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keelywolfe · 3 years

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FIC: Knick Knack Paddy Whack (BAON)

Summary: As far as Stretch is concerned, there's only one solution when you're addicted to thrift stores. Selling all the crap you bought so you can buy more!

Notes: Stepping outside of the main storyline for a moment, we'll get back to the aftermath we're all expecting in a moment. 😁

Tags: Spicyhoney, Established Relationships, Domestic Fluff

Part of the ‘by any other name’ series.

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Read it on AO3

Read it here!

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Stretch was a bonafide thrift-a-holic, he honestly was, and he knew it. It was an important thing to know about yourself, really, because certain problems arose from bad case of oooh-shiny-itis.

Sure, one ceramic zombie hand thrusting up from the dresser to hold his rings and change was an awesome thing to behold, but an entire collection of zombie hands was a tough sell to the person you were living with, especially if that person was Edge. Not that he’d managed to find a collection of zombie hands and if he had, that thrift store would have been on the weekly check list, for sure. But the same premise applied to ‘zombie hand plus an entire horde of other bizarre ceramics surrounding it’.

Stretch wasn’t bitter about the limitations when it came to his collection, nah, he got it. There were certain things you couldn’t ask for from the person you love, and a house filled up with weird tchotchkes that looked like they belonged to the grandmother of the chainsaw massacre family was a step too far. Plus, asking Edge for more space would be unfair. He’d either agree because he didn’t want to tell Stretch no, or he’d say no and feel bad about it. Nah, the set of porcelain dragons playing instruments in a rock band he’d found wasn’t that important, not if it gave Edge a case of the guilts.

Problem was, Stretch really couldn’t resist sometimes. How was he supposed to turn away a wedding painting of Yoda and Kermit the frog? Or a coffee mug with a penguin orgy on it? He couldn’t, that’s how, but his allotted space was filling up in the house proper and soon he’d started to amass quite the collection in his lab, too. It was when the overflow expanded enough to start infringing on his erlenmeyer flasks that he decided he needed a new strategy. Science waited for no one and definitely not anything with the word ‘taxidermy’ included.

That’s when Stretch came up with the plan. Okay, it wasn’t a plan, exactly, more like a flash in the pants of brief inspiration, but hell, he’d been flying by on those his entire life, why stop now?

One of the places he frequented was an antique mall, which was a fancy way of saying one rung on the ladder above actual thrift store, except they rented stalls for people to sell their stuff, so maybe it was more like a glorified garage sale. People carted in their junk for other people to buy and the cashier up front handled all the transactions. Minimal time, minimal effort, that was exactly what he and his kitsch needed, so Stretch went ahead and rented a stall of his own.

The not-exactly-a-plan worked out pretty well. He could buy something at the thrift shop and proudly display it for a while around the house, and then when it came time to replace it with a new find, he’d add it to his stall and whatever money came from it, he donated to the local kid’s charity that the Antique Mall supported. That meant he got in his kicks and joy without looking like a prequel to a Hoarders episode and Edge only had to deal with the octopus tentacle ashtray for a few weeks.

Seriously, it was a win-win all the way around.

A few things did take up permanent residence, of course; he couldn’t give up his zombie hand. But so long as it wasn’t a clown, (clowns were disposed of by Edge immediately and with great prejudice), he was allowed things like his nested Matryoshka dolls of Nicolas Cages for a time.

About once a week he went down to add new things to his stall, mostly during the weekday hours when the buses were on the empty side and he could take up an extra seat with his box of additions. It wasn’t exactly a secret, Andy came along a few times to help, but he never really mentioned it to Edge. Not until today when Stretch realized he’d let things go a little too long and he had some extra boxes to haul down.

Better to take care of it while he was thinking about it, otherwise it tended to turn into an endless cycle of ‘oh, I should do that today’ and him forgetting, but aside from the extra lugging required, it was also Saturday and the bus would be loaded. Hitching a ride would be required, plus a little extra muscle, and his husband was his favorite source for both.

He found Edge in the kitchen, sitting at their temporary table with his laptop and yeah, it was Saturday, time to drag him away from whatever bullshit work he was doing. Stretch put on his best wheedling face and asked, “babe? can you give me a lift today?”

“Of course.” Edge didn’t look up, what a total waste of Stretch’s beguiling charms. His gloved fingertips were soft against the keyboard as he finished whatever he was typing before glancing up at Stretch, and maybe his schmoozing wasn’t entirely wasted; the way Edge closed the lid on his laptop spoke of a guilty conscious for working on his day off. “Where are we going?”

“downtown,” Stretch tucked his hands into his pockets and rocked on his heels. “i need to hit up my junk and disorderly shop.”

That got him a pause, “Your what?”

“heh, you’ll see.” Stretch curled a finger at Edge in a ‘come hither’ motion that his husband didn’t follow, only watched suspiciously. “c’mon, i need you to help me carry some stuff.”

“This ride is starting to sound less like transport and more like a chore.” But Edge followed him to the basement for the boxes, and, surprise surprise, his willingness to help went up a few notches from wary to eager when he figured out what Stretch was doing. Eh, couldn’t blame him. At the top of the pile was a plush frog with the top hat that played ‘hello my baby’ whenever you pushed on its foot, something Red did every single time he walked past it, plus anytime he’d felt like shortcutting in for a quick press. Time to let it damage the sanity of another family.

The boxes were tossed into the trunk of Edge’s car, frog and all, and soon they were on the road, heading downtown. Truth be told, Stretch wasn’t sure what Edge would make of the place. He tolerated thrift stores well enough, but the antique mall was a different kind of beast. An entire building of obscure collections cluttered together into eclectic displays that others were trying to barter and sell.

There were stalls filled with milk crates of old records, shelves and shelves of antique glassware and dishes. Some stalls had vintage clothing, feathery boas mixed in with disco pants and ruffled aprons. Old instruments, rusty farm equipment, strange kitchen gadgets that looked more dangerous than useful, this place had everything and then some.

Plus, the mall had a certain sort of smell, a musty, dusty scent verging on decay that settled into the sinuses and hung around for a while. Stretch thought it was the smell of a life well-lived and he kinda liked it; after years of thrifting, he associated it with finding treasures, but who knew if Edge felt the same. His tastes in smells (heh) ran more to clean and green, not old-timey funk. Could be it reminded him of shower mildew.

Whatever his opinion of the odors, Edge kept it to himself. He helped with the box carrying and checked out Stretch’s stall curiously but didn’t say much. Probably recognized the stuff on the shelves as having once been on a table or Stretch’s nightstand, until the glee wore off and it ended up gathering dust in the basement. He wandered off at some point, heading into the depths of the mall, and left Stretch to restock his meagre wares.

It took longer than he’d expected. Since he’d opened up his stall, not everything Stretch found thrifting found its way into the house proper anymore. Some of it he bought as a straight-to-video option and he was getting pretty good at finding interesting doodads at the thrifty places that might sell better here, location, location, location, that was the ticket.

Stretch always priced his junk reasonably, usually not much more than he’d paid for it. Wasn’t like he needed the money, and besides, Stretch knew himself pretty damn well, therapy did that to a guy. At the end of the day, he knew what this was really about; all an elaborate scheme to satisfy the inner packrat in his soul that struggled sometimes with giving things away.

Bartering had been built in him before he could say the word; in the Underground, he’d gotten damn good at getting deals for what he could scrounge at the dump. This was the same thing, really, just with slightly different stakes. Dinner wasn’t riding on his latest stash of dvds anymore, always a plus, and these days he could simply look at the empty shelves, content in the knowledge that his Smeagol cardboard cutout had found a new home.

Hey, therapy wasn’t the only way to work out a few kinks in your internal lines.

When the last box was emptied, Stretch wandered up to the front desk to give the lady who ran the front register his new inventory list. That was when he heard it.

There was an old piano up front with a sign on it that said, ‘Do not ‘play’ if you cannot play’. Most of the time it sat silently but someone up there was giving it a good try today. The notes were slower, with obvious hesitations as the player searched for the correct keys, but the song was one Stretch knew. Gently melancholy, a match to the cautious playing.

His curiosity piqued, Stretch wandered over to watch and he wasn’t entirely surprised to see Edge sitting on the piano bench, his attention on his hands as he slowly played. It was a tough choice between watching him play and simply listening to the song and Stretch found himself trying to do both. The uncertain skill in hands he knew so well as they coaxed the music free.

When the last note faded, a faint smattering of applause came from the different stalls around them. Stretch waited for it to end before sitting on the bench next to Edge.

Quietly, Stretch said, “i didn’t know you played.”

“I don’t,” Edge said. He smoothed a hand over the keys, not pressing down, simply touching them. “Not really. I can’t read music, but I know a song or two by rote. A friend of mine pushed me to memorize them.”

Welp, Stretch didn’t have to ask what friend, now did he. An old friend back in another world, and people weren’t replaceable even if they wore the same face. He didn’t say anything, didn’t need to; Stretch understood in a way only a few people could, and he settled a hand on Edge’s leg, squeezing his knee gently.

“that was really good,” Stretch offered, “you have a good memory, babe.”

“Some of my memories are better than others,” Edge said. The words were more contemplative than sorrowful, and he didn’t look at Stretch, only touched the back of his hand briefly with his gloved fingertips. “You tend to feature in the best ones, love.”

He reached for the keys again and started to play. The song was more confident this time, bright and cheery, with only the occasional missed note. A handful of other people drifted over, some pausing to watch and some moving on, going about their day with a song to carry them along.

Stretch only tapped his toes and listened as Edge played, more than willing to let him go on until he was ready to stop. If Edge wanted to take a brief dive into the past, then the antique mall was a place for it, where memories and times past mingled with the present.

Besides, a new memory to take home was better than any knickknack.

-fin

Note: The first song Edge was playing was 'Clair de Lune' by Debussy and the second was 'The Entertainer' by Scott Joplin. In case you were wondering. 😁

#spicyhoney #papcest #keelywolfe #underfell #underswap #underfell papyrus #underswap papyrus #by any other name

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talesofafangirlwithadvr · 3 years

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October/November Picks

Long time no see! So...it’s been a little bit since I’ve posted a wrap up. I had all intentions of posting one after October, but then you know life gets ahead of you and before you know it it’s Thanksgiving. Not much has changed in my viewing habits for these past two months, so I thought I’d group them together for a mega wrap up. Hope you enjoy :)

Without further ado here come some spoilers.....

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SECRET SOCIETY OF SECOND BORN ROYALS

This Disney + original movie was one of my highly anticipated watches for the fall. I am disappointed to share that it was a let down. The concept was such a cool and creative one. Having the second born in a royal family not simply be the “spare” but be the protector...with superpowers! (In a very YA way, getting their powers at a specific age.) They just should have gone about the story in a better way. I wanted more time with them learning about the powers and to make the villain stronger. Overall the acting wasn’t bad (which is good for a Disney + original), but it was just lacking. The movie was LONG and yet much did not feel like it happened. It was cool seeing Casa Loma (the castle they filmed at) as I was just there two summers ago. Sadly, I will not be watching this movie again.

VIOLETTA SEASON 3

We all already know how pumped I was when season 3 of Violetta was released on Disney Plus in September. I couldn’t believe it after waiting so long for the second season. I really enjoyed the beginning of this season and knew we would be headed down a road where I would grow tired of the storylines.

We have hit that point.

Quick Violetta rant. Things I am done with:

Roxy and Fausta plot

Fran and Diego being a secret

Herman and Priscilla

Pablo not at the studio

Milton being evil

Ludmilla lying

Recently, my sister is catching up to where I am in the season, so this has pushed me to watch more. I am on episode 43 and some of the above venting has been solved, so that is super exciting. I am finding myself wanting to watch it more now, so fingers crossed it continues to get better.

JULIE AND THE PHANTOMS

Kenny Ortega has done it again! When I first heard the premise for this show and watched the trailer on Netflix I wasn’t too sure. Then both of my sisters watched it and they wouldn’t stop talking about it, so that was a sign that I needed to watch it. Since then, I have watched the show twice and can’t stop listening to the music. THIS. SHOW. :) I get the hype. It’s just so wholesome and feel good. The characters are well crafted and the episodes go way too fast. They are the kind of characters (and cast) that make you wish you were a part of the show. I can’t wait for the next season (because there better be one). Definitely add this one to your list if it’s not on their already.

THE OUTPOST

The Summer CW shows were pushed to the fall line up due to delays in filming of the originally planned shows. I hope this means that they’re getting a little more love this year. The Outpost deserves it, as it is currently in its third season. (I think it might have gotten a little more now that the 100 is over and the commercial aired during the 100′s last season. Maybe people heard Black-blood and decided to give it a go.) This season has seen a new threat and during the first eight episodes there’s been MANY twists and turns, making it hard for me to remember how this season started. There’s been a lot of unrest in the Outpost and changes in who is in charge. While there are some unnecessary plot-lines (like that Tobin had to be married), I’m really enjoying others. Like how important Janzo is, his relationship with Ren, more Munt and that TALON AND GARRETT FINALLY GOT TOGETHER!!! It makes me so happy and is what we deserve after these three seasons. I love how strong both of their characters are and how they are both Warriors. I hope the season ends strong.

PANDORA

Just like The Outpost, Pandora was originally a Summer CW show that is now airing its second season. I really enjoyed the first season (like more than I was expecting), so I went in with higher hopes for this new season. Unfortunately, I have been let down so far. With the first season, there were parts that left me confused and my biggest review of this show has always been how there were gaps or moments where I didn’t know how much time had gone by. Those kind of things I could overlook, but this season the overall plot just seems weaker. I think this in part because of so many new characters. I know a lot of the season 1 cast ended their characters’ plots away from the Academy, but I wasn’t expecting them not to be a part of this season’s story. That has been a difficult adjustment. I also feel like I only understand Jax’s story and not so much about the other government/rebellion points. It’s getting a little better, but I hope it gets to be more enjoyable.

THE SPANISH PRINCESS--SEASON 2

When I originally was creating this list I had just started this season, and felt completely different than I do right now. I just finished this season last week. Much like my above review on Pandora, The Spanish Princess wasn’t sucking me in. I had a few episodes gather on the DVR. Then once we hit episode 3 or 4 and more drama was starting/Henry was starting to show glimpses of the Henry VIII we all know, I was growing more interested. In season 2 of the Spanish Princess, we do not see a loving Catherine and Henry for long. Problems Catherine have in conceiving a boy (male heir) are one of the main focal points, as is Woolsey’s growing influence on the king. With several sub-plots this season, I specifically enjoyed learning more about Meg in Scotland (as a big Mary Queen of Scots/Reign fan, I liked seeing a portrayal of her grandmother) as well as Princess Mary Tudor (who I was unfamiliar with. I loved her and Charlie Brandon’s relationship and wish we could have gotten more.) Each week I watched this show, I found myself Googling a lot. That is always one of my favorite parts of watching a historical drama based on true events. I know right now it looks like the producers aren’t continuing with the Tudor line and might have a different part of history as their next show, but I wish they would. I’m feeling the call to watch the Tudors as it’s on Netflix and I haven’t seen it before. I want to learn more about his wives.

BLOWN AWAY

In a complete shift from a period piece, here is another Netflix show I thoroughly enjoyed watching last month. Do you find the act of glass blowing to be extremely interesting, but you would never dream of trying yourself? Or do you like competition game shows that are not like anything else you’ve watched before? Then Blown Away might be for you! It’s a very fast watch with only a handful of episodes that are about a half hour a piece. (I honestly wished they were a bit longer because it was SO GOOD!) Each contestant is a glass blower and they get to show off their skills by competing in a specific challenge. Each episode you see someone get eliminated until the final where the winner gets a residency at Corning Museum of Glass in upstate New York. This show came out in 2019 and I am hoping a second season comes out.

LIFE IN PIECES

This CBS comedy was one that I remember loving when it first came out. But I only remember watching the first season because then I couldn’t remember which day it was on. (It’s going to sound weird, but because I don’t watch a lot on this network I often forget it exists. We also only had a one room DVR at the time, so we couldn’t tape more than 2 things. Oh, the joys of multi-room DVR). After I finished my re-watch of Derry Girls in September, I was looking for another sitcom to re-watch. This was when I stumbled on the full series of Life in Pieces on Amazon video. (It’s free to watch with Prime.) I was so surprised to see there were 4 seasons! Since then I have been watching a good amount of episodes when I sit down to watch it. Now I’m about mid way in the second season. I highly recommend this show if you haven’t seen it before. It gives vibes of Modern Family. Very short episodes that include four storylines. The format is one that I haven’t seen done before in a sitcom.

SUPERMARKET SWEEP

The revival of the beloved game show from the early 90s is now hosted by Leslie Johns and is the best thing you should be watching on Sunday nights. If you know your grocery shopping list like the back of your hand then you are all set for this show. Leslie Johns is hilarious as are the cast of characters that are regulars in her supermarket. I think it would be a great TV show to be on and I’m not just saying that because I want one of the sweatshirts (although that would be great). If you want (another) feel-good watch, look no further! You catch up on demand.

RE-WATCHING

ANNE WITH AN E

It’s hard to believe that we only got the third season of Anne with an E at the beginning of this year (as this year feels like its been going on forever and when I watched the third season I was in a much less stressed place). Currently, I am teaching a class involving Little Women and Anne of Green Gables. The main focus is on how these stories get adapted in recent times and include such modern plots (and sub-plots). Naturally Anne with an E is perfect for this topic (and after watching season 3 at the start of the year) was one of my major reasons for choosing this topic. (The other being Greta Gerwig’s latest Little Women.) As I’ve been planning my schedule, I’ve re-watched this show. There is something so great about watching it from season 1 all the way through to season 3. You get to watch them grow up and it’s crazy to see how young they first were. Comparing it more to the novel has been a fun time, but also analyzing it more has been great and made me appreciate it even more. With all the stress of our current situation watching this show has made me escape and feel good. (Yes, I know I’ve used that word a lot in this wrap up, but it’s true.)

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Hopefully my next wrap up isn’t as delayed. Wishing everyone a happy holiday season!

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popolitiko · 3 years

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How The New York Times is Visualizing the Smartphone Tracking Industry

By Erin Merkel | April 29, 2020

“I used to look at my phone like, ‘What a fun and convenient trick that I can get an alert when I walk near a pizza place.’ It’s not a fun trick. It’s a business, and you’re the commodity.” — Stuart A. Thompson, The New York Times

Editor’s note: Since this interview was originally published in February, the global coronavirus pandemic has shed further light on how location tracking data is collected and the potential risks of how it’s used. Google is releasing aggregated location data reports to show how people’s movement patterns are changing around the world, while privacy advocates are sounding the alarm about governments’ efforts to obtain more location data from telecom companies.

A phone application company you have never heard of before likely knows where you are right now. That information is being bought and sold right now. Those apps and their partners have joined a lucrative industry at the expense of the privacy of smartphone users. It’s an issue of national security, and it’s virtually unregulated.

The New York Times’ Privacy Project is directing attention to this issue. In Twelve Million Phones, One Dataset, Zero Privacy, Stuart A. Thompson and Charlie Warzel visualize phones as dots being tracked around the country, from the Pentagon and the White House to the streets of San Francisco.

Storybench spoke with Warzel, a writer-at-large for the Times’ Opinion section, and Thompson, the head of Opinion’s visual journalism department, about why they chose to create these visualizations and the challenges that arose in constructing this data-driven, yet very human, story.

The article opens up to a visualization of blinking dots on a map of different buildings. It looks like it should be in a spy film. Why did you decide to make this the first thing people see?

Stuart A. Thompson: So, the Times had approached this topic one year prior with a news piece and this is building on the foundation of that. We never really had a good sense of scale for how much data there is. The data that we had was of several cities and super dense and covered everything. And we wanted to give people that visceral reaction. It’s not one person or some strangers. It’s everything everywhere. And we had that idea really early on to do a zoom-out of a city and the idea was to start at one dot and keep going, and going, and going, and it would never end. I think that was the idea, to have an emotional connection to something you never get to see.

Charlie Warzel: It is really hard to wrap your mind around how much information is out there, how many phones, and how much is being sent. I think this is one of those stories that had a lot of the words before the visuals were on the page. As soon as I saw what Stuart had made, I was like: “We don’t even really need the words. The visuals tell the story better.”

Did you specifically ask to have these graphics rather than have a picture or video?

Thompson: The way that newsrooms used to be set up, and a lot of them still are, is you have reporters doing interviews and writing text and you have a bunch of graphics people making bar charts who sometimes do more visual stuff. They’re sort of just sitting in the corner of some dark closet in the newsroom (laughs). The Times for the past decade has been trying to marry those two things closer together and that’s the origin of the team that I run, which is the visual journalism team in Opinion.

Rather than making visuals like the window dressing on a nicely reported piece, let’s find the stories and tell the stories that you can’t tell without visuals or can’t tell nearly as well. Like you could probably write this story without any visuals and it would be a good story that people would read, but the impact really comes from seeing it all together. They’re not separate things.

A reporter might think of a headline while they’re writing and we might think of the visual that we want to lead the piece because that affects what is written. In the first text-only drafts of the piece, it had bubble points for that stat and little annotations around it so editors will know what we’re trying to do there. We show them that you have to imagine this idea with these images. Whether it is a video or it’s animated that it is for additional flair but it does pull you in a little bit more gradually.

Could you walk us through how you were introduced to this story and your research process?

Thompson: So the Privacy Project, which is a year-long look at privacy and technology, approached us with the data and they were worried about the implications. They thought it could use someone with a voice to argue for change. We went out to learn about an industry that’s pretty opaque and hard to understand because it’s totally invisible. When you’re on your phone, you can’t see what’s going on. A lot of the business deals are not announced publicly. The connections between different companies and what they do with the data … none of that stuff is that well exposed. It was a huge research undertaking and there was a lot of data work.

Warzel: This is one of those situations where the data led everything. It was the story, and a lot of the reporting was either to confirm things or get more contact for things in the data. This was sort of an interesting reporting process because a lot of the times you’re going and calling up people or going to visit people. We went to Pasadena for one story. It was an inversion of the general reporting process.

Usually you go to people and are like, “Please tell me this thing. I need to know information.” And we actually had all the information and we’re asking people to see it. It was sort of a weird mode. It was data driven in the sense that the data helped provide so much for those visuals, but it was also in the sense that it was giving us leads and anecdotes. The reporting was just trying to run that down and make sure it made sense or it was accurate.

Did you know at the start from looking at the data how you wanted to organize the story? Was it when you started to talk to people that it took form?

Warzel: Before we started talking to people we found in the data, we had the outline of the story. We made our outline based on our research of companies who promote assumptions. We had problems with that. One assumption was that the data is anonymous, and we felt pretty comfortable saying that it was not. [The companies say] it is really hard to keep this data anonymous and secure, and we obviously had the data so how could it be secure?

We had [the data on] Washington, so we knew that national security would be part of our series. It ended up being the second story of the seven. I think we had a pretty good sense of the parameters of it. That Pasadena story didn’t come until pretty late. Only a couple weeks before. We had stories in the main pieces about the people we had, but it seems like there was a little more to say when you isolate a region … The first stories were big high-level stories about business and the industry and the national security apparatus. The data is also a story of communities, and towns, and people living their lives, going to Best Buy and church. There was enough there that we could make a full story out of that. We wanted to zero-in on an area where there was a mix of different stories to tell.

Was there a situation where someone didn’t want anything to do with this story? How did you handle that?

Warzel: That was a major thing in this. It was actually another reason to go to Pasadena. Originally, we didn’t know how many stories it was going to be, but we identified a lot of people through this and wanted to do the due diligence of contacting them and just getting them to talk about the experience of being in this data set. It was people we found at political rallies, people who might have been in government, a whole slew of people who were relatively famous to those with no public profile. Not a lot of people wanted to talk.

A lot of people thought it was maybe like a scam. You’d think coming from a Times’ email address, the whole premise of it sounded kind of outrageous. Like, “We have reason to believe we’ve tracked all your movements. We work for The New York Times.” And a lot of people were like, “Is this an email scam?” Or people [believed they were being] phished. I think that’s part of the reason we zeroed in on a neighborhood and put ourselves to the ground and do the work of knocking on doors of people cold and had that awkward interaction of explaining.

There were people on the ground who didn’t want to talk. There were people in religious organizations or other community organizations who felt vulnerable and didn’t want to talk to the piece. When we were able to show certain people what we had, and communicate what the project was about and it had this advocacy about it, there were a lot more people who were interested.

You included the companies who use data collection, as well as their logos, in the piece. Is that a definitive choice you felt you needed to do?

Thompson: We talked about that quite a bit. I thought it was really important that companies are identified because, for one reason, is that they operate pretty much behind the scenes. They’re literally hidden in the apps you download. I’ve identified like 80 companies that were working around this. We had to feel comfortable with the ones that we include and make sure it was fair, because companies that work around the industry might not engage with what we are talking about in the story. [They] might have other priorities and might have a smaller part in the business, so we ended up plucking the ones we felt most comfortable with.

Warzel: I was a little more on the outside of that process until we got to this point of needing to talk about it, who we wanted, who needed to be in there, sort of talking to the companies and needing to vet them. That was maybe one of the most frustrating parts of the reporting because it really did highlight just how opaque the advertising industry is and the ways they manipulate language in order to shield themselves.

There were a number of companies that, when you contact them and tell them they’re going to be identified in a mobile data location space, they say no, we don’t do that…instead, they say they track some sort of customer journey path. They change the words around so they don’t fit into the category, but it’s effectively the same thing. It’s very difficult because it is so technological. It is so nuanced and varied. A normal consumer doesn’t stand a chance when it comes to that decision.

Because this process was so frustrating, especially with these companies saying what they did, were there any statements you were careful not to make?

Thompson: The other reason we wanted to identify apps is because when you see a bunch of names, they’re all these weird companies. It’s like, “Wait, these are the ones that have my locations?” It’s not like Google, where we understand that they have everything. It’s more like a startup that you don’t know about. We were careful around apps. It’s tough to talk about apps and companies without isolating one. You want to include everything. That’s what people want to know. When we publish this story it’s like, “Okay, what apps do I need to delete?” And it’s really hard to say. That’s part of the whole system. It’s hard to know what they’re doing.

I talked to Foursquare and brought the CEO a list of apps that were receiving locations and how they were disclosing that to people. He said they do get locations, but you know it’s like we can do it under this specific contact and we don’t use it. We keep it briefly and we throw it out … You have to be really careful reporting the industry because it is so complicated and the companies are so adept. The whole basis of their business is to be confusing to people. That’s part of it: the misdirection that goes on with privacy policies and disclosure screens. They control all the language and they try to make it as finely tuned as they can to get everything they want out of it. Overall, it’s a good idea to be careful about how we talk about companies and what they do and feel comfortable it can be understood totally.

Did that influence why it was published in the Opinion’s section?

Warzel: The sources came to the Opinions section because of the Privacy Project and the ongoing work we were doing in this space. Also, because there was a genuine worry about this information, a desire to advocate for change, and pressure lawmakers, tech companies, and the advertising industry to feel the need that there is something wrong here that needs to be addressed urgently. That is the type of work the Opinion section is well suited for.

Sometimes a newsroom is constrained by that lack of opinionated journalism: “You need to decide for yourself what do think about this.” But our piece didn’t do that. It said that we want you to know this is the argument. This is out of control, this is invasive, this needs to change. And in a couple of ways the final piece we publish in the series is an editorial by the editorial board at The New York Times that argues explicitly that lawmakers need to do something.

Americans didn’t sign up for this, and a federal privacy law is needed. That’s just something that a traditional newsroom is not going to be comfortable doing necessarily, and I think all the rigor of reporting, all of the vetting, all the careful use of language and responsibility… that’s the Times’ standard of reporting and fairness. Our ability to advocate as well was the real reason why they came to us to do it in Opinion.

Screenshot: The New York Times

In the Opinion section, you have the ability to advocate for change. What do you hope readers will take away from this article, the project and the information you’re putting out?

Thompson: I hope they’re afraid. Like, I’m afraid (laughs). Maybe change some of their behavior, but that’s not gonna do very much for the world. I think some of this stuff is a slow build, you know? Congress is pretty distracted right now with some other important matters. I don’t think this story is triggering a new law next week, but what I hope is that it pushes the conversation forward on privacy, how important it is, how far companies have gone in a system where privacy is unshackled, and they can do what they want.

You can argue for banning all this stuff, but for people who are like, “I don’t really care. I have nothing to hide”… I think you can have nothing to hide and also have some limits on what these companies can do: how long they can keep it for, how granular it can be — in some circumstances they can get you down to a few feet of your location — and how often they can do it.

My ultimate hope is that people be concerned. Like Cambridge Analytica changes the view of Facebook, this can change the view of this area of how people look at their phone. I used to look at my phone like, “What a fun and convenient trick that I can get an alert when I walk near a pizza place.” That was so innocent a couple of years ago, and I hope that people change their minds after they read this, that is not an innocent thing anymore. It’s not a fun trick. It’s a business, and you’re the commodity.

Warzel: On my end, I hope that people for the first time, at the scale we are able to show it, understand what they are opting into. The onus is not on the consumer to fix this and police themselves. These companies need to be the ones that change. Lawmakers need to be the ones that put that pressure on them, but the service that I’m most happy to provide people is an understanding of what’s going on on their devices without their knowledge. I think in general, it’s so helpful to know what you’re up against.

I look at everything from Cambridge Analytica onward — and I think the Privacy Project is a part of this — as a greater reckoning with our devices and our privacy and the safety of our information. I think that’s a slow building process and one of the biggest tools in that fight is knowing what it is you’re up against. That’s why I’m so glad to see the way Stuart and his team were able to present this, because I think it gives people that understanding to know what they’re participating in.

This article first appeared in Storybench and is reproduced here with permission.

Erin Merkel studies journalism at Northeastern University. Storybench was founded in 2014 at Northeastern University’s Media Innovation graduate program in the School of Journalism as a “cookbook for digital storytelling.”

https://gijn.org/2020/04/29/how-the-new-york-times-is-visualizing-the-smartphone-tracking-industry/

#Smartphone Tracking

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honeyctzen · 4 years

Text

scarred leash (prologue) - m.l

IMPORTANT: This is the prologue for my newest fanfiction and is an introductory to the main character and the themes of this story. It involves sex, bdsm, self harm and themes relating to that matter. It will also not just be sex, but have an actual story and characters falling in love. If any of this is not for you, my other works are much lighter and less “plotty”. I really hope this excites you for the rest of the story, I am very much proud of it. Thank you! - Maisie ♡

─── ･｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

I was sixteen when I chose to leave home without even whispering a word to anyone. Sixteen when I decided I had to go out alone into the world, to make my own way with the little experience I had gathered so far. It took a long time to map out my plan, endless days that turned into sleepless nights. I spent most of my last teenage years memorising a singular night, a night that would lead me into the next stage of my life.

My dusty countryside town was a few hours from the monumental London. I thought about the city all hours of the day, the faraway land that was London. The idea of even stepping foot in it was weird and foreign and still, it was the only place I ever wanted to go. I’d lived in one place for my entire life and rarely ever left the town, in fact I’d only left it a few times. All because of hospital trips. The idea of living away from that place was terrifying and yet, completely exhilarating. Given that back then, I’d been pretty naive to how the world works as I’d never been told of it. I wanted a nice house, nice job, maybe I would meet a nice person and we would have a nice relationship. I had come to learn as my research into London and life in general continued that it wouldn’t be that simple. Everything was complicated. If you wanted a place to live, there was several thousand procedures you had to endure. If you wanted a job, you had to have a thousand different qualifications. I thought after realising all this that my hopes of leaving were over, that was when I had begun thoroughly planning.

Through school and college I was able to obtain the qualifications I needed to move away and work in business. I knew I would have to work for a few years before I gained any sort of fulfilling job, but I had endured years of education, I understood patience. Through research I had found a small flat that I would be able to pay for with money I’d saved over the years and earnings from a job I would later procure. Life would still be difficult, I knew this. I was a young, inexperienced girl moving out to a tumultuous city, it would be dangerous. Though I had concluded long ago that dying in this new fantastical place was far better than peddling on back home, where I would die unknown, just another body in the wet dirt underneath the town church.

I knew by leaving that I was inflicting an unimaginable amount of pain upon my mother, who was as neurotic as she was suffocating. Though I understood she didn’t mean to be, I couldn’t bring myself to feel sympathy for her. My father ran, as did my older brother, leaving me and my ailing grandmother the only people she had left. I wasn’t old enough to understand why my father had just abandoned us but once I grew enough to comprehend love, pain, divorce, I got it. This town was the entire world for my mother but as I got older, she realised it wouldn’t be for me. Instead it would be a restraint.

The first time I recall my mother knowing I would be difficult is when I was eleven. I developed much quicker than most children my own age, breasts already sprouting on my chest, hair spreading over my body. There was a huge wave of name calling, little jabs at my appearance, and while I tried to ignore it, eventually it burrowed beneath my skin. That was the same year I cut myself for the first time. My fingers coiled around a pair of scissors, pressing the metal over the flesh of my arm until a litter of red scratches appeared over the pale skin. Back then, it was just a punishment, a way of controlling myself from completely losing my mind. I stopped it for a while. In natures due course, the other girls grew into their bodies and I was planted back into an unremarkable place among my peers. There was no bullying and so, I forgot about cutting myself for a couple years.

While I had physically matured much quicker than others my age, mentally, it seemed I had been halted somewhere. There appeared no reason for it but the things that my schoolmates were interested in disgusted me. When a friend first showed me porn, I remember feeling vomit rise up in my throat. A woman, bundled up with rope, a muscled, balding man arched over her. The blood curling shrieks that filled the room felt torturous. I couldn’t understand how people liked this, how they liked it enough to pleasure themselves to it. I suppose that was when my fascination with sex begun. Initially, it was hatred, a complete abhorrence for the thing, a vexation that appeared randomly and intensely. If a classmate would mention it, or describe any sort of sexual act, I felt ill. My stomach twisting uncomfortably as the boys all called out derogatory names for the women they had seen in the films and then once again, I grew to hate my body.

I was fifteen the next time I cut myself. It was much more deliberate, much more intense. I had swapped out the dull scissors, for a pocket knife a friend had gifted me. It was able to bury itself much deeper than before and immediately, with the first slice, a tsunami of relief rolled over me. Though, it was a different kind of relief than it had been those years before. I found myself thinking back to the woman I had seen in the porn, the intricate ropes that clasped themselves over her limbs, the pained screams that passed her lips. The man leaning over her figure, how his fingers gripped the flesh of her waist, how he bevelled his teeth down onto her neck until it bled. I found myself recalling each detail of the images I had seen so long ago, and I found myself cutting down into the flesh as the memories scurried across my brain.

I felt guilty afterward, an awful guilt that followed me around for weeks. But then, a boy would mention shapes they had seen in porn and suddenly, I would feel the urge to damage myself again. It spiralled quickly. So quickly that I, myself, was shocked. Instead of recalling images I had seen, I created my own imaginations. Blurred, colourless visions of violence, and sex dulling into one, all as I pulled a knife against my own skin. It continued for months, months of fantasies and cutting and by the time my sixteenth birthday hurdled toward me, I had a plethora of thick scars covering my arms and legs. Though that didn’t faze me when finally, three years after all my friends, my mother bought me a cell phone.

She would scour over the phone from time to time, checking my messages, calls, emails, and all other forms of communication. Yet, of all the applications on the phone, my mother was the most ignorant to the internet. She didn’t understand the concept of it, let alone know it was built into the mobile and so, I was able to roam free for the first time. And I roamed. My inexperience meant I didn’t know what sites to go to, nor did I know which keywords to search. The titles of the videos that came up almost seemed to be in a foreign language but after a couple of trips to the websites, I gathered the premise of each category. After locking myself in the bathroom, I would go to the sites and type in words such as bondage, submissive, sadism, pain and the things I liked would appear. Though I now understood how people looked at porn, I still didn’t understand why they touched themselves to it. Merely pushing a blade into my leg as I watched seemed to be enough. I wasn’t sure if it was sexual for me, or if it was a punishment thing as it had been when I was younger.

My understanding of my own sexuality went little further than this and my adventures on the websites dwindled until they stopped. It had grown to stop making me feel any better, and so I began inflicting more serious physical harm upon myself. The hospital visits followed soon after, as did my mother’s rantings about how unhealthy that stuff all was for me. For once, she paid attention to me. It almost felt nice, deserved. But I couldn’t hold it for long, as quite abruptly, my grandmothers health began to decline. She died a while after growing sick, and the absence of her in the house made my mother somehow more insufferable. And though we lived in the same house, it was almost as if we were separated by an unseen barrier.

I didn’t completely mind, it gave me enough solitude to go about my planning. Endless research into where I could live in London, what jobs I could obtain with the qualifications I would acquire after leaving sixth form. It took a while to find what would suit me right but after I finally latched onto it, my future suddenly felt full, meaningful almost. I now had something to look forward to, something to work toward. So, I studied harder, concentrated on the daydreams of my new life away from the idle cottage town. My grandmother had left some money to both me and my mother, more to me. I insisted I was able to tend to my own finances and after long bouts of pleading, my mother agreed. I had money, two months left at sixth form and then I could leave.

Time blurs together, memories jumbling, I can barely remember the last few months back home. But what I do recall vividly, is the night I left. I had booked train tickets the week prior and planned to stay in a hotel while I found somewhere to live. I needed to be close to the central city, I knew that much, though, not much else. I’d found a job interview for admin staff at a stockbroking company. My business a level came in handy, and my odd passion for calculations and numbers did too. If I could just get this job, if I could get that flat, I could make it.

I chose to leave during the night, climbing from my bedroom window, scuttling across the streets like a fragile hedgehog. I’d never even snuck from my house once before and the first time I was, I was doing so knowing that I would never come back. With every step I took I thought I would be caught and hauled back home by my hair. Each step further from the slanted bungalow made my heart beat a little faster until, gradually my pulse slowed, and the gentle pitter of my feet grew to calm myself. Though I didn’t feel completely secure until I passed the welcome sign to the town. But once I did, I felt a weight pulled from my stomach. A sudden notion that I had done it, I had gotten away like my father and brother did years ago, like my grandmother had in death. I was now free to do everything I had lost the chance to do through my mother’s coddling. I could drink, do drugs, have sex with an endless stream of people, work. I found myself grinning as I wandered further from town, the dishevelled map directing me toward the train station. The smile pulling at my lips until I worried they would rip. And it only widened when I spotted the station, when I saw my train, when I boarded, when the train began to drift from the docile place I had called home.

I knew that now, I was reborn, I was my own person. It had taken three years to map everything, to prepare myself for life away from the secure blanket I had been smothered with all my life. But now, it had all come to fruit. I dreamt of London on the train, my head pressed against the window, my scarred legs trembling with the thought of all the things that I could do. My chest thick, and heavy with excitement.

─── ･｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

London was everything I had imagined and so much more. It was larger than anything I had ever seen back home, with each building bigger than the next and thousands of vehicles filling the roads. As the train eventually rolled into the city, my eyes clasped over each detail that began to emerge. The differences of the people that wandered the streets, the warmth in the chatter that clambered through the train windows. Everything was so different, so good. I found myself smiling away as I watched from my place in the tube container, my toothy grin shining back at me in the reflection. I was finally there, finally apart of everything I had read about.

Walking the streets was even better, even more real. My feet paced the same tempo as everyone else, my body dipping between the mounds of crowd as I ambled through the roads, glancing down at the map I had printed back in my murky home. The directions were confusing, each street twisting awkwardly to the next and what should have been a five-minute walk turned into two hours of working out where I was. Though eventually, after consulting several locals, I found my way to the flat I had seen in the ad weeks ago. It was in what my mother would have called a ‘ghetto area’ but it was still much larger and greater than the street I had lived on all my life. It looked a normal house though split into three different flats, with a garden leading up to the two doors and ivy climbing up the sides of the home. I’d felt nervous to knock, I wasn’t particularly sure why. Perhaps because the person to answer could have been my future roommate but now, thinking back, I shouldn’t have been.

The person that had answered was taller than me, her gangling arms hanging low, one raised to her mouth as she nursed a cigarette. She was beautiful in an odd way, striking, her nose large and hooked, hair shorted and burnt from styling. She smiled widely when she spotted my obviously anxious face, her voice pouring out in its deepness.

‘The tenant?’ She mumbled through puffs of the intensely clouded cigarette.

‘Um, yeah.’

‘Cool, cool, yeah, sorry, come in.’ Her accent was prominent, thick and harsh but calming all at once. I smiled as I stepped into the flat, the stairs immediate at the entry. I stood beside my single suitcase, my backpack still on my shoulders, her gaze dancing across them before she turned away. She climbed them ahead of me, her feet clattering against the wooden steps and I trailed behind, eyes clinging to each detail of the walls. I wanted to take in as much as I possibly could, I wanted this to be my home, my sanctuary.

Once we stood in the depth of the flat, the girl began to speak again, pulling the cigarette from her mouth for a moment. Throwing her body onto the dusty sofa and awaiting me to sit beside her. I allowed the bag to drop to the floor, my feet pushing it further from me. My lanky limbs folded in on themselves as I perched on the seat, features impossibly too bright for the dullness of the flat.

‘You’re eighteen?’

‘Nineteen.’ I corrected abruptly.

‘Okay, you just have to be eighteen to rent, but that’s fine then,’ she said, inhaling from the stick before releasing the dense cloud into the room, ‘so, um, this is it.’

‘Um, what’s your name?’ I ask quietly.

‘Oh, shit, sorry, I’m Rose, and you?’

‘Ellie.’ I mumbled.

‘Are you the owner?’

She snickered, ‘Uh, no, my uncle is so I get a discount, barely, but, it helps. Um, he doesn’t really care who moves in but I, I do, I live here, so.’

‘Yeah,’

‘You’re not from here?’ She asked, finally pushing the cigarette into the ash tray that sat near her. The smell still strong but dissipating enough for me to open my mouth to speak.

‘No, I um, actually moved here today.’

‘Shit.’

‘Yeah, um, so, I’m new to this.’

‘Where you from?’

‘A little town just outside Sheffield, I, um, hated it, figured it was time to get away.’ I explained as briefly as I could, my fingers instinctively pulling on my sleeves whilst I spoke of home.

‘For a bit or are you staying here long term?’ She questioned, eyes flitting once more over the lack of things I had brought with me. It hadn’t been that I had forgot much, I hadn’t owned many things back home, not things that warranted bringing anyway.

‘Long term.’ I answered immediately.

‘And you’re gonna work here?’

‘Hopefully,’ I chuckled, ‘I have a job interview tomorrow, so, I um, I’d find work anyway, so I could pay, but,’

‘Cool, so, you want to move in then?’ She proposed, her voice soft, speaking the question as though it held no merit. My stomach churned, lips parting in another goofy smile, head nodding vigorously.

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smolbeandrabbles · 4 years

Text

Halfway Home - Ralph Anderson x Shifter!Reader (The Outsider)

GIF CREDIT: X

Author’s Note: I think this gif set really cemented this fic as something I was gonna do. This one is the closest thing I will write to Show!Canon, although I’ve borrowed a couple of Shifter ‘Tells’ from the book.

I thought this was going to be really short, but in the end I’m glad I wrote it like this, instead of the way I had planned And I really really hope you all enjoy it 💙💜

Also the lyrics to this song are PERFECT Halfway Home - Carly Pearce

Disclaimer: Characters & Plot are Stephen King’s (or... Richard Price’s characterization...) / Lyrics not mine (and lyrical liberties taken) / gifs not mine - credit as appropriate. / Direct quotes used from Episode 10 - so, spoilers ahead!

Premise: This was never a problem in a million years you’d expect to have to face. And in all the lifetimes you’d lived you never had faced it. But now the Frankie Peterson case is over Ralph is aware your species exists, and that discovery may well rip you both apart...

Words: 8729

Warnings: Swearing / The Outsider show spoilers ⚠ Angst/Hurt Caution Warning ⚠

____________

Blame it on me, I'm an actor, I'm a fake Blame it on me, I broke your heart but by mistake Call it what you wanna, good intentions or denial But if I'm bein' honest, I've been lyin' for a while Halfway right doesn't make it right Halfway wrong is still wrong Half of me is with you here tonight And half of me is long gone But halfway to Heaven isn't Heaven And halfway home just ain't home

And I put it off, I was selfish, I was scared I put it off and I know it isn't fair You don’t want to stay, but you don’t want to say goodbye Let's call it what it is and we'll get out of this alive And I'm sorry If I hang onto you, I'll drown I'm so sorry If I don't let go, I'm goin' down Halfway right doesn't make it right Halfway wrong is still wrong Half of me didn't see it comin' Half of me knew it all along... ---

[Holly] “Are there more of you?”

[The Outsider] “Why? Have you seen someone like me before? Are there others? Cause there have been times when I sensed there could be more...” ***

You stood in the sliding glass doorway, looking out over the back yard, everything about your senses was heightened - it was like you could even hear the grass move. You knew there were others out there - heck, you were old enough to have walked amongst your own kind before you became an ancient relic left to history and ghost stories. A time when you were gods amongst men, until men rose up.

But here? In Cherokee City, Georgia? It didn’t make a lot of sense to you. Not for there to be another. You knew why you were here. Tired of running, tired of tracking, tired of being everything your species condemned you to be - you wished only for a quiet, peaceful existence. And you had one now; Detective Ralph Anderson saw to that in every way he could. And to him you were a normal human being, that lived their life out just as accordingly. All your weird little ticks were exactly that... because every human had exactly the same – a long list of ticks and traits that made them the person they were.

The problem was this shapeshifter wasn’t doing what you were doing. You’d sensed it before the Frankie Peterson murder, but as soon as Ralph came home from that case you knew something was wrong. Something was different this time. And he explained in lengthy detail the crime scene, and the DNA. That alerted you. No criminal left their DNA just lying around, but you could be so careless. Because everyone would suspect the person you had shifted into, not you. You could just as quick become someone else and be well on your way... to do exactly the same somewhere else. So long as everything added up. So long as the person who you had replicated got caught and the evidence was water tight.... and they had no alibi.

Well that was easy once, before DNA testing came into play. And then it took humans a little while to get that up to scratch, and DNA was your whole game. Witness accounts could be sketchy, but as long as your kind could produce enough, and better, witness accounts to the contrary you could get away with it. Their word against... well, something you’d fabricated.

The problem was, the victims of this was both a child and a man, named Terry Maitland, who didn’t deserve what had happened. Of course, really no one deserved it - but a man who was a teacher and had seeming never done anything bad in his life was not a man that deserved this. And to you, the child was unforgivable, it wasn’t uncommon amongst your kind to eat people – even now – but children? That was wicked and cruel – which may have explained the malice in the air. Not just the feel of it, but the feeling it was stirring up within the town. Drunk on pain and suffering. That made you hold on to Ralph and his love a little tighter – because an emotion like that was far more sustainable. And you weren’t about to let yourself go down the same path that this one clearly had.

But you were selfish and worried, and all you wanted was for this to go away, be buried, and you could go on living your quiet little life. If Terry went to prison, and your counterpart moved on, it would just be something unforgivably terrible that happened here. Even when you knew the repercussions of that... but you didn’t care so much about that so long as your identity was hidden.

Ralph had every single confidence that they both had the guy, and that the evidence was so good that Terry was going away whether he denied it or not. And Ralph’s confidence bled into you, which was a bad thing, of course and you let yourself get comfortable and cocky about it. Sure, you could absolutely tell him - and that made your conscience weigh heavily on you - but he’d say you were insane... You could show him, but how would that hold up in court? And what would it do to you, and the life you had worked so hard to build here.

Then it all hit you; because Terry Maitland was at a conference in Cap City, and he was on video tape. That wasn’t something that even the best evidence could save a shapeshifter from. How did you combat that? Stupid and careless - that’s what your counterpart was. And a child, to get so confident as to display itself so openly. You did, but that had taken many years of good practice, and you didn’t go around killing and eating children.

The other problem was it didn’t go away. And as the Peterson family fell one by one, and so did Terry at his arraignment, it stuck around. New to the game, maybe? But if it couldn’t sense you then it was young, and if it could but was looking to encroach on your territory, then it had another thing coming. The crude monster drawings you’d seen of your race weren’t far off an accurate depiction of your true form. You hadn’t had use for claws and needle like teeth in a long time - but you would surely use them if you had to. And to protect everything you knew, and everyone you loved here? Without question.

***

But just as suddenly it was gone. The tension that loomed over you dissipated. The case however, did not. And before you knew it Private Investigator Holly Gibney was in town. You had an uneasy feeling about this, and when Ralph asked if you were going to accompany him to the meeting you flat out refused. You didn’t know what she knew, what if she took one look at you and shattered your world into pieces? You couldn’t risk it. And perhaps it was better you didn’t go, because when he got home, Holly in tow, Ralph was beside himself.

When you’d gotten him to quiet down about what a waste of time it was - and stop being so rude, with her in the house - you asked him what was up. When Ralph rolled his eyes and refused to do anything but mute it, you gently coaxed it out of Holly yourself. And although a lot of her ideas were misconceptions, she had it right. “El Cuco”: a mishmash manifestation of stories and rumours carried on for centuries about your species. Not all shapeshifters were the same, and this new one was not the same strain as you. But close enough. You didn’t think telling Holly that you believed her held too much consequence aside from trying to get Ralph on side and to believe something. Even when he still scoffed and called you crazy too. You had some effect though, because lying together that night, with the quiet of the darkness that surrounded you – Ralph asked if you really did believe her – you could only answer that you really did, and it took him a little longer to dismiss it with a soft hmph!

But then they all went out to Tennessee and you were left behind. And you didn’t see what Ralph saw, or hear what he heard... or say what he said. And he came back to you with far more in his head than he’d ever wanted. And whenever you asked him about it he simply told you you wouldn’t believe him, and Holly gave you a similar story. Even when you tried the prompt of so it’s all true-!? Ralph clearly wanted to forget something he probably never could, and certainly didn’t want to talk about it. Holly left soon afterwards – with Ralph’s gentle smile and wish to work together again, sometime. Though of course he hoped on something less Supernatural. That evening you sat together on the couch in silence – your head resting on his chest. Maybe it was all over now? Terry Maitland would get completely pardoned in Hayes’ press conference, and you very much doubted that the other shifter got out of the situation alive. Though you were also aware there were many others that didn’t make it out of there also. Ralph had told you that much, but didn’t elaborate on anything else. And you’d just as soon help him forget, it to blow over, and you and he to go back to your quiet small city life. *** It didn’t. Because Ralph couldn’t get it off his mind. Sure he didn’t want to talk about it actively. He could barely wrap his head around it – around what he’d witnessed, around the idea that there were things out there beyond the explanation of science. Of everything he’d ever known. He might have asked Holly out of curiosity what else was out there, and watched her shrug with a smile… but did he want to find out? Did he even want to entertain the idea that this was anything other than a nightmare? Of course he didn’t. But part of him realised he had to. Having been cleared to go back to work Ralph was at least glad of something to put his mind to. But he was also worried – and dare he say it even scared? What if the things out there were perpetually WORSE than what he’d been through. He could handle himself, always had. But what if those things came for you? Ralph couldn’t handle the notion of that, but what if it happened? He’d never forgive himself if something happened to you – whether you be the one that was transformed into or… no, he couldn’t bare to even think of you as the body. He was glad you didn’t have children, together or your own – dare he even say relieved that you couldn’t have them. Because that was just another thing to worry about – and those were mounting on Ralph pretty quickly. And now he watched you so closely; he knew it might end eventually but how couldn’t he get paranoid? Scratches always came with questions, and you always gave him that little look of annoyance - Ralph, I just scratched myself. If someone did it to me after what Holly said, I’d come to you – you KNOW that! - and he also just as closely monitored the back of your neck. But you knew exactly why – and you let him do what he needed to do to get over this, because you knew you couldn’t become a victim of your own species. Not in the ways he was thinking anyway. The problem was everything coincided at just the wrong time. The shifter that Ralph had dealt with was clearly a great deal younger than you. A strain that shifted by shedding skin like a reptile, should have been easy and over in a few minutes for one as old as you. Like taking off a jacket and leaving it on the bleachers on a Friday night. But it took this one a month or so to change from one person to another, during which the composition of one victim broke down as he prepared to shed. Something very similar happened to you. A human form was not your true form – however the human form you chose was not someone whose DNA you had acquired. Each one of you could present human as necessary to blend in – but you weren’t meant to sustain it for more than a few months at a time. And, like he had, you would break down. It’d last for nearly 3 days total, but you would feel extremely uncomfortable in your own skin until your body was ready to regenerate itself. Technically you could shift at any point, but it wasn’t exactly the easiest thing to do under the watchful eyes – and even more so now – of a Cherokee City detective who was suddenly aware of the existence of your kind. It'd take an hour of quietly sitting alone in the midst of the woods with no one around, and then you could go back to being you again, but it was a long hour. And you made the mistake of choosing the park where the Peterson murder had happened. But it was oddly cathartic to sit in the middle of all that and contemplate. To cry, and feel that sorrow like a strange shot of adrenaline; to beg for the forgiveness of your kind for doing something so goddamn awful. And one lunchbreak later you’d step out of the trees and brush yourself down, shiny and new, and no one would know any different. It took about a day to really set back again, but even the most observant of humans wouldn’t be observant enough to know that your face probably looked a little off – it would be something so insignificant they couldn’t place.

You’d probably never been more wrong about anything in your life. You’d been with the same man for four years; and he was a detective. He’d never noticed anything before, but he’d never seen one of you before Tennessee. And the one he had seen, had made many mistakes. *** For four days Ralph Anderson had witnessed things in you he wanted to believe might have been figments of his imagination. Like his paranoia was making him see these things and they were tricks of the light. He thought he might be able to deal with it once or twice and write it off, but when the fourth day came and it was still happening, his suspicions had never been more heightened. Your eyes were the one thing you couldn’t control. You didn’t leave that odd gooey residue because you didn’t shift the same way he had – yours was more of a ‘shimmer’ from one person to the next and that meant you didn’t really leave much trace. Your skin might have felt odd, but that was only to you – and you could shake off feeling uncomfortable as anything: that time of the month… or just an uneasiness about the world right now (and he’d understand that with the Terry Maitland case still fresh!). But your eyes in light – that was a hard one; they flickered usually when you got emotional but you could control that. An odd silver sheen that would come and go and could be down to any number of tricks, including ones people’s brains played on themselves, but that wasn’t what this was. Ralph had seen that shine before. And it was too much of a strange coincidence for it to mean anything else. That shine wasn’t a reflection in your eyes, but something that seemed to come from within them. And he’d seen that in ‘Claudes’ eyes in the cave. And now in you for four consecutive days. Straws for eyes. Too many people had given that description, every nightmare Maitland’s daughter had had mentioned that. And it was odd to see in that cave – but it was horrific to see in you. It came and went but it was there. And every fibre in Ralph’s being tried to deny that. Surely you weren’t one of those things? How could that be – he had to be seeing things, he just had to be. He couldn’t accept anything else but that – not you, anything or anyone but you. He’d been with you for four years, he KNEW you. And he loved you. And Ralph didn’t know which was worse. He couldn’t even believe that lying in bed with you now, watching the way you breathed, he could even contemplate that thought. You’d looked like this since he met you – the other shifter didn’t last more than a few weeks, and then took nearly a month to become something else, but you were here. Like this. But was this you-!? Was this a victim of yours? Why the hell was Ralph talking so crazy to himself!? He had to be seeing things; but no matter how many times he told himself that, Ralph Anderson also couldn’t bring himself to believe it to be true. It was like the evidence was staring him in the face and he just didn’t want to acknowledge it. He didn’t want to believe it with Terry either – and that was just as concrete. And he’d been wrong there, he could be wrong here. But that was almost worse. Ralph bit his lip, and was even more horrified to find that the usual gap he maintained with you – of about two inches, close enough to reach out and hold you, to be protective – had now subconsciously widened; he couldn’t have been further across the bed from you if he’d tried. And he wasn’t sure he even wanted to fall asleep next to you – but hell he had done for nearly your whole relationship. He would have to get to the bottom of this and soon… at least he knew that much. And racing around his head were the same questions; What the hell are you? Is that even what you really look like? Is that even your real name? Who ARE you? You had already left for work before he awoke, and you left a sweet little note wishing him a nice day. But it just left him empty. Ralph placed it back on the counter and made himself a coffee. He had to know – but he couldn’t just go rushing into a confrontation with you without being sure. He wouldn’t make that mistake again. And he didn’t know exactly what you were yet, his experience consisted of one shapeshifting entity; you might have been one but you weren’t necessarily the same kind. But he’d killed one of you before – would he hesitate to do the same again? Ralph cursed himself for even thinking that. He could be so wrong about this – but had the uneasy feeling that he wasn’t. *** This continued back and forth for a few days; Ralph Anderson was in denial. And although you could sense something was wrong, he’d been acting odd since he got back from Tennessee and you didn’t blame him for it. You were more inclined to think that was just going to continue. And you would allow him to adjust back to normal at his own pace. If he ever really got back to that – if normal was something Ralph could rebuild for himself after the Frankie Peterson case. You knew life wasn’t yet as it had been before, but you were confident it was going that way. And your gentle sunny disposition wasn’t one you were about to let get dampened. In fact, you were sure Ralph needed it right now. You hummed along to your music as you made yourself breakfast, took a shower and got ready for work, and were still doing so as you reached the front door. Your partner was standing in the kitchen, staring out across the front lawn as you passed him, you paused and turned back. Something was troubling him; “Ralph?” He continued to stare forward. “Ralph? Babe? Ralph!? Sweetheart-!” It took you a little while to rouse him from his thoughts. “Huh-? Oh! I’m sorry.” You titled your head; “You okay, babe?” “…Yeah…” His eyes seemed to look everywhere but your face, “I’m fine, why.” “…You just… seem a little distant lately…” You took a few slow strides towards him, “Are you sure?” “Yeah, I’ll be okay.” “Okay…” You smiled gently, “You know you can tell me anything, right?” He tried not to obviously wince at the irony, “Of course I do.” “Alright, well, I’m off-! And… I’ll see you later.” “Sure. Have a good day.” You waited, thinking perhaps he would offer you a goodbye kiss, but he didn’t. Something was up. “…And you.” You tried not to sound dejected, and knew you’d clearly failed. “Y/N!” He caught your arm, pulling you back towards him – eyes looking straight into yours and hoping against hope that the next three words out of his mouth sounded genuine right now; “I love you.” Though he’d never lied more. You didn’t see through him, not even slightly. In fact your only thought was that you knew he did. “I love you too.” He let you go, smile still on your face and then watched you turn with a renewed spring in your step and exit the house. As soon as he heard the door slam closed Ralph lifted his hands to his face. He’d used exactly the same trick on you that the other shifter had used to collect everyone else’s DNA – with that yank back on your arm as an excuse. It was just a scratch sure, but it was so much more significant than that. Underneath his thumbnail was just a trace of blood. But it wasn’t red, like his was. It looked a lot more like he’d contemplated a sentence too long and pen ink had leaked, stubbornly burying itself under his nails. Blue-black. He’d seen quite enough of that coming out of the hand he’d stabbed to pin ‘Claude’ down. “Oh. Fuck!” *** Ralph had a hard time of it at work – and even more so when those too inquisitive wondered why he was bringing up the files for Frankie Peterson. He would simply answer that he just wanted to check on a few things, only to have them say ‘Why!? It’s closed!’ Because she’s a monster – was his only thought, and yet he couldn’t vocalise it - I fell in love with a monster. And he stared hard at those images until his vision blurred, not from tiredness – not because his brain had enough and needed to zone, but hot, angry tears. All this time he’d been with something capable of this – how the hell did he even know that you hadn’t done this? He didn’t know what you were doing when you weren’t together – and now Ralph was beginning to think that he didn’t know you at all. Why was this happening to him? Why again? Why in such a short space of time? Because he’d made a mistake with Terry? Now the Universe was just hell bent on destroying everything… You by comparison had a good day at work with your friends and barely noticed anything, not even Ralph’s little nick of your wrist. Although, when a colleague pointed it out you simply laughed – you had a bad habit of being clumsy sometimes and scratches appeared out of nowhere, even when you were careful. And of course, you had to be careful, the only time you bled the same colour as a human was when you shifted into one – and it was probably your one tell. Scratches happened, anything deeper than that and you’d be in trouble. Up until now you’d managed to avoid anything so serious ever happening. When you returned home Ralph was still pondering over notes, not so obvious as to be Frankie’s, and was so out of his head that it was difficult to get a read on him. Your kiss on his cheek did cause him to flinch; “OH! God-!” He placed his hand over his heart, adrenaline immediately spiking “Shit – I’m sorry, I’m just…” “It’s okay-!” Although your heart was racing equally fast, “You’re working, I’m sorry…” “No it’s…” He couldn’t even bring himself to say it, and his smile was restrained, but to you, at least he was smiling. You backed off; “I’ll make dinner-! Alright?” “Sure…” You beamed, and his eyes followed your walk away before he returned to his notes. Did he fear for his own safety? Truly he wasn’t sure – but how many times had you linked your hands behind his neck, or rubbed his shoulders after a hard day or even just placed a gentle kiss there. He shuddered slightly as he thought about Jack Hoskins; could you do that to him? Right now, Ralph hated that he had to assume the worst. Right now, you were none the wiser. *** It was approaching midnight and Ralph had made sure you were once again safely in bed. If there was something else he’d payed great attention to with Holly Gibney, it was how to check for traces of that ‘El Cuco’ entity. Ralph’s best guess was that if you truly were one of those things, you would leave that same trace everywhere that he had. Leave your fingerprints the same... He stood alone with his flashlight in the middle of the living room – fingertips hovering over the light switch. Could he bear to know the answer? Didn’t he already know. Ralph took a deep breath, and bit his lip – closing his eyes, he flicked the switch. It took him far too long to reopen them – and when he did, he ran cold from head to feet. It was everywhere. He was barely exaggerating to say there was more white than blue. He suddenly felt weak, stumbling backwards Ralph had a hard time trying to catch himself against the wall. His breathing was hard and ragged and he felt sick. He knew he probably would be sick. The house was dark so now the only light being thrown up was this, from you. He tried to swallow but his mouth was dry – sweeping the light to the stairwell, he followed it. Trying to calm himself down – but how could he? Everywhere he turned his beam that you had touched, or brushed against, was this substance. It caught brightest in the bathroom and he had to stop. In some places the white was faded - even if it completely covered a surface it was faint - But not here. Ralph approached cautiously. Aside from your bedroom he supposed this would be the place you’d spend the most time without clothes – only here water ran down your body in droplets and cascaded to the ground. The shower looked like someone had thrown a pot of white paint over it and the floor wasn’t much better – and even though it was white, it reminded Ralph too much of blood spatter. He was afraid, and repulsed, and hurt, and heartbroken. He gagged, and then realised that it wasn’t going to stop there. Not even at his worst crime scenes, or as a rookie seeing shit for the very first time, had Ralph Anderson ever thrown up at the sight of something – he was too calm and steady for that. But this was beyond words, this was you, this was the woman he loved, the person he wanted to spend forever with. And all of a sudden everything he’d been trying to hold in didn’t want to stay in his head, or his heart. And Ralph was crying again – but these were real body shaking sobs. He had to do something about this, but he was just as afraid of what he would do to you.

*** Ralph didn’t even wait past waking up the following morning. Dressing, he wasn’t even sure what he was going to say, or how he was going to do it – but he walked down those stairs with a fully loaded pistol in his left hand. You could have kicked yourself a million times – maybe you just wanted to pretend everything was alright, that his tone wasn’t off, that his vibe wasn’t off. That it was everything that Ralph had been through over the past month and not you. But as soon as you heard the hammer click back and felt not just the malice, but the intent, you knew it was all but over. You didn’t even look at him, staring straight at your coffee cup – there was no point hiding this now. “You better be careful with shooting that.” He should have been fazed by your sentence; he almost was. Instead what came out of his mouth was defensive and venomous; “I already know you can die.” You breathed out, is that how he was going to play it? “Not easily...” You turned to him, stare measured “I’m not some child who has barely grasped the concept of shifting and makes careless mistakes Ralph. I’m much older than he was.” His eyes flicked away from yours and his brows furrowed – it made him look angrier, rather than his usual concerned; “Who ARE you-!?” Your voice raised to match his, but you were determined not to shout; “You know who I am!” “How can I-!? You’ve lied to me from day one-!” You took a step back: no matter how right he was, what did he want you to say? “And if Frankie Peterson hadn’t turned out the way it did, you would be none the wiser-!” “So if another you had gotten away with what he did, that would have been okay-!?” “Ralph. Terry Maitland, Frankie Peterson… no one who lost their lives over this deserved it. Except the son of a bitch that did this in the first place-!” Your heart hurt, “What do you want me to say Ralph?! If I’d have told you what I was, then what?” “Four fucking years we’ve been together – and you didn’t even - Who are you, right now!?” “Me.” “Bullshit!” “I have a human face, as much as I have a form that’s a lot more like what you would traditionally call a monster-!” You winced, thinking you’d probably said all the words he didn’t want to hear; “Ralph, will you please put the gun down.” A bullet through your head might only slow you down. To be honest you’d never had much contact with human weaponry, but you didn’t fancy testing it out when the man you loved was the one pulling the trigger. “…I can’t sustain a human form for four years. Not even this one… But I promise you this face is my own.” “How many have you killed?” You noticed his gun hand didn’t waver “What?” “Children. People – I don’t care, how many, killed and eaten-!? FUCK! What the hell-! Do you know how crazy this sounds out of my mouth-!?” You furrowed your eyebrows and tilted your head; “I don’t know.” Not very “Considering you’re pointing a gun at me for being a shifter.” “Answer my question.” “Ral-” “ANSWER the question.” You sighed, “I don’t eat children that’s insane – that’s cruel, and heartless, and downright repulsive.” But people? Yeah – once, but how far back in your history did he want to go? Human sacrifices to Gods were once a thing. But ever since you’d walked predominantly on two legs with the face you’d chosen for yourself, you decided looking human meant acting like one too. Ralph’s laugh was cold, like he couldn’t believe he was trapped in this; “But what anything else is game – what do you get off on, is it the killing, or the suffering!?” “Suffering is like Heroin, but that’s unsustainable. If I wanted to feed on emotions those aren’t the ones I’d chose.” You followed the barrel of his gun as he shifted his weight; “I don’t kill people, that’s murder and there are laws against that. I am dating a fucking detective; how dumb do you think I am-!? And eating people?!” You scoffed, “If that’s what you think of me then we are done here.” That smile was just as cruel; “Yeah. We are fucking done. Hold your hands out.” You stared at him in disbelief, “Are you kidding me-!?” “I figure I can’t fucking shoot you in my own house. HANDS.” Though right now as he looked at you that wasn’t mercy, that was I’d rather not have to move out because they’re busy turning this into a crime scene! “You’re going to arrest me-!? On what charges-!?” “Whatever I have to. You’re dangerous.” You figured with a gun still pointed at your face you’d rather do what Ralph said, and placed your wrists out; he would have nothing on you if you did what he asked. There was just one problem, your thought to instinctively try to take his own arm – to pull him closer to you and say something, or kiss him or anything. You were still you. Why did things have to change because of what you were? Ralph could be angry and upset but he was reacting to what he knew, why did that mean something had to happen? Of course as soon as your skin touched his he withdrew; “DON’T. Touch. Me.” Then he took a deep breath, rethinking his idea, “Turn around.” “What, so you don’t have to look at me when you shoot me?” “TURN. AROUND.” You narrowed your eyes, voice displaying your astonishment, “You really think I’m gonna turn you into Jack Hoskins, don’t you? You are un-fucking-belivable Ralph Anderson.” But you did turn away for him, and his yank on your arms was not gentle, “…If it makes any difference, I can’t do that. Whether it be a trait of his kind or just because he was so sick and twisted and evil…” Ralph pulled you back, cuffs tight against your skin. He hoped you wouldn’t strain and bleed blue again. “If it makes any difference…” He breathed, your back up against his chest (You didn’t dare tremble at that because it would be for all the wrong reasons), and you heard the faint click of his safety going back on, “I don’t care.”

*** Ralph pushed you into the back of the car, and whilst he had you cuffed the questioning continued. But you felt his revulsion, and he didn’t look at you. “Was it ever really real? Any of it!!?” For a moment you pitied him, that he would be forced to say any of this; “Ralph. I love you.” “Don’t say it. Don’t you dare say it-!” “How can it not be real-!?” There was silence and then he sighed “You told me you couldn’t have kids... because you’re this?” You blinked hard, staring at the back of his head. Why would he chose to fixate on that specifically? You knew he’d been disappointed about it when you’d told him, but it was Ralph’s decision to stay anyway. Besides, any time he was on a case that involved children – particularly this one – he was always glad you didn’t have any.

You cast your eyes to the floor and then the window, but you didn’t want to be anything other than honest with him; “I can’t have children with you. Because you’re human. If my mating season coincided with his presence in Cherokee City then... I could have kids, yes.” You rested your head on the window, wondering why you were continuing but suddenly couldn’t stop yourself from giving him something like a Discovery Channel documentary on your species “…Females are bigger and it gets pretty nasty. Like you shoulda seen the other guy nasty – with teeth and claws like that… And he was pretty young, so even worse. That’s if he survived; females used to kill and eat males after mating. I believe there’s spiders that do similar. Though it’s always the female that chases… Shame that stopped to preserve our race; would have saved you a job…” Ralph found himself almost retching again and wished he’d never asked. The car ride fell silent.

Eventually he pulled out his mobile and tapped away an urgent text - despite trying to lean over to see what he was doing, he’d done it at such an angle that you simply couldn’t. You thought about telling him that texting and driving wasn’t safe, but preferred to keep quiet – less you get him yelling at you again. It wasn’t something you liked very much. Perhaps you deserved it, but you had to admit to yourself any time you’d thought about telling him, it never ended like this – perhaps he’d need some time alone to come to terms with such things and you’d help him through it as best you could, but it was never in the back of his car snapped in handcuffs. Besides, he was sitting texting so you didn’t know who he was talking to. Ralph Anderson was defiantly an “I’ll call you!” man.

When he pulled into the precinct you knew exactly who he had messaged, as standing on the front steps looking equally confused and worried, we’re both Hayes and Sablo. You were outraged; “You’re kidding-!? You’re getting our friends involved-!??!” He turned to you with a look that said both shut up and how dare you call them friends, before exiting the vehicle and coming around to your side.

Yune was the first to move “Shit! Ralph! What the hell are you doing-!?” You supposed the question was warranted; Ralph was pulling his girlfriend out of the car in handcuffs. Hayes was staring, mouth open like this could only have been a dream. Try living it from this angle, mate. “What I must.” Was Ralph’s bitter reply “Y/N! What happened-!? Are you okay-!?” Though Ralph was putting his body firmly between Sablo and yourself. Possibly to protect him, but you’d roll your eyes at that – did he really expect you to go around attacking everyone now he knew? You gave him a weak smile; “Best to stay away from me Yune...” Ralph yanked you away from him and, holding you firmly, marched you into the building. Hayes was shoulder to shoulder with him; “What are you doing!?” “She’s going in a cell!” “Why-!? I hope you know what you’re doing calling me into this after Frankie Peterson!! What are the charges-!?” His shout-whispering definitely verged on the former, and you almost wanted to tell him to shut up also. “Whatever the hell you can possibly put on her.” “You haven’t CHARGED her-?!” Hayes stopped dead causing Yune to almost crash into him, “Ralph are you fucking insane?!?! Let her out of those cuffs right now, I’m not being a party to this!” “Well guess what - you are! And you have been for longer than you realise.” Yune placed his hands on his hips still watching you, and you were staring at the wall because right now your emotions were peaking all over the place, and if your eyes were going to burn silver it was now. “Will you at least tell us what this is about?” Ralph presses the button for the elevator; “Yeah. I’ll meet you in my office.”

As the elevator door pinged he walked you in, and pressed the button for the holding cells. You remained silent, finding your shoes more interesting. But what would you give to have those hands on you lovingly right now. Ralph’s grip was strong and you thought he was currently using more pressure than necessary, but supposed you understood. Yune and Hayes turned to each other in the lobby in utter disbelief - and Hayes sighed to break the silence, hardly daring to think he could possibly have been thrown into this situation again; “This is a lawsuit waiting to happen.” *** No-one asked him any questions. Probably because Ralph didn’t look like a man who wanted to be asked any questions right now – and you looked just as unlikely to say anything. In fact as he marched you down the corridor people actively stepped out of his way; man on a mission. He stopped to breathe only when he had you in front of the cell – and for once you could read your detective like an open book. He had no reason to hide emotion from you when he didn’t know you could read his aura, or get a vibe from him – but now they were loud and clear. Ralph pushed the cell door open and brought your wrists closer to his, paying close attention to your fingernails in the process. He unlocked the handcuffs, luckily they’d only made faint marks on your wrists because you didn’t struggle – he’d have a hard time explaining otherwise – and he almost sighed in relief, before giving you a hard shove in. You stumbled, caught off guard by the movement and he slammed the door shut behind you. You turned around – damn near glaring at him as he locked it up, but he still wasn’t looking at your face. Ralph couldn’t, yet. Couldn’t bring himself to look at a person he thought he knew, and was now a damn near stranger. “You’re staying there until I figure out what to do with you-!” “Why don’t you just take me out to a cave and put a bullet through my head Ralph, that’s what you want-!! I can read you!” You almost spat it at him – because the nerve of him not to look at you was nearly insulting. Like he could throw away four years of good memories just like that. And then he all but did; “Because I LOVED YOU.” His voice raised and so did his eyes, that gorgeous blue now so in pain, and you couldn’t take it away this time – he was hurt and betrayed, but there was nothing in that sentence that held untrue and you could feel that. Loved. Past tense. Just like that. “Ralph…” Your eyes flickered silver and stayed that way, your shoulders and your features slumping in defeat, “Ralph, please…” “Oh no, you’re staying here. Now I gotta sort this fucking mess…” He stepped away from you, unnerved even more by that unnatural eye colour, “RALPH!” You couldn’t take that. How could he say that to you? How could he just walk away after saying loved!? But Ralph Anderson didn’t stop, he kept going, and you heard his quiet murmur that no one was to touch you, to see you or speak to you before he came back. There was agreement, and then your partners footsteps faded. You slumped down on the bench, unsure of what you were feeling for the first time in your entire life. You’d been through the rise and fall of empires. Been treated like a God, feared like a monster and hunted like an animal. Hidden in many different countries under many different identities in cities that didn’t even exist anymore. But in all those lifetimes – you hadn’t ever felt something quite like this.

***

Yune Sablo was eerily quiet, he couldn’t even find the words. That was okay though, because DA Kenneth Hayes was livid - and couldn’t get them all out quick enough.

“You WHAT-!?! This WHOLE time!? All that shit you told me on the phone about Jack Hoskins and-!?” He paused only to collect his thought, hand to his temple momentarily, “And some other police guy - that was all crap!? Do you two HEAR yourselves!? Shapeshifters - tell me this is all a big fucking set up, please! God, let this be a joke!!” Ralph shook his head; “Every word is true. And I can prove it, if you wanna walk with me to the holding cell. I mean it won’t be hard - she bleeds blue.” Hayes made a face; “I don’t want to go anywhere near that. What I wanna know is why everyone was in on this but me. Did I not matter? Was it something I said-!?” “You’re smart Hayes, but you’re logical. I would never have believed it until I had to, you would have laughed us out of your office. Easier to let you do what you had to on terms that make sense, and don’t sound insane.”

“Like you do!” Hayes then did laugh, but not in humour, “Ralph-! You’re saying she is the same kinda thing that killed and mutilated Frankie Peterson - and that’s not the only murder, you’ve given me two more that are known about and an attempted kidnapping - stole identities of countless people, made mind slaves of others and almost killed all of you in Tennessee-!? And she’s just locked up in a holding cell-!?” “That’s exactly what I’m saying.” Ralph folded his arms, “she denies that she does any of that, but who is to say... and I couldn’t exactly shoot her in my own house could I-!?” Would have been a hell of a clean-up operation, and it’d taken more than a bullet to stop the last one. If he could withstand that, and you were older, then what could Ralph put you through before you died. He shook that thought quickly away when it started to remind him too much of torture. “And you believe her-!!?” Ralph was silent, and looked across to Yune for support. The Lieutenant clearly didn’t want to interject however, causing Hayes to put his head in his hands; “She’s met my KIDS Ralph-! She’s been to my house—! We’ve all been around her and to plenty of events -! And all she needs is a drop of blood to become us-!?” “I. Know.” Ralph sounded exasperated, “How do you think I feel-?!”

***

It was a lot later in the day when he returned. You’d been left alone with nothing much more than your thoughts, and had watched shadows pass along the floor. You were glad for the silence and you slept in short bursts – but all of it was broken. And when you awoke you wanted to reach for a person who was no longer there. Because you weren’t in bed back home like you usually were. It was almost strange that you’d ended up being the one with the nightmares now – having soothed Ralph out of more than his fair share since the beginning of all this.

He walked in, duffel slung over his shoulder. He’d changed his shirt from this morning, so he’d clearly been home. You didn’t even have a clock to tell you the time. You’d mutter something about human rights – but knew you’d give Ralph the perfect opportunity to remind you that you weren’t human, and you refused to do that. He dropped the bag by the door – still giving you that same stare – like you were dead to him; the worst of the worst. And given the kinds of things Ralph had seen during his tenure, even you thought his look was a little unfair. But justified; why would you look at someone who had just broken your heart as anything less than a monster. And you really were one, at least in his eyes.

He opened the door just a crack, satisfied that you would stay still - try and show that you were no harm to anyone - and kicked the bag over to you. You looked pretty subdued, just sitting there on the bench – Ralph hoped you’d had some time to think it all over and stew, like a real perp. He wanted you to make some kind of mistake. But he’d been through it with Yune and Hayes, you could be held here for 48 hours, despite cries of insanity and protest. Neither of them was about to let a shapeshifter run loose in Cherokee City (again), and Ralph just didn’t know what to do with you otherwise. Or if he could be trusted. For a moment sympathy seemed to cross his face, and you weren’t sure if you should believe it or not; “I brought you some things. Clothes and pieces. I figured you might want them. It’s the decent thing…” Unlike you he seemed to say, but not out loud. Your eyes fell to the bag, and you reached for it slowly. Indeed, when you upzipped it, he’d given you fresh changes of clothes and a few things to make you more comfortable. You didn’t know why; he had no reason. Unless Ralph felt even just a little guilty about the situation. You supposed that was what he wanted you to feel most of all.

You should have been thankful, but you weren’t. “Oh you’re bringing me things now!?” Your smile was thin, “I assume that means I’m staying? The full 48 hours is it, Ralph?” You raised an eyebrow, standing; “…Why? Why the hell even pretend you still care about me!?” His face fell immediately, the sadness in his eyes that pulled across his face replaced by steel blue anger. You weren’t about to beg his forgiveness and Ralph knew that. But you standing up in the way you just had, that determined stance, hard eyes – he barely took a breath. All his feelings about everything, from pulling up at the Frankie Peterson murder to right now came out at once. He was venomous and cruel, and he didn’t care, he’d had enough; Ralph slammed his hand up against the bars; “There’s nothing stopping me from walking out of here right now, coming back with a bus load of tourists, and just watch ‘em fucking push each other out of the way, desperate, trying to get the best angle of your fucking face. Just look at your eyes… The colour of your blood? How much do you think could be charged for that?” It was a disturbing thing to see. Suddenly the man in front of you was a complete stranger, there wasn’t a person in the world that you thought would recognise the smile on Ralph Anderson’s face now; “And then comes the ever curious scientific community. They’re gonna be real interested in you. Poking, probing, injecting, extracting…” He gave a slow shake of his head, lowering his voice to no more than a whisper, delivery as casual as if he were simply passing the time of day; “They’ll cut little pieces of you off, take you back to the lab.” You took a step back, lips parting, what was wrong with him? There was no way in hell he’d get to speak to a human being like this; but you guessed it was okay. Because as Ralph was reminding you, you weren’t one. He raised his voice again, that hatred wasn’t just for you, it was as much for the dead body in a cave in Tennessee, but it cut deep – deeper than you were prepared to admit whilst he was standing in front of you; “-Just keep fucking carving you, and carving you, and carving you until...” He paused, because your eyes flickered back to that silver, and Ralph figured he might have gone a step too far. Maybe but what the hell, he’d said it now – and didn’t your kind deserve it, for all you’d put this City, and all your victims through? “…yeah. You wouldn’t want that, would ya? And it would serve our purposes much better if no one ever knew that you even existed.” He took a step back, shaking his head, “So you gotta go.” Then Ralph turned, without another word, and walked away.

The silence was suddenly eerie, and you wanted him back yelling at you again. You were aware that your eyes were still shining and worse, they smarted. You heard lights flickering on and off throughout the station, and Ralph’s equally angry footsteps fading away. And all you could think of was him returning to that house all alone. You just hoped that his friends would support him… because you knew that he might be saying love in the past tense, but the pain in your chest told you you weren’t about to let him go. Not easily.

Your head lowered, resting against the metal, and when you knew he was gone, and you couldn’t feel his aura anymore you let out a breath; shaky. Just the one, before you started sobbing. ‘So you gotta go.’ That echoed far louder in your head than anything else. What had they decided in that room? That it was okay for them to kill you? Because surely no one else in the world would miss you. A lawyer and two detectives could cover it all up easily, it’d be seamless. He’d loved you for four years – and suddenly he could contemplate putting a bullet through your head. And with that line, would probably go through with it.

You placed your hands over your face, trying to quiet them. But realised just exactly what you had to cry about, aside from sitting in a jail cell, and losing a man you didn’t think you could live without; you had lost your city… and quite perhaps your life. In every sense of the word.

It’s all over. It’s all fucking over.

---

@menndelsohn @3134045126 @happyskywhale @wltz-bby #MendoTagSquad

Well this is it! The last fic of 24 - roll on all the ones I will write at 25!

#The Outsider #The Outsider HBO #HBOs the Outsider #Ralph Anderson x Reader #Ralph Anderson #Shifter!Reader #Ben Mendelsohn #So. She isn't Dia because that's not who I see in my head... but basically the entire cast of The Outsider has their own Shifter!Reader #and I WOULD write them all #major angst #I love reading back through my work and being damn impressed with myself and THIS is one of those moments #D A M N #I love this piece - so much!#This turned out so much longer - but also so much better than I could ever have hoped for #so I really REALLY hope you all enjoy it #124 #AU!Harmony #last fic of my 24th year-!!!

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bechloeislegit · 4 years

Text

25 Days of BeChloe Christmases - 2019

DAY 08 - REMEMBERING CHRISTMAS

Author's Prompt: Follow-up to "Amnesia," Chapter 6 from BeChloe Week 2019. [If you haven't read it, you might want to know the premise].

It was the day after Thanksgiving, and Beca was helping Chloe decorate their tiny little New York apartment. She had been back for a little over three months and had regained some of her memory, but there were still large gaps where she couldn't remember anything.

"I had a dream last night," Beca said as she began pulling a string of tangled lights out of the box of decorations. "Or maybe it was a memory."

"Do you remember anything about it?" Chloe asked as she stirred the hot chocolate on the stove.

"Not much," Beca said. "It was Christmas time and I was young. It wasn't a happy time for me and I seemed to be sad."

"I think it's part of a memory," Chloe said. "Your dad left you and your mom around Christmas time when you were five. When we first met, you said Christmas made you sad because it reminded you of when your family fell apart. It took me two years to get you to not be sad at Christmas. Now you love it, or at least pretend to for my sake."

"Oh," Beca said. She took a deep breath through her nose. "Mmm, that hot chocolate smells really good."

"It's the best," Chloe said. "I can't wait for you to taste it again for the first time. It's sort of our tradition. It started at Barden. We would decorate the tree while drinking my dad's famous hot chocolate and listening to Christmas music."

"And I liked doing this?" Beca asked as she struggled with the string of tangled lights.

"You did," Chloe said with a small smile. "You'd always griped about it, but you secretly loved it."

"I don't know if I like the old me," Beca said, looking at Chloe. "You tell me I loved all these things, but I'd gripe about them. I sound like a, a, an old person who is cranky all the time."

"I think the word you're looking for is curmudgeon," Chloe said with a laugh. "You weren't cranky or curmudgeonly; just keeping up the facade that you were a badass."

"I'm not much of a badass," Beca said, holding up the tangled of lights. "I can't even figure out how to untangle these things."

Chloe poured hot chocolate into two mugs. "Do you want marshmallows in yours?"

"Of course," Beca said. "I love marshmallows in hot chocolate."

Chloe looked at Beca with a big smile on her face. "Yes, you do. The more the better was always your motto."

"I don't know how I knew that," Beca said, smiling. "It just came out."

Chloe picked up both mugs and walked over to place them on the table. She motioned for Beca to join her.

"Let's sit at the table," Chloe said. "We'll finish the tree in a bit."

"Okay," Beca said, dropping the lights she was holding back into the box. She sat across from Chloe and blew on her hot chocolate. She took a sip and let out a content "ahh."

"You always did that," Chloe said chuckling. "Every time we'd have hot chocolate."

"I can't help it," Beca said. "It's delicious." Beca took another sip and set her cup down. "You know, it's weird. Some things just happen and I have no memory of doing them before. And other things pop into my head like a short video reminding me that it happened."

"You've come a long way since you came back," Chloe said, sipping her hot chocolate. "Let's see if we can jog some of your Christmas memories."

"Okay," Beca said. "So far, all I remember is that I was sad at Christmas."

"I don't know much about your younger years and Christmas so I'm going to start with the Christmases we've shared," Chloe said. "Close your eyes."

"Okay," Beca said, closing her eyes. "Now what?"

"Imagine your dorm room," Chloe said. "There's a knock-"

"Wait," Beca said, opening her eyes and looking at Chloe. "I thought my dad was a professor at the college. Which I would assume meant he lived close to the college. So, why was I living in a dorm instead of with him?"

"You didn't like your dad then," Chloe said. "He left you and your mom when you were young. When you graduated from High School, he showed up and demanded you to go to college. Since he was a professor it didn't cost him anything for you to go. You only agreed to attend if you could live in the dorms."

"Oh," Beca said, frowning. "I haven't talked to him since I came back. Are we okay now?"

"Yes," Chloe said. "You two came to an understanding and you don't hate him anymore."

"Wow," Beca said. "I really have missed a lot."

Beca rubbed her temples and looked a bit overwhelmed; Chloe knew it was time to stop. The memories would come in their own time and she didn't want to cause Beca any pain or stress by trying to force things.

"Come on," Chloe said. "Let's untangle those lights and get them on the tree."

"Okay," Beca said, placing her hand over Chloe's on the table. "Thanks, Chloe. You always seem to know when I need to back off from trying to remember."

~ Day 8 of 2019's 25 Days of BeChloe Christmases ~

A few days later, Beca was sitting alone in the apartment, admiring the decorations that Chloe had put up. She helped but was fairly useless since she had no idea what she was doing.

Beca was thinking back to the first few days she had returned to the apartment after being released from the hospital. She smiled when she thought about how she told Chloe she loved her and wanted to date her. Chloe was all for it at first, but the more she thought about the more she wanted to wait until Beca got some of her memory back before they pursued a relationship.

Beca sighed. She could see where Chloe was coming from, but every day she was falling more and more in love with the redhead. She wasn't sure how much longer she could wait to start dating.

Beca looked up when she heard a key in the door. She smiled when she saw Chloe enter.

"Hey, Becs," Chloe said with a smile.

"Hey, Chlo," Beca responded.

"I can't believe it's almost Christmas," Chloe said with a smile. "And it's only two weeks before I head off to Tampa. I can't wait to see my mom."

"Oh, right," Beca said. "You're going to your folks for Christmas."

"I wish you'd change your mind and come with me," Chloe said, sitting on the edge of the bed, looking at Beca.

"I'd feel out of place," Beca said. "I know you said I've met your family, but I don't remember them. Christmas is supposed to be a fun time with family. I'd only make everyone feel uncomfortable."

"That's not true," Chloe said. "They love you. You've spent quite a bit of time with them over the years. And, who knows, they might be able to help you regain some of your memory."

"Maybe," Beca said with a shrug.

"Think of all the memories you gained when you went back to work," Chloe said. "You didn't think you'd remember anything about your job, but when you went everyone was happy to see you and you went back to it like you were never gone. You remembered how to use the mixing equipment, and you're already working on an album. You took baby steps and you're doing great."

"I know," Beca said. "But that was just remembering how to use the equipment. I didn't remember any of the people and I'm still meeting some I don't recognize even though I've worked with them for like two years."

"Just think about it, Becs," Chloe said, squeezing Beca's knee. "I'm sure my folks would love to see you."

"I don't know what I'm going to do," Beca said. "My mom wants me to go to Portland since she hasn't been able to make it here to see me. If I go there I won't know anyone at all. I'd at least know you if I went to Tampa." Beca sighed. "I promise I'll think about your offer."

"That's all I can ask for, for now," Chloe said as she stood. "Now, what do we want for dinner?"

~ Day 8 of 2019's 25 Days of BeChloe Christmases ~

Beca continued with her daily routine for the next ten days. No new memories surfaced and she was getting a bit frustrated. She talked to her mom who convinced her that if she went to Portland there were a lot of memories she made there and perhaps something would trigger her remembering more. Her mother made sense, so she told her she'd be there for Christmas.

After ending the call with her mom, Beca sighed. Now she had to break the news to Chloe that she was going home to her mom's and not to Tampa with Chloe.

Beca saw the time and knew that Chloe would be home soon. She placed an order for pizza and set the table.

While she waited for Chloe and the pizza to arrive, she searched for a cheap flight to Portland. She completed her online reservation and sent a quick text to her mother with her flight plans.

Just as she put her phone away, Chloe came through the door, carrying some bags.

"Hey," Beca said as she stood. "Let me help."

"Thanks, Becs," Chloe said. "This is the last of my Christmas shopping. I'm all done."

"Can you get all this on the plane with you?" Beca asked as she set two bags on the rollout bed.

"Oh, no," Chloe said. "I'll take them to the post office tomorrow. I'll just take a few of the smaller, more valuable things in my suitcase."

"I, um, ordered pizza for dinner," Beca said.

"That sounds good, Becs," Chloe said as she grabbed a bag with already wrapped gifts from the closet.

"It, uh, should be here any minute."

"Okay," Chloe said as she started looking through one of her bags. "Here it is."

Beca stood by the kitchen counter as Chloe pulled something out of the bag.

"So, do I leave this here under the tree for you?" Chloe said, holding up a wrapped gift. "Or, do I send it to Tampa for you?"

"Um," Beca tried to say more, but her throat wouldn't let her. She cleared her throat and tried again. "Actually, I, um, I'm going to Portland. To, uh, be with my mom. For Christmas."

"Oh, okay," Chloe said, smiling at Beca. "That will be nice. I'm sure your mom will love seeing you and having you home."

"Chloe," Beca said softly. "It's just there are a lot of memories in Portland. My memories. I'm hoping the visit might trigger something and help me get some of those memories back. You understand, right?"

Chloe smiled brightly. "Of course, I understand. What kind of friend would I be if I selfishly wanted you to spend Christmas with my family instead of your own?"

"Thank you," Beca said, hurrying over to Chloe to pull her into a hug. "I was worried you were going to be mad at me."

"Don't be silly, Becs," Chloe said, holding Beca to her.

Beca pulled back from the hug and looked at Chloe. "You're beautiful, Chloe Beale. And I'm not just talking about physical beauty."

Chloe blushed at the compliment. "Thank you, Beca."

~ Day 8 of 2019's 25 Days of BeChloe Christmases ~

Beca arrived at her mother's house, feeling the same trepidation she did when she first approached the door to her apartment. She fiddled with the strap on her bag before taking a deep breath and knocking on the door.

Beca almost fell over as her mother rushed her and grabbed her into a hug as soon as she opened the door. It took Beca a moment before she buried her face in her mother's shoulder and returned the hug.

Beca doesn't know how long they stood there before her mother sniffled and pulled back from her. She held Beca by the shoulders and looked at her. She smiled at Beca through her tears.

"It is so good to see you, Beca," her mother said. "You look good."

"I look like you," Beca said, studying her mother's face.

Sarah laughed and said, "People say that all the time."

"Oh," Beca said, nodding her head.

"Come in," Sarah said, grabbing Beca's suitcase.

Beca followed Sarah into the house and looked around. She didn't recognize anything but it seemed familiar.

"Are you hungry? Or thirsty?" Sarah asked. "I made lunch; we can eat whenever you want."

"I am a bit hungry," Beca said, standing by the door.

"Then we should eat," Sarah said. "We can chat and I can show you around later."

"I'd like that," Beca said with a smile.

Beca took set her computer bag by the door and followed her mother to the kitchen.

"I hope you still like chicken salad," Sarah said, pulling a few things out of the refrigerator. "I also have barbeque chips because they used to be your favorite."

"I still like it all," Beca said as she sat down.

~ Day 8 of 2019's 25 Days of BeChloe Christmases ~

Lunch was done, and Sarah showed Beca around the house, pointing out things that might jog Beca's memory. Not much did.

They approached a closed door, and Sarah stopped as they reached it.

"This is your old room," Sarah said. "I didn't change anything even when we thought-"

Sarah clenched her jaw and tears stung her eyes. Beca put a hand on Sarah's arm.

"It's okay, mom," Bea said softly.

"I'm sorry," Sarah said as she wiped her eyes. "The six months you were missing were hard. I went to New York and wanted to go to Baltimore to look for you. Everyone talked me out of it because no one knew where you went or why, so I had no place to start. I didn't think to call hospitals. If we had, maybe we'd have found you sooner."

"Don't, mom," Beca said, sniffling. "It wouldn't have changed anything that happened to me. I'd rather you see me like this than in a hospital bed not knowing you were there or being able to hug you."

Sarah let out a sob and pulled Beca to her. The mother and daughter cried in each other's arms for a few minutes; Sarah was the first to pull back. She wiped her tears and put a smile on her face.

"Ready to see your room?" Sarah asked.

"Let's do it," Beca replied, wiping her own tears and smiling.

Sarah slowly opened the door and stood back to let Beca enter first. Beca took a deep breath and walked about three steps in. She stopped and looked around.

"I was expecting something a bit darker," she said with a laugh.

"It was when you were a teenager," Sarah said. "Then after you started Barden, you came home for the summer and changed everything to what you see here."

Beca ran her hand over the dresser to her left. There were several framed pictures and she picked up the first one.

"I always loved this picture of me and dad," Beca said, causing Sarah to look up at her.

"You remember," Sarah said.

"What?"

"You did always love that picture," Sarah said. "Sounds like at least one memory came back to you."

"Yeah, I guess it did," Beca said, putting the picture back in place.

The next pictures were from when she was at Barden. She picked up one of her and Chloe.

"I told Chloe I was in love with her," Beca said, looking at her mother.

"Finally!" Sarah said with a laugh. "When did you tell her."

"The second day I saw her," Beca said. "After I came back from Baltimore. I had no idea who she was but I knew she was special and I knew I was in love with her."

"You two always had something special," Sarah said. "And I'm glad you finally realized it."

Beca put the picture down and opened a drawer. She laughed when the first thing she saw was a pair of reindeer pajamas.

"Chloe gave these to me the first time I went to Tampa with her for Christmas," Beca said. "Her whole family wore matching Christmas pajamas. It's something they do every year."

"You said you hated them," Sarah said. "But-"

"But I really love them," Beca finished.

"Yeah, you do," Sarah said. She looked at Beca and smiled. "Come with me. I have something to show you."

"Okay," Beca said. She shut the drawer and took another quick look around before following her mother out of the room.

Sarah went to her room and went to her closet. She motioned for Beca to sit on the bed; she did. Sarah pulled something off the closet shelf and carried it over to Beca.

"This is a photo album you were working on the last time you were home," Sarah said. "I think it might help bring back a few more memories for you."

Sarah held the album out to Beca. On the front was a photo of her and Chloe wearing the reindeer pajamas. Beca hesitantly reached out for the album.

"Will you sit here while I go through it?" Beca asked Sarah.

"Of course," Sarah said and sat next to Beca.

Beca opened the album on found a note she had written to Chloe.

"I tell Chloe it's a picture story of our friendship," Beca said after reading the note.

Beca flips through the next few pages and comments on what each photo is. When she reached a photo of her giving Chloe a piggy-back ride, Beca laughed.

"I remember this," Beca said. "Chloe had decided she was too tired to walk to practice and decided I would make a good taxi and hopped on. We almost fell three times because I was laughing so hard."

Sarah had a smile on her face. She watched Beca and noticed that Beca had yet to realize that she was remembering.

Beca continued looking at the album and commenting on each photo, sharing her memory of how or why it was taken.

Beca turned the last page and furrowed her brow. "Oh," Beca said.

"What?" Sarah asked as Beca set the album on the bed.

"I, uh, tell Chloe I love her and that if she felt the same I would post a picture here to signify that we started a different chapter in our lives together."

"That sounds very romantic," Sarah said.

"I know," Beca mumbled, rubbing her temples. "I, uh, I'm starting to remember things. I remember you and dad yelling a lot. I remember the day he left us. I remember my thirteenth birthday when you took me to New York and we saw Annie. I remember you have a scar behind your ear from where I threw a toy at you when I got mad because it was blue and I wanted yellow."

Tears were streaming down Beca's face as memories started pouring out of her. Sarah wiped her tears and pulled Beca to her.

"I can remember," Beca sobbed into Sarah's shirt. "And it's causing my head to hurt."

"Maybe we should call your doctor," Sarah said. "See if we need to get you checked out or anything."

Beca nodded and pulled out her phone. She was lucky and got one of the doctors who worked on her case while she was in Baltimore.

After Beca finished speaking with her doctor, Sarah called her doctor and asked if he could check Beca out. She explained everything that had happened and the doctor told Sarah to take Beca to the hospital and he would meet them there.

~ Day 8 of 2019's 25 Days of BeChloe Christmases ~

"We're going to want to do an MRI," Dr. Maxwell said. "Once we have those results we can figure out where to go from there."

"Okay," Beca said. "I do have a headache and the memories keep going through my head like a slideshow. I have memories jumping around all over the place."

"Can you handle the pain for a bit longer?" Dr. Maxwell asked. "I want to get the MRI done before we give you any medication."

"Yeah," Beca said. "It's just a dull ache right now."

"Okay, then," Dr. Maxwell said. "I'll take care of getting that MRI scheduled."

Dr. Maxwell left and Beca looked at her mother. Sarah smiled at her.

"I think I want to call Chloe," Beca said.

"I think you should," Sarah said. "It will be a little while before you'll be taken for the MRI."

"Yeah," Beca said nervously. "I love you, mom."

"I love you, too, sweetheart," Sarah said her eyes glistening with tears. "Call Chloe."

"Okay," Beca said and wiped her eyes. She pulled out her phone and pulled up Chloe's contact.

Beca hit the call button and put the phone to her ear.

"Hey, Becs!" Chloe said answering the call. "Miss me already? I just saw you this morning."

"I wanted to tell you that I've been having some headaches and I'm at the hospital-"

"Oh, my gosh," Chloe interrupted. "Are you okay? I'm coming up there."

"No, Chlo, that's not necessary," Beca said quickly. "I'm getting an MRI to make sure everything's okay. My mom's with me. Stay with your family."

A nurse entered and spoke to Sarah. Sarah nodded and the nurse left.

"They're ready for you," Sarah said.

"Chlo, I have to go," Beca said. "I didn't want you to get upset if you couldn't reach me. They want to do a few tests and I'll call you back later and let you know what's going on."

"You'd better," Chloe said.

Beca ended the call and her mother looked at her.

"You didn't tell her," Sarah said.

"I know," Beca said. "I didn't want her to come here until I was sure everything was okay."

"All set, Miss Mitchell?" the nurse asked as she came into the room.

"All set," Beca said.

~ Day 8 of 2019's 25 Days of BeChloe Christmases ~

"The MRI looks good," Dr. Maxwell told Beca and Sarah. "No abnormalities, no swelling, no issues whatsoever. I'd say you're lucky that your memory has come back without any long-term issues to worry about."

"What about her headache?" Sarah asked. "Will that continue?"

"It might for a while," Dr. Maxwell replied. "But, I don't think it will be long-term. Take some ibuprofen and come back if it gets worse. Anything else?"

Beca shook her head and Sarah said, "Not that we can think of."

"Good," Dr. Maxwell said. "I'll have the nurse bring your discharge papers and you can go home."

"Thank you, doctor," Beca said.

"You're welcome," Dr. Maxwell said. "And good luck."

It was late when Beca and her mom made it back home; they had been at the hospital for almost eight hours. Beca was tired and sent a quick text to Chloe telling her she was home and fine but extremely tired, and she'd call Chloe tomorrow.

"I'm going to bed," Beca told her mom. "Thanks for everything today."

"I'm glad you're better, Beca," Sarah said. "Goodnight."

Beca hugged her mom and kissed her cheek before going upstairs to her room.

The next morning, Beca woke early and stretched. She sat up in her bed with a smile before jumping out of bed and hurrying over to her closet. She grabbed a box and went to sit back on her bed.

She opened the box and it was filled with various jump drives. She ran her hands over them and pulled one out.

Chloe's Faves was written on a piece of tape covering part of the drive. "I made this for Chloe during the summer between my Junior and Senior Year. Of course, I never gave it to her because then she would have known about my feelings for her."

Beca dropped that in the box and picked up another. She went through several, identifying when she made that particular drive. She had a thought and jumped off the bed and ran out of her room.

"Mom!" Beca called out.

"What's wrong?" Sarah asked as she came running up the steps, meeting Beca at the top.

"Would you be upset with me if I wanted to go to Tampa to be with Chloe?"

"You just got here," Sarah said.

"I know," Beca said. "And I promise I'll be back. And I'll bring Chloe with me. Hopefully, as my girlfriend and not as a girl who is my friend."

Sarah chuckled. "I'm good with that. Let's see if we can find you a flight."

~ Day 8 of 2019's 25 Days of BeChloe Christmases ~

Beca knew it was a long-shot trying to get a flight on Christmas Eve, but she was lucky and managed to reserve the last seat on a plane leaving the next day for Tampa.

Sarah took her to the airport and got Beca's suitcase out of the car. She set it down and pulled Beca into a hug.

"I'll miss you," Sarah said as she hugged Beca.

"I'll miss you, too," Beca said. "Plus, I promised I'd be back."

"You'd better," Sarah said, hugging Beca tighter before letting her go. "Now, go get your girl."

"Thanks, mom," Beca said. "Merry Christmas!"

Beca was anxious and hoped that Chloe was okay with her just coming to Tampa without any notice. Her flight was uneventful and she grabbed a cab outside the terminal. She smiled after she gave the driver the address to the Beales from memory.

Beca arrived at Chloe's house and stood outside the door. She knocked and stepped back to wait for someone to answer. Beca was relieved when Chloe was the one who answered.

"Beca!" Chloe squealed as she grabbed Beca in a hug. "What are you doing here?"

"You were wearing a blue checkered dress the first time I saw you," Beca said as she held Chloe.

"You remembered something," Chloe said, pulling back and smiling. "That's great, Beca. But, you could have told me this over the phone," she teased.

"And the second time I saw you," Beca said. "You burst into my shower and made me sing with you. You got mad at me when I kept complimenting that German woman from DSM. I held you while you cried when Tom dumped you and kept you in Ben and Jerry's Chunky Monkey ice cream for weeks. You like to sip peppermint tea when your throat hurts."

"Becs?" Chloe furrowed her brow as she studied Beca's face as she spoke

"And I went to Baltimore because I had found someone who was selling an original Little Mermaid snow globe that I knew you would love and I wanted to get if for you for Christmas," Beca said, through her tears. "I could have ordered it and had it mailed but I wanted to see it to make sure it was good enough for you. I was on my way to see it when the accident happened."

Beca took a breath and continued. "I knew within minutes of seeing you again, and even after my coma and having amnesia, I knew that I was in love with you and had been for a while."

Chloe was crying as she pulled Beca back into a hug. "You're memory is coming back."

"It's back, Chlo; all of it," Beca said, as a tear fell down her cheek. "I remember everything."

Chloe held Beca tighter. She finally pulled back from the hug.

"You know, you could have told me all this over the phone," Chloe said again with a teary laugh.

"No, I couldn't," Beca said. "I wanted to tell you that I was in love with you while looking into your eyes."

Beca took Chloe's hands in hers and held them to her chest. Their faces were now inches apart and Beca stared into Chloe's eyes.

"I love you, Chloe," Beca said.

"I love you, too," Chloe whispered before smashing her lips against Beca's.

They broke apart when they heard someone clearing their throat. They looked to see Charlotte Beale smiling at them.

"Merry Christmas, Beca," Charlotte said. "I'm glad you could join us."

"Thanks, Charlotte," Beca said.

"Chloe, why don't you show Beca up to your room," Charlotte said. "I have a feeling you two need to talk."

"Come on, Becs," Chloe said, grabbing Beca's suitcase and hand.

Beca readjusted her laptop bag as Chloe led her inside.

"It's good to have you back, Beca," Charlotte said as Beca passed her.

"It's good to be back," Beca said, smiling.

#bechloe fanfiction #bechloe #beca mitchell #chloe beale

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spookyspaghettisundae · 4 years

Text

All Eyes on You

Maybe it could have been a regular weekend for me, but there’s no way for me to tell if I was the one who screwed everything up. I was a bit hungover from the night before, so my head weighed a ton and every source of bright light made me cringe in pain—whether it was the fluorescent neon tubes overhead or the daylight streaming in through the store’s front windows.

Every single beep of the cashier running items over the scanner at checkout was like a tiny knife being stuck into my skull, over and over and over again, even though I was fairly far away from it, browsing the unnecessary amount of different brands of laundry detergent.

I grabbed some random one that had nice soft colors and chucked it into my shopping cart. It caused the whole thing to shake and rattle and a person pushing past me gave me a dirty look.

Under any other circumstances, I wouldn’t have wasted any thought on this, but today was different. Now, everything was different. Now, as I looked up, and past that guy shooting me the disparaging glance, I realized that everybody in the store was looking at me.

“Feeling watched” would have been the understatement of the century.

It was so weird and jarring that I forgot about the effects of my hangover for the next few minutes. In part because my heart was racing, in part because my mind was going wild with conspiracy theories and rampant paranoia.

Although I pretended to not care or not notice, I could tell that everybody in the store was looking at me at one point or the other. Normally, I would have chalked this up to something silly, like one of my friends having written something on my forehead with a magic marker while I was passed out.

But with what had happened the night before, I knew better. I knew something was wrong. Horribly wrong.

It didn’t help that some of these people would pretend to not be looking at me, either—furtive glances, eyes quickly darting down to study a shopping list on their phone, or to act like they were looking over grocery items on the shelves. Anything to avoid eye contact with me.

I know what you’re thinking. Just allow me to dial back and explain before you make up your mind.

The night before, I was feeling pretty depressed. I was still pretty new in this town and knew nobody around there. Just some backwater town in the middle of nowhere. The rent on the apartment I had found there was cheap, and the commute to my workplace only an hour which was a vast improvement over my last home.

So I grabbed some beers, drove up to a lonesome little picnic area on the forest’s edge that I had seen on the first day I had visited town when I went to go scout out the apartment a few months ago, and decided to chill out there and watch the sunset after a tedious Friday at work.

The whole day had dragged on at a snail’s pace and I just wanted to unwind and not stare at any screens for a few hours.

I sat there, nursing my first beer, sitting on top of the backrest of the bench like a rebel, when I spotted a mansion near the forest’s edge. I mean, I had seen it before when I first took a drive through this town, but it was only now that I noticed a few funny details about it. And when I say “funny,” I don’t mean the amusing sort.

It had a large red brick wall encircling the entire yard—and that place was as big as a football field. The large mansion matched that appearance, also featuring red bricks and sandstone and wood in its construction, and a lot of unusual details like a tower built into the corner of it. Everything was overgrown with lush green ivy, and there were some nice-looking trees on the property.

So far, so idyllic.

The weird part were the men in green camo clothing, carrying what I think were assault rifles. They patrolled around the inside of the walls, so it was no wonder I hadn’t seen them when I drove through town earlier that year, but being up on the hill at the forest’s edge gave me some elevation and allowed me to see over the walls somewhat.

They were all pretty big-looking dudes. I pegged them for soldiers or something like that—though my imagination wandered to this being a mafioso’s estate and these guys being some well-armed thugs.

It would make sense for some gangster boss to be living well out on the countryside where everything’s nice and quiet, right?

I downed two whole beers and while I had been trying to distract myself with unpacking everything that had happened over the course of the week—both at work and in my personal life—my curiosity got the best of me.

I had to know what the hell this mansion was.

With a simple plan in mind, I packed up everything, and drove back down from the picnic site, now taking a detour so I could casually roll past the mansion. A large steel gate obscured any way of seeing into the mansion’s premises, which was frustrating. In my mind’s eye, I had expected one of those metal fence gates that you can see through, but this one was just a solid surface instead.

Tossing out my original plan, I parked my car across the road by the grass, got out, and walked over. You may be thinking that I was crazy, and I can assure you I am. I was always a bit of a tomboy growing up, and I possessed a fearlessness that got me into trouble every now and then—and because I always got away with playing dumb or innocent, I always got away with my shenanigans and I never learned. Not until this day.

I pressed a button by the gate that I figured to be a buzzer and waited.

Within seconds, a small metal slot opened on the gate, from which a man wearing sunglasses peered through, and it was so sudden and swift in response to my pressing that button that I nearly choked in surprise.

“Yes?” asked the man behind the gate.

“Uh, I was, uh, I was,” I started stammering until my wit finally kicked in. “I was up at the picnic site up here to relax and I had no reception on my phone whatsoever, but I need to make an important call. I figured I could ask here if I could use your land line, or something?”

I slung out my phone and waved it around like a magic wand while flashing this man a dumb smile and shrugging. He looked over his shoulder as if he was responding to someone behind him, but he didn’t say a word. I think he looked up at the picnic site and I could feel the blood draining from my face. Because he turned, though, I saw a weird tattoo on his neck: just a single eye.

Not like I know anything about ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, but if I had to describe it, that’s what it reminded me of. No fancy elaborate details, just a simple eye. Wide open.

His head turned back with a painful slowness. I could sense the gears churning behind his forehead.

“My phone’s got reception just fine,” said the man. “Here, you can borrow mine.”

I guessed my charm had worked its magic. He held out his phone through the small slot, offering it to me.

Realizing way too late that all of this was a terrible idea, I glanced at my phone and flicked its display on, then chuckled—way too nervously, I presume, “Hey, look at that! I got a bar back. Maybe it was just up at the woods that was not working out for me. Thanks, though.”

The guard slowly withdrew his phone and even though I couldn’t see his eyes, I could have sworn he was glaring at me. I smiled back at him, hoping to disarm any ill will, and started getting really scared about this being some sort of gangster hideout.

“Have a nice day,” he said. But it sounded more like a threat.

He shut the slot with lightning speed and I turned to leave, holding up my phone and pretending to make a call. I yapped away into the void of the non-existent phone call, cringing at my pathetic attempt at emulating a one-sided conversation and the resulting blandness, until I had gotten into my car and slammed the door shut behind me.

My palms were sweaty and cold when they clasped the steering wheel and stick, and I drove away. I was pretty rattled for the rest of the evening although I got back home without any further incident. On the whole ride home, I kept looking into my rear-view mirror to see if I was being followed. And in my paranoia, I thought that some people on sidewalks were shooting me looks, but I dismissed it at the time.

Back at home, I drank the rest of my beers and distracted myself with lousy TV shows until fell asleep.

Then I woke up the next morning, sporting the splitting headache, and decided that things couldn’t be so bad. Because, hey, when it feels like gremlins are pounding the inside of your skull with a jackhammer and your brain’s a funny soup, a lot of worries stop existing. With that state of mind, I went to do my grocery shopping for the week.

And now—this. Everybody watching me. In the confines of my own head, I was calling myself names and cursing myself out for being such a paranoid idiot. There was no reason to be afraid.

But my heart wouldn’t stop racing. Even outside, as I put my groceries in the trunk, I knew that even the people driving in and out of the small parking lot were looking at me.

Watching me.

Worse: I saw that tattoo again. On someone’s forearm. Some lady returning an empty shopping cart to the storefront. She never looked at me directly, but with my back turned to her, I had felt a burning gaze transfixed upon me.

What the hell was this? As an avid reader of strange fiction and horror movie enthusiast, I immediately thought they had to be some sort of cult. What if this entire town was run by a cult? Stranger things have happened.

This was all so surreal. I felt very small and like I was just a passenger in my own body. Everything tingled. My fingers felt numb.

I drove home and shut myself in for the rest of the weekend. I tried to distract myself with TV and video games and even talking to a friend who lived halfway across the country, but nothing helped. I couldn’t help it. I kept thinking that this entire town was crazy and that I was being watched now. I even started getting paranoid if they could tap into my phone or hack my computer, so I avoided telling my friend about anything I had witnessed here.

Just shot the breeze about how life had been for her lately, and put up a good show in pretending that everything was normal on my end.

Come Monday morning, I snuck out of my home and got into my car. Paranoia got the better of me again, so I started checking my ride quite thoroughly, not caring if I would be late for work that day. I had watched too many stupid shows to not think that someone might have tampered with my car. I checked to see if the brakes were working, if there were any bugs, pawing underneath my seats for foreign objects, you name it.

I’m not any sort of professional and if anything was there, I probably missed it. But hey—I tried. Still, I found nothing.

After wasting half an hour on this exercise in futility, I drove off. I never felt so exhilarated to go to work as that day. Because work, for the first time, felt like an escape from something worse. It also felt like an escape from my own head, because I was questioning my own sanity. Surely, the whole town couldn’t be in a cult, right?

I cranked up the music on my radio and sang along to a song I normally hated. And I felt good. For a short while, at least.

It stopped when I drove down the road I usually take to leave town to go to work. A nice narrow road meandering through the wooded area, just like the ones you see in horror flicks.

There was a roadblock in the way once I rounded a curve, with a small jam of cars lined up in front of it. Two police cars obstructed the path and there were some officers standing beside them, one of them talking to the driver in the car at the front of the line. My heart sank, plummeting right into my gut region. I could feel my belly pulsing with my accelerated, anxious heartbeat.

I wonder—does everybody get as nervous as I do whenever I see cops nearby? It’s not like I’d ever done anything wrong, but it had always made me nervous. Even under normal circumstances. Even before this weekend.

But today was different. The events of this weekend had multiplied my paranoia—they had mutated it. If this whole town was run by some weird cult, what if the cops were in on it? What if they were looking for me?

Right when one of the cars was let past the roadblock and drove off, I panicked. I steered out of line and made a U-turn, swerving back onto the road with screeching tires and driving off. It took me a few moments to realize in retrospect that this made me grind my teeth and may have been a stupid move, but I started speeding up and driving away.

The trembling started when I saw a cop car show up behind me, half a minute later. They let the siren wail at me for a split second to grab my attention, and used their blinker to signal me to pull over.

With growing dread, I planned to play along, but step on the gas if things went south.

Even with all the adrenaline rushing through my body, and my attempts to stop my trembling by gripping the steering wheel way harder than natural, I gently steered the car as best I could, driving it onto the roadside and letting it roll to a stop. But I kept the engine running.

A police officer emerged from the car behind me and approached. His hand was resting on the gun at his hip and I wondered if my running motor had anything to do with that.

Or because of this damned cult. Or whatever the hell was going on here.

I rolled down my window once he had arrived there and he looked me up and down. My resolve crumpled and I cut the engine as a token of good will.

“License and registration, please?” asked the police officer in a gravelly voice.

His whole posture was rigid, like a statue—his body language tense. So was I.

Remembering what can go wrong in such an encounter, I carefully leaned over to retrieve the documents from my purse and hand them over. I could feel him watching me all the while, and for the first time in days, I felt like someone watching me was the appropriate action, given the circumstances.

I handed the cop my license and papers and he looked them over, his hand now finally away from the gun, and taking off some of the edge. He studied my face after inspecting my ID.

Then he handed back everything.

“Pardon the interruption, ma'am. Have a nice day,” he told me, and swiveled.

Right when he was walking away was when I saw the tattoo on his neck. The eye—staring at me. Almost as if the damned tattoo itself was watching me.

I never believed in the supernatural or UFOs or any such bunk. But my paranoia was really taking me for a ride now, and I questioned everything I believed in.

When I revved up my engine again and drove off, I still felt the officer’s eyes on me.

Anyway, now you know. That’s how—and why—one day, I bounced from that awful little town, leaving all my belongings behind. How I drove halfway across the states, and started a new life after changing my name.

I’d tell you the town’s name so you can avoid it, but I keep seeing that tattoo in my nightmares. In some of them, it’s like people have an extra eye on their body where there shouldn’t be one, in place of that tattoo. Like the skin breaks open and some bloodshot, weird eye stares at me. Always the same eye.

I still feel watched out in public sometimes. Hell, sometimes I even feel like someone’s watching me at home. I know I should talk to a therapist about this, but I’m afraid they won’t believe me. Or worse.

I got an anonymous call from someone telling me not to talk about what I had seen, but I had to get this off my chest, and maybe nothing bad will happen if I don’t tell you where this was.

—Submitted by Wratts

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medea10 · 5 years

Text

My Review of Wotakoi: Love is Hard for Otaku

#anime review #wotakoi #wotaku ni koi wa muzukashii #narumi momose #hirotaka nifuji #tarou kabakura #hanako koyanagi #naoya nifuji #kou sakuragi

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hylukotranslations · 5 years

Photo

Pati Pati - vol 76, April 1991 Album: Kurutta Taiyou (Mad Sun) 2nd picture is a visual representation for the track: Machine

Toll Yagami (Drums) Interview by Kazuyoshi Aikawa (Doll)

At the indie time, all the interviews were done by you and U-ta. Does this mean you had a kind of position of the leader ?

Well, not really. Actually, at that time we were the only two members who could speak (laughs). Now all the members got used to the interviews and speak, but at our debut Imai or Hide almost didn't speak at all, right ? As well in the interviews as outside the job. Or maybe I should say that they were unable to speak (laughs).

Then you had the role of the decider ?

At the beginning a bit yes, but now it changed and we are a total democracy. So, when we choose the songs or for other stuffs, we decide on the majority. Since we are five, there is forcedly a majority. Because, since we are the current members, we've been having a strong will to always respect each other.

Then, everything is decided on the principle of majority

But after all, maybe I'm the one who forces things the most. How to say, I accept to some extent what is decided on the principle of majority, but when I think that something is really risky, or the method is completely wrong, even if I've lost, I quite often bring the decision by force to my side.

Maybe you look at the band in its globality

I don't know. Maybe I'm the most objective one. It would be weird if I say I'm not someone artistic, but in the contrary I'm the one who has the most "fan" mind... So I look at the band from this point of view. You know, I like to watch our own videos. And I think, ah that scene is filmed that way, this is seen like that, that's the way I look at the band.

Is it since before ? Or does it come from your temperament ?

Probably from my temperament (laughs). Since the time I've begun drums, it happened that I studied before a mirror how I would look like if I hit like this or that...

You are a nervous one

Quite ! I'm tense since the day preceding a live in a big hall (laughs). It can seem ridiculous, but it's like if I was preparing myself for a fighting position (laughs). I think the worry is bigger, I hope for example that the sticks won't fall, since if they fall the rhythm will stop. I'm like that.

Are you aware of the fact that what you've been doing so far and the results you got are being linked ?

I don't know... The fact that we are staying in this circle that way, and that our records sales go up to 500.000 copies, makes me feel something like destiny. You know, I believe in destiny. So I think that maybe we were lucky to have been guided by destiny. So, about the "Buck-Tick Genshou (Buck-Tick phenomenon)" at the Yutaka Koukaido (note : the live which permit the band to sign with a major label), I can only think that the audience accepted to be caught in the mechanism. Moreover, considering our abilities of that time, we weren't a band that could gather an audience that goes up to five times the capacity. Really, it was a circle where you do your utmost and then you can only let God decide for the rest.

Recently, you said that you can finally assert what you really are, does this mean you couldn't do that so far ?

In the beginning, when you start as a major band, you have, despite everything, to accept the major system. Really, until "Seventh Heaven", we were in a situation where we couldn't refuse what we disliked. So, it happened that Acchan had to do a game in a gathering of fans, and after that he went back home very angered (laughs). We thought, is it that to be a major band ? But we knew later that we were the first band to have done, for our launching, stuffs that usually idols do (laughs). It happened that we were the first ones to have done stuffs different from the methods used until there. So, when we knew that we were shocked (laughs). Because until there, we thought that what we did was normal.

Despite of that, you've been expressing in your albums stuffs that are very self-asserting

Because we all wanted to engrave the best of what we had at these moments. So, it's not really a matter of technique, we pulled out the maximum we could at that moment, and stocked it. This means that we don't think about what comes after. In the interviews, when we were asked something like "what will happen next ?", we were often in a state where we said "We don't know. Since we pulled everything out we are like a blank paper, we can't say anything anymore". Today we are still like that.

In this meaning, in this "Kurutta Taiyou", in what did you pull out everything ?

The basis of the arrangement is that, Imai does his own, and Hide his own... So, what I cared the most about was, since guitars and vocals are put over me, I had to make their basis as solid as possible. I think this comes from what "Taboo" 's producer learnt me, the sensation of "just" which doesn't allow the sound's trembling. Until there, I didn't think about it that much. So, maybe I was too indulgent towards myself. When I thought it was right following my sensibility, I imposed it. I didn't listen enough to other persons' opinion, I was just thinking that if I felt it good, that was right.

With what kind of stance do you consider the Rock that you do ?

There are sounds and it certainly is a style too. So, I think that if we were popular, that would be rather weird. If it's not maniac to some extent, maybe it won't be cool enough... In reality, I think that people listen to music with that state of mind too. They think that this band is cool because they are different from the others on such points. As far as I'm concerned, the bands that I've liked so far are all original bands too.

You mean that their music is transmitted distinctively from the one of the idols ?

It's rather something that people feel at the moment they see us, and we don't force ourselves to show that we are different from them. When we show ourselves in lives and if we ask, do we look like idols, I think we don't. Until now we've been, in an usual way, playing in livehouses, that's our way of expression. So we don't care about how people see us, when they see bands something lets them guess how the latters grew up.

Then, how do you see the other bands ?

Well, I think that the ones that passed through identical methods look somewhere like us. Not the sounds, but the impression they give, their presence.

When you said a moment ago that you could play your own way, does this come from concrete results such as the number of audience or your albums sales ?

I thought that after all, if you win you become the imperial army (laughs). It allows you to say whatever you want.

Making this album, did you think you won ?

I don't really know what is to win or loose, but we have deepened what we really wanted to do, using as much recording time as we wanted. (laughs) We used around 900 hours. So, I wondered if we were in a situation where we were allowed to do that. You know, only 3 years have passed since our debut, but during that time it happened quite many stuffs in our band. Like that incident (note : probably the fact that Hisashi was arrested for lsd use). At that moment, I honestly thought we had lost. It was like, we couldn't say what we want anymore. And that was really the case. In the final analysis, it was like if we had completely lost our will during the process of rebirth... If I say it exaggeratedly, we were at the point 0 at that moment. From the point of view of our album sales, we hadn't fallen, but psychologically, how to say, we experienced again a decline (laughs). Personally, I couldn't care less about if our sales fell. What I want is to accomplish what we want to do. The basis of Buck-Tick's music is that the melodies are our major premise, so I think that we'll never escape from that objective (laughs).

By the way, you said you'd want to play in livehouses

Yes, like at Shinjuku Loft. If we limit the audience, I think it would be possible, and there won't be any problem. Even if they are only few hundreds, there is more pressure when they are closer to us, so we could see very clearly who they are looking at. Thinking about it now, I think it would be interesting. Just imagine Acchan facing empty seats, singing sitting next to a spectator (laughs).

Talking in this meaning, what could be the things you lost and the ones you gained arriving at this point ?

What we lost is surely, Imai and Acchan were targeted about it, our private life. It's really awful, these pictures, magazines. We'd like to say, we are a rock band so these things don't concern you at all. What we gained... a bit popularity, and fans (laughs).

Living your way, where do you look for for your feeling of satisfaction, as a musician ?

I simply wish we could reach the popularity of Yu-min or Southern (note : Southern All Stars). To get a solid status. That we could freely do all what we want to do, in a good meaning, wishing that our audience would accept it.

--fin

translation: hyluko [livejournal] scans: tigerpal [livejournal]

NOTE: these translations are not mine also might not be very accurate. i took them from hyluko’s site using the wayback machine. thought they’re great to share. if the owner is around and wants me to take them down i will!

#バクチク #ヤガミトール #狂った太陽 #Buck-Tick #Toll Yagami #Kurutta Taiyou #translation #pati-pati

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maskydoo · 5 years

Text

Nightmare Neighbors 6

(I’m writing out scripts for upcoming storytime style youtube videos, and posting what I have here. Note that this is a true story. Feedback is welcome.)

Nightmare Neighbors 6 draft

Imagine the angriest crazies you’ve ever met online. Now imagine they know where you live. Now imagine, they routinely hang around near your house, waiting to catch you outside and alone.

Somehow, my life next to Loony and Toony Feckwad was like living right next to the worst kind of Youtube comments section.

And there’s no simple block function.

Now, I’ve been using the made-up names for these people throughout the telling of this story so far, but during these events, I didn’t actually know these people’s names.

I figured at this point, since I was getting the law involved, I really should find out.

Also, I told my boss about what happened, and he told the higher ups at the company. They decided for security reasons to preemptively ban the two crazies from the premises, and needed names and identifying photos so the guards could deny them entry if they ever showed up at my work.

But. Like. It’s not like I could just ask them their names anymore.

So what can I do?

The obvious option was to do a public records search by looking up their address. I got names… but… I wasn’t entirely 100% totally certain it was really them.

I didn’t know how trustworthy the information on shady-looking public records sites would be, and I didn’t want to accidentally give the police, and eventually the court, the wrong people’s names.

I was especially confused since multiple surnames came up for Loony, and I wasn’t sure if they were different people who happened to have the same first name, or if Loony really did change her surname that many times. (It turned out to be the latter.)

So. To Facebook. I couldn’t find a profile for Toony, but I did find Loony. Good enough, now I could confirm their identities.

That was all I wanted to do. I didn’t care to go through her information, and I certainly didn’t want to contact her. I wanted as little to do with her as possible, which was partly why I waited this long to even find out their names.

I was about to click away when… I noticed something. Right to the top of her profile there were several unhinged posts that were clearly about me.

For starters, she was convinced I was stalking her Facebook, and had been for some time. These posts were deranged rants that were clearly meant to call me out, and included lines like:

“I know you’re reading this, stalker!”

I mean… now I was reading it, but these posts went back weeks, months. What the hell, lady? She thought I cared to see her facebook, but that was the first time I ever looked her up.

She even had one that was taunting me for not getting to have her husband and how she’s a special beautiful wife.

She… just has no grasp on reality at all. Imagine being mercilessly harassed by crazy people over a situation that only ever existed in their head.

In her posts, she also ranted about how I was calling her from hidden numbers. Anytime she got a call, it was absolutely me. It MUST have been.

I don’t. I don’t think I have to tell you I obviously never called these people. I’m a millennial. I can barely be bothered to call people I actually like. I order pizza through apps just to avoid speaking to a human.

But that’s not all I was accused of. In a more recent post, she insisted that I had some habit of driving slowly past her house with binoculars.

Ummm…

I live next door to her. I drive in this neighborhood because… I live here. But I funny enough, I don’t drive past her house. I don’t need to. My house is on the corner.

And what would I need binoculars for? Their house is only a few yards from the road. Even if I wanted to watch them… I wouldn’t need binoculars for it. And I would think driving at the same time would be pretty difficult.

I don’t think I even own any binoculars.

And what a weird thing to complain about when they are literally the ones watching me. They watch me from their windows, they stand outside in the dark waiting for me to get home from work. And apparently that’s OK.

Lady. Lady. Lady…. lady. Lady. Do you live in your own little world?

I guess she just assumed that since she was so obsessed with me, I must be obsessed with her.

That’s… that’s not how anything works.

I know in an previous video I called out Toony as a viewer,

(replay joke)

But that was obviously a JOKE. I don’t expect him to ever actually watch this. And I don’t expect he’d have the self-awareness to recognize himself if he did.

But Loony, Loony really thought I had nothing better to do stalk her, or at leas that’s what she was claiming to think on Facebook for whatever relatives of hers that would see it.

I have no idea why she wrote those things. It could be she was just lying for attention, just making it up out of nothing. For what reason, I have no idea.

Or It could be that she was truly delusional, and genuinely believed her own words. It’s possible she was suffering from very real paranoia.

I think the difference between her paranoia and mine is that I actually did have crazy, hostile neighbors.

Whereas Luna had a neighbor who wanted nothing to do with her. I’d be happy to pretend she didn’t exist. If she and Toony ever quit their nonsense, that would be the end of it.

Yet here she was, pretending it was the other way around.

Now. I don’t really care about the unflattering and untrue things she was saying about me on her page. They were absolutely insane, yes, but were not really harassment like standing around in the dark screaming at me when I get home. It’s her page. She can write what she wants. I don’t have to read it.

What I did care about though were the references she kept making in her rants to the day I’d ‘get what was coming to me.’ She said multiple vague threatening sounding things along those lines in a number of her posts about me.

So, yeah… I was right about this pattern of escalation. This nutjob clearly intended to do me harm eventually. As she said herself, it was only a matter of time.

To make matters worse is her Facebook friends and family believed her, and wanted involved. Maybe they’re similarly crazy people, or maybe they were actually decent folks but, since they only had her crazy words to go on, got a very wrong impression of the actual situation.

Either way, this was really concerning when a number of these people left comment son her rants, offering to come ‘deal with me,’ and asking Loony for my information, my name, where I lived.

Ok, so that angry internet strangers at my house metaphor I used earlier had a strong chance of becoming a lot more real than I thought. There were now strangers volunteering to physically come to my home to physically punish me for things the Feckwads were making up.

This is bad. This is real bad.

I didn’t know what to do. I was completely sickened by what I saw. I knew I never wanted look at her page again. I just wanted to close the page and never think of it again.

But… forgetting what I saw wouldn’t make it go away. The danger still existed.

And now it wasn’t just the neighbors I had to worry about. This witch has and an army of flying monkeys to send at me. Any random stranger on the block could have been with Loony and I had no way of knowing.

At this point in my life, I was already dealing with a lot of problems. And I really, really, really did not need this.

I was now alone most of the year, with my boyfriend away at work in another country. I didn’t really have any friends or family nearby. Not much of a social life to speak of. Even at work I was largely isolated. Being a security guard, I was often the only person in the entire building.

My only regular human contact was decidedly negative, which made me withdraw more.

It was like when you burn your hand, you don’t want to reach out again.

And now even had to worry about random strangers at my door.

As I mentioned before, my work schedule was inhuman. I’d work morning, day, and night shift all within the span of a week. Sometimes, these would be 12-hour shifts with only 8-hours off in between. I never had a consistent sleep times.

And when I tried to sleep, I was kept awake by daytime noises, just the unease of being alone, and by having unstable neighbors who liked to sneak around near my house at night.

The work schedule and lack of sleep weren’t great for my grades. I was, of and on, taking classes full time. Or, I was trying to, but concentration was hard. I ended up getting sick and as a result of everything, failed an important class.

My dog got sick, needing medication multiple times per day. Then my cat got sick, and needed emergency surgery. I’d drag myself half asleep to vet appointments, try to find ways to make medication times fit work hours, setting alarms to wake myself up in the few hours I could sleep to give meds, and worried constantly about how I was going to pay for it all.

I spent most of my time indoors. The construction of our homes was very much not in my favor. The way they were designed, the neighbors could easily see from their windows when I was outside. Their bedroom window had a clear view over my fence and into my back yard. And their kitchen widow could see my driveway, so they always knew when I came or left. If they saw me outside, they’d shout from their windows or even come outside to confront me.

But my windows minded their own business. I couldn’t see their property from inside my house they way they could see mine. So I had no way of knowing if they were out there until I was already out my door. I had no way of avoiding them.

So I just. Stayed inside. I was exhausted anyway.

That garden project I wanted to start? Not happening now that my yard isn’t a relaxing place to be anymore.

My dog wants to play, but she’ll have to settle for chasing the ball inside.

The grass is getting long, but I can only manage a section at a time before I’m interrupted.

Eventually, it got hard to find the motivation to do much of anything at all. I hardly even saw the sun anymore.

I’m not saying that the neighbors alone pushed me to seriously google symptoms of depression. They weren’t that powerful, and I wouldn’t want to give them too much credit. I probably would have been feeling generally pretty low anyway.

But they were an extra source of stress that I did not need on top of everything else, and contributed to making my existing troubles worse.

I mush have looked pretty pathetic. I don’t care much for malls, but I dragged myself to one one day, and I wasn’t even sure why. I guess I just wanted to be away from my house. I bought a pair of pants I didn’t need just to justify the trip. This cashier, I didn’t even know her, came around the corner and hugged me. I didn’t tell her anything, but I guess she just knew I needed it.

I should be able to feel safe in my home, but this was stolen from me. I worried about what might come next. Maybe they’d damage my property. Maybe they’d hurt my dogs. Maybe they’d attack me in my driveway or break into my home. Maybe they’d send a stranger after me.

I couldn’t know.

But what I did know, is that I couldn’t live with this. No. I wouldn't live like this. I refused.

Time for a plan.

#maskydoo #nightmare neighbors #storytime #script #feedback welcome

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