I don’t think he did.”

Avataratlast: Who’s Foo Foo Cuddly Poops? Another friend?

- Banditrocs: Probably an animal.

Keepitreal: how did this dude manage to tame three wolves? it’s only been an hour?! and why does he wear that makeup? i’m so confused, was this all planned? does he have a crew?

- Boomeranglife: You must be new here.

“So, I’m gonna sign off soon, mostly so I can give these three some love. I think the best course of action would be to answer some of my commonly asked questions, tell you all a bit about wolves, and then give you the official goodbye until I get bored enough that my resolve crumbles. That’ll take at least another two hours with the fact that Lemur somehow managed to sneak my notepad into my bag. I wasn’t gonna bring it because I left in such a hurry, but then I’m inventorying my stuff and find it. Lemur’s such a pal.”

“Alright, gotta start the answers so I get cuddle time with the canines. My frequently asked question get put in a list thanks to my subpar hacking skills. Don’t tell Knife I said that or they’ll make good on their promise to lock me in a closet. Let’s get to it.” The screen split to show a list of questions on one side, the wolves on the other. Some of the questions were blacked out, probably due to being inappropriate.

“So, if it’s blacked out, those are hateful, nasty, or have far too many swears. The first question is the same as always, asking what my name is. My response is the same as always. Smiley emoticon. The next is my age. Under 50, above 10. My gender? Male. Is this a profile or something? Seriously, all these are about my identity. Sexuality? I let the people theorize cause I don’t care about what y’all think, unless you’re a bigot, then get off my channel, pretty please with The Moon on top. Real hair color? Hmm, I guess I can probably give you that. It’s not white. Eye color? Not white, either.”

Actlikewater: is everyone getting this?! he’s giving us information!!!

rockbeatsfire: what r y’all getting hyped up for? he hasn’t said anything

- powertoBoomerang: have you watched these before?

- - rockbeatsfire: i watched that parkour one

- - - powertoBoomerang: one - watch them all. two - you need to be more specific, and three - he never says anything about his identity besides pronouns. we have information. we can figure this out!

- - - - CaptainSparky: Are you sure about that?

- - - - - powertoBoomerang: we can figure this out maybe!

“What’s my nationality? Theorize, ma dudes. I ain’t gonna say, so go to one of those lovely blogs. Boomeranglife is really sweet, they’ve got a bunch of videos all about this sort of stuff. Actually, it might only be about my channel. I don’t really know. I just saw one of their videos and started questioning if I really was a Spirit. Ask them, and give them some love. They a nice peep.”

“What is my favorite animal? Either sabertoothmooselion, flying bison, or flying lemur. Is that seriously a commonly asked question? Am I gonna get spammed with artwork now? Do I need to have a lesson on how to draw flying bison and lemurs and all that? I’m gonna do it anyways, and all artwork is accepted, so long as you keep it PG-13. I’m around kids.”

“Am I single? I don’t know. Really, I don’t know. I could be dating Warrior, or I could be stealing Kuzon. I literally have no idea. I platonic flirt with everyone, and I’m horrible at reading social cues when it comes to romance. Wheaty? Apparently had a crush on me until three months ago. They told me when it ended so I would relax and I had to explain my oblivious nature and crippling anxiety. Ballerina? We’re married according to a small town and soulmates if you listen to a certain nomadic troupe. I might even be dating everyone on the team, heck if I know.”

“Am I a bender? Heh, that’s a good one. Can’t believe you haven’t figured it out yet. Who am I? Hold up, Ima search this.” There was the sound of keys tapping as the screen showed the videographer searching himself up. When the screen loaded, there was a bleeped out sound and the three wolves rushed towards him in concern.

“Holy Spirits! Tui, La, Yue, and Agni! *bleep* I’ve got a Wiki page! They gave me a *bleep*ing Wiki page! I’m not even that popular!”

Livelovemurder: he knows we see this, right

- Boomeranglife: I’m still recovering from him mentioning me, but I don’t think he realizes he is a celeb here

Azulastan: someone get this boy some tea! His video from literally an hour ago already has thousands of views! someone call Bandit!

- SouthernChief: on it! I’ll spam the comments of that last video. Hopefully they respond!

- - UncleTea: Good man/woman/enby!

Livelovemurder: wow, our first reaction to seeing him hurting is to contact Bandit. didn’t she once launch him into a tree?

- UncleTea: that was the first time they were officially friends. now they’re best friends

“Alright, I think we all earned some wolf facts. Did you know that wolves can live over ten years? Pretty long for any wild animal, even longer for a predator in a wasteland like this. Wolves are also extremely expressive for animals, and they’re very social. Wolves can get much bigger than dogs, except polar bear dogs, and despite what most people think, they don’t usually hurt children. Even the really small ones. They’re more likely to adopt your kid than try to hurt them. I personally believe it’s because they’re a lot smarter than most people credit them. Comment #WolfRights below and I’ll see if I can start a movement.”

“Now, I’m signing off once again, so say goodbye to Rookie, Baby, and Fluffster. See ya.”

The second video ended. Comments were pouring in about the clip, and Boomeranglife had already gotten another thousand subscribers in the time it took for the video to be played twice through. SouthernChief did indeed spam Bandit’s latest video, and had the earthbender ignore them until they mentioned that the guy from Boomeraang didn’t think he was popular.

- Bandit: He what?

- - SouthernChief: he doesn’t think he’s popular

- - - Bandit: I’ll take care of it.

Time Skip 5 Hours

The next video was titled ‘Who Sold Me Out?’ The starting screen showed Gurl in their Hei Bai mask, very clearly holding the camera. They waved at the screen before flipping the view around to show what was in front of them. The Boomeraang guy was sitting squashed between what appeared to be several people hiding underneath blankets. He was glaring directly at the camera, face set in a scowl that was once again greatly emphasized by his facepaint.

“Alright, I only got a few minutes to get this out before the others get sick of hiding under blankets. Who the *bleep* sold me out‽ Just because I didn’t realize how popular I am doesn’t mean you needed to call Bandit! Seriously, who was it‽ I’m out on the ice, having the time of my life sketching Baby and Fluffster and Rookie, and then, out of nowhere, Bison is flying towards me with Kuzon and Princess. Then they practically drag me back and I can no longer feel my legs because there’s four people on them. Whoever it was, you’re on thin *bleep*ing ice. I was fine! I was more than fine! I wasn’t the alleged leader of a rebellion!”

“You done?” Gurl asked from behind the camera.

“Yeah, I’m done.” The screen flipped back to Gurl.

“The dude’s been majorly *bleep* off because someone tattled on him. You have the thanks of the rest of us and the anger of one squished Youtuber. He refused to come out of the house, so we all decided to stay in tonight. The protests are over for the day anways, thanks to the fact that the Council is starting to give in. We promised an afternoon of peace so they could discuss it all without worrying. And we’ll be bringing you rebounders to the morning rally as well. NO EXCUSES!” The last words were thrown towards the guy on the other side of the camera, and a loud groan was heard. “He’s gonna do his outro and then y’all are gonna say goodbye.” The view reversed again.

“Signing off for now! See ya, ya traitors!”

The screen cut out.

SouthernChief: i regret nothing

UncleTea: He looked like an angry toddler, OMS.

Boomeranglife: gals! pals! dals! I got big news!

- Livelovemurder: spill

- - Boomeranglife: the NWT is having a bunch of protests all across their cities!

- - - Tyleestan: do we know who’s leading it?

- - - - Boomeranglife: no, NWT is too secretive! i just heard it from a merchant that left as they were starting. we live about as close as you can get to the north pole w/out actually being there

- - - - - SouthernChief: sucks, dudes. next time, for sure

- - - - - - rockbeatsfire: next time there’s a rebellion? does that actually happen a lot?

- - - - - - - Boomeranglife: seriously, watch the videos. I recommend in chronological order instead of by playlists

- - - - - - - - rockbeatsfire: alright, alright, i’m going

#sokka #atla #atla youtube au #youtube au #avatar the last airbender #smellerbee #katara #aang #toph #azula #zuko #suki #haru #teo #appa #momo

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veliseraptor · 6 years

Note

fix-it with bonus Angst(TM): Loki's back somehow and of course Thor's overjoyed, and after a giant hug he does the Thor thing where he puts his hand on the side of Loki's neck, EXCEPT WHOOPS that is now a massive trigger for Loki because of how he died, and he FREAKS THE FUCK OUT (and then possibly someone else has to talk him down from the flashback because Thor's too guilt-stricken and afraid of doing the wrong thing again)

breathe in, breathe out (exhale and inhale), 1.2k, post-infinity war loki lives obviously, semi-graphic descriptions of character death

why would I work on all my long-form actual projects when I can fill short whumpy angsty fix-it aus eh?

Fingers scrabbling at Thanos’s wrist, fighting for air, wasn’t the first time Loki had thought well, it’s over now.

It wasn’t the first time he was wrong, either.

His first thought on waking, exhausted and chilled to the bone, was Thor, what did you do. He stared up at the blue sky, not daring to try to stand, and focused on breathing slow and deeply, the euphoria of air moving through an intact trachea.

He still felt sick, and woozy. Coming back from death was never pleasant. He should know.

(Ha, ha.)

Thor, his sluggish thoughts informed him, prodding gently. You need to find Thor. Make sure he didn’t do anything stupid.

See his face again, in sunlight.

He staggered to his feet, taking a moment to balance himself when he almost fell. He could make out a smudge of what might be a city, or at least a cluster of buildings, on the horizon. It occurred to Loki that he had no idea where he was, or where Thor might be, but at least in some kind of population center there would be water, and his mouth was dry as bone. He started walking, taking it slow. Still processing the fact that he was alive. His thoughts kept circling-

Undying. You should have chosen your words more carefully.

Loki flinched, jerking his thoughts away. Think of Thor. Only that just brought memories of Thor on his knees, bound and muzzled, helpless. Screaming. He couldn’t breathe-

No, Loki reminded himself forcefully, sucking in a lungful of air. He could breathe. That was the point. He was breathing now, just fine.

He kept walking. Norns, he was thirsty. Was Heimdall back, as well? Was Valkyrie? The rest of Asgard?

He was distracted enough - out of it enough - that he walked into the barrier in front of him. He stared at it, frowned, focused, and walked through it. Then he sat down and leaned back against it to wait for whoever it belonged to to come looking. He hoped they were friendly - or at least indifferent. He didn’t particularly want to do any fighting right now.

Closing his eyes, Loki dozed.

He didn’t sleep so much as...drift, and he woke up fast and hard for the hum of an approaching vehicle. He lifted his head from where it was resting against the barrier and considered standing, but decided against it. He wanted to be as unthreatening as possible just now, and that probably meant looking as pathetic as possible.

Miserably enough, he didn’t think he had to try very hard.

Of course, then, while the vehicle was still some distance away, someone leaped off it and started running towards him. Loki could not quite keep himself from starting to smile. “Thor!” Someone shouted, but he ignored them entirely, coming to a skidding halt just inches away.

He had a right eye again, though it was brown instead of blue. The mismatch had a bit of a rakish effect. Thor reached out and caught himself, as though he was afraid to complete the gesture.

“Loki,” he said, and it was all Loki could do not to flinch at the way he said it, raw as an open wound. I’m sorry, he wanted to say, but they were both, he thought, too brittle for it.

He forced a smile. “Did you miss me?”

Thor made an incredulous, disbelieving noise and reached down, his eyes shining. “Yes,” he said simply, the one word cutting through every wall Loki could have thrown up, even if he’d wanted to.

He took Thor’s extended hand, watched his shoulders sag with relief when they made contact, skin to skin, like he hadn’t quite believed it until then, and then Thor was hugging him. Loki dropped his head against Thor’s solid shoulder, feeling him shudder once like he was trying not to cry.

“I told you, didn’t I?” He murmured, though at the time he’d meant it for a comforting lie. “You can’t get rid of me that easily.”

“Don’t,” Thor said, his voice almost vibrating, and Loki had to try not to flinch. “You don’t know - don’t you ever do that again.”

“I had to,” Loki said. “He was going to kill you--”

“And you thought you could beat him? With a knife?”

Loki bit the inside of his cheek. “I had other ideas,” he said. “But there wasn’t time. Thor - I’m sorry.” Because he needed to say it. Because Thor shouldn’t hurt like this.

“Don’t apologize,” Thor said after a moment, and Loki winced at how close he sounded to cracking. “Just...stay alive, this time.”

“Hopefully,” Loki said. Thor’s eyes tightened around him. “You know your friends are watching,” Loki murmured.

“And?” Thor’s voice was defiant. Loki couldn’t help another small flicker of a smile. “My brother is back from the dead. I think I deserve to have a few moments.”

All of them, Loki thought. As many as we can get.

Thor drew back, though, and if his smile looked like it hurt, his blue eye was full of relief. “Loki,” he said, and cupped Loki’s neck, his rough palm against the side of Loki’s throat, fingers curved over his spine--

Loki’s thoughts jerked. Stuttered.

The ship burning, Thor on his knees, Heimdall dead and the Hulk beaten and gone.

“Loki?”

He was shaking with fear but his voice somehow stayed steady, somehow he was moving, walking forward, speaking slowly and deliberately to give himself time to think but nothing was coming, nothing, stupid move, Loki, idiot, he couldn’t breathe couldn’t struggling like a rat in a trap, the crunch of cartilage buckling, red hot vicious pain oh Thor I’m sorry I’m-

“Head down,” someone was saying, far away, somewhere else. “Deep breaths-”

How, Loki wanted to say, but words wouldn’t come. How am I supposed to breathe like this with the Mad Titan’s fist around my damned throat-

(Damned, fine choice of words, there.)

“It’s fine,” someone said, sounding a little desperate. “Focus on…”

He recognized that voice. I’m not the one who’s out of time. Loki blinked. The real world - or rather, the current world - swam back into focus. He stared at Captain America, who stared back at him, looking like he had no idea what he was doing and would rather not be doing it. At some point he’d ended up back on the ground. His lungs wouldn’t quite cooperate with his attempts to inhale.

He looked past the Captain to see Thor, his face stricken. Loki couldn’t quite dredge up a smile. He remembered what had happened: that familiar gesture, such a source of comfort for so long, and he’d - panicked. Shattered.

Humiliation burned in his stomach. Worse, guilt, because Thor deserved better, Thor deserved something other than another burden to bear--

(There was a joke on the tip of his tongue, don’t be so distraught, you’ve been saying you were going to strangle me for years, but he didn’t think either of them could bear it.)

#thelightofthingshopedfor #loki #infinity war spoilers #a wild fic appeared #tragic siblings #loki's a goddamn mess #thor is my favorite puppy #yeah there are other things i should work on what of it

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pjbehindthesun · 7 years

Text

chapter 3: on evolution

Thursday, June 21st, 1990

“Hey, Red!”

I grit my teeth as I try my hardest not to slam the filter basket into the espresso machine before turning around. Another yuppie asshole, stinking of cologne and money, leaning on the counter like he owns it, right in my face. He’s so close that I have to keep myself from recoiling in surprise. His impeccably pressed blue dress shirt has one of those white collars. As if there could be any doubt.

“Hiya, gorgeous, how about a refill?” he fixes me with a flirtatious smile, all perfect white teeth and empty blue eyes.

“Sure thing, sir,” I reply with what I hope is a convincing smile and take his cup. He puffs his chest out a little at the “sir.” I don’t know why but I half expect him to pound it like a gorilla.

“How long have you been working here?” He blatantly eyes me up and down. “Can’t be very long? I think I would have noticed a gorgeous thing like you.”

Thing. Figures.

“Only a couple months, and only part-time,” I keep my voice neutral, but his sliminess is saturating all my senses, tuning out the chatter of the other customers, the clank of dishes, the smell of coffee. I hand him his cup.

“How about you give me your phone number too, baby?”

“Oh, uh,” I try for a natural laugh, “no, I’m taken.”

He takes the cup with one hand and grabs hold of my hand with his other one, lacing his fingers into mine before I can pull away. “I don’t see a ring,” he says in a low, unctuous voice, “so I don’t see a problem.”

“No, really, I –” I stammer as I rack my brain to try to find a way out of this interaction without pissing him off. He may be slime, but he’s paying customer slime and I’m on the clock. I’m still fumbling for words when the ding of the cafe doorbell and the thud of approaching boots cut through my thickening fog of anxiety.

“Hey bud, you wanna tell me why you’re bothering my woman?” comes a menacing voice from a tall figure who’s just materialized behind the asshole. It takes every ounce of willpower I have not to laugh.

The jerk’s mouth falls open as turns around and finds himself looking squarely at Chris’s black-clad chest before he looks up. He releases my hand like he’s been electrocuted and puts his own hands up defensively. “Hey, brother, it’s cool, didn’t mean anything by it, you know how it is…”

“I’m not sure I do, maybe you can tell me.” Chris’s voice is a little softer now, a little lower, but somehow that makes it all the more intimidating as he folds his arms across his chest and scowls down at the yuppie.

“Come on, man, you’ve just got a really hot piece here, can’t be helped!” He attempts a smile, and something in his contorted face reminds me of the evolutionary origin of the primate smile. Show your fangs, clenched together, submissive, unthreatening.

Chris leans in further and says, quietly, “I’m thinking unless you want to be my next ritualistic sacrifice, it can.”

Ok, that’s it, I’m finished. I whirl around and wipe up the bar, letting my hair fall in front of my face so neither of them can see me laughing in the mirror. Unfortunately, that means I miss watching the asshole skitter towards the door, but when the bell dings I turn back around to see Satan himself grinning at me.

“Pretty pleased with yourself, aren’t you, Mr. Crowley?”

“A simple thank you works, Cora.”

“So that’s a yes then. You cost me a customer.” I glower at him as I grab the coffee pot and make my way out from behind the bar.

“I’m thinking that’s one you won’t miss.”

“I won’t, but my boss will,” I stick my tongue out at him. “And thanks. But really. Your woman??”

“Hey, it got rid of him, didn’t it?”

“Still. You didn’t have to John Wayne the shit out of the situation. I could have handled it, you know.”

“Oh, believe me, I know, I’ve witnessed it. He just seemed like the type who wouldn’t get the hint unless he knew you were someone else’s territory.” He lowers his eyes to his boots like he’s ashamed to even admit that the type exists, but we both know he’s got it pegged.

“Well, at least we’ve evolved past territorial pissing.”

“Maybe you have, Smokey…” he looks up slowly with an evil grin.

“Gross.” I wrinkle my nose with a laugh. “What brings you in?”

“Apart from the usual terrorizing of the bastards?”

“Obviously.”

“I just wanted to make sure you’re still coming to our show on Saturday! You’re not working, right?” This is the third time in the two weeks since we met that he’s stopped by the cafe to remind me about his show. Considering that I only work here part-time, that’s a pretty impressive stalking record. Even I have to admit that the boyish eagerness is adorable.

“Not working. No lab. I’ll be there. My friend Lucy’s coming too, is that cool?”

“Is that cool??” he echoes as he pulls me into a hug that lifts me off my feet and sloshes out some coffee from the pot.

“Oh shit, let me help,” he says, setting me down and grabbing the rag from the pocket of my apron and bending down to wipe up the floor and the toe of my boot.

“You’ve done enough, I think. And you’d better let me get back to the rest of my non-predatory customers.” I raise my eyebrows and nod down the wall of dark, heavy wooden booths. He lightly takes hold of my shoulders and steers me around to face them, walking me awkwardly down the narrow row.

“I’ll see you Saturday, baby bear,” he grins in my ear before letting go and backing out of the cafe.

My nearest booth of customers is a pair of girls about my age, and from the looks on their faces they’d been watching the whole confrontation. “How are we doing over here, ladies, anyone need anything? More coffee?”

“Was that Chris Cornell??” One of them asks with wide eyes.

“That’s him.”

“He’s your boyfriend??” her friend squeals.

“No, definitely not,” I shake my head with a chuckle as I top off their mugs. “Just a friend. Can I get you anything else?”

***

Friday, June 22nd, 1990

“So, what video am I picking up?” I ask over the phone, wary of the response. Tonight’s our standing bi-monthly movie night, which is something of an odd tradition because although Cora is my best friend in this world, we can’t agree on movies to save our lives. We end up alternating in order to keep the peace, which means half of the movies are romance or comedy (my pick) and the other half are…

“John Carpenter’s The Thing?”

“No way. We did that already, I am not watching that thing with the dogs again.”

“They’re puppets, Luce!”

“It’s no, Cor.”

“I’m assuming The Wrath of Khan is still off the table?”

“As long as it still has ear-invading alien bugs…”

We go back and forth a few more rounds until she gets me to settle on The Empire Strikes Back. At least Harrison Ford’s not bad to look at. And it will be easier to find in the store than some of the more obscure ones she’s come up with in the past.

It’s a little after 4:30 when I hang up, which gives me enough time to get the last of these invoices sent out. The hallway in front of my desk is actually pretty quiet, for once. I’ve been in this job for two years now, ever since I graduated, and I honestly think my supervisor Greta gave me her old desk in the front of the station so she wouldn’t have to talk to anyone anymore. Everyone treats me like a receptionist, constantly asking me questions and calling me “Excuse me, Miss?” I don’t mind too much, I guess – I actually like people, unlike Greta The Disgruntled – but it makes it a little harder to get everything done. I’m just getting down to it when I hear my name echo down the hall. Jake is jogging towards my desk with a big smile on his face.

“Hey, Jake! Done for the day?” I ask as he comes to a halt at the counter above my desk.

“Nearly. I just needed a quick breath of fresh air, seeing as I’m now in the sea of paperwork portion of the program.” he scrunches his eyes shut and then widens them with a zoned out look, as if trying to refocus.

“Oh, well then, welcome to my native habitat.” I wave a hand over the pile of papers and brightly colored sticky notes spread across my desk.

He props his elbows on the counter and rests his chin on his hands. “I like it here. The locals, anyway.”

Don’t ask me why, but talking to Jake got so much easier over the last week or so. I used to be a nervous wreck whenever he’d come by to say hello. One time I spilled a bottle of White-Out in my lap and ruined my skirt just because he waved. In my defense, he’s like, ridiculously, superfluously good-looking. He’s tall, dark, and handsome, just the perfect cliche. But last week we started chatting more, and he seems so much less intimidating now that I know what a sweetheart he is. It’s been refreshing to make a new friend, and I really don’t know what I was so worked up about.

“So, save any lives lately?”

“Today was pretty boring, thankfully,” he knocks gently on the press board of my desk, “just an anaphylactic toddler.”

“Poor thing!”

“Nah, she’s okay now. Just a strawberry-free life from now on.”

“I don’t know, that sounds pretty terrible to me.”

“Yeah, I guess it does,” he concedes, straightening up and ruffling up his hair a little. ““How was your day?”

“Compared to a lifesaving day in the pediatric ward, I’d say it was absolutely riveting,” I tease, patting the ream of paper piled up in my outbox.

“And what are you up to tonight?”

“Movie night with my friend. It’s a tradition.”

“Lucky friend,” he smiles, “whatcha watchin?”

“Star Wars. She picked it out,” I add hastily. Jake’s bright green eyes light up even more, if that’s possible.

“Oh, which one?”

“Don’t you start too! Empire.”

“Hmm. More of a Jedi fan myself. Empire’s so dark, I’m a sucker for a happy ending.” Is he blushing?

“Me too! Cora says it’s all just a little too perfect, but what does she know, she likes the weirdest stuff.”

“Cora? That your friend?”

“That’s her.” I point to a picture of the two of us on my desk, and he cranes over the counter to get a closer look. It’s a somewhat blurry, lopsided, sun-spotted photo we took of ourselves at the Japanese garden at the Arboretum in March, when the cherry blossoms were going insane. I took a whole bunch just in case none turned out, which was wise, because this is the only one where we’re even remotely both in frame, and Cora’s grumpy expression is the perfect barometer of how many pictures I’ve made her take before that one. But she’s a faker, because she’s got the same photo up on the cork board in her room.

“That picture is sickeningly adorable, you know that?” Jake beams, straightening back up. “Well, what are you up to tomorrow night then?”

“Oh, uh, tomorrow’s the Soundgarden show.” Why is he so interested in all of my evening plans all of a sudden?

“Hmmm. Busy lady. Well maybe –” Greta’s squawky fishwife voice, saying something indistinguishable but clearly annoyed, suddenly booms off the linoleum from goodness knows where, making us both jump and then laugh. “Better let you get back to it before the boss lady catches you slacking,” he teases with a smile, patting the counter a couple times with his hand before he darts around the corner.

Did he – was that – was Jake just trying to ask me out? No way, I’m imagining things.

But what if he was? I mean, I’ve been crushing on him since he started his residency here last summer. He’s so kind, and funny, and thoughtful, and… expected. He’s everything I’ve always been told I wanted. Daughter of a doctor, I always figured that would be my life eventually too. So why don’t I feel more excited that he’s finally noticed me?

…Why haven’t I run into Jeff again?

Jesus, it’s almost 5, I’ve got to finish this paperwork and get out of here.

***

June 21st. Which makes it three months and two days. My life’s changed so much since that message from Xana that it’s barely recognizable. And I don’t even have time to figure it out, because we’re still in this fucking contract, promoting the album, as though in the minds of the record company, nothing’s happened. And I guess for them, that’s true. They’ve got whatever new thing coming down the back end to fill the void. And Andy’s words are still reaching new people, just like he always wanted, but he’s not here to see it. What about our void?

I guess that’s what tonight’s about. A bunch of us are meeting out at Discovery Park, just a typical bonfire type deal, but we’ve all got this in common. This… loss. Me and Stone, Bruce, Greg, Chris, Kevin. A club no one wants to be a part of, but everyone seems to need. I don’t even have the words to make sense out of it, and I fucking hope no one tries. Just as I’m tossing the bundle of firewood and the case of shitty, cheap beer in the trunk of my car, a little Corolla rumbles into the parking lot and scatters my thoughts about Andy. It’s so ancient that it’s hard to tell what color it’s supposed to be, but I’ll settle on blue only out of charity. It’s old enough that it never even had a passenger side mirror, and the rear bumper appears to be held on by sheer willpower. The engine shuts off and that gorgeous girl from the hallway last week steps out.

“Hey, Lucy?” I call out.

Her face breaks into this warm, radiant smile as soon as she spots me, like she’s known me forever, before her shyness takes over again and her cheeks flush a little. “Hey, Jeff.”

“Hi,” I grin back, blissfully forgetting about it all, for now. “Whatcha up to?”

She waves a bag from the video store excitedly. “Movie night! Not for a while, though, Cora -- that’s my friend on your hall -- she usually doesn’t get back from the lab until around 8, and that’s on a good day.”

“Even on a Friday?” I wrinkle my forehead. What’s so fucking important?

Lucy seems to read my mind. “I know, I know. You have to love her for it, though, we need people like her to save the world. She’s a mad scientist, you know that, right?”

I chuckle a little. “No, I actually don’t know her at all. I run into that guy of hers occasionally. He’s… interesting.” My Great Plains manners are asserting themselves. I honestly can’t stand the guy, but I’m not about to say that to this friend of his.

“That’s a word for what he is,” she mumbles through her teeth to the pavement, and I feel another surge of warmth for her.

“So movie night is just you girls, I take it?”

“By definition. Where are you off to, with your firewood?”

“Oh, uh, a bonfire thing. Up at Discovery Park.” I shut the trunk and lean on it, hoping she doesn’t ask me anymore about it. Talking to her is just… comfortable, easy, and there’s not enough of that in my life right now.

“What’s the occasion?” Shit. But it’s not like she could have known. I look over her face, all open and sweet, and try to find a way to say it out loud.

“Uhm, there isn’t one, really, it’s just… a bunch of us… uhm… we… we lost a friend. Little while back…” I blink fiercely to try to stop the stinging in my eyes.

She hops up on the trunk of my car and lays a hand on my shoulder. “Oh, Jeff. I’m sorry. We don’t have to talk about it, if you don’t want to.”

“Yeah. Yeah, thanks.” I swallow hard to push down the lump in my throat as she rubs her hand up and down my arm briefly before dropping it to her lap.

I glance over at her, expecting to see the usual pitying expression, but she’s just watching me carefully, with serene blue eyes. A wisp of blonde hair is blowing in her face and she tries, unsuccessfully, to keep it looped behind her ear. I don’t know how she’s doing it, but it’s like she’s lending me some of her calm, wrapping me up in it and making it easier to breathe.

“So, uh, you work at the hospital?” I sniff, trying to regain some composure.

“How’d you – oh, I’m a ditz, my badge,” she giggles, toying with the Harborview photo ID around her neck.

I gently lift it from her fingers and inspect the photo. It’s a good one, although I’m sure this girl couldn’t take a bad picture if she tried. “Wow, your hair used to be so long.”

“Mmhmm, even longer than yours. Although I wish I’d thought to wear hats more often, I bet they cut down on the maintenance.” Her eyes linger on the oversized blue striped beanie I’ve got on tonight as a small smile plays on her lips. I pull the hat off and set it on her head, pretending to judge her like a critic evaluating a painting.

“Well? Am I pulling it off?” she giggles.

“Unfairly well, actually. Gimme that back,” I say as I snatch it off her head and arrange it back on my much scruffier head.

“So what do you do at this hospital of yours?”

“I’m a medical biller. It’s a fast-paced and exciting world.” She adopts a monotone, but she can’t keep a straight face for long before that nervous giggle bubbles back up.

“That’s right, you told me that. Living the dream. What’s your real dream?”

“It’s not important, it’s nowhere near as cool as yours.”

“Oh come on, what does that have to do with anything?”

She blushes furiously and looks down at the ground. “I just think it’s so cool, you know, that you’re a musician. I wish I was more creative.”

“I mean it, what is your big dream?” I don’t mean to hassle her, but it’s not just small talk now. I am just genuinely curious about what she wants for her life. And I just met her, what the hell?

“I want to…” Jesus, she’s almost cringing, “…be a mental health counselor?” her voice rises up, asking rather than telling.

It takes me a second to realize that the reason she’s cringing is that I’m gaping at her, and I try to pull my face back together. “Sorry,” I say, inadvertently laughing a little, “it’s just… it’s perfect.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah! What are you waiting for, you should totally do that!”

She beams at me and adds, “I just don’t know how good I’d be at it, but like, I grew up in this tiny little town, and… there just weren’t a lot of mental health services, well there wasn’t much of anything, and…” her voice trails off as she notices me grinning back. “Ha, what??” that nervous laugh again.

“It’s nothing, heh, I just, uh… I grew up in a town of like 700 people, so I sort of know the feeling.”

“You did?? Where?”

“The absolute fuckin’ Middle of Nowhere, Montana. The booming metropolis of Big Sandy.”

“Whoa, Montana! You’re a long ways from home.”

“I wouldn’t say that.” She grins at me again and fidgets with that one golden wisp of hair. “Where’s your little town?”

“Brewster, it’s in Washington, a ways east of here. I mean, I guess everything is, unless you live in an island in the freaking ocean, obviously, well, I mean there’s West Seattle, obviously, but, no, you know what I mean, right?”

“Right,” how is it possible for someone to be so irresistibly cute when they just ramble on about nothing?

“Well, I should let you get going, I don’t want to keep you,” she says, patting the trunk under us and jumping back down to the ground. No, really, you can keep me.

“Yeah… yeah. Well, we’ll see each other around?” I don’t even care how desperate my voice sounds, I just want it to be true.

“Yeah, definitely,” she says with another subtle flush on her cheeks. She gives an awkward little wave and darts across the parking lot and into the building.

Definitely.

#behind the sun #chapter 3 #fanfiction #fanfic #chris cornell #jeff ament #pearl jam #soundgarden

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771lljosephkwesiasemnor · 5 years

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New post on Longreads

The View From 5-Foot-3 (and a Half)

by Soraya Roberts

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | June 2019 | 9 minutes (2,497 words)

Okay, I’m not even that short, but I just watched Reese Witherspoon get called “untrustworthy” on Big Little Lies for being 5-foot-1 so I have to talk about it. I’m actually 2.5 inches taller than she is — I’m aware that insisting on that half inch makes me sound like a pedantic asshole — but that’s still short enough that when I lost half an inch it felt like a betrayal. I don’t know where that half inch went; all I know is that one day I was 5-foot-4, and the next I was 5-foot-3-and-a-half. Who cares, right? Terry Gross is 4-foot-11 and recently interviewed Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who is 5-foot-9 and asked the Fresh Air host if being short affected her. I could basically hear Gross’s shrug through the microphone. And same. But now that I think about it, that's a heavy shrug.

Witherspoon was disparaged by Meryl Streep, who was playing the mother of a man who abused his wife. In a sense, the former was representing feminism; the latter internalized misogyny — that unpleasant habit we have of acting out sexism despite ourselves. What’s interesting is that most of us don’t actually need a Streep to do it. We're pretty good at hacking away at our own self confidence, conjuring imaginary competitions with other women, isolating ourselves from them, all of which has the self-sabotaging effect of perpetuating the behavior that keeps us down. It’s not really about height, but height is as good a marker as any for how the world sees us and how we see the world (and ourselves in it) — in other words, for how trustworthy 5-foot-3-and-a-half becomes.

* * *

In the Big Little Lies scene in question, Madeline (Witherspoon) is at a coffee shop and notices Mary Louise (Streep), the mother of the guy she saw getting pushed to his death last season (it’s a soap). The way Madeline’s holding her muffin, that blush-pink blouse with the bow and the matching makeup and the black cardigan — she looks like such a lady who lunches. A small lady. While she is phonily consoling the older woman, Mary Louise suddenly exclaims, “You’re very short.” The face Witherspoon makes is perfect. She says, “Excuse me?” but with her head a little down so it looks like her entire face is puckered and she’s time traveled back to eighth grade when she was a 13-year-old girl saying, “What did you say, bitch?” to some bitch. Mary Louise kind of backtracks but not really: “I find” — somehow Streep manages here to look down at Witherspoon while looking up at her — “little people to be” — at this Streep ever so slightly toggles her head back and forth like she’s not tossing off a total insult — “untrustworthy.”

There’s a lot going on here, chiefly the clashing of present and past: Madeline is now, Mary Louise is then. You’ve got this younger woman who watched as her best friend’s abusive husband was killed, then covered it up without losing much sleep because he was a piece of shit and the (fictional) world is better off without him. Then you’ve got this older woman, the mother of the abuser, who believes her son was done wrong, not realizing that he was the one doing all the wrong. So, really, if you want to be Feminism 101 about it, this is the patriarchy confronting feminist progress and trying to subvert it. But it’s a lot easier to fight that when you’ve got Streep right in front of you than when she’s in your head.

I don’t think I’ve ever been reduced to my height like this, but it often defines how I think of myself. As a child I was often one of the smallest in my class, and while I would’ve preferred to be one of the tallest, at least I wasn’t one of the kids you don’t even mention. Like being short meant being original. Like at least I owned one superlative — if not the smartest or prettiest — and it wasn’t one that was obviously bad, like being the dumbest or the meanest (although the latter I kind of liked too). I think that all came less from my actual stature and more from wherever my shoddy self-esteem did. I saw my shortness as a stand-in for the interesting personality I was pretty sure I didn’t have. It was like a flipped Napoleon complex, which isn’t about his height — he was 5-foot-7! — but about being compelled by what you perceive as a disadvantage to overcompensate by being outsize in some other way. My perceived disability was that I was invisible, so I outsized the meaning of my shortness. (By the time I grew out of my height defining my originality, I was memorable for other things. Like my sparkling personality.)

We aren’t a very tall family, but it’s always made sense to me that the men are bigger than the women, like that’s how it’s supposed to be, Darwin-style. The women are dainty and elegant and the men can be whatever the fuck they want — they’re taller, just like they’re smarter. So from the start, height was a moral issue, and if there was a discrepancy between mine and any other girl’s, there was a problem with one of us. Every time I’d see a much taller girl I’d think, Jesus Christ, thank God I’m doing one thing right. As if it were a conscious decision I’d made, as if I had anything to do with how I looked. It’s gone the opposite way in adulthood; whenever I’m in a room with a taller woman, I feel way less visible. Actually, that’s a nice way of saying I feel like shit. I feel like a farmhand from the Middle Ages or like some dumpy nursemaid from *waves absently* that same era — an uneducated unsophisticated plebe. The best women — richer, smarter, prettier ‚ are all tall and thin and long-limbed and I’m a runt.

Knowing that all of this has to do with historic myths about gender and health and beauty — not to mention that I literally cannot find a pair of pants I don’t have to hem — creates the shoe paradox, which is a thing I just made up but which is also very real. It’s the feeling of being very riot grrrl when you wear any sort of flat “unfeminine” shoe like a Converse or a Doc, like you are embracing your deficiency of not performing femininity appropriately (come to think of it, this is kind of an addendum to that short-being-original thing). The paradox comes in when you suddenly decide to wear heels, which don’t make you feel like a traitor but, on the contrary, imbue you with even more power because you are no longer suffering from that nonexistent deficiency. It makes no sense to me either, but then neither do the rules of a patriarchal society.

I’m not sure how much my outspokenness has to do with how I look as opposed to how I feel, but my size appears to affect how people react to it and, sort of, how I do too. Basically, I have this idea of myself as a bulldog-chihuahua, some small, pugnacious cartoon animal — growing up, my aunt called me chooha, or mouse, because I squeaked — like a fightercock with no real power. Scrappy. It seems like a lot of guys see me that way too, as endearingly mouthy but ultimately unthreatening. It has the dual effect of being simultaneously flattering and demeaning. That extends to my perceived helplessness, too. On planes I’ll be reaching for my bag in the overhead compartment and some dude will stretch over me and grab it, then smile like I’m an adorable idiot in a losing battle that he would’ve just as happily laughed at but decided on chivalry instead. I know that’s what some of them think, because it’s sometimes what I think when I’m helping someone smaller than me. When I have to ask for some item in a store that’s on an unreachable shelf, I hear myself invariably flirting with the clerk and it feels triumphant that there’s a reason to allow a (preferably hotter) person to help me. And I hate myself for it.

When I’m alone with a guy who’s bigger than me, regardless of how he looks or even how stupid he might be, I’m instinctually deferential. I thought this was weird until my editor just noted that it’s “a pretty understandable safety mechanism, no?” YES (although now I am actually questioning how stupid I am). (Ed. note: not remotely stupid.) But I think it also has to do with my even more problematic ingrained belief that most men are smarter than me (I know, I know) as well as being stronger than me (generally true). So height, regardless of the other person’s agency, becomes this zone of self-reflection where ultimately the shorter I am the less substantial I am. But then there’s the boyfriend paradox, which is not unlike the shoe paradox. I’m dating a guy right now who’s 5-foot-10, which means that when we hold hands, I can only really comfortably grab his last two fingers — yeah, it’s cute — but that also means that hugging him, because he can envelope me, feels more secure. The paradox here is finding comfort in belittling myself, which, magically, works no matter the height. I dated a guy who was 5-foot-6 and thinner than me — “I’m indie thin!” — and while hugging him felt more equal, the fact that he was thinner than me was more noticeable because we were basically the same size, which was like facing a constant living reminder that I’m unable to not be fat. The point being that internalized misogyny ensures that YOU WILL NEVER WIN.

Being a short woman in a group of women can make me as self-conscious as being a short woman in a group of men. With men I’m always struggling to be heard, although I don’t know how much that has to do with being short and how much that has to do with just being a woman. It’s fucking annoying and either makes me louder than usual or more quiet. Women don’t have to do anything to diminish me, they just have to be standing there. Most of my friends are about the same height as me, but when I’m with one who’s much taller I always feel like Ratso Rizzo from Midnight Cowboy — you know, the con man greaser who wheels and deals. I have no idea why I think I look like Dustin Hoffman. No, I do; it’s because I have this conception of myself as small and savvy and naughty and taller women generally as a bit more, well, Jon Voight as naive gigolo. It’s funny because when I’m with someone the same height as me, I’m less conscious of how I look; I’m not an outlier, so it’s a nonissue.

None of this has literally anything to do with who any of us actually are. It has to do with the false ideas I (we) have of myself in the presence of men and other women and the false ideas I (we) have of men and other women and how those things work together to make me (us) self-destruct.

Ironically, the Ratso Rizzo thing probably also comes from my unwillingness to be overlooked. I’m very much “I’m walkin’ here!” when someone taller stands in front of me at a concert or sits right in front of my face at a movie theater. It’s usually a man and I usually want to stab him for being inconsiderate even if he isn’t aware. BE AWARE! Speaking of stabbing, I’m not actually short enough for my height to determine how safe I feel. I think I would feel as unsafe alone at night with a man walking behind me even if I were 6 feet tall, because I assume men are stronger than me regardless of their size. What I do notice is that I have intense anxiety in a crowd that I might not have if I were able to see over everyone’s head. I remember this psychologist relating my anxiety to my size. She said that she commonly got small women coming in and she compared us to small birds or squirrels — you know, how they’re skittish and their hearts beat really fast? Because they’ll basically be trampled or eaten if they don’t have hyperawareness. Maybe that’s what reads as untrustworthy in shorties, their lack of trust in not being stomped.

* * *

A few scenes after the “untrustworthy” one in Big Little Lies, Madeline bumps into Mary Louise again in her real estate office because this is a soap and everyone’s always bumping into everyone else. Madeline has since exchanged her black flats for a pair of grapefruit stilettos, and Mary Louise notices: “I see you’re wearing heels.” At that Madeline confronts her about being an asshole and Mary Louise apologizes and explains that she had some shitty best friend in boarding school (of course) who made her this way: “She was just an itty-bitty little thing with a big bubbly personality that was designed to hide that she was utterly vapid inside. You remind me so much of her and I suppose I punish you for that.” Witherspoon’s face, again. And Streep, again, does this great thing, where, when Witherspoon basically tells her to eff off and walks away, Streep gives her shoes another look and chuckles, with an “Oh, sweetie” cock of the head. Like the idea that Madeline could transcend who she is is endearingly pathetic.

At the risk of playing into the sexist tradition of pitting women against one another, there’s a frustrating feeling that Mary Louise — who is only five inches taller, by the way — has won. That her misogyny has insinuated itself into Madeline to the point that she has actually changed the way she looks in order to appease it. But it’s only a short (ha) stay. Madeline later comes to the rescue of her best friend, Celeste, who is Mary Louise’s daughter-in-law, who vaguely gestures to some kind of emergency. Mary Louise, distraught, asks, “What kind of an emergency?” To which Madeline shruggingly replies, “The kind short people have?” As Madeline walks away you notice she’s wearing running shoes. I love how the connection between two women — Madeline and Celeste — can act as a shield against sexism (in this case, Mary Louise’s). Would that we could all be that strong. Which makes me think of the poll I tweeted asking how tall everyone thought I was. The majority answered 5-foot-5, almost the same height as Streep. I’m not going to pretend that doesn’t make me feel better, but I’m working on it.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

Soraya Roberts | June 14, 2019 at 6:00 am | Tags: Big Little Lies, feminism, Height, identity, Internalized misogyny, Meryl Streep, Reese Witherspoon, Soraya Roberts | Categories: Arts & Culture, Essays & Criticism, Story | URL: https://wp.me/p4KhvY-wKE

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carriejonesbooks · 5 years

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I am the least threatening woman in the world.

When I sat down to write about something, that’s the sentence that flew off my fingertips:

I am the least threatening woman in the world.

And then I thought about what it means.

I –

That one is sort of obvious.

Least –

the smallest extent

Threatening –

There’s a lot of definitions for this one, but I think that the one my brain was going for is “causing someone to feel vulnerable or at risk”

In the world –

Wicked hyperbole because I’m an author and we’re into hyperbole.

But seriously, I am the sort of woman that even the most insecure people don’t care if their spouse texts. This is essentially true in all things work and life related.

Or am I? My perception of myself is pretty unthreatening, but one of my friends recently told me I have no chill and I could totally throw-down. He meant it as a compliment. Another friend told me, “You are so super mellow and chill. What was he talking about?”

Different people perceive us in vastly different ways, but even how we perceive ourselves can be all over the place.

So, when I think, “I am the least threatening person in the world,” am I actually just falling into a writer stereotype of self-loathing? Am I really saying, “I’m ugly and boring and nobody is intimidated by me because I’m basically nothing?” Or is it something else?

And why do so many of us writers (and comics, and artists, and bankers, and humans) do this? When this negative self definition is obviously not a helpful tool.

Writers and Self Loathing

Back in 2015, the New York Times asked two writers on their thoughts about writers and self loathing.

Thomas Mallon wrote, “The aggrieved writer’s immortal longings represent, finally, a loathing not of the self but of the human condition, a desire to thwart the tragic fact of death. Writing has always offered a particularly good means of doing that.”

I read that to a friend and he rolled his eyes. “You aren’t self-loathing. You’re self deprecating. There’s a big difference. You’re afraid to claim your success. I think it might be a woman thing or a New England thing or something.”

“Are you telling me that I’m afraid of being successful because I’m a woman? Or because I’m from New Hampshire?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Hm,” I said because honestly? That’s a pretty big assertion that takes a lot to unpack.

Or maybe the self deprecation is because of my New England-ness and me being a woman and told not to ‘toot my own horn’ because it’s “tacky.” But maybe it’s also a thinking thing. Writers think a lot. We think about humans and society and our place within it. We think about character growth and motivation and that means that we sometimes think a lot about our own selves.

Anna Holmes wrote in that same Times piece, “Although I don’t buy the idea that self-loathing is a requirement for writers — I know too many writers, particularly men, who hold themselves in perhaps higher esteem than they should — I do think that writing demands a certain amount of self-awareness, and that self-awareness and self-loathing can be two sides of the same coin.”

Being judgmental about who we are, knowing our own flaws and faults, it can be hard. It’s hard to face our lack of personal perfection – not just for writers, but for all of us. And while we often give our friends and family space for errors or ‘flaws’ or screw-ups and forgive and love them anyway? That’s not always so hard to do with ourselves. To be self aware means to know we are imperfect. But our imperfections aren’t the end of the world. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that.

Making Ourselves a Trope

And the thing is that when we write about writers? We are making ourselves a trope and often continuing that cycle of negativity. I remember a couple of years ago when I had a five-second meltdown about how I could never watch another movie or television show about a writer.

“It makes me depressed,” I sputtered. “They are all just — they are either super wealthy or alcoholics or creepy.”

Apparently, I’m not the only one who has thought this. In 2017, Ben Blatt published a survey of some literature called “Writers are Self-Loathing: 50 Writers on Writers, In Fiction.”

Okay. It’s fiction, not movies, but it’s all about our culture and how we define ourselves.

Blatt wrote, “Writers don’t have the best reputation and they have no one to blame but themselves. Instead of writing stories where writers are attractive, heroic, and strong, they describe the writers within their own works as eccentric, depressed, reclusive, broke, and egotistical.”

Blatt gives example after example of writers putting writers down, defining them in not a very positive light.

Here are some excerpts that I took from his Signature article.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

I’m going to beg the rest of you out there, don’t define yourself as miserable, as nothing, as non-threatening, as invisible. Don’t believe yourself to be the trope. And maybe think about why that trope is there? Negative self awareness and self loathing and self deprecation. It’s like an evil trinity that holds us back, keeps us down. We don’t need it.

Writing News

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“Least Threatening Woman in the World” Self perception and writing I am the least threatening woman in the world. When I sat down to write about something, that's the sentence that flew off my fingertips:

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