#i think my Heavy depression makes it hard for me to get the brain chemical response needed for the adhd brain employees to go 'mm yummy' | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

un-unavoidableanxiousball · 1 month

Text

This one I wrote when I was 15 and posted on Wattpad as well. I also added some things while editing. I wonder what it says about my mental state that I could so easily get into that mindset... (T-T)

Masterlist

Letting Go

Rating: Mature

Characters: unnamed female character, mental voice,

Tags: venting, nature, heavy angst, depressive and suicidal thoughts as a mental voice, (heavily implied) character death,

! Warnings ! : suicide, s3lf-harm, depression, suicidal thoughts, description of blood, suicide attempt, self-doubt, low self-esteem, death, vomit, self-destructive behaviour

Word count: 1979

Read at your own discretion.

⚠︎⚠︎⚠︎⚠︎⚠︎⚠︎⚠︎⚠︎⚠︎☠︎︎⚠︎⚠︎⚠︎⚠︎⚠︎⚠︎⚠︎⚠︎⚠︎

Have you ever felt hopeless?

That kind of hopelessness which paralyzes you. Not your body — your mind. Or perhaps it's not even your mind, but your emotions. Brain producing or receiving the wrong chemicals — it's guesswork, never paid attention in biology class — to some it might be the soul that faulty.

Paralyzes you in such a way that no matter how many times or for how long your thoughts accuse you of wasting time, to move, be productive, improve! No matter the loudness and frequency of their unheard screams to others — you're stuck. Can't bring yourself to change, because why should you try to when there's billions of people on earth more worthy of the chance called life, everyone dies in the end. What do you put into the world, if human lifespan is so short yet too long as well and there were countless human before you and will be after you.

You're so paralyzed that if in moments of great emotions, you can't bring yourself to care. Can't find guilt after an argument, no anger nor embarrassment after being insulted, somehow no tears are visible when a close member dies and it's time to pay respects. Pleasure is unfound, because you don't know what should bring it. It's full resignation or numbness.

Ever felt like anything you would do just isn't enough for people around you? That no matter how hard you try, how much efford you put in — nobody seems to appreciate it? No visible pride in the people around you. Moreover some see those accomplishments as bare minimum; which hurts so deeply in your heart it can't get through the darkness and unstable walls.

Perhaps the times you accomplished something — something as simple like organising your desk or cleaning your room, eating a meal or just getting out of the wretched bed; damn it you were proud of yourself! You went to share your pride with someone, only to get lectured for not doing anything useful nor helpful for them? For slouching around, being an obstacle, a burden.

You feel more depressed in result. Close yourself off, escape the pesky problems, and whenever you've accomplished something again — you start to doubt if telling somebody else about it will ever bring positive outcome or worse you doubt yourself.

Day by day you re-think each and every action you're about to make to prevent yourself from getting more hurt than you already are.

One after another after another after ano—— and you don't care. You didn't even notice when you stopped caring. Seems like personalised masks became permanent. You have built walls so high to not be hurt as much and as strong as you've been before.

You can't find yourself enjoying the things you've liked or were told you did before. As if the little passion you had — had been drained from you, locked and wasted. Spoiled.

Yet somehow you managed to fake it all and lie to your friends, with a fake smile, a fake enthusiastic voice, fake opinions on whatever topic, which you probably weren't intresting in in any way or just didn't want to be excluded from the little group of friends you managed to have.

But even that loss it's 'spark'. Now, you distance yourself from them too, no matter how it pains you in the inside, no matter the childish voice inside you that tell you "Mama, mama help me, anyone,".

Because you want nothing more than to cry on their shoulder tell them anything and everything that bothers you and weights down on your very soul, to be hugged and feel loved; but you don't do it, won't do it in fear of being judged, laughed at or pushing them away with the state you're in.

No, you can't have that, can you?

Too many times were you ignored to not expect anything else to be the truth.

A certain girl definitely feels that way. She's come so far as to ignore all of her friends. But hey, it's not like they noticed or anything, she always was kind of distant. Introverts, right?

At the moment the girl was standing on a bridge. She's looking at the small river flowing by below her.

She comes to this place almost everyday whenever she feels like getting away from everything. She grew to love it here, the trees around gave great amount of shadow to hide from sun's rays on warmer days, the gentle wind calmed her down whenever she was stressed and the beautiful sound of the river flowing was calming as well.

She spent almost all day in here today.

Today was difficult for her, she couldn't bear it even though nothing bad happened to her. Nothing stands out. She did what she felt like - came to her safe zone to be alone. Of course she couldn't get rid of that voice which somehow made it's way in to her head and controls her heart.

While making her way to a tree to sit down under, she felt tears in her eyes as she heard the voice's mocking words.

"You're weak. You can't even embrace a little truth without taking it out on yourself." it whines, "No wonder you've no friends! Hahahaha—," the laughter continued, "You end up shoving them away to the basement, you starve them and then, and then, ha hahaha, you act surprised when your connections are long dead and starved!"

The girl was full on sobbing.

"Damn, what was it about a lover? Your dreams only. You're ugly. I mean look at yourself! How could you be pretty with those big disgusting cuts?"

"Plus you're lazy, you can't do anything right." it cackled, "I mean... they're such easy tasks, so... What makes you wonder that your Charming One wouldn't look down on you? You're no royalty.."

"Why are you so naive as to have unreachable and unrealistic dreams? I know!" a dramatic pause, "You're stupid."

She was wailing with her legs pressed against her chest. She couldn't stop herself from letting the tears out from her eyes as the voice continued.

"Nobody loves you, because you're useless. Can't you see? You're not good enough, you'll never be. They don't care about you. Why would they? You couldn't care less for them. You're an emotional mess. Not a grain of realness inside you. I pity them. Having to look at you is just painful. No wonder they avoid you."

The girl tried to calm herself but was unable to. Her body was shaking from her ugly sobs. Crying a river of tears, she tried to take deep breaths to maybe stabilise her shallow hiccuping breathing.

"You're such a crybaby. Can't you handle a simple truth?" It scoffed in her mind. "Wait I forgot, we already covered that. Your idiocy is contagious. Bleh."

After some time she succeed to calm down, mainly by beating her thighs repeatedly. Sobs were still escaping her chest every once in a while. She felt the itching on her arms, making it hard not to scratch or reach for her pocket knife in her bag.

"What? You're resisting this urge? Since when? You're not strong to keep it up. You always relive yourself this way, don't you know? Did you forget? Memory too short?" it cruelly went on, "You like the feeling of the blade on your skin and the pain it brings along. And the blood. Mmm. That delicious blood, running, dripping down your arms. There's always blood whenever you cut, don't you hate it? It's entertaining for me to see your disgust, the blood makes you want to throw up or pass out. Are we keeping count?" it intoned, "I'd be lying if I said I was surprised, but then again you're just some psycho who clearly doesn't know how to properly act like one!"

She could hear the sinister tone the voice has. Although it pains her greatly, it was right. She hated the sight of blood and yet she continues to harm herself. It really relived her. She knows it's not healthy nor anything positive. Yet she can't seem to stop.

She slowly rolled up the black sleeve of her hoodie. She put the knife to her arm.

Pressed.

She could feel the smirk, smug satisfaction in to the voice, and also her own satisfaction at the feeling of the blade cutting her skin. She created more cuts in places which weren't covered yet.

Trying to ignore the crimson red liquid flowing down her arm — to focus on anything else but fresh, leaking wounds. Taking deep breaths. No, no no nononono the smell — horrid, terrible — metalic stale.

In and out..

In—

She could practically feel the bole in her mouth. Focus elsewhere, c'mon...

Fresh air filled her lungs with each breath. Wind, chirping birds and slowly flowing river created a pleasant melody.

The water as a beautifully sounding base, the wind played the various instruments, grass, trees, bushes. Birds sang with different voices and tones, each special in their own way. If someone was to listen to the sounds, they most likely wouldn't hear those the same way or just ignore them seeing nothing special unlike her. She apriciates anything that's pretty, elegant, natural moreover can't cause her harm.

"Speaking of which, are you enjoying yourself, bitch? I'm confident you spacing out made a lot of good to those ugly wounds!"

It cackled when it felt her flinching at the mention of the name. Girl's eyes cousiously wandered to her left arm. Immediately she regreted doing so. Her face expressed disgust as she tried not to gag nor vomit at the sight.

Her arm was covered in so many scars now, not a single one of the older ones was visible. The cuts were different lengths, deepths, some were wider, others smaller, some placed horizontally, some vertically. To add more to this mess — the blood was everywhere now, the dirt, her hoodie, on her jeans.

Blood was all coming from the horrible cuts she made which made her even more nauseous.

Averting her eyes, she tried to focus on something else, yet she couldn't. The image haunted her mind, she couldn't block it off.

The girl started to gag, sweet acidic taste filled her mouth.

Abruptly she stood up, making it worse, trying to rush to the river. Her vision got more foggy and unclear as she moved forward. She stumbled on her feet, falling to her hands and knees. Not being really far away from the water she managed to reach it and as soon as she did that she threw up everything her stomach previously contained.

"You do know you can't do anything about your arm right? I mean... you could always add more. You're going to die anyway so what's the point? Bonus Points! — if you'll die here nobody will find you. You're all alone. Nobody cares about your well-being. Not that they care about your being at all..."

More tears continued to stream down her face as she listened to the voice. The pain coming from her arm is getting more unbearable by each passing second.

Her vision starts to fade as she tries to control her sobs, ignore the pain and block out the images of the blood and memories of her family and friends. She could hear the cruel laughter and continuous mocking of the voice but even it starts to quieten.

Being overwhelmed by hurtful sensations, she couldn't seem to feel her body. Her tears were silently from her brown eyes, praying for somebody to find her, to take care of her, to tell her everything will be okay.

But her prayers weren't answered, maybe they didn't reach anyone in the first place. As she was letting go, the darkness took care of her.

Nobody came. Proving to her about her meaninglessness.

"I'm sorry." A mere whisper left her lips.

...

#cross posted on wattpad #original work #original character #tw s3lf harm #tw sui attempt #tw depressing thoughts #reupload #heavy topics #heavy angst #rating: mature

2 notes · View notes

dollsonmain · 2 years

Text

This is one of those “Should I put this on the whining blog? AM I whining or am I talking about something? I don’t even know.” things, so have a cut.

So I’m obviously having a depressive spiral ಠ_ಠ and these down swings make everything hurt and everything is personal and too hard and I’m just wrong there’s no place in the world for people like me and I need to die to make the world better and end my own suffering because there’s no other option.

Being aware that it’s a depressive episode both does and does not help endure it. The negative feelings are very real and very deep, but I KNOW it’ll let up after a while and be less heavy so just hold on, right? That’s kept me alive so far.

Anyway.

Posts go around and make me think of things that make me even more unhappy with myself and really it’s all self-loathing, self-disgust, and that’s especially heavy during a depressive spiral.

Right now I’m plagued by a post about unrequited love and one about maladaptive daydreaming.

I am guilty of both.

The unrequited love post basically boiled down to “Stop torturing yourself. Break all contact.”

It is torturous to want something you can never, ever have. It’s no different for me than wanting to be fit, strong, and active and have all of those happy brain chemicals people say come with it. It will. never. happen. I am disabled.

But wow do I want it, and not being able to have it due to circumstances that I can’t change hurts.

I’ve asked myself many times whether it would hurt me more to break contact or to keep being friends but always wanting more.

I’d rather support him as a friend than never speak to him again no matter how much it hurts to want something from him that he can’t give me because he doesn’t have the same feelings for me that I do for him.

There was another thing my cousin posted that was "Peace is the result of retraining your mind to process life as it is, rather than how you think it should be.” - Wayne Dyer

And I’m like...

Life, as it is, is SHITTY, I’m being emotionally and financially abused, people are being killed for the color of their skin, the environment is collapsing, it should NOT be this way! Who the FUCK would tell someone to be PEACEFUL with that and not want that situation to improve???

That’s like when I bring up something That Guy does that is abusive and hurtful and he says “Just don’t get mad.” like..... DON’T GET MAD?!?!??!?!?!!?

Gentlemen, you can both kindly fuck right off.

Though I have a feeling the original quote had more to do with money than anything else. They usually do. Be content with what you have instead of jealous of people that have more money, their flashy lives and lots of expensive stuff don’t mean they’re happy.

The more I train my mind to process life as it is, the more discontent and angry I become.

Then the maladaptive daydreaming post....

That’s kind of all I have keeping me going right now. Imaginary love for myself as I am. Imaginary different self that is worthy of love. Imaginary independence. Imaginary mobility, strength, and grace (I am so clumsy...). Having my own little imaginary place that I’m able to afford because of my imaginary job.

More things I want and can’t have, and the part that hurts most is coming back to reality and being reminded how very different what I want is versus what is real and what is attainable.

But the gist of the post was that daydreaming becomes maladaptive when it cuts into your productivity and ability to work toward those dreams and it’s like, in my case, WHAT productivity? I am DISABLED. I’m not productive. What little bit I can do to work toward that dream is not enough.

How else would I spend that time? Staring at the walls?

Anyway, I think the biggest detriment to my own daydreams, because productivity is not affected in my case since it’s something that occupies my physical down-time anyway, is the constant yearning for things I can’t and will never have, just like unrequited love.

But even in my daydreams I rarely have or get what I want. My low self-worth makes the potential lovers turn away and the effort fail even when it isn’t real. So part of the detriment is also constantly experiencing the same agonizingly consistent failure even in my own daydreams.

But hey, 20 years and a new paintbrush later and I can finally paint a thin line.

15 notes · View notes

thelovelygods · 3 years

Link

As a teenager, Sylvia Plath vividly understood the extent to which her body steered her. "If I didn't have sex organs, I wouldn't waver on the brink of nervous emotion and tears all the time," she wrote in her journal in 1950. Ten days before her death, she had come to believe that "fixed stars/Govern a life." It turns out that Plath was probably right -- more right than she could have possibly known -- about her biology and her fate. But when Plath's journals were first published in 1982, what was most obvious about her was the supercharged nature of her emotions. Whatever causal agents may have been governing Plath's life, they were blown back by the force of her personality.

As unmistakable as were Plath's volatile emotions in the 1982 journals, the heavy editing of the text necessarily made it hard to discern the patterns to her moods. Even so, there did seem to be a detectable pattern, and it did not seem then, nor had it seemed to the people closest to her during the last years of her life, to be merely a function of temperament. In the weeks before her suicide, Plath's physician, John Horder, noted that Plath was not simply deeply depressed, but that her condition extended beyond the boundaries of a psychological explanation.

In a letter years later to Plath biographer Linda Wagner-Martin, Horder stated: "I believe ... she was liable to large swings of mood, but so excessive that a doctor inevitably thinks in terms of brain chemistry. This does not reduce the concurrent importance of marriage break-up or of exhaustion after a period of unusual artistic activity or from recent infectious illness or from the difficulties of being a responsible, practical mother. The full explanation has to take all these factors into account and more. But the irrational compulsion to end it makes me think that the body was governing the mind."

For at least the past 10 years it has been generally assumed that Plath fit the schema of manic-depressive illness, with alternating periods of depression and more productive and elated episodes.

The hypothesis that Plath suffered from a bipolar disorder is persuasive. But in late 1990, another, even more intriguing medical theory emerged. Using the evidence of Plath's letters, poems, biographies and the 1982 journals, a graduate student named Catherine Thompson proposed that Plath had suffered from a severe case of premenstrual syndrome. In "Dawn Poems in Blood: Sylvia Plath and PMS," which appeared in the literary magazine Triquarterly, Thompson theorized that Plath's mood volatility, depressions, many chronic ailments and ultimately her suicide were traceable to the poet's menstrual cycles and the hormonal disruptions caused by PMS.

Thompson pointed out that Plath unwittingly recorded experiencing on a cyclical basis all of the major symptoms of PMS, as well as many others, including low impulse control, extreme anger, unexplained crying and hypersensitivity. She also suffered many of the physical symptoms associated with PMS, notably extreme fatigue, insomnia and hypersomnia, extreme changes in appetite, itchiness, conjunctivitis, ringing in the ears, feelings of suffocation, headaches, heart palpitations and the exacerbation of chronic conditions such as her famous sinus infections.

Thompson compared Plath's reported mood and health changes with the journals, letters and biographies and found that her symptoms seemed to appear and disappear abruptly on a fairly regular schedule, with clusters of physical symptoms and depressive affect followed by dramatic changes in outlook and overall physical health. Those patterns can be directly linked to the dates of Plath's actual menses, particularly in 1958 and 1959, when she most habitually noted her cycles. Judging from the pattern of Plath's depression and health in late 1952 and in 1953 until her Aug. 24 suicide attempt, Thompson posited that "it seems reasonable to conclude that this suicide attempt was directly precipitated by hormonal disruption during the late luteal phase of her menstrual cycle and secondarily by her loss of self-esteem at being unable to control her depression."

Thompson showed that a well-known journal entry from Feb. 20, 1956, is clearly traceable to Plath's menses, to which she refers directly a few days later. The journal fragment takes on new meaning in light of having been written during the physically and emotionally debilitating luteal phase of Plath's cycle: "Dear Doctor: I am feeling very sick. I have a heart in my stomach which throbs and mocks. Suddenly the simple rituals of the day balk like a stubborn horse. It gets impossible to look people in the eye: corruption may break out again? Who knows. Small talk becomes desperate. Hostility grows, too. That dangerous, deadly venom which comes from a sick heart. Sick mind, too." On Feb. 24, the same day she notes in her journal that she has a sinus cold and "atop of this, through the hellish sleepless night of feverish sniffling and tossing, the macabre cramps of my period (curse, yes) and the wet, messy spurt of blood," Plath wrote a letter to her mother blaming her dark mood on her physical health: "I am so sick of having a cold every month; like this time, it generally combines with my period."

By the fall of 1962, the poems (which Plath carefully dated as they were completed) seem to follow a pattern of metaphorical renewals and optimistic transformations for roughly two to three weeks of artistic production, then jagged, seething accusations and aggression for a couple of weeks.

Thompson's PMS theory has been largely ignored by Plath scholars. But it immediately gained two important supporters: Anne Stevenson, Plath's controversial biographer, and Olwyn Hughes, Plath's former sister-in-law, whose letters were published in a subsequent issue of Triquarterly. Though oddly defensive in tone, Stevenson's letter does commend Thompson for her "invaluable contribution to Plath scholarship ... Certainly no future study of Plath will be able to ignore the probable effects of premenstrual syndrome on her imagination and behavior." And it states that she wishes she had been able to utilize Thompson's insights in the writing of her own work on Plath.

A letter from Olwyn Hughes also congratulates Thompson for her scholarship, but unlike Stevenson, Hughes practically stumbles over herself in amazement at the PMS theory. Hughes, who was quoted in Janet Malcolm's book "The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes" as characterizing her long-dead sister-in-law as "pretty straight poison," wrote to Thompson: "It is quite a shock to digest all this -- after thinking for so long that Sylvia's subconscious mind was her prison, and to suddenly realise it may well have been in part, or wholly, her body. But it certainly tallies with Ted's mentions -- he has always felt some chemical imbalance was involved."

Hughes further points out that Ted Hughes had spoken of Plath's ravenous appetite just prior to her periods and asks, "I wonder if that is a known characteristic of PMS?" (According to the PMS literature, it is.) But most tellingly, Olwyn Hughes explains that "one of the reasons I was so bowled over by your piece is that Sylvia's daughter, very like her physically, suffers quite badly from PMS but is, in these enlightened times, aware of it and treats it."

Dr. Glenn Bair, one of the leading experts on PMS treatment and research in the United States, confirmed to Salon that PMS is typically passed from mother to daughter. In a rare interview about her parents, Frieda Hughes told the Manchester Guardian in 1997 that after the "collapse of her health," including extreme fatigue and gynecological problems, she underwent a hysterectomy in her 30s.

After a careful review of Thompson's article, of a seven-page monthly breakdown of Plath's symptoms for 1958 through 1959 and of the documented evidence of Plath's pregnancies and postpartum symptoms of 1959 through 1962, Bair said, "If you hack through the PMDD criteria, I think that you'll find that she fits the PMDD profile."

#sylvia plath #pmdd #this almost made me cry #SHE UNDERSTOOD

168 notes · View notes

burnedbyshoto · 3 years

Text

I wanted to make myself like the ravine

— There are plenty of things that Hawks knows about, but there are few he knows none about. A journey of how Hawks navigates the meaning of the word love.

⋄⋆⊹⋄⋆⋄⋆⊹⋄⋆⋄⋆⊹⋄⋆

pairing: hawks (takami keigo) x fem!reader

warnings: recent manga spoilers, future!au, alcohol consumption, fem!reader

word count: 6,819

a/n: this is for the pocuties valentines day collab! rhank you for letting me join! inspired by the poem to the title of this fic!

⋄⋆⊹⋄⋆⋄⋆⊹⋄⋆⋄⋆⊹⋄⋆

A G A P E

—

Hawks is one of the fastest men in the world.

It’s not a brag; it’s the truth.

A cold, hard, damning truth.

Hawks is a Pro Hero with the power, skill, and finesse required to take the fall for the entire country. He is someone who is loved by all, who thrives off of the appreciation and the cheers, but he knows — he understands — he’s expendable. He’s a tool—an object seconds from being put to rest.

There are many things that Hawks knows; he’s been training to be a hero since he was in his very childhood. Blindfolded, tested and conditioned to be the ideal hero, the perfect pawn.

Hawks is no idiot, and he will never deny that often times that he isn’t sure what he is feeling.

Emotions are weird for him. Feelings are oversimplified in everything he was taught, yet disgustingly really and oddly interfering the second he had set foot into the spotlight. He was used to the cold, the people who would view him as a specimen, experiment 20493, codenamed: Fierce Winged Hawks. The only emotions he understood was apathy, seriousness, anger, resentment, bitterness, disappointment, and relief. When finally, finally, the Hero Commission broke his wings, his spine, and his mind, the small boy so eager to be a Hero ultimately nothing but a soldier, ready to follow commands to the T.

Hawks has only heard of love from the blurry, unclear memories of his childhood. His mother muttering how she had no love for him to be taking care of him as he did, or his father saying he could never love him. Love was foreign, strange, alien to him. Even when he was eighteen and finally given a bit of freedom from the chains the Hero Commission bound him in was expressed out of love. But he was put into the cage that granted him the ability to spread his stiff wings; love made no sense.

He saw lovers making out in alleyways, and he furrowed his eyebrows, wondering just why anyone would want to kiss in the smelly, dark, virus-infected areas. He saw his colleagues come in looking dazed, refreshed, reborn, yelling loudly, and singing poetry about their love for some other person they met just yesterday. He also couldn’t ignore the days, weeks, months later when they would rearrive with red-rimmed eyes, swollen eyes, and a tremor to their voice.

Love seemed… awful to Hawks.

Love was a deception of brain chemicals. Nothing more than your mind bending, flipping, and twisting to make something that made absolutely no sense make sense.

Hawks had expressed that one day to a sidekick of his, his barriers and walls crumbling away because he had been on a stakeout for five days straight now. The world that could never keep up with him was numbing his brain.

“Well, that’s romantic and flirtatious love for ya,” his sidekick explained with a halfhearted shrug. It seemed that he both agreed and disagreed with what Hawks had to say. “They’re amazing loves, don’t get it wrong, and they definitely don’t make sense, but they’re loves not meant to last.”

Hawks blinked.

“What?”

His sidekick chuckled, hands rubbing at his eyes as he peered out the window again, his sullen eyes looking even more tired.

“Have you never learned the different types of love before, Hawks?” the sidekick teased as much as he was curious. “I figured a pro as popular and smart as you are would know the different types of love.”

Hawks feathers fluttered in his inability to keep his lack of knowledge to himself.

“I don’t.”

“Wow, finally something Hawks isn’t aware of!” the sidekick laughed, and his hand opened his phone, fingers hitting the screen before shoving the device into Hawks’ chest. “I’m sure you’ll find that you can understand at least one love.”

Hawks grabbed the phone, head cocking to the side in his curiosity as he scrolled down through the phone.

There were eight different types.

Eight different ones that he could have experienced within his then twenty-one years, and he found himself unable to look away from one.

Agape: universal, selfless love

“Hawks, they’re moving!” the sidekick squawked, and Hawks handed over the phone, and with nothing on his mind, burst out the window, ready to take down this organization.

Hawks had to admit that later that night, when he was finally able to sleep in his own bed, he felt selfless love. It was for the people of Japan. The many citizens who needed his help and the heroes of the country who rose to the demands of the job. Maybe it wasn’t the type of love depicted in anything he’s ever read or watched before, but that was okay. It was love.

The love he has for the citizens is enough to keep his head afloat.

This is the only love he needs in his life right now, the only love that matters.

But he’s no longer twenty-one, he’s twenty-five, and the wings on his back that feel practically invisible to him, are hurting. His back is in pain, his quirk almost gone, save for the smallest, insignificant feathers perching from the stumps of what was his beginnings of a wingspan. It still burns, phantom singes and phantom heat whenever he thinks about his nearly gone, never to be grown again, wings.

“Well, Hawks, you already know that this is going to happen,” comes the cold voice of one of the board members of the Hero Commission. A man who had practically raised (see managed) him.

Today was the end of Hawks life, more or less.

“AFO, Shigaraki Tomura, and the well-known former members of the League of Villains were finally stopped,” Hawks speaks with a nod. He knows, even though he could not be a soldier, he had been around to see the young UA students, Endeavors Interns, bring them to justice.

The biggest names of evil were dead, and Hawks already knew he was over.

To be fair, he was glad it was over.

But still, it hurt to hear the indifference in his voice, the apathy, the tedium.

“Operation: Fierce Wings - Hawks is officially over.”

“I could’ve figured that one out pretty easily,” Hawks jests, unable to show the way his heart twisted and withered under the knowledge that he was no longer a hero. His love, his agape, for the people were still there. Still, just as he recognized in his colleagues who were experiencing the different forms of love, it didn’t matter how much love you held for someone, something, for the innocent, helpless people…

Life takes, it destroys, and love doesn’t seem to have a chance.

“Thank you for your twenty years of service. I hope you find the freedom you had been looking for.”

P H I L A U T I A

It’s been a week.

Seven days, twenty-one hours, sixteen minutes, and thirty-four seconds since Hawks was fired (see Honorably Discharged) as a Pro Hero.

Hawks has always felt that the world moved oh so slowly behind him. It had been his wish that heroes be able to relax, laze around because society had evolved enough that criminals knew better, were treated better, and could integrate into a truly peaceful society.

It had been his dream.

But right now, he was bored.

B o r e d.

“Fuck, I don’t care,” Hawks grumbled, face smooshing into a pillow as he watched the Netflix Series Bridgerton drone on the screen. “Dump his ass.”

His apartment, it was safe to say, was a mess. There were cups, bowls, plates, and chopsticks everywhere. His hair was ruffled, stringy, held back by a hair clip he had stolen from Miruko. His beard was nearly fully grown in, and there were bags under his eyes despite the fact he was sleeping for more hours of the day than staying awake. He was sore, tired, bored.

So bored.

He didn’t think being bored was going to suck this much, going to hurt him like this.

Fuck.

“Open the damn door, bird boy!” came a sharp scream and powerful kick from the front door.

Hawks glared at the door, the tiniest of feathers he had been able to regrow, trying to pathetically open the lock on the door. A sheen layer of sweat pushed against his forehead, and Hawks grunted, trying to lift the heavy lock.

BAM.

The door swung open, forcefully kicked open by none other than Pro Hero Miruko.

“Yo!” Miruko waved, lips pulled in a fierce grin as she entered through the broken doorway with nothing but a bag of unknown items. “I figured you were here!”

“...you broke my door,” Hawks pointed out, eyes narrowed as dust and destruction danced within the air.

“You took too long,” Miruko breezed, slamming her plastic bag on the kitchen island. “It’s a fucking rats nest in here, birdbrain; I thought you were somewhat organized?”

Hawks groaned loudly, sinking further into his couch as Miruko began reorganizing his kitchen area — dumping the dirty dishes into the sink and throwing things away in fast, practiced skill. “Life is too boring, and I’m too bored to do anything about all of the mess,” Hawks exaggerates partially, hand twisting and dancing as he speaks. “Thanks for cleaning up the mess.”

“I’m not cleaning up your damn mess, birdbrain,” Miruko barks out a laugh, her hands slamming against the now, somehow, clean surface. “I’m just making my life easier!”

Hawks looked over the top of the couch with a semi impressed, semi uncaring look and shrugged.

“You seem to have a great handle over those robot limbs now,” he points out.

Sure enough, Miruko had two bionic limbs, limbs that she had finally managed to work into a fighting career. After spending two years on the sideline, relearning how to walk and then fight, she was back on the field.

She was a hero again, despite it all, unlike him.

“Damn right, I’m amazing!” Miruko preened, chest puffed, and bunny tail wagging excitedly. “But anyway, I figured your dumbass would be depressed, so I brought you some shit.”

Hawks watched with a curious gaze as Miruko quickly hopped once from where she was in the kitchen to a place on his couch, landing on Hawks' legs unintentionally.

“OW!”

“Look at what Rumi brought you,” Miruko laughed, slapping Hawks on the back as he cradled his legs. “And yes, I just referred to myself in the third person, so shush.”

Hawks grumbled, lips in a half pout, half frown.

Taking the opaque bag from Miruko, Hawks pulled out the many items in the bag.

Carrots, a KFC gift card, Korean skincare products, a movie about Miruko’s recovery process, and a 1001 Things to Do (A Book on Finding Self Love).

Hawks stares at the book.

“The perfect items for a self-care, self-love spa day,” Miruko nods, once again slapping Hawks on the back. “Some old sidekick of yours told me that you don’t know what love is, so I figured that I would help teach you the most important one! Self-love! Truly the hardest one to master, in my opinion, but damn if it isn’t a good one.”

Hawks feels transfixed almost, unable to look away from the book as Miruko slaps him on the back yet again as she moves to leave. He hears her yelling about forwarding the bill to fix his door to her, her agency would pay for the damage, and how she’s off to train with some bunny hopping boy from UA.

Opening the book, Hawks looked at the number one thing to do on the book and sighed.

#1: Look in a mirror and name five things you LOVE about yourself.

Well, it’s not like he has anything better to do.

Hawks is on number thirteen (Stand at a bridge and scream into the void about the things you love at dusk) when he realizes that maybe… he doesn’t love himself.

It is without saying that he loves people; agape, after all, is the only love type that made sense to him, but philautia, self-love, was way lost on him. Objectives 2 - 12 on the book were entertaining to do! They had Hawks going outside of his house much more than his week trapped indoors, and for the first time since the day his wings had been burnt off, his house was spotless.

But it was clear to Hawks that he didn’t feel love for himself.

Whenever he tried to convince himself that he should love himself, that there were terrific qualities in himself, he thought back to the dirty, burnt room.

“I still gotta protect their happiness!” the phantom in his mind screamed, the broken sob collected in his throat.

Hawks shivered, unable to let himself recognize the pain and hurt in the phantom's eyes, or the way that he now wished he had never done that… why had he done that?

What a mess…

The small chirping of Hawks phone interrupts his morose thoughts. He looks at the screen, eyebrows raising in slight mirth and caution as none other than his former intern was currently calling him.

“Tsukuyomi-kun!” Hawks laughs into the receiver, the weight of his past for a moment forgotten. “How are ya?!”

“Hello, Hawks-sensei,” Tokoyami’s calm tone fills Hawks' ears. “I was calling because I have a request to make.”

“Name it,” Hawks spoke immediately, slouching against the cold bars of the bridge, eyes closing as he tried to relax. “You need a letter of rec or something?”

“Nothing of the sort, actually,” Tokoyami says. “We third-year students are graduating in a few days; I was inquiring if you would attend on my behalf.”

“Wow, Tsukuyomi-kun, no need to be so formal with me!” Hawks laughed delightedly, his hands carting through his feather-like hair, “I’d love to come and watch you guys graduate! Is it true that the finger-smashing boy is the valedictorian?”

“That would be false, Midoriya-kun has nothing on Yaoyorozu-san.”

“What a bummer, you’d think he’d be first after how he helped win the war for us, huh?”

“You’ll find that Yaoyorozu-san is highly gifted and undeterred by most things,” Tokoyami sighed. For a moment, Hawks chuckled at the melancholy tone to his old intern's voice. It sounded as if he had been striving with great difficulty to reach the highest marks as well.

Hawks began speaking to his rather odd ex-intern with great curiosity with the blanket of the night surrounding him. His defenses and thoughts whittling away the more they spoke, the later it got in the morning.

“Ne, Tokoyami-kun, I have a question?”

“Concerning what?”

Hawks pauses, his brows furrowing as he looks up into the still dark sky, “Do you know how to love yourself?”

Silence.

Had it been anyone else, Hawks would have panicked at the lack of noise. Still, his already less than chatty intern typically took to not speaking much to begin with.

“Self-love is difficult,” Tokoyami finally spoke, his words slow, carefully chosen. “We humans are flawed; we all have demons. Most of the time, we only recognize and see our demons, oftentimes forgetting that being human also means being weak and at times immoral. Loving oneself is a hard task because we know ourselves better than any other. It’s a work in progress for everyone to love oneself, it's a type of love by the Ancient Greeks, but it’s not always everpresent. One must accept all flaws to love oneself, and remember that flaws don’t make you less, even if you believe otherwise.”

“...wow, I asked for a sentence answer, and you gave me a speech. Who would’ve known you were so in check with your emotions, Tokoyami!”

“You knew, I’ve already revealed this side of me before. You laughed last time too.”

Hawks finds himself home thirty minutes later, and he stares up at the ceiling, fingers drumming against his chest.

Self-love… it seems like an ever-evolving type of love, but it’s there. He knows that even if he has regrets and hardships and things he hates about himself, deep down, self-love exists and that it will exist.

Patience.

Even the fastest man in the world could demonstrate patience.

L U D U S

“What can I get for ya?”

“I have no idea honestly, do you have any recommendations?”

Hawks could say with complete honesty that he felt entirely out of place.

He was at a local bar. The bar was semi-busy today. Most young adults dressed in an arrangement of clothes, each on a different level of soberness as they cheered to this and that.

Why was he at a bar even though he was slightly uncomfortable? Well, you can blame #73 in the book for that.

(#73: Enter the first bar you find, order a drink, and flirt!)

“What type of liquor do you like? Hard or soft?”

Hawks blinked; he didn’t know.

“Hard?”

The bartender looked a bit unsure of him for a bit before nodding and turning his back to him.

Did hard liquor mean he was going to get an iced drink? He’s never consumed alcohol before.

“Here you go!” the bartender sang, slamming two shot glasses before him. “Two shots of Bacardi.”

“Oh, thank you?” Hawks tilted his head as a small cup of OJ was placed in front of him (“That’s your chaser,” the bartender had laughed). Bringing the small glass shot glass up, Hawks looked around at the throngs of people surrounding the bar and looked at you. You were cheering loudly as you raised your own shot glass in the air with a whoop and, in a fast, fluid motion, brought the shot glass to your mouth and took the liquid down easily. Hawks was definitely unimpressed now; that looked entirely too easy. “Here we go, cheers to me.”

Imitating your own actions, Hawks shot back the liquid in his shot glass, and immediately his entire body tensed.

EW.

NO.

EW.

OH GOD, NO!

Spitting out the sour, bitter, disgusting — dear god, how do you even describe this taste?! — liquid, Hawks, chugged the OJ, his lungs and throat and tongue burning from the shot.

“That was disgusting!” Hawks spat to absolutely no one, his hands covering his mouth as he stared at the other awaiting shot of ‘Bacardi.’ “Why would anyone drink that?!”

“Only madmen drink Bacardi while sober,” a voice joined in on Hawks' one-sided conversation. “Or bitches who are self-sabotagers. Never trust a hoe who says Bacardi is their favorite drink.”

Hawks turned around to see you, the girl he had regrettably underestimated for taking the shot, smiling at him with a not entirely sober look to your face.

“You look like neither. That and the way you took the shot obviously means that you had no idea what you were drinking.” Hawks continued to stare at you, completely perplexed by your casual conversation, the dress on your body that was twisted a bit, screaming wonders about your level of sobriety. You took to the empty barstool beside him with a grin and a calculating look, “You’re Hawks, right?”

“Yeah, Hawks,” he spoke, his tongue feeling weird in his mouth as he bowed stiffly in his chair. You were beautiful, fuck.

“I’m y/l/n, nice to meet you!” you speak easily, fingers grabbing at his other filled shot glass with a concerned look. “I have a feeling you shouldn’t try to take this other shot.”

“Dying of alcohol definitely isn’t in my vision of ways to go out,” Hawks grins. Pushing through his haze of awkwardness as you shift in the barstool so that you’re now facing him entirely, knees pressed to his thigh. “I’ve never actually drunk before?”

You inhale sharply, your eyes going wide as you break all levels of personal contact that’s acceptable of strangers in Japan and grab his cheeks.

“Alcohol virgin?!” you gasp, the sweet smell of some liquid drafting from your breath. “I’ll teach you everything that I know, don’t worry!”

You let go of his face, neck turning away from him, looking for the bartender to flag him down.

“Don’t you have—?”

“They can wait,” you wave at the bartender before turning back to Hawks with a confident grin on your face. “I have my favorite Pro Hero right beside me; I think they’ll understand.”

“Alright, what is it that I need to know?”

“My full name,” you breeze with a wink. “Y/l/n y/n.”

“A beautiful name.”

“I am a beautiful woman.”

Hawks chuckled good-naturedly, his head nodding in agreement, “I think we were talking about the alcohol, though, not your attraction as a female.”

“All in good time, all in good time,” you laugh, taking to the bartender and ordering two drinks, both of which were entirely foreign to Hawks.

Hawks would not consider himself to be an expert at flirting. He was attractive, a great conversationalist, and did have a type of edge to his words that often seemed playful or a warning, depending on how you looked at it. But it appeared that his natural way of speaking was more than enough to make him flirtatious enough to match the way you spoke to him.

You had introduced him to a single mixed drink, telling him that getting drunk by yourself at a bar typically wasn’t a smart thing, so keep to something with a low alcohol percentage. Just enough to make you loosen up, but not enough that you were incapable of getting home. Hawks liked the way your hand rested on his forearm. How you smiled and laughed at something to show your interest but not at everything to show that you weren’t faking your amusement at what he was saying.

You matched his every word, not backing down from his bluffs. Soon enough, Hawks felt his cheeks warm when he finally looked directly at your smiling face (he wasn’t sure if it was from the alcohol or not).

Eventually, though, the night ended, and you shimmied off the bar stool as your friends had come to collect you to leave.

“Can I get your number?” you ask, eyes mostly entirely sober as you handed him your phone. “I know you were the man who was just a bit too fast, but I think I can handle that.”

Hawks snorts, his eyes rolling in his amusement, “That was horrible.”

“I’m drunk, I have an excuse!” you exclaim with a pout that quickly turns into a giddy smile as Hawks enters his number to your phone. “Don’t worry though, once I’m sober, I’ll flirt your eyebrows clean off!”

“That sounds painful!” Hawks yells as you wave goodbye, your arms linked with a line of other girls as you leave the bar with teasing laughter and undecipherable words.

It was with you that Hawks realized that he had come to find a new type of love.

Ludus, the love of flirtation and playfulness.

Damn, who would’ve known.

P H I L I A

Hawks was having a pretty bad day.

It wasn’t anything super terrible happening, all things considered. It was a lovely day out; the sun was warm, the sky so blue, and the birds chirping. Nothing on the news to be concerned about and all his precious people were safe.

But it was still a bad day because instead of being out and about with you, his now borderline best friend/girlfriend, who he was stupidly having a crush on, he was stuck at home.

Hawks was sick.

Deliriously, stuffy nose, goopy eyed, chapped lips, and feverish sick.

You: Are you sure you’re fine????

Hawks: Im perfectly okay. Ill go with you to the park next time sorry

You: Thats not what im concerned about stupid!!!!!

Hawks: Bye have fun!

You: I knoW YOURE SICK ASSHOLE

Hawks chuckled, rereading his messages with you.

Blowing his nose for what felt like the umpteenth time, Hawks resumed the movie on the screen that you had recommended him to watch — Disney’s Chicken Little — because it reminded you of him, or something like that. The TV droned on with the movie, and Hawks found it hard to keep focused as the Sandman danced on his head and whispered in his ear.

He hadn’t noticed he had fallen asleep until a loud banging was heard on his door.

Shuffling towards the door, Hawks opened the still slightly broken door with bleary eyes and a stuffy nose.

In front of him was none other than you.

You… with a basket full of things.

“Hi!” you greeted him, pushing past Hawks easily and walking into his apartment. “You look worse than I thought you would be!”

“That's hurtful,” Hawks pouted, closing the door behind you, sneezing, then following after you. “Why are you here? I thought you w-were — achoo — going to the park?”

“I was, but we were supposed to go together to check off number 184, and I wasn’t about to go alone to complete a list meant for you!” you exclaimed, dumping the overfilled basket on the kitchen counter.

“Mm,” Hawks hummed, his voice dry and cracking as he pulled the blanket closer around him. “What’s this?”

“A get well care basket,” you say in an unmistakable like tone; you glance at him, smiling widely, and gesture dramatically to the basket. “Follow along, if you can.”

“Pfft.”

“So first, I have some sleepytime tea; I swear to the gods and back that this tea will cure you and knock you the fuck out,” you say, pulling out the thing on top of the basket and putting it to the side. “Next, we have some tissues because you obviously need them.”

“Hey!”

Hawks watched through red-rimmed eyes as you carefully and thoroughly explained what and why you had brought him. Fuzzy socks, a blanket, his favorite snacks and drinks, medicine, DVD’s to more movies you told him he had to watch, an embarrassing childhood picture of you that he had been wanting and swore he would never expose least he wants to die, more oils for his diffuser, and a signed Endeavor poster he had been wanting.

Safe to say that after he had been drugged up, eating some soup and drinking some tea on the couch, wrapped up in the blanket you had bought him, laying between your legs, Hawks was feeling much, much better. It had been hours since Hawks had coughed or sneezed, and he was talking with you about how Disney movies were being produced less and getting sort of worse with each one. The movie titan slowly losing its ground.

“Okay, it’s almost eleven pm; I have work tomorrow, you are still sick, let's pack it up!” you eventually say during a moment of comfortable silence.

“I can’t believe you have to work,” Hawks sniffled, standing up off the couch so that you could get up. “Seems like a crime.”

“It’s not so bad! Being a celebrity PR manager is a million times easier than a hero PR manager. At least we can help decide what's seen!” you laugh, helping to clean up his living room of the bags of chips and drinks.

“Sure, sure,” Hawks grins, keeping the trashcan open for you so that you could place the trash in. “Thank you.”

Walking you towards the front door, Hawks comes to the sudden and almost alarming realization that he doesn’t want you to leave. He wants you to stay. He thought this was a friendship, and it was one, a good one at that! For about a month now, he had known that there was a type of love he had for you, one of friendship.

It was called philia.

So why did he want to keep you wrapped up in a hug, to pull you close and press a gentle kiss to your forehead, to your cheek, to your lips?

“—I’ll be back tomorrow to check up on you during my lunch break,” you say, slipping on your shoes as you pull on your jacket. “If you need anything at all, call or text—”

The words on your tongue die immediately when Hawks still slightly chapped lips press against yours. The sick must that was present earlier on the day is no longer there, and you can feel heat and fire bursting from your cells as Hawks pulls away from you.

“I’m sorry,” Hawks breathes out, a small smile on his face, a daze in his eyes that tells you he definitely was not completely sorry. “I couldn’t resist anymore?”

“W-We will talk about that later!” your voice squeaks, your heart hammering in your throat because fucking Hawks kissed you. “If I-I get sick, I’ll rip out your eyebrows!”

“Will you go out with me? On a date?” Hawks continues on, leaning on the doorframe you’ve yet to pass.

“...I hate you, yes,” you warble, hands pressing against your burning face as Hawks grin grows.

“Perfect, I’ll text you,” he allows you to pass through the doorway where you feel both entirely light and giddy yet awkward and mechanical.

“Hawks, I swear, if your stupid kiss got me sick!”

“You’ll rip out my eyebrows,” Hawks laughs, waving a hand. “If you rip out my eyebrows, I demand a kiss for every hair you pluck out.”

He laughs at how he can basically see the heat rising from your ears as you squawk and run away.

Looking at #184 of his book, Hawks smiles as he crosses it out (#184: Ask out your crush!) and sighs. Philia was love between friends, but it was also, if he remembered correctly, one of affection. And it was without saying that he held a deep affection for you.

E R O S

As much as Hawks claimed he knew about the world, he was as clueless as a newborn baby when it came to the topic of love. Reasoning? Well, today marked a year of being together. It had been a year since Hawks had kissed you when he was snot-nosed kissed (you did get sick, by the way, and while you didn’t rip out his eyebrows, Hawks had kissed you plenty in apology), and then took you on a date where you went to a trampoline palace.

He was clumsily romantic. More often than not, he wasn’t actually romantic. Still, the sincere thought and emotions he put into it made his actions seem so thoughtful and sweet.

You’re not sure why you actually believed that on your year anniversary, he was going to plan something for the two of you. So the reaction he had when you showed up on the year anniversary, armed with a bouquet of flowers and a small personal gift for him, Hawks looked deeply confused.

“This is still not bad!” you exclaim, watching as Hawks attempts to redecorate his apartment from the messy bachelor vibe into something of romance. It was easier said than done, especially as your boyfriend had no decorations in his house that wasn’t fanboy or bird material.

“I didn’t realize that one year anniversaries were meant to be out and about!” Hawks yelled back, failing to nail the fairy lights onto the ceilings. “I knew you wanted to do something, but I thought it was going to be like ‘let’s go get some KFC!’ sort of thing!”

“Definitely not,” you laugh, sitting on his couch with the take out food sitting on the table. It had just arrived, and Hawks was still not accepting the lack of romance in his apartment. “But it’s okay, really Hawks! I didn’t tell you, which is entirely my fault! Come on, let's watch something together, eat, and relax!”

Hawks sighed and looked up at the ceiling.

He should have known that one year anniversaries were a big thing in dating too. They sure were in businesses; what a rookie mistake. Not satisfied with the lack of romance in his apartment but also unable to do anything more to it, Hawks sulked over to the couch and sat beside you, grabbing his dinner plate.

“Thanks, dove.”

“You’re most welcome, baby vulture. Thank you for the food!” you grin, breaking the chopsticks and digging in.

The food is eaten with a mirthful conversation, the TV playing the 100 Funniest Hero Fails playing on Youtube. Eventually, the purples and pinks of the sky became dark.

Night is here.

Hawks went from sitting right beside you to lying on the couch and having you snuggled into his stomach at some point in the night. YouTube is no longer playing Hero Compilation videos. Still, it is now instead showing a chef with a giraffe quirk demonstrating how to make your very own pancake treehouse, no clickbait!

Hawks is transfixed on you, watching the way your eyes sparkle and shine as you stare up at the screen, your lips moving as you give your side commentary, but he can’t hear a thing.

Five weeks ago, on this day, was the day that Hawks realized that the philia love he had for you had evolved once again. It had become one of eros. Romantic, passionate love. He loved you; he loves you. Anything you wanted or needed in the world, Hawks would do anything to give it to you. He had yet to tell you said realization; after all, he needed to make sure it wasn’t some fluke but found himself chickening out each time he wanted to confess.

Gliding his thumb against your cheekbone, Hawks stared adoringly at you, head tilted as you laughed at the video before glancing up at him. It was evident that you hadn’t been expecting him to be staring at you so intensely. As soon as you glanced back at the TV, you snapped right back, curiosity blazing off your gaze.

“What’s up?” you asked, hands pressing to his chest as you lift up a bit. “Do I have something on my face?”

“I love you,” Hawks whispered, the words coming out so much easier than he thought it would. “Y/l/n y/n, I love you.”

Your eyes widen significantly, your jaw dropping as your eyes grow just a bit watery.

Hawks smiles softly, knowing that for so long you had told him you loved him without a single moment where he returned the affection. It hadn’t bothered you. Obviously, you knew why he didn’t say it, but finally hearing him say it seemed to break you just a bit in the best of ways. He kisses you softly, fingers wiping away the single tear that fell.

“I love you,” he repeats.

“I love you too, Hawks,” you blubber, your smile so bright yet wobbling with your heartfelt emotions.

“Takami Keigo,” Hawks corrects. “My name is Takami Keigo.”

Hawks watches as you process his name, and a wet laugh bubbles from your throat as you nod your head, hands reaching behind his neck to pull him close for the first soul-consuming, fiery kiss of the night.

“I love you, Keigo.”

If this wasn’t eros, well, then, Hawks didn’t know what it was.

P R A G M A

two years later, valentines day

Keigo sits on the bed, fingers adjusting the tie around his neck as he stares at you doing your makeup in the bathroom. Your eyes intensely concentrated on your reflection as you painted dark red lips on yourself.

To sum up the last two years in a single, simple phrase, Keigo would say that love now made even less sense to him.

It wasn’t precisely that it made perfect sense before. Some days he still argued and wondered about how love could exist in specific scenarios. Or why, after you stole his final KFC chicken leg he was saving, he could always love you after such betrayal. It made no sense to him, but also made perfect sense, hence the complete confusion.

But it was without saying that as you twirled in your outfit in front of him, a grin plastered so large and lovingly on your features, that it made sense.

How could he not love when he had someone like you.

The walk to the restaurant was perfect; he had even taken a moment to slow dance with you when you came across some performers. Your sweet smile meant just for him made Keigo hum contently as he kissed you gently.

Dinner was amazing. The food rich and luscious, entirely to die for that had the both of you moaning about how great it was before laughing because the waitress definitely heard that. After dinner was over, you and Keigo were now waiting on desserts when he simply grabbed your left hand and slid a simple ring over a very important finger before placing a kiss on your palm.

“I know I was at one point too fast, and maybe I think I was too slow to ask this, but would you like to wake up and have chicken with me every day?” Keigo asked, watching as your face went through a million stages of understanding, processing, internalizing, accepting, and pure emotions.

The kiss was sloppy and wet, the tears streaming down your face beautifully, like diamonds in the dark sky.

It was today that Keigo unlocked the last love he ever thought he would have.

Pragma: committed, enduring love.

#hawks x reader #takami keigo x reader #hawks fluff

185 notes · View notes

todisturbtheuniverse · 3 years

Text

FIC: Adjacent Truths

Rating: M Fandom: Stardew Valley Pairing: Shane/Female Farmer, Shane & Jas Tags: Depression, Suicidal Thoughts, Friendship, Pre-Relationship Word Count: 1900 Summary: Jas overheard something Shane can't take back, and it's eating him alive. The farmer notices. Also on AO3. Notes: Post-4 Heart Event—a direct sequel of it, if you will. Content warning for suicidal ideation.

When Jas had still been just a baby, Charlotte had told Shane that something changes in your brain after you have a kid. Hormones, chemicals, neurons firing, all fine-tuning, honing in on the sound of the baby's cry, making interpretations on an instinctual level. He'd panicked when Jas had started crying apparently unprovoked in his arms, but Charlotte hadn't even twitched. "She's just hungry," she'd said, with her tired-happy smile.

"She seems mad about it," Shane had said, looking down into the scrunched-up, red face, the tiny mouth open in a hiccuping wail.

"She gets that from Patrick."

But Shane wasn't, had never been, Jas's parent. By the time he'd learned to sort her hungry-crying from her tired-crying and everything else, she'd been nearly out of babyhood.

And there was no easy fix, anyway, for the way he'd made her cry this time.

She avoided him after what she'd overheard. He didn't blame her. She was a smart kid; it was a good time to cut her losses, free herself of any emotional attachment she had to him. Marnie would be a better guardian than he was, anyway. Maybe the ranch wasn’t doing all that great, but no one in the valley was, and they all managed to keep limping along somehow. Once he was gone, they'd probably be just fine, lightened by the absence of his dead weight.

But he kept hearing her. That was his brain's special talent: replaying, over and over again, the bad moments, so that he wouldn't forget how terrible he was. The sound of her sobbing echoed around in his head with the hundreds of other unpleasant things that repeated themselves there: the song he’d been using as a ringtone when he got the call about Patrick and Charlotte; the stuffed pig that Jas wouldn’t let go of that first week, the one that made the most obnoxious oinking sound; the disinterested scratch of the social worker’s pen on paper, changing the course of their lives forever.

“You want to talk about it?” Lydia asked.

Jas still went to the farm with him on Saturdays. She just didn't make conversation during the walk. The first words she spoke were to Archimedes, and then she waded into the woods, heading for the treehouse, silent.

He didn’t talk much, either, but that was how it had always been. Lydia would tell him about whatever project she was working on; she would remind him again that he could come back later for Jas instead of helping; and then, inevitably, they would get to work. Because he still wasn't enough of an ass to pawn his goddaughter off entirely on someone who hardly knew her.

It was a low bar, but it was what he could clear.

“Talk about what,” he said, and swung for the tree again. He was glad that the damn sprinkler system hadn’t had another crisis since last weekend. If Lydia had put him to that kind of fiddly work today, maybe he wouldn't have cleared that bar.

“Whatever it is,” Lydia said. She watched the tree, eyes darting between trunk and canopy, waiting for the moment it began to tip so that she could warn him out of the way. “I can’t read your mind, but obviously something’s been eating you the last few days.”

He swung the axe again. She hadn't traced his mood back to The Incident. Maybe she didn't want to bring it up if she didn't have to, or maybe other people just didn't spend as much time thinking about how much of a loser he was as he thought they did.

Sounded fake.

“I don’t know,” he said. Thud. “Maybe you’re imagining things.”

Lydia was no saint. Sometimes, just like everybody else, she got impatient. Usually it was because of the sprinklers. But those sometimes were rare, and she wasn't taking the bait today, as usual.

“Maybe,” she said amenably, and lapsed into silence again.

After a few more strikes, the tree creaked warningly. “Now,” she said, and they both hustled out of the way of the trunk. It fell slowly at first, then faster, faster, until it hit the ground thunderously right in the space they’d cleared for it.

Lydia was the mastermind, but at least Shane wasn't terrible at brute force labor.

She picked up a second axe; they both positioned themselves along the fallen tree to start chopping. She needed a fair amount of lumber to get that barn built before winter hit. It was hard for him to imagine thinking so far ahead. The farm was just overgrown enough that she could probably collect all the lumber she needed right here, instead of having to buy it. He didn't need to ask if she'd be able to afford it, if it came to that.

“But maybe I’m not,” she said, picking up the conversation after five minutes, like it’d never been dropped. “I mean, you’re cutting up this tree like it’s personally offended you, so there’s a chance. Just saying. I know you think I talk too much, but I’m a good listener.”

Shane took a deep breath. He fully intended to let out a heavy, annoyed sigh, the kind that usually sent anyone who’d dared take an interest scuttling.

But, as happened too often with Lydia, a stream of words came out instead, like he was powerless to stop them. One more thing he couldn't control.

“Take your pick,” he said, and went on dicing up the tree like it deserved the cutting. “Morris is on my ass about saying the catchphrase whenever I spot a customer.” Thwack. “Gus is on my ass about my tab, which is nowhere near as bad as Pam’s, but apparently it’s a problem when you’re not best friends.” Thwack. “Marnie is on my ass about looking for a better job, like there’s a lot of options in Pelican Town.” Thwack. “Jas won’t even look at me, let alone talk to me.”

They'd established a pleasant kind of rhythm. Lydia’s axe fell not far behind his, creating a rhythmic one-two-beat, one-two-beat.

“Jas,” Lydia said after a moment.

His axe fell out of rhythm. “What?”

“You told me to take my pick. I say Jas is the item on that list that’s really bothering you. The other stuff happens all the time.”

It was no use telling her it was just a figure of speech. It was, but at the same time, she was right. All that other stuff was background noise, compared to Jas.

He hated when she was right. Except when he didn't mind. It was always hard to tell which it was until much later, which didn't help a lot with in-the-moment reactions.

He settled for hitting the tree again.

“Why do you think she’s not talking to you?” Lydia asked, taking up the rhythm again behind him.

“You know why.” He said it to warn her off, in case she’d forgotten—but he didn’t think she had. He wasn't that lucky.

“Maybe. But tell me again.”

Lydia didn't believe in hiding things, letting them fester. She was completely fine wearing most of her bruises out in the open, cheerfully admitting that something had gone wrong and she was working on it—again, most of the time. She had a couple secret bruises that he'd poked, accidentally or intentionally.

But he was all secret bruises, or at least, he'd have liked to be. As long as he kept hanging around her, though, she'd keep digging them up to air out. The obvious solution was to stop hanging around her. He wondered, again, why he hadn't done that yet.

“She overheard something she shouldn’t have,” he said, “because someone dumped a canteen of water on me and made a scene.”

Lydia actually laughed, a little breathless, in the middle of her swing. “Oh, I see. It’s my fault.”

She was kind of refreshing, was the thing. Everyone else at The Incident had taken it so damn seriously. Granted, that was exactly two other people—Marnie and Jas—and one of them was seven, so maybe that wasn't surprising. But still. It was nice that someone had heard the thing he said and wasn’t afraid to talk about it.

“Maybe,” he said.

“I panicked,” she admitted. “Not my finest moment. I’m sorry.”

He grunted in acknowledgment. They went back to the beat, one-two, one-two. In the distance, Archimedes barked.

“So she knows you meant it,” Lydia said, after a moment.

His axe hit a little crooked, and the rhythm stuttered again. He looked up at her. She realized he'd stopped, and she stopped, too, returning the look.

It wasn't that she didn't look sad, or worried. It was just that those things seemed secondary to a kind of openness, a thoughtfulness, like she was solving some kind of puzzle. He wasn't sure if that was a good or bad thing, or whether he liked it or not.

“Haven’t told her otherwise,” he said.

He expected a lecture. He gave one to himself more or less every hour. Put on a good face for Jas, or Just tell her you were having a bad day and didn’t mean it, or Tell her you’re going to be around for a good, long time, even though you don’t know, even though it might be a lie. The kid had already been through hell. He should've figured out some way, any way, to keep her from going through more by now.

He just couldn't. He didn't know why.

But she didn’t lecture. She said, “You don’t want to lie to her.” As if she understood.

He went back to his wood-chopping. “I don’t know how to lie to her.” He wished he did. That would have made this a lot easier.

But then, if he lied, she wouldn’t see the inevitable coming before it hit, which would make it all the harder for her.

Lydia went back to chopping, too. “I don’t think you need to, for what it’s worth.”

“Yeah? You got an age-appropriate way to explain wanting to die?”

Finally, she hesitated, but only for a one-two beat of the falling axes. “Not really,” she said. “But Jas has already been through a lot. She knows stuff that most kids don’t at her age. So you can tell her adjacent truths.”

“Lotta syllables.”

Finally, she gave an impatient little sigh. “I mean things like—you’re sorry that she had to hear that. That it has nothing to do with her, and doesn’t mean you don’t love her. That things are just hard for you right now.” She breathed heavily on the next swing, more exasperation than effort. “She gets that you’re grieving, too, Shane.”

Trust a person like Lydia to paint it in such nice strokes. Like his best effort, which fell far short of winning any prizes, would be sufficient to a needy little kid.

But maybe...well, saying something could always make things worse, but the idea hadn't come from him. It was a start.

“I’ll plagiarize,” he said. “Thanks.”

It seemed like she was going to let it lie there, but then she spoke up again. “Like I said, I’m a good listener, so. You need an ear, I’m here. Day or night. I mean it.”

She wasn't wrong. She was a good listener. But she had some kind of future ahead of her, still, and he'd poisoned enough people with his failures. It was out in the open now; it didn't need to be rehashed. Next time, he would keep his mouth shut.

#sdv shane #sdv farmer #shane/female farmer #universe writes #depression cw #suicidal ideation cw #friendship #pre-relationship

13 notes · View notes

killherfreakout · 3 years

Text

half of who i am isn’t all my fault

a series about hands and where they touch.

part two: your hand under my chin

[a/n: bipolar disorder, mixed state of mania and depression.]

* * *

The world is ending.

At least, to a twenty-something artist in Paris named Eliott Demaury, it feels like it is. And he can’t decide if he wants to sit there and watch or throw caution to the wind and go down with it.

It’s another quiet weeknight in the city, late enough that the partygoers are on their way home but early enough that people aren’t up for work. So the world is continuing as normal, and yet, it feels like Eliott is on the edge of it and about to fall off.

And there’s no one to blame but himself; no one to blame but his chemically imbalanced and traitorous brain, on the brink of consuming every last semblance of control he has left, in the middle of a sleepless night. Eliott knows this feeling too well, and no matter who much he tries to fight it, his attempts are futile.

Eliott finds himself sitting on the edge of their bed, and he watches as Lucas’ parted lips huff out soft breaths in his sleep. He looks ethereal, like some kind of angel sent to watch over Eliott when he wants to give up on himself, always there when he doesn’t know he needs him. Lucas is some kind of perfect dream, in between real and imaginary, as he lays there like he has no idea the sight he makes.

Lucas said once, after Eliott made him try his special omelettes, I’m glad you have one flaw, otherwise you’re just too perfect to be real. And Eliott knows the way people look at him, like he’s an entity only good for his beauty — although, if he has anything to say about it, he would argue he’s the furthest from that — and not a person with real human emotion underneath it all. The thought makes a cruel, humorless laugh bubble up inside his throat.

And he doesn’t want to be the asshole who’s ungrateful for his conventionally attractive features, but every time it comes up, it just— it feels like it’s the universe’s twisted way of overcompensating for the ugliness that hides beneath the shiny surface. It makes this shame and guilt swirl inside of him, and there’s this voice mocking him, saying, if only they knew. If only they knew how flawed this body is, how close it is to breaking.

His boyfriend’s peaceful state somehow magnifies Eliott’s awakeness, and his body feels heavy but his mind and heart feel like they’re going fast enough to run a marathon. Like he has all this energy he needs to burn but he’s stuck inside the small apartment as the world ends inside it, and seems to keep going outside of it.

Inevitably he finds his cigarettes on the ledge of the living room window, and goes through one before he even realizes he’s smoking it; he goes to light another but gets annoyed at the busted lighter, deciding to raid the fridge for something to wash down the nicotine.

A gust of wind outside reminds him of the outside world, his body somehow not big enough for everything he feels inside, like he belongs out there. But he can feel himself coming down, feeling like he fits inside his body again the more he breathes, and he tries with all his might to stay afloat before he crashes.

Eliott lays on the cold floor of their bedroom, his head against the wall under the window and legs bent at the knee with his feet against the foot of the bed. It’s not quite comfortable but the position allows him to see some of the sky over the tops of the buildings outside, including a few stars that shine through the darkness.

He lays there for a while, just looking at the tiny shining stars and melting into the cold floor, trying to focus on the sound of Lucas’ tiny breaths from the bed.

There’s a star that peeks through a small cloud as it passes by, and Eliott can’t tell which one it is or which constellation it belongs to, but he knows that it’s one that moves around the North Star, like all the others do. Then a thought comes to him: he’s like one of those stars. He’s always changing and going in circles, sometimes hidden behind clouds in his mind, not visible to anyone. The thought could be dreamy and romantic, comparing himself to the stars, but with the current state he’s in it feels like a curse. Like the pole his life revolves around is his bipolar disorder, where he has no choice but to let it decide his course.

It makes him feel so small and so alone, always at war with his mind and with himself. The stars seem so far away, and he’s just left lying on the cold floor in his own apocalypse that no one can see.

His eyes wander across the ceiling, unfocused and frenzied as these thoughts keep swirling around his head, hands clenching at his sides.

There’s shuffling on the other side of the room where Lucas tosses in the bed, groaning before calling, “Baby?”

Eliott registers the sounds but can’t break his focus from the ceiling of his mind and the room.

“Eli, where are you?”

Lucas calls his name a few more times, the sound getting further and further away as the younger one searches the other rooms of the apartment. Eliott wants to scream for help, wants to tell Lucas, I’m here, I’m here, but he can’t.

Somehow, though, he seems to beckon him back.

There’s footsteps and then a source of light, and Lucas almost trips over Eliott’s legs where he still rests on the floor by their bed. Lucas sighs when he realizes he’s found him, sleepy features illuminated by the blue light of his phone. His eyes are squinty from the light and his hair is a perfect mess all over his head, a few strands falling down to his eyes. He still looks like an angel - and here he is, to save Eliott from himself like he knew he would.

“There you are,” Lucas kneels on the floor by Eliott’s side. Eliott finally focuses on his voice and his presence, his angel. “Come back to bed, baby.”

Eliott doesn’t move, can’t move. Lead has settled into his bones trapping him to the floor, and every nerve screams to get up, to go back to bed with Lucas, but there he lies, paralyzed.

“Oh, Eliott,” Lucas’ smile disappears, thumbing away the tears that Eliott didn’t even know were flowing. His voice is soft and loving just like he is. “What’s going on?”

His eyes close to the words, no doubt causing more wetness from his eyes. The thumb wipes it away again, so gently, it’s like magic.

Subconsciously Eliott registers Lucas’ concern and the way he asked, noticing how he asked what’s going on? instead of what’s wrong? — because something doesn’t necessarily have to be wrong to make Eliott feel like this, because what Eliott feels right now is something that happens sometimes. They’ve had plenty of experience with this exact moment, when Eliott is close to losing himself and Lucas makes sure to keep him from going too far.

“Lucas…” His voice is weak, his throat closing and breath stuck somewhere that can’t get out. Eliott can feel the touch again, this time firmer, more real. Lucas leans down to be closer to him, and keeps up that brushing on his face, but it’s overwhelming all of a sudden, and there’s no simple answer to his question and—

Eliott finds some strength, or just a fighting response, to turn over and away from the touch and warmth of Lucas. He misses it as soon as it’s gone but stays in his new position with his back turned to the other boy. Lucas doesn’t reach out again, just leaves him be. Eliott is glad his boyfriend is respecting his space but can’t help the guilt setting in that he pushed him away. Eliott lays there quietly, though his mind is anything but. He doesn’t know if Lucas is still there when he finally finds his voice again.

“I was doing so well, I thought I might have finally had some control over this. But it just came out of nowhere and—”

Sudden panic washes over him, because it never really comes out of nowhere, and if it does, there are signs he can recognize so he’s at least a bit prepared.

Eliott thinks of the fact that he hasn’t slept more than a few hours in the past three days, and how tired he doesn’t feel until right at this moment. But he was so focused on his art projects and so excited with how they were coming together, the time seemed to fly by. That happens sometimes, just getting swept up in inspiration and letting it take him away - without triggering an episode. Because he prides himself in his passion and creativity, and how he uses art to sort through his feelings and express his truest self. The thought of his recent works being the product of his mania rather than his own intention makes him so angry and upset that he was born with a brain that always ends up letting him down.

But now in hindsight he doesn’t know what to think, or what exactly triggered these feelings, or how he got here, or what will come next. Eliott had been diligent with taking his meds and going to his weekly sessions, but now that he thinks about it, he can’t remember if he took them yesterday and—

Eliott lays with his back on the floor again. “I should have seen this coming. I knew I was doing too well that something was going to happen, and it’s always the same shit.” He tilts his head back to look at the stars again, and imagines himself as one of them. “No matter how hard I try, it's like nothing I do is ever up to me. And I have to deal with myself for the rest of my life.”

It’s silent again and Eliott has a moment of terror that he’s completely alone, like he’s the last person on Earth and shouting into an endless, dark void.

“Hey,” the sound is like a beam of light breaking through the dark void, like another lost soul is greeting him, saying, I’m here, I’m here.

Lucas hasn’t left from his place next to him; he’s laying on his side facing Eliott on the hard floor. Eliott doesn’t look at him, though; he doesn’t want to see him look at how much of a mess he is. He knows Lucas doesn’t pity him, and he’s so glad for that, but the way Lucas has so much love and care in his eyes makes Eliott only feel more undeserving of it. So he stays on his back and glances from the ceiling to the endless sky.

“Hey,” Lucas says again, in a soft whisper, but firm this time. “Eli, can you look at me?”

Eliott doesn’t want to be like the stars and revolve around his bipolar. Maybe he can find a new way to navigate, by following a new star, a new pole that is a fixed point in his life. Like the one in front of him now, made of stardust and blue eyes and love.

He swallows thickly, his breath finding a way out as he catches sight of Lucas. Eliott was right, there’s so much love in his beautiful, still sleepy eyes. Even though Eliott is turned on his side to face him, he tucks his head down to his chest.

Lucas comes a little closer, and slowly reaches a hand out to Eliott as not to scare him. He runs his hand over the fabric of Eliott’s chest where his heart beats fast underneath, and gently uses it to lift his chin so that Lucas can see him.

Eliott lets him, lets Lucas position his face to open up to him, lets himself be seen. But he’s stubborn when he gets like this, so he still looks down and away from Lucas who still has Eliott’s chin in his hand.

“Breathe,” Lucas says calmly, looking into his eyes. Eliott keeps their gaze this time; Lucas’ is more direct and practical now, communicating more than his voice. Eliott lets out an excuse for a breath, more like a quiet sob, and then Lucas says again, “Breathe, in and out.”

Lucas watches as Eliott tries again, but it’s still impossible. He wants to look away again but the hand under his chin won’t let him, the fingers there softly tracing the frown on his face as if to smooth it away.

“Listen to mine and try to breathe with me.”

It’s then that Eliott decides that Lucas is his North Star, even if just for tonight. His mania and his depression and his anxiety and his sleepless nights will always be there, but right here and right now, he uses every last ounce of control he has to listen as Lucas’ chest rises and fills with air and slowly deflates.

Eliott tunes into the sound of every breath, and soon he somehow finds that he’s breathing in time with them.

“There you go, keep breathing,” Lucas reassures, his hand moving from Eliott’s chin to his shoulder and slowly down his arm to where his hands lay in front of him on the floor.

After some time, Eliott’s heart rate is slow again, and he’s exhausted. He’s about to fall, into real sleep for the first time in days, and Lucas is right there with him.

Lucas’ voice sounds like it’s on the other side of that void, far away but extremely close at the same time. “I’m sorry you feel like that, and I wish I could say the right thing to make you feel better, but all I can say is that you’re right, it sucks. I mean, I’ll never know exactly how you feel, but I’m acknowledging that it must feel awful. But I do know that you’re so much stronger than you think, and I know that you are so much more than your weakest moments, and that I’m right here with you through anything.”

Eliott’s eyes are heavy and his mind is starting to drift, but the words make him hold on just a little bit longer. He flutters his eyes open to see Lucas staring back at him, the smallest sleepy smile on his lips. Eliott does his best to return it, even if it’s a lazy slant of his mouth.

“I'm sure it must feel really lonely sometimes, but I’ll keep reminding you that you’re not alone.” Lucas’ hand is tickling down his forearm, and he intertwines their fingers to bring them to his lips, leaving feather-light kisses across his knuckles. “And I can’t wait to deal with you for the rest of my life.”

My angel. It’s the last thing Eliott thinks before he surrenders to sleep, his hand still in Lucas’ where they lay on the hardwood floor.

When Eliott wakes it’s to the sun shining at a low angle into the room, and he tosses in the bed to shy away from it, bumping into a hard body on his side. Lucas is sitting against the headboard smiling down at him, greeting him with a good afternoon, my love.

After a few long moments of waking up, still coming to and vaguely remembering his state the previous night, Eliott swallows though his throat is dry and regards his boyfriend looking all awake and beautiful.

“Did you carry me to bed?” Eliott asks half in awe and half in confusion. He’s done the same for Lucas countless times, but he doesn’t think his boyfriend ever has.

Lucas scoffs but he has the widest, most beautiful smile on his face. The kind that is contagious even when Eliott is not feeling up to smiling.

He gets him to drink some water and take his meds, and Eliott is too tired to fight it.

“Remember when I said you were stronger than you think? Well, so am I.” Lucas smirks with a quick raise of his brows, and Eliott goes to bury his face into Lucas’ neck and shoulder, his absolute favorite place in the universe.

“I love you,” is all Eliott has the energy to say, before he rolls over and goes to sleep a few hours more. Lucas laughs that soft and adorable laugh of his, and joins him under the covers. My love, my light, my angel, my star.

#skam france #elu fic #elu #skamfr fic #mywriting #hands and where they touch

60 notes · View notes

writinginthedarkwood · 4 years

Text

Alien! Kirishima x Reader: Better With You

Warning: NSFW, ovipositor kink, implications of past abuse (not done by our shark toothed boy)

I recommend checking out some of the other parts to this AU! MY MASTERLIST

You can enjoy this without it, but reading the other parts might answer some questions you have. :)

The tornado siren wailed. It’s a sound I’ve heard my entire life, but it’s taken on a completely new meaning.

Before, we’d run to the middle of the park and take shelter with our neighbors. I remember being little, and hiding under the ground from the violent winds that would tear through our community.

The piercing sound stirred all the sleeping bodies around, the light flicked on in my neighbors trailer. I watched her shadow hurry and throw things into a bag through her window. She pushed her small son out of the door as they ran to take shelter.

Everyone in the park jolted awake, panicking and running in fear.

Everyone but me, and my father.

My father whistled through his nose as he slept. He turned only slightly in that worn down chair, his foot kicking the pile of aluminum cans over, but otherwise completely unconscious. The T.V. was a loud rerun of a crime show, but it suddenly switched over to the emergency broadcast.

The male anchor spoke with a shaking voice. “Paris is falling.” He swallowed hard. “Please take shelter immediately....” He held the paper holding his cues and set it down before reading the next line. “A craft was spotted over Lexington... may God have mercy on us.” The camera cut to the sound of the emergency alarm. I rushed and shut the T.V. off, my heart pounding. My father didn’t stir, still sleeping like the dead.

This was it, it was finally my turn.

I ran to the front door and opened it slowly, closing it behind me as quietly as possible. I climbed onto our garbage can, using the gutter to stable myself before jumping onto the roof.

I used to sit out here when I was little, breathing air that wasn't heavy with cigarette smoke.

The sky looks different to me now, like the stars were actually thousands of eyes looking down at me. Or that it might actually crack open, spilling thousands of bug like aliens down to the ground like in the movies. Even though people are terrified, cities are going up in flames and families are being separated. The footage they catch of girls being taken, they always go with a smile on their face.

Whatever was coming for me, had to be better than here.

"Wow the sky looks really cool from down here." A male voice startled me, I gasped and stared at an interesting looking soldier stood behind me. He had no shirt on, but a sash going over his chest was decorated with patches and medals. His black pants almost seemed a bit big on him, and one pant leg was tucked into his boots. He had brilliant and striking red hair, sticking out of his head like a spikey rock formation with just as incredible red eyes to match.

His teeth were sharp, but his face was gentle and kind.

He smiled at me and sat down beside me. "I wish I had more time to look around..." My breath was stuck in my chest, my hands were shaking.

Is this... man the alien? He dug in a pouch on his hip and pulled out a clay figurine. "I found this. I just think it looks awesome, it's for you." I didn't reach out to take it, my body feeling frozen with shock. He gently grabbed my wrist and flipped my palm over, placing a little frog statue in my hand. It was warm from him holding it. It must have came from someone's garden in the park. "I-..." The little frogs paint was chipped, but it was cute. "Thank you. I like it." I kind of smiled at him, not entirely sure how I'm supposed to feel. "I was hoping you would! You've probably guessed who I am." He said with a hint of blush on his cheeks like he was shy. "I was surprised to find you out here in the open." He thought for a moment. "Are you alright?"

I looked at him, his face was sweet and filled with concern.

Hot tears stung my eyes and I buried my head between my knees and tried to hold back a sob.

"Hey, hey don't be upset... I promise I'm not here to hurt you." His touch surprised me. His hand pulled my head out of my hands and turned my face to look at him better.

"Your cheek is swollen. Are you injured?"

I said nothing and his eyes narrowed. "Come here, come here everything is okay now..." He stood and helped me stand to my feet. He placed his lips on my cheek and parted his mouth, his spit making a small space sticky and wet.

A pleasant sensation came over my tired body. He pulled me into his arms, lifting my feet off of the ground and holding me bridal style. I laid my head on his chest, feeling warm and comfortable. I closed my eyes and rested on him.

Is this why all that footage from fallen cities had girls with smiling faces? They suspected brain washing. I don't feel brainwashed.

I feel good.

I opened my eyes to look at him and saw that we were somewhere completely different.

We were in some type of hallway. There were a lot of people here, couples walking together. Some girls looked a bit like me, wearing normal clothes. They looked a bit shaken up, and clung onto their accompanying alien tightly. Other girls were human, but something was different. They were smiling brightly, wearing all the same dress but in different colors and patterns.

A lot of them had small pregnant bellies.

He set me down on my feet and took my arm to keep me steady. "Welcome home! The ship is designed to look like a neutral place our humans would enjoy vacationing too."

It did sort of look like a hotel.

He opened a sliding door by placing his palm on the wall and we stepped inside. "You know you're a little quiet, which surprises me. But I'm hoping you'll warm up... you still have what I gave you?"

I held out the little frog and he took it, setting it on a plain white table. "Our first decoration!" He leaned against the table and crossing his arms, making the medals on his sash jingle. "You probably have a lot of questions. I am Captain Kirishima Eijiro. You can just call me Eijiro, but if you don't like that name you can call me something else!" He nervously laughed. "Wait that's weird. Am I blowing this? I feel like I'm messing up."

"I'm Y/N... it's nice to meet you." I stood there awkwardly and looked around the room. It was pretty plain, a small bed in the corner. A kitchen without any utensils. "So you're not going to... kill me?" I asked feeling like my tears might come back.

He looked at me funny. "No not at all. Did you think that and you didn't fight me?" Eijiro's face was very concerned. "How about you take a hot shower and afterwards we get you something to eat."

The bathroom was small, and the shower wasn't too difficult to figure out how to turn on, but I couldn't get the steamy water to shut off. I wrapped myself in a soft towel and just about opened the door when I heard his voice.

"Yes I'm worried about the wellbeing of my mate. Her wellness scan says her brain is imbalanced. I think she's been emotionally injured." He was speaking to someone, I didn't hear another voice. "Yes sir. Thank you your Highness. I'll give her nutrition and treat her with the medical aide you're sending by. I'll give you a report after a few days to see if her conditions improved."

I opened the door and he smiled at me, looking up from a watch on his wrist. "I can't get the shower to turn off." I said quietly. He happily walked into the bathroom and showed me how to work everything. He turned the water off, and showed me how to open the cabinet and get toiletries. "And if you ever just want to relax you can change what oils go into the water. They're good for stress, sleep, and even waking you up in the morning."

I stood there, feeling a bit exposed in my towel. Eijiro tried to discretely look at my body. His eyes darted over me quickly, but he managed to mostly hold eye contact. "I should probably let you get dressed. I have some clothes for you."

Eijiro gave me a red dress to put on. It had pretty flower patterns sewn into it, giving the fabric just a bit of texture. It was lightweight and comfortable like a night gown. "Before we get some food in you, I'm going to offer some first aid okay?" He opened the front door and grabbed a package that was sitting outside. He unwrapped a vial and prepped a syringe.

He sat down beside me. "Things are going to better for you now. I'm going to keep you safe." He kissed my exposed arm, dragging his tongue across my skin and leaving a sticky trail. The saliva sizzled and absorbed into my skin.

My whole body felt warm. My skin erupted in tingles and chills. The needle entering my arm didn't hurt. "That didn't hurt did it?" He rubbed the injection spot tenderly. "No, what was that?"

"Your wellness scan came back showing some light damage to your lungs, as well as some sort of chemical imbalance in your brain. A few injections should clear up any damaged cells and get the hormones flowing correctly."

Could he really be curing my asthma? I've had issues my whole life with breathing. Nobody seemed to care enough to stop smoking in the house, or even roll the windows down in the car while I'm in there.

"You can make my depression go away?" I looked down at my hands. My finger nails are always picked down to the nub.

"If that's what your imbalance is called, yes."

Eijiro made a meal for me out of a tan powder and some type of hot green liquid. It reminded me of oats, but was very sweet. After eating together in the relative quiet, a sudden drowsiness came over me. He pulled the blanket over my shoulders and tucked me. I was asleep before I could even count to ten.

I rolled over, groggy and still feeling a bit tired. My arms hit something hard, and my eyes shot open. I gasped and almost fell out of the bed at the sight of sleeping Eijiro. He was breathing out of his mouth softly, a bit of drool falling onto his pillow.

I sat up on my elbow and his left arm flopped over me, pulling me back down on the bed with a loud exhale of air leaving my chest. "Hey!"

Kirishima lazily opened one eye before snuggling into my neck. "Good morning Y/N... ready to start the day?"

For some reason I feel a bit more comfortable today. After getting dressed, I had a lot of questions. He explained why I'm here, how the two of us will be living together from now on. "See I don't know how ready I am to start a family." He smiled and put a hand over mine. "I figured we could spend our time on the ship getting to know each other. Our culture is a little different than yours, we usually start a family right away once we find a mate."

I felt a bit of panic rise in my chest. A family? Is that what the rumors meant about the aliens needing DNA? "But I think you could use some time to heal and adjust. What do ya think?"

"I... I don't even know what to say. I feel like I walked into a dream world." It felt too good to be true. There must be more to this I'm not seeing, people aren't whisked away from our troubles to paradise. Maybe I died, and he's really my guardian angel?

"Does that make me your dream guy?" He gave me a wink and I smiled at him.

"So down this way we have all these resteraunts that we can stop by for lunch." Outside of the hotel like halls were more sterile looking, white halls that lead to different sections of the ship. "Before that I thought maybe we could take a look at the gardens." I held his hand while we walked through rows and rows of gorgeous, vibrant flowers. Tree's grew tall and made beautiful shade for us to sit under. We leaned against the cool bark, I rested my head on his shoulder. Kirishima told me stories about Home World and what our lives will look like when we get there.

"I feel like I'm talking a lot. Why don't you tell me about your life on Earth?"

My smile fell and I tried to think of something, anything positive about my child hood. "Well Earth wasn't that interesting. Home World sounds so beautiful and incredible. I mean, no human has any type of power like you do." He held up his hand and flexed, his skin hardening like rock. I giggled and he kissed my cheek.

We spent time like this together, building some type of routine. Wake up together, and then spend the day having fun and eating.

Every night he would give me an injection, and we'd fall asleep holding each other closely.

On my seventh night, I sat up in the dark gasping for air. My heart was pounding against my chest and I let out a terrible choking sob. Kirishima woke up immediately, hopping out of bed and searching the room for some type of threat. The light flicked on and after a few seconds of looking for an attacker he turned back to me and pulled me into his lap. "Y/N what's happening?" His voice was panicked and I tried gulping down air. "I had a nightmare." I pushed my words out with a shaking voice. He grabbed his watch he always wears off of the night stand and put it on. Holding my hand, a holographic screen appeared from the watch. "Your heart rate is rapid, and your endocrine system is pumping a lot of adrenaline." He moved me off of his lap and started digging in the kitchen. He pulled a medical kit out and starting prepping a syringe. "No! No I don't need any medicine." Tears stung my eyes and I took a deep breath. "It's just a panic attack."

He set the med kit down and looked at me strange. "A what?"

"A panic attack. Sometimes I have bad dreams, and they make me freak out." I pushed some of my hair behind my ears and started to settle myself. Usually they last a lot longer than this, but I feel like I have slightly more control than usual.

"What kind of horrible thing in your dreams made you wake up like that?" He sat down beside me and took my hands in his. His hands are callused and warm. I wanted to tell him, tell him anything and everything.

The years and years of living in hell, always being told that I'm nothing and deserve nothing.

"Your injections you've been giving me... they help a lot with-" I took another deep breath. "They help me to not feel like I'm always drowning." He started rubbing my back, just letting me talk. "Does your species have medicine that can make me forget Earth?" My voice cracked and he pulled my head to rest on his shoulder. "I just want to forget everything." I let my walls fall just a bit and cried into his shoulder. "Hey I've got an idea. How about we go for a walk?"

It was dark in the gardens. The artificial sky was lit up with a beautiful display of soft twinkling starry lights. Nobody is around but the two of us.

We laid down in a clearing and just looked up, staring at the beautiful lights like we're stargazing. He let me just enjoy the quiet, holding my hand beside me.

After a little bit he broke the silence.

"You know, I'm a pretty positive guy." He chuckled a bit. "But I'm also a soldier, I've seen a lot of messy and terrible things. Lost organisms that I was supposed to save. Kill organisms because I was ordered too." He spoke seriously, but still managed to have an air of kindness behind his tone. "I think I understand what's going on with you. You've been through war. I can't make the things you've seen and been through go away..." he rolled to his side and touched my face gently. "But I can fill the rest of your life with new memories..." I looked at his face and couldn't help but smile. "And be here for you when the old ones creep back up. You'll never have to go through anything alone again."

I grabbed both sides of his face and kissed him. His eyes were huge with shock, but he leaned into my kiss. He hovered over me, trying to keep his muscular body from pressing down on me too hard. He swirled his tongue past my lips and I shuddered, waves of heat washing over me and pulsing in my core. I gasped and pulled him down on top of me harder, a slight moan leaving the corners of my mouth. He pulled away from me slightly with a nervous laugh. "A-are you alright?"

I kissed his nose. "Your kiss made me lose my breath."

"Well that's because of my spit. It makes you... comfortable." He looked down at me with a smile. "Ready to go back home?"

The next morning I woke up and stared dreamily at Eijiro's face. He looked so much different to me today. His gorgeous face, his toned body. I ran my finger down his chest and my touch caused him to flutter his eyes open. "Good morning baby girl..." He yawned and stretched out his arm. His stretch had him flex all of his muscles and I pushed myself a little closer to him. "Good morning, I was going to hop in the shower..." I tried to lace my voice with lust so he would take the hint that I wanted him to join me. "Okay! While you're showering I'll cook us up some breakfast."

Lightly disappointed I stepped into the bathroom and undressed. I turned the water on and let it run for a moment before wrapping a towel around me. "Eijiro?" I called out and he quickly opened the door and stepped in the steamy shower. "You alright Y/N?" I dropped my towel and stepped in the water. "Oh I'm fine. Could you hand me more body wash?" Eijiro stood stunned for a moment. "Of course I can." He cleared his throat and got into the cabinet. I took the bottle from him and rubbed the soap on myself. "Would you mind washing my back?" I bat my eyelashes at him and he quickly stripped his shorts off and joined me in the water. He slammed his lips against mine and I wrapped my arms around his neck. He pressed my back against the cool tile and his hips pressed against mine. His fingers combed down my back, his nails dragging against my skin and scratching me. I moaned into his mouth. "Please Eijiro... I want you." I whined. He pressed two fingers against my folds and swirled around, feeling my wetness stretch around him. "Are you sure about this Y/N?" I looked down and noticed his member was strange. His member was large, and the tip was rounded and closed off. The veins stood out against his pale skin, because they were maroon instead of a light purple or blue. "Yes please..."

He turned me around and bent me against the wall. I pressed my hands against the glass to steady myself and he backed my hips up to meet him. His tip pushed into my walls, my body eager to meet him. I gasped as he started to move, letting my body adjust slowly at first before gaining speed. His fingers dug into my hips as he groaned while thrusting into me. The bathroom echoing the sound of his body hitting mine. He bounced me off of his pelvis over and over again, I just moaned and cried out his name over and over again. "Eijiro please I'm going to cum-"

"I wanna make you feel so good baby- hold on-" His member shifted in my body, I felt him pulse as something moved through him. He pushed himself against the very tip of my cervix. Something moved up into my body, it felt like a jelly substance for just a moment before dissolving.

I felt fire run down my spine and erupt. I cried out, my orgasm rocking my body. He wrapped an arm around my waist to keep me steady as his cock shifted again. Another dissolving sensation, and then another. I cried out, shaking. My hands fell off of the wall and Ejiro held me close to him, keeping me from slipping in the water. "You alright baby?" I nodded yes, my chest heaving.

We laid snuggled together on the bed for most of the afternoon. He traced shapes on my back, giving me kisses on my head while we talked between naps.

I could get used to this, being touched with such gentleness. "I love you Eijiro." I whispered to him. I snuggled into his chest further. "I love you too Y/N. I always will."

#inthewoods bnha alien au #Kirishima Eijirou #kirishima x reader #ovipositor kink #ovipositor #BNHA au #bnha fanfiction #bnha fic #bnha imagines #my hero fanfic #my hero academia #my hero fan fiction #bnha monster fic #bnha monster au #bnha monster boy #mha kirishima #kirishima x fem

819 notes · View notes

chilling-seavey · 3 years

Text

Heartbreak Hotel (d.s.) - Chapter Twenty-Three

A/N What wouldn’t Daniel do...

T/W Physical violence

“Where’d you run off to yesterday?” Jack asked as Daniel slid onto his usual stool.

Daniel slouched forward against the counter with a tired sigh, “I ran into Loretta.”

Jack paused his polishing of cutlery and waved Zach over from tending to a table. Zach rushed over to join them, pausing to slide the order slip to the kitchen before giving Daniel his full attention.

“She said Corbyn forbid her from seeing me and she wants me to leave her alone. Forever.”

“Wait, what?” Zach frowned. He and Jack exchanged confused glances. “But you just gave her the best night of her life pretty much.”

“Yeah…well…” Daniel faded out with a shrug.

“So what, she’s just going to ignore the fact that you’re chemically, biologically, emotionally, and physically made for each other?” Jack scoffed.

“Apparently. Because Corbyn makes the rules now.” Daniel mumbled, picking at the countertop.

Jack continued polishing the cutlery and organizing them into the plastic bin in front of him, only shaking his head in disbelief.

“So after all, that it just takes her to say ‘leave me alone’ for you to drop all you’ve worked for?” Zach asked.

“It just…” Daniel sighed, straightening up on the stool. “It just makes me so angry that she lets him boss her around all the time.”

“Well that’s how it works in society. At least she’s a well-behaved girlfriend.” Jack mumbled, offering the play of devil’s advocate. Zach elbowed him under Daniel’s depressed pout in their direction. Jack sighed, glancing back up at Daniel before turning back to his polishing, “I’m not going to tell you what to do because you have your own head on your shoulders; but you spent the last month and a half chasing after this girl and it would be a coward move if you just gave up.”

“She doesn’t want anything to do with me though.” Daniel said.

“She only doesn’t want anything to do with you because Corbyn told her that’s what she wants.” Zach corrected.

Daniel chuckled humourlessly, shaking his head tiredly. His heart still ached but he pushed it down with the anger that was growing inside of him at the unfairness of the whole situation.

Zach continued, “You’ve got to do something about it, Daniel.”

“Have a civil conversation with the guy.” Jack said. “Sit down like men and talk it out.”

“Corbyn doesn’t seem like the talking type.” Daniel grumbled.

His friends were silent for a moment and Daniel raised his eyes from the counter to look up at them, frowning as their surprised faces were staring out the front window of the diner. Daniel turned to look over his shoulder just as the bell above the door rang and Corbyn and Jonah walked in, dressed in their usual black leather. The air was thick with tension the second they stepped foot in the diner and Daniel turned quickly back to avoid being caught starting, tugging at his shirt collar as if breathing was suddenly difficult.

“Jesus.” Daniel swore under his breath.

Jack smirked, polishing a handful of butter knives in his hand, “The universe really does work in weird ways, huh?”

Corbyn and Jonah glanced over to the group of three at the counter and Daniel didn’t dare look up, keeping his head down and back turned to them.

“Does he see me?” he whispered.

“Uh huh.” Zach answered quietly, staring right back at the two friends, watching as they glared distastefully at them and then found a seat in one of the booths together.

“You can stop hiding under the counter now.” Jack said.

Daniel raised his head slowly, “I wasn’t hiding under the counter.”

“Might as well have been.” Jack said. “Just go over there and ask him what’s going on.”

“I can’t do that.” Daniel could feel his heart racing in his chest, some sort of adrenaline starting to pump through his veins just at the sight of Corbyn and Jonah sitting across the restaurant.

Jack spoke lowly like he was the devil on Daniel’s shoulder, “He’s taking your future from you.”

“The future you’ve only dreamt of your whole life.” Zach added.

“And the one you already had a taste of.”

“He’s undeserving of her.”

“You going to let him get his way with it like this?”

“Do you want to be miserable the rest of your life after you had a glimpse of what could be?”

Daniel got up from the stool before he could second guess, fueled by his friends’ words, and started right over towards the booth across the diner. He felt like he was walking outside of himself; some strange out of body experience as he approached the table, maybe caused by the dose of adrenaline that was filling him. Daniel was never an aggressive person whatsoever and Jack and Zach knew that well; not worried at all as they watched their best friend saunter across the tile floor.

The moment Corbyn raised his head and his eyes landed right on Daniel’s, the younger boy let everything out like a dam breaking.

“Who do you think you are?” Daniel snapped as strongly as he could.

Jack and Zach glanced at each other with entertained and surprised expressions before turning back to the scene a few feet away.

Corbyn cracked a small smile and looked across the table to Jonah before looking back up to Daniel, “What the hell are you talking about?”

“You have no right to tell Loretta what she can or cannot do!” Daniel smacked his palm on the table for emphasis.

Corbyn’s eyebrows raised, “Oh really?”

“Yes, really! She can do as she pleases, and you cannot boss her around like you are! You…You can’t tell her that she can’t see me!”

“Well, that’s where you’re wrong, Seavey.” Corbyn said coolly, leaning towards him over the table, “She’s my girl so therefore she’s mine to do as I please with. Do you have an issue with that?”

“Yes.” Daniel jabbed back.

A few other patrons were glancing over at the teenagers and their small argument.

“Why’s that, Seavey? You think you can come in here and swipe up my girl? You already took her on a date and nearly kissed her in your car – don’t think I didn’t see that – and I already warned you to not try anything funny. You’re a pathetic little boy. You don’t know one thing about life.”

“I know that she’s not your soulmate!” Daniel shouted.

Corbyn’s stern stare turned stone in a millisecond and Daniel nearly shuttered under the intensity of it. There was a beat of silence.

Corbyn grabbed the front of Daniel’s shirt and tugged him close until they were nearly nose to nose and Daniel was leaning half over the table, staring fearfully right into Corbyn’s grey eyes. He could feel his breath on his face.

“What gave you the balls to say that bullshit?” Corbyn seethed.

“She told me! She’s been lying to you the whole time and I think you’ve been lying to her too! You’re not her soulmate; I am!” Daniel said. “You’re nothing more than a phony and too much of a coward to go find your real soulmate and let Loretta be actually happy!”

Corbyn was off the bench in a flash and pulled Daniel towards the door by the front of his shirt. He walked so briskly that even Jonah couldn’t get up to follow them in time; everyone’s eyes turning to follow them out the front door of the diner with Daniel nearly tripping over his feet as Corbyn shoved him out onto the sidewalk. Daniel hadn’t even caught his footing before Corbyn delivered a punch right to his nose, sending the smaller boy stumbling backwards.

“Shit!” Jack gasped and he and Zach tossed down their cutlery to rush outside, Jonah right in front of them.

Daniel was powerless against Corbyn’s strength, barely getting his hands in front of his face to defend himself before Corbyn hit him again, and then once more, sending him toppling backwards onto the sidewalk. The patrons of the diner gathered at the windows to watch the fight unfold as Corbyn straddled Daniel’s body and delivered punch after punch to his face until blood was coating his knuckles and splattered onto the pavement.

Daniel could barely even move, too in shock to register what was even happening. All he could feel was the metal of Corbyn’s ring colliding with his face and this aching warmth that spread all over his body before his brain could even process the pain.

“Get off him!” Jack grabbed at Corbyn’s arm to try and drag him off his best friend but Jonah pulled him away, glaring down at Jack and Zach in near warning. A crowd was forming around the scene on the sidewalk, the sickening sound of the hard punches bringing more people around.

Corbyn paused to grab the front of Daniel’s shirt and pulled his head off the pavement, shouting down at him, “I told you to mind your own fucking business!”

Daniel only coughed, blood dribbling down his chin from his split lip. Corbyn punched him again before standing up and kicking him right in the stomach, sending the crowd gasping and Daniel to double over in agony on the sidewalk.

“Hey, asshole!” Jack dodged Jonah’s arm and went right over to Corbyn and gave him a rough shove.

Corbyn caught his fist before Jack could hit him and delivered a hard punch to him stomach, forcing the air right out of Jack’s lungs until he was gasping and stumbling onto the ground himself. Zach crouched to tend to Jack as Corbyn turned back to Daniel. He kicked him once more in the stomach and then used the heel of his boot to push Daniel flat onto his back against the pavement. Corbyn bent down right in front of him and lifted Daniel up by two hands on the front of his blood-stained shirt again,

“Had enough yet?” Corbyn seethed.

Daniel let out a small whimper, earning him one last punch to his nose before sound of heavy footfalls from down the sidewalk got louder as two police officers came running to see what was going on.

Jonah rushed over and grabbed Corbyn’s arm to pull him away, “We gotta get out of here.”

Corbyn stood up, staring down at Daniel on the sidewalk and he stretched his right hand out, blood staining his knuckles and he flexed his fingers a moment before leaning over the younger boy. He spat down on him distastefully before offering a vicious, “You hear me, Seavey? You stay the fuck away from me and my girl or I’ll finish you off.”

Jonah and Corbyn disappeared quickly down the street, leaving Daniel laying weak on the sidewalk. Zach rushed over to him and set his gentle hands on his best friend’s shoulders as he assessed the damage. Daniel winced as he moved slightly, reaching a shaking hand up to swipe the blood from his nose and he let out a small sob as he took in the deep red on his fingertips and he rested his head back against the pavement.

Daniel stared straight up to the sky, the forms of Zach, Jack, and the officers leaning over him fading into the glare of the LA sun.

#🍓#soulmate au #daniel seavey #why dont we #wdw #1950s #soulmate!wdw #jonah marais #jack avery #corbyn besson #zach herron #christian seavey #daniel seavey fanfic #why dont we fanfic #limelight #au

27 notes · View notes

nerianasims · 3 years

Text

Billboard #1s 1984

Under the cut.

Yes -- "Owner of a Lonely Heart" -- January 21, 1984

The full version of this song is way too long. Not surprising from a former prog rock band. The music is good and interesting, but it loses me before the end even in the shorter single version. There's too much stuff. As for the lyrics, maybe that prog rock gloss made people think they were profound, but they look like self-help. Some incredibly 80s Reagan-era individualism, better to be alone than to be hurt, you're the only one you can count on, blah blah blah. Not for me. 'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

Culture Club -- "Karma Chameleon" -- February 4, 1984

The video to this song has nothing to do with it, unless there's supposed to be a connection between the con artist on the fantasy world 19th century steamboat and the guy who keeps coming and going whom Boy George is singing to. And I didn't fully realize the "you come and go" double entendre until just now. I like the video, anyway. And I like the song quite a bit. It's a very cheerful-sounding song about being strung along by some asshole.

Van Halen -- "Jump" -- February 25, 1984

Van Halen was something boys were into. It's weird how we delineate these things. At least back in 1984, if it got coded as a boy thing, then if you were a girl and also found it interesting, you'd damn well better hide it or certain other more socially powerful kids would tear you to shreds. That was my experience, anyway. (And if other girls were into it and you were not, you were also in serious trouble.) So though when I heard Van Halen songs I thought, "hm, I'm intrigued," I did not dare pursue that interest. Except for this song. This one was allowed. It's fun.

Kenny Loggins -- "Footloose" -- March 31, 1984

Footloose is a pretty good movie. At least I remember it being so when I eventually saw it in college in the 90s. Anything that stands against censorship, and for art and people having fun, already has an in with me. Also Kevin Bacon's great. The song isn't about the movie particularly; it's just about how dancing is wonderful. Though there is a hint at the movie: "You're playing so cool/ Obeying every rule/ Deep way down in your heart/ You're burning yearning for some/ Somebody to tell you/ That life ain't passing you by/ I'm trying to tell you/ It will if you don't even try." Yeah. Agatha Christie at one point lamented that young people in the 1950s were far too serious and self-righteous, and really needed to go dance in fountains. I feel the same now as she did then. Though wait until after the covid vaccine's been widely taken. Anyway, this is a good dance song.

Phil Collins -- "Against All Odds (Take A Look At Me Now)" -- April 21, 1984

It's a lament about being dumped. Apparently, Collins wrote it about his wife leaving him out of the blue, taking the kids and the dog with her. Ouch. There's a great drum part, which keeps the song from being too boring, but I still don't like it. Phil Collins' serious love/heartbreak songs don't do it for me. I find this one depressing without being cathartic.

Lionel Richie -- "Hello" -- May 12, 1984

I remember this video from when it was on the air. Mostly because of the Lionel Richie clay head. But also because I was like... is she his student? Isn't that a bad thing? Even though she's an adult in college, I still thought you weren't supposed to do that? I've had a major squick against teacher/student relationships, even in fiction, since I was a kid. Possibly this is because I come from a family of professors. (I didn't get a PhD and am therefore the black sheep.) Without reference to the video, the song is terrible. The lyrics are just repetitive cheese, whatever, but the song is so slow and blah and I don't like Lionel Richie's singing.

Deniece Williams -- "Let's Hear It For the Boy" -- May 26, 1984

I keep being surprised that there are people who think someone is worthless if they don't have a lot of money and don't dress fashionably. In this song, the titular boy also can't dance, but is that a thing that people get dinged for in reality? I don't know, maybe. This song was in Footloose, and it's the same sentiment as "My Guy"; her boy isn't some smooth-talking rich brat, but "he's my lovin' one-man show." He's like Edward Ferrars, not Willoughby. It's a fun song.

Cyndi Lauper -- "Time After Time" -- June 9, 1984

This is one of the greatest songs ever. Not just pop songs. Any song, of any type.

Duran Duran -- "The Reflex" -- June 23, 1984

These lyrics make no sense. That doesn't matter for this song much, which is all about the music. Which is not the best of Duran Duran's music. For all the many, many, MANY different musical ideas in it, it's actually kinda boring. They'd have done better to simplify. I imagine this sounds something like cocaine feels, though drinking way too many Mountain Dews to pull an all-nighter's my only comparison. Duran Duran were never my favorite, but I do enjoy many of their songs. This one, meh.

Prince -- "When Doves Cry" -- July 7, 1984

Prince only two songs after Cyndi Lauper? Is it my birthday? The song's lyrics start out being about the amazing chemistry between the narrator and "you." That establishes why they're together. Then Prince moves on to how they "scream at each other," and it's what it sounds like "when doves cry." He's accusatory -- "How could you just leave me standing/ Alone in a world so cold?" But then he goes right into thinking maybe it's his fault: "Maybe I'm just too demanding" etc. It's a sexy, thoughtful, and anguished song about a relationship in trouble. I like to think they'll overcome their problems and stop screaming at each other. Trust me, it's very possible. Also the music is great.

Ray Parker Jr. -- "Ghostbusters" -- August 11, 1984

Um. I have no idea how to evaluate this one. I heard it first in the theatre when I saw the movie, but I heard it years after every week when I watched the cartoon. It just... is.

Tina Turner -- "What's Love Got To Do With It" -- September 1, 1984

I have an overwhelming memory of hearing this song when I was alone in the grocery store as a teenager. I have no idea why the memory's so strong. Maybe it was the first time I went to the grocery store by myself? Maybe I ran into a guy I had a huge crush on, though I don't remember that? (If I was 16, that could have been one of any three guys... Romance is my secondary aspiration, after all.) In any case, it's a good song. The attempt to pretend love is a bunch of chemicals and doesn't truly matter is a pretty common one for the broken-hearted. And Tina Turner's great as always.

John Waite -- "Missing You" -- September 22, 1984

Two songs in a row about being in denial over matters of love. Interesting. This isn't the most fascinating song ever, but it's a good solid song about heartbreak that isn't gloopy at all. In the main vocals, Waite keeps insisting "I ain't missing you," but in the background is a soft voice that sings "missing you" over and over. That's a smart artistic move.

Prince and the Revolution -- "Let's Go Crazy" -- September 29, 1984

I liked a lot of pop music when I was 7, but I didn't get Prince. His songs sort of slid out of my brain as a "thing for grownups," and who could understand grownups? He was short and wore fancy outfits, and that's about all that registered. When I hit puberty, though... yeah. This song is more adult than that, though, and I don't mean sexually, though there is plenty of sex in this song. "You better live now/ Before the grim reaper come knocking on your door." The song is about sex, partying, and death. Also Prince was an astonishing guitarist, along with everything else. It's not one of my favorite Prince songs, because the lyrics are pretty depressing and it's super loud, but it's still great.

Stevie Wonder -- "I Just Called To Say I Love You" -- October 13, 1984

I never really listened to the background beep-de-boops in this song before. I've wondered before why this song, with its simple lyrics and melody, didn't bore me. It's the beep-de-boops. They, along with Stevie Wonder's perfect delivery, make this song musically complex. And the simple lyrics, with the more complex musical counterpoints, absolutely work. It helps that this is the kind of thing people really do.

Billy Ocean -- "Caribbean Queen" -- November 3, 1984

That heavy breathing after the line "I get so excited just from her perfume" is unfortunate. Otherwise, it's a song about how he met this "Caribbean Queen" on vacation and she "tamed" him so he's no longer looking for "love on the run." Sure, why not. I'd like a little more story to it, but that's me. It's got a good beat though, and is enjoyable enough as-is.

Wham! -- "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" -- November 17, 1984

I just realized I don't like this song. The beat and hook are sort of irresistible, and as a dance song the music absolutely works. But there's too much nostalgia about stuff that George Michael actually wasn't old enough to be nostalgic about. He was only 21 at the time, born in 1963, and yet he was singing about Doris Day. You can homage anything at any age, but... meh. And speaking of age, it's kind of a childish song and George Michael's voice was always more on the mature end, even if he was young at the time. For me, it hits a jarring note.

Daryl Hall & John Oates -- "Out of Touch" -- December 8, 1984

The beginning makes it sound like this is gonna be a relatively hard rock song, but that ends after a pretty short time. It's still really loud, with huge drums, and Hall pretty much shouts the song. Hall & Oates were great when they stripped stuff down. All this noise doesn't work for them. There are neat parts when all the noise suddenly stops and there's total silence, but then it goes right back to the rather uninteresting loudness. Not for me.

Madonna -- "Like A Virgin" -- December 22, 1984

And so it begins. Backstory: Madonna went to the same high school as my mother. She was friends (maybe more? he won't talk) with one of my uncles. When my grandmother saw the Like A Virgin album on the rack at the store, she said, "I'm so glad [he] didn't marry that girl." When my mother told me that, my reaction was "Are you kidding? We'd be rich!" But my family cares about PhDs and not money. My uncle ran wild in high school, but eventually became a successful career diplomat (and stopped being a jackass) after the woman he was in love with told him he'd better shape up or else. Also he looks a lot like Guy Ritchie, so that was weird for a while. I'd be in the grocery store and for a second think, "Why's my uncle on The Enquirer with Madonna?"

So anyway, the song. The way Madonna sang it in later iterations, I like it. I can't stand the version that became a #1 hit. The Betty Boop voice is just ugh. I love a lot of Madonna's music, and she would be something of an inspiration to me in later days, with her unapologetic persona as a woman who liked and wanted sex -- and enjoyed shocking the censorious -- but I was 8 at the time. I didn't get any of it, I just knew she sounded squeaky in this song and it bugged me.

BEST OF 1984: "Time After Time" by Cyndi Lauper. WORST OF 1984: "Hello" by Lionel Richie

#billboard number ones

12 notes · View notes

all-things-are-nothing-to-me · 4 years

Text

Descending into Madness An Anarchist-Nihilist Diary of Anti-Psychiatry

Just sayin’... The opinions expressed in this text represent no other than my own. My position against psychiatry is based on my own personal experience and should not be taken as an authority on the subject. Psychiatry, medications, and or psychiatric incarceration is considered helpful by some, and I wish them the very best experience with it.

But also... To the ‘freaks’, the ‘weirdos’, the ‘delinquents’, and the unruly... To those who embrace these words like daggers drawn against civility, To the insubordinate youth who refuse to tranquilize their play with meds, To those who riot in the asylums, and those who dare to escape from them...

Let the moonlight illuminate our iconoclasm, witches and savage animals spellbinding fire in the night, for the destruction of society, with the courage of unmedicated confrontation.

Any society that you build will have its limits. And outside the limits of any society, unruly and heroic tramps will wander with their wild and virgin thought — those who cannot live without planning ever new and dreadful outbursts of rebellion! I shall be among them!” — Renzo Novatore

I’m sittin’ at a big round table with about three nurses and two doctors. My eyes are sensitive to the light cus I haven’t slept in days. A nurse directly beside me has been gently nodding at me with the same look of concern for about an hour. My vision keeps blurring and then re-focusing. My hands are slightly trembling. I’ve been fighting the urge to lay my head down since I sat down. It appears this awkward meeting is almost over, and I have some papers to sign. The doctor who has been talkin’ since I got here is still talkin’ and I admit, I haven’t really been paying much attention. Finally the talking stops and everyone stands up. The nurse beside me helps me up by my arm. I start to feel dizzy. We begin walking down a long hallway and eventually enter a room. Another nurse in the room greets me with a pillow, a blanket, and a pill to “help with rest”. Before sittin’ down on the bed I’ve been assigned, a nurse calmly requests my belt and shoe laces. I comply and decide while I’m up I might as well take a shit before I go to sleep. About five seconds after my ass hits the toilet seat I hear a commotion - frantic pounding and demands to unlock the bathroom door. Confused and startled, I jump up, trip over my pants, and unlock the door. Apparently I’m not allowed to lock the bathroom door - or have it totally closed while I’m in there. I quickly finish shitting in plain view of a nurse and walk back to bed. I notice a different nurse has pulled up a chair right beside it and sits down with a clipboard and pen. I lay down and try to get comfortable while accepting the awkward close watch by this nurse beside me. As I start drifting off to sleep I reflect on everything that’s goin’ on. Oh that’s right. Earlier today I tried to hang myself in my apartment and this is my first night in a psych ward.

**** INDIANAPOLIS, March 18 th 2018 — Resource Treatment Center Riot Nearly a dozen Indianapolis police officers were called to respond Wednesday night to a riot at a juvenile psychiatric treatment and addiction facility on the city’s east side.

Eleven officers were dispatched to 1404 S. State Avenue just before 11 p.m. Wednesday on a report of a disturbance at the facility. The location is home to the Resource Treatment Center juvenile psychiatric facility, as well as Options Transitional Living, which provides sober housing for homeless or at-risk youth.

Police arrived to find that a group of juvenile residents had done more than $50,000-worth of damage to the facility and assaulted four staff members. Officers took nine juveniles ranging in age from 13-17 into custody on preliminary charges of vandalism, rioting, battery and disorderly conduct.

****

During my time at this psychiatric prison I was subjected to what’s called ‘one on ones’ which basically means I’m at risk to myself and therefore require 24 hour observation by staff. Two different nurses watched me shit, sleep, cry in my sleep, and eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I was required to take meds and a sleep aid everyday. I had face-to-face therapy once a day. I was only allowed one 15 minute phone call per day. I wasn’t allowed outside at all. I was told to “set anchor” because the faculty had no intentions on releasing me “anytime soon”.

All the reasons I was originally depressed took a backseat to this new horror show I found myself in. Everyone in my ward talked about one day gettin’ out, despite being told they would “never make it on the outside”. I couldn’t help but notice the striking similarities to incarceration at a prison for criminals. This was a prison. The more I heard stories of attempted escape, violent physical repression, and hopeless isolation, the more I realized this was not a place to ‘get well’, nor any hospital I ever been to. These prison guards wore scrubs, enforced order with chemical warfare and physical restraint jackets. “The hole” was the padded room. Those who resisted were tackled to the hard floor causing cuts and bruises. And to the nurses and doctors, we were all just “case files” or “subjects” to be talked down to and humiliated. We were in their world now and it was their rules.

“We need a program of psychosurgery and political control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be surgically mutilated. The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view. This lacks historical perspective. Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal. We must electrically control the brain. Some day armies and generalswill be controlled by electrical stimulation of the brain.” - Dr. Jose Delgado, a Spanish professor of neurophysiology and author of the book ‘Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society’

The era of institutionalized ‘care’ for those with ‘mental illnesses’ began somewhere around the 19th century with heavy support from the state. Public asylums were built in Britain after the passing of the 1808 County Asylums Act. This created an upsurge of asylums being built everywhere. These asylums were known for inmates havin’ to live in filthy conditions with bars, chains, and handcuffs.

The Lunacy Act 1845 was known to have changed the status of ‘mentally ill’ people to ‘patients’ who required treatment. This led to the eventual chemical treatment of people as ‘medical patients’ – despite the fact that lab tests, X-rays, and brain scans have never verified psychiatric disorders as medical diseases or brain damage. Over time, this inspired the emergence of psychiatric medical experiments on ‘patients’ in order to chemically ‘cure’ their ‘disorders’. The 20th century saw an explosion of psychiatric drugs. The first anti-psychotic drug, Chlorpromazine (brand names: Thorazine, Largactil, Hivernal, and Megaphen) was first synthesized in France in 1950.

Psychiatry, asylums, and prescribed drugs contributed heavily to reinforcing social order and individual submission through fear. As the years went on psychiatry and asylums expanded, re-defining and strengthening the power of state repression and civilized control.

Along with this came an ever-expanding culture of publicly calling out those who were considered ‘disturbed’ or ‘mentally ill’. The first to be targeted were those who didn’t fit the narrowly defined behavioral expectations of society. In the 18th to early 20th century, individuals assigned female at birth were often institutionalized for damn near everything including unpopular opinions, social unruliness or a politicized refusal to be controlled by patriarchal society. Other individuals of various assigned identities who sexually deviated from hetero-normativity were institutionalized and considered “confused” and in need of being converted.

One major marketing scheme deployed by the pharmacology industry was the social construction of an ideal emotional state that every ‘normal’ individual was expected to experience. Today this same ideal can be found everywhere – from televised entertainment to billboard advertisements and so on. The ‘happy’ and ‘depressed’ binary was used to create social pressure leading people to feel isolated or out of place for not happily accepting the conditions of society on a daily basis. Being “sad all the time” was, and still is frowned upon and ridiculed – regardless of its complex nature and the reasons behind it.

Despite being emotionally fluid by nature, the individual human (animal) is expected to fulfill the civilized role of positivist supremacy. This normalized obsession with positivity plays a key role in suppressing emotional responses of outrage to the multitude of oppressive experiences. The obsession with - and normalization of - positivist performance also encourages people to overlook the deep-seated trauma caused by civilization on a daily basis. Everything from the fear of flying, car wrecks, workplace injuries, to being late on bill payments – all examples of fears attributed to trauma. But because civilized life requires wage-slavery and commitment to continue, these forms of trauma are trivialized and written off - usually followed by something like “that’s life” or “it is what it is”.

As techno-industrial society advances, new laws are constructed to create new definitions of ‘criminality’. This means there is an ever-narrowing idea of legalism. The same can be said for psychiatry. As more labels and identities for ‘disorders’ are created, the pharmacology industry expands. And as the conditions of capitalist, industrial society continue to worsen, more misery becomes available for exploitation with the sale of “feel good” prescriptions.

Under capitalism, where there are ‘correctional’ facilities, there is a profit motive to keep them filled. Where there are ‘inmates’ to fill those institutions, there is financial gain or cheap labor. And where there is any potential for social unrest, there is an ideology and identity to categorically define an unruly individual as ‘anti-social’. Society turns ‘disorders’ into categorical identities assigned to those it considers ‘undesirable’ in order to reinforce the social conditions that pressure people into behavioral uniformity.

Today, within the realm of identity politics, psychiatric-assigned identities garner social capital where ever victimhood is glorified for social benefit. As with any form of identity politics, I have seen many individuals exploit psychiatric identities by brandishing them as reasons to rid themselves of responsibility for their actions. And as this plays out in the all-too-familiar social cannibalism of identity politics, individuals personalize these psychiatric- assigned identities and create inverted hierarchies of social entitlement.

Ultimately, a new identity-based movement is formed, gaining media recognition and becomes assimilated into the broader prison of society.

****

Thursday, September 4, 2014 Riot at Central New York Psychiatric Center A dozen staff members were injured when several inmates started rioting in a kitchen area at the Central New York Psychiatric Center on Wednesday.

Four people were hospitalized for their injuries, authorities stated. The fight broke out at about 11:45 a.m., when five to six inmates started attacking staff in one of the kitchen areas using kitchen utensils as weapons, according to the state Correctional Officers & Police Benevolent Association. The inmates tried to fight their way into the mess hall.

At the same time, another fight broke out between inmates and staff on the floor above the kitchen, officials said. The emergency alarms were raised, and security personnel inside the facility were able to break up the two fights, with help from the state police.

****

After careful planning, I was released from psychiatric incarceration much sooner than originally set. The walls were closing in on me and the monotony of daily under-stimulation, medicated numbness, and confinement started breaking me down. Witnessing the prison cannibalism of infighting between incarcerated individuals, I began spiralling worse than I had prior to being there. On top of that, my two attempts to secretly organize a rebellion had failed miserably; the wards or ‘bunks’ were so small that an artificially constructed bond was easily created between most staff and patients. Snitching was heavily rewarded.

Nobody wanted “any problems”. So instead I turned to another method of emancipation; using my own high school knowledge of psychology to convince my therapist I was merely suffering from “a broken heart” due to a “recent romantic breakup”.

Despite the full spectrum of my hatred for society, the life I was living at the time, and the complex emotional storm that raged in my head on a daily basis, I was able to convince my therapist and the other nurses I was just upset over a breakup. The humiliation of having to role-play such a lie paled in comparison to my desire for freedom from that place. Released into my mom’s custody, I was required to continue taking my medications three times a day and seeing a counsellor once a week.

Against the wards request, I went back to living in my apartment. I could see where the police had went through all my notebooks as well as a pocket book of phone numbers. The noose I worked so hard to construct and attach to a wooden beam along my ceiling was gone. To this day I don’t know if my landlord took it or if the police did. My rent was overdue indicated by the notes in my mailbox. Luckily I was working a self-managed painting job at the time so I couldn’t get fired. I could start back up the next week.

That night I masturbated for the first time in what felt like years. But I couldn’t orgasm. The next day I called the doctor who dealt my meds. According to him, my impossible orgasm was common with people on psychiatric medication. A week went by and I continued to feel numb. Nothing was interesting to me. I often found myself watching the hands on clocks move or staring out my window at passing cars. I didn’t feel sad. But I didn’t feel good either. I just existed.

After about a month of being out of the psych ward, I decided to stop taking my meds. The hassle of getting them filled as well as keepin’ up with taking them everyday just wasn’t worth it. And neither was feeling numb. I didn’t know what would happen. Would they find out and send the police to take me back? A couple weeks went by without meds and I started to feel slight changes. I was scared but prepared for the hellish withdrawals I had heard all about. I got dizzy a bit, and some headaches but nothing more. Soon I stopped gettin’ calls from my counsellor. I expected her to be upset and leave me angry voicemails. It never happened. Eventually I felt my appetite change and I could experience emotional reactions to things easier and more frequently. And I finally had an orgasm!

For the next couple years, I reflected on those experiences and began exploring the origins of my suicidal thoughts, the origins of the morbid depression that caused them, as well as the consumerist life I lived as a wage-slave law-abiding citizen.

****

A Riot on Thanksgiving Morning 2016 at Springfield Hospital Center (a regional psychiatric hospital and former slave plantation located in Sykesville, Maryland) In the early-morning hours of Thanksgiving Day, Catherine Starkes and April Savage huddled in an office with several other employees at the Springfield Hospital Center in Carroll County as patients rioted around them.

Starkes and Savage said patients threw chairs, knocked over file cabinets and tried to break into the staff's Plexiglas-enclosed refuge. The patients poured cooking oil over the floors, making them slippery. One patient tried to crawl into the office through the suspended ceiling, Starkes recalled.

It was like no other night she could remember in 22 years of working with dangerously mentally ill patients at Maryland state hospitals.

"They wanted to take over the unit. They seized the unit," she said.

****

“What we say is the truth is what everybody accepts. ...I mean, psychiatry: it's the latest religion. We decide what's right and wrong. We decide who's crazy or not. I'm in trouble here. I'm losing my faith.” -Dr. Railly from the movie “12 Monkeys”

Similar to religion, psychiatry assumes a powerful role in defining “right” or “wrong” in terms of “normal” vs “abnormal” behavior. The standardization of a particular, socially expected behavior is essential for creating categories of people defined in terms of their contribution to the collective success of society. With psychology as a basis for analytically outlining ‘problems’ and suggesting “potential cures”, mass society becomes dependent on its authority for deciding who is “normal” and who isn’t. Certain behavioral characteristics unique to an individual become outlawed in order to maintain this social conformity.

Speaking from my own experience, psychiatry and all its theories, roles, and chemical prescriptions at best aims to merely manage ‘symptoms’ of ‘disorders’ - not eliminate the sources of their creation.

By ‘symptoms’ I am referring to any set of behaviors or emotional responses that indicate an individual’s struggle to conform to societal expectations or ‘normal’ behavior.

By ‘disorders’ I am referring to the set of behaviors or emotional responses that have been selected and condemned by society, and therefore declared a ‘mental illness’ by the authority of psychiatry.

By ‘sources’ I am referring to any and all prisons, societal forms of coercion, and civilized society – all of which pressure individual subservience and ideological conformity.

The conflict of interest in ‘curing’ the ‘mentally ill’ becomes apparent when acknowledging that successful cures to particular behaviors and emotional responses would require the abolition of civilized society all together - the same civilized society that creates trauma, followed by the concept of mental illness and subsequently a ‘solution’ via many forms of emotional anaesthesia.

Another factor of social control built into psychiatry is its ability to distort and control dissenting information. Social systems that require the subordination of individuals are always sharpening their ability to suppress or demonize information – especially information derived from rebellious experience. When it is individuals themselves who are considered living examples of this information, those seeking total control will portray them in such a way that renders the nature of their rebellion a mere product of mental illness. For example, the Soviet Union responded to rebels with psychiatric wards called “Psikhushkas”. One of the first Psikhushkas was a psychiatric prison in the city of Kazan. In 1939 it was transferred to the secret police. Psychiatric incarceration was used in response to political demonstrations and attacks. It was common practice for soviet psychiatrists in Psikhushka hospitals to diagnose those who rebelled against soviet authority with schizophrenia.

Just as religious authority figures speak of purging people of their sins and demons, psychiatry seeks to purge people of their ‘sickness’ and ‘bad’ habits. In the church of psychiatry, only those most committed to social conformity (or emotional suppression) can enter the heavens of being socially recognized as ‘sane’ or ‘normal’. Normal or civilized behavior is rewarded with social capital and easier access to survival resources. And in the eyes of those who fear unbridled freedom, without the church of mental psychiatric authority, ‘the masses’ just might descend into madness...

****

Sept 5 2016 John George Psychiatric Hospital Riot Nurses at Alameda County’s embattled mental hospital say three patients tried to incite a riot overnight and escape the facility. Staff members are blaming chronic overcrowding at John George Psychiatric Hospital’s emergency room. It’s the latest in a string of troubling incidents at the hospital uncovered by 2 Investigates.

Nurses – who didn’t want to be identified for fear of jeopardizing their jobs – tell 2 Investigates that two male patients and one woman demanded to be discharged from John George’s Psychiatric Emergency Services (PES) department Sunday night. But when they were refused, they turned violent, according to staff.

The patients allegedly tried to encourage others to help them push the facility doors open to escape.

****

“The Law, social expectation, and psychiatric tradition and practice point to coercion as the profession’s paradigmatic characteristic. Accordingly, I define psychiatry as the theory and practice of coercion, rationalized as the diagnosis of mental illness and justified as medical treatment aimed at protecting the patient from himself and society from the patient.” - Psychiatrist turned anti-psychiatry, Thomas S Szasz, M. D.

While reflecting on my experience with psychiatry, including being on three different medications and my stay in the ward, I started asking myself questions I had never thought to ask before: what are the social conditions contributing to my feelings of misery? What type of behavior is characteristic of ‘mental illness’ and ‘normal’ functioning? Who enforces these definitions as universal truths to begin with? Is it the same psychiatric authority that at one point considered homosexuality a mental illness – then changed their minds in 1973?

I couldn’t help but notice that despite all the therapy, meds, and psychiatric hospitality the world outside my head was still the same. Poverty still dominated my hood, rich billionaires were still playin’ golf while the government continued bombing other countries. Millions of non-human animals were still bein’ mutilated in slaughterhouses on a daily basis, and the environment was still bein’ devastated by industrial expansion. I still needed to wage-slave away to pay my rent. And like everyone else, I needed to do this until I got too old and eventually live out my days in a nursing home. But somehow I was supposed to be ‘happy’ - or at least apathetically accepting of it all without a fuss. Obedience without incident. Without question. Or as the others in the ward had said to me “no problems”.

Currently in my life, I am still angry, still depressed, and still sometimes suicidal. But rather than seeing these things as what’s broken about me, I see them as a reflection of how fucked up the world is around me. I find little things to help me channel the anger, depression, and suicidal thoughts. I exercise, practice mixed martial arts, enjoy a walk in the woods at night. I star-gaze from park benches, rooftops, and moving freight trains. I indulge in stolen food and cherish the excitement of criminal activity. Managing my emotions is a daily activity coupled with observation and growth. I listen to the stories of others and learn from their experiences. I listen to my emotions and source their origins, making it easier to understand my needs and desires. My emotions – my madness - manifesting as anger, depression, and so on remain sharp and act as the best tools for understanding the effects of this imprisoning society on my well-being.

My disposition lacks evidence of being broken or brain damaged – if anything, it would suggest the contrary. My emotional state is a complex response to the anxiety that occurs when recognizing society for what it is – a prison propagating itself as ‘normal’ life. And integrated within this prison is a web of altered realities that materialize the logic of control and domination: Wage-slavery masquerading as productivity and personal responsibility. Coerced submission and obedience to law and order in “the land of the free”. Pictures of happy cows on packages of mutilated body parts. Borders, bio-technology, cyberspace communities of friends interacting with the emotional vacancy of digital communication.

And it is here, in this same social prison society, that the word insanity is used to describe an individual person rather than industrial civilization - the epitome of mechanized social control.

“The stars up close to the moon were pale; they got brighter and braver the farther they got out of the circle of light ruled by the giant moon” ― Ken Kesey, from the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

I believe deep down all people are ‘insane’ - not in terms of mental illness - but in terms of individual, unique differences that remain defiantly incompatible to behavioral order. In society, some people hide these differences better than others. And many people I have come across express frustration with having to keep themselves locked up inside, aching to break out. The fear of being socially labelled insane or crazy keeps people passive and submissive. But some people experience difficulty assimilating themselves. And while society attempts to frantically control and eliminate certain undesirable people and behaviors, natural responses to environmental conditions continue to produce both.

If one were to really examine the social interactions between individuals, one can see the subtle tip-toeing of animals peeking from within the wardrobe of humanism. It is the fear of being too loud, too angry, too sad, too imaginative – the fear of allowing oneself to exist at full bloom – that incarcerates the animal individual. It is the fear of exhibiting any personal qualities or characteristics that would violate the boundaries of socially expected behavior. Breaking the laws of psychiatry could be punishable by chemical injection, imprisonment, or even death.

This fear also plays a vital role in creating an obsession with relying on institutional specialization rather than peer to peer support. This obsession is normalized when, in response to someone reaching out for emotional support, friends suggest ‘professional help’ as if to surrender themselves ineffective by default. It says something about the nature of one’s confidence, ability, and will to support another when that support is often outsourced to an elite group of ‘professionals’. I’m not tryin’ to say that every individual has the capacity to support others at all times: I am suggesting an examination of the inferiority complex internalized by people in the face of institutions, and how individuals often find themselves too busy obeying the demands of capitalism, or too distracted by consumerism to make time for supporting their loved ones – let alone themselves.

If one were to examine society as a whole, one can see how over-simplified, quick-fix solutions to complex problems is built into it. If one were to examine this even on a personal level, one can see how everything about industrial society reduces personal time to the point where one often neglects their own emotional health. Against the demands of technological addiction and wage-slavery, making time for supporting one’s self and or those they care about is, however under-rated, nothing less than an act of personal revolt. “You need professional help” is often the quick response to an individual simply looking for support from close friends. Not all people (including myself) enjoy being pathologized or assigned a diagnosis like a broken machine. It is this ‘professional help’ that replaces intimate support with capitalism where someone struggling is treated as a profitable ‘case file’ and dealt a bottle of pills.

From a vibrant friend struggling with a unique history of complex emotional experiences, to a patient branded with an over-simplistic set of psychiatric identities – the individual becomes merely a unit of diagnostic measurement.

Diagnoses act as identity configurations defined in terms of symptom-based sameness. These identity assignments are constructed by the specialists of psychiatric authority, and are enforced socially by those who uphold its power. The same way that leftists are quick to use statist terminology to publicly label and shame “undesirables” or those unwanted by The Movement (for example, using the word “terrorist” to describe proponents of anarchist attack), they are equally quick to call people ‘mentally ill’, or ‘toxic’- demanding they seek ‘professional’ help. Perhaps without realizing it, leftists socially reinforce the validity of the state and psychiatric authority by reducing the complexity of individual behavior to mere psychiatric constructs and moral condemnation.

Psychiatry provides a comforting sense of order in the refusal to accept the chaotic nature of behavior. By asserting psychiatric terminology and morality many leftists seek control over social interactions with the intent to sterilize and homogenize them. This attempt at behavioral uniformity goes hand in hand with the treatment of individuals as members of monolithic, identity-based groupings. Behavioral uniqueness and variety are often discouraged or condemned when they don’t fit neatly constructed scripts. One’s behavior or emotional expression could be trivialized by being socially called out as ‘problematic’ - a label which itself requires the conformity of a generalized consensus to define and enforce.

Society and all its defenders require the dam of psychiatry to subordinate and control the tidal waves of individualist variety and social unrest. I can only imagine what would happen if the mechanisms of control failed on an individual level - if freedom of emotional expression took aim at the crystal castles of psychiatric authority, shattering the illusion of sterilized permanence. One after another an individual cannonball weakens the continuity of the structure, an ungovernable individual compromises the strength of collectivized subservience.

****

Jan 31, 2006 Riot at the Riverview Hospital For Children and Youth Five male patients at a state-run psychiatric hospital for children face rioting charges after they ripped out a phone line and tried to steal a worker's car keys before barricading themselves in a room over the weekend, a state official and other sources said Monday.

The incident at Riverview Hospital For Children and Youth occurred less than a week after employees protested over conditions in the facility, contending that the hospital is increasingly unsafe because of the volatile mix of patients.

Sources said that between 11 p.m. and midnight Sunday, a group of boys in the hospital's 11-bed Lakota Unit came out of their rooms and started confronting and arguing with staff. A male clinician and two female employees were assigned to the unit at the time.

Sources said the boys surrounded the man and tried to get him to turn over his keys but he refused. When one of the female workers tried to use the phone to call for help, the boys pulled the phone line out of the wall, sources said. The youths then barricaded themselves in a room and tried to smash a large exterior window, which broke off its hinge.

Sources said the boys intended to escape through the window but were stopped by a Connecticut Valley Hospital police officer who was called to the scene and was outside near the window .

Authorities would not release the names or ages of the boys involved. All face charges of inciting to riot, disorderly conduct, criminal mischief, unlawful restraint and threatening.

****

When, in expressing themselves, individuals let their emotions rupture the confines of psychiatric authority, and fan the flames of their contempt for social control, psychiatry begins to resemble the shell of a burnt out police car. If psychiatry is the agent enforcer of mental law and order - let it die along with every cop and agent of the state. As with identity politics, I refuse to participate in the use of psychiatric terminology when describing other individuals. As with all other socially constructed assignments, I reject psychiatric labels as they seek to limit the horizon of emotional complexity.

When, in expressing themselves, individuals become wild with nihilist hostility toward all ideological roles and identities, what is left of a society without individual conformity? What is ‘male’ or ‘female’ without being fixed to an aesthetic or performative role? What is ‘black’ or ‘white’ without the social construction of race? What is the sane/insane binary without the commanding authority of psychiatry? What is social law and order without anyone willing to obey?

My anarchy is found in the obliteration of these social constructs and the rejection of their ‘social contract’ that universalizes their false existence. I use the phrase social contract because that is precisely what accepting these identity assignments is. It surprises me to see such little prisoner solidarity with those incarcerated at psychiatric facilities. I imagine total anarchy looking like all prisons - including every manifestation of the educational-industrial complex, every zoo, and every asylum – being burned to the ground.

****

On New Year’s Day, 2018, 10 Children as Young as Age 12 Riot and Escape from Strategic Behavioral Health Center in South Carolina During the New Year’s Day incident, patients broke furniture to make weapons. The state report suggest Strategic staff missed warning signs that patients had planned to escape. They did not question residents who were wearing multiple layers of clothing that would allow them to change what they were wearing when they left the hospital.

In a less than five-hour span beginning in the late afternoon, there were seven “Code Purple” incidents in which workers are alerted to trouble. A state investigator reviewed video showing patients going from room to room, throwing a trash can, tearing up paper and tearing schedules off the walls. When one employee arrived, according to the report, he heard loud noises and cussing and saw trash all over the floor in the hallway. Patients had barricaded themselves in a room and had weapons he described as boards with six-inch screws.

“There was no staff trying to get into the room and he was told by staff, ‘They have weapons. Don’t go in,’” records say. “The nurse described the situation as a ‘riot, complete breakdown.’”

By the time police arrived, the south Charlotte psychiatric hospital had descended into chaos. Patients at Strategic Behavioral Center — some wielding wooden boards — attacked one worker, barricaded themselves in a room and escaped through a broken window.

**** For many years I paraded psychiatry as a valuable scientific instrument for understanding the inner workings of human behavior. I no longer find it useful after learning to recognize people as complex beings with unique emotional responses to this civilized nightmare. I have come to recognize psychiatry as, at best, another form of identity politics that ultimately attempts to force the infinite complexity of emotional expression into rigid categorical boxes.

Individual people are far more than ‘bipolar’, ‘psychotic’, etc could accurately express. While a person may experience combinations of emotions socially identified by a psychiatric category, their emotional state can not be summarized or represented by any list of fixed terminology.

My refusal to define a person by the emotional struggles they experience is similar to the reasons I refuse to identity people struggling with intoxication as ‘addicts’. An individual's struggle in coping with society is complex and unique. Psychiatric labels and identities are tools of the state – an entity which I reject. As a tool of civilization, psychiatry creates alienation and violence by treating people found to be emotionally unfit for society as ‘broken’, and therefore socially inferior. I personally refuse to disregard an individual’s struggle for survival by assigning them a psychiatric identity that puts blame on them as ‘mentally ill’ - rather than focusing attention on industrial society itself. Like prisons for ‘criminals’, the ‘correctional’ facility of the psychiatric ward seeks to condition submission through coercion and confinement. Solving or curing ‘mental illness’ in the societal sense often ends up becoming a re-defined ability to condemn, suppress, or sterilize emotions.

Like all governments, presidents, and authority, psychiatry never gave me freedom. Assigned psychiatric labels didn’t help me – they only filled me with an internalized sense of victimhood and inferiority. Medication didn’t ‘cure’ or ‘fix’ me – only damaged me, numbing me to my own senses in order to create an emotional void between me and the fuckery of civilized life. So instead, with nihilist celebration I descend into madness, taking aim at social order and civilization. With armed animalism I realize now that there was nothing to fix - my natural contempt for domestication and social control reminds me that I was never ‘broken’ to begin with.

With maniacal laughter I mock the conventional standardization of human behavior. I reject the authorities of psychiatry, their holy book (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM–5)), and their prisons. I refuse to continue being a test subject for their ever-expanding pharmacotherapeutics. I am an individualist against the collectivized consensus used to materialize institutions of psychiatry. I am a nihilist - hostile to the ideological sane/insane binary and all social constructs that, with pathology, attempt to categorically subjugate individuality. I desire nothing less than a feral revolt against civilization. If civilization and psychiatry marry at the church of morality, then let my anarchy be a fiery black smoke that chokes their gospel of social control.

#anarcho nihilism #anti civ #green anarchy #individualist anarchism #nihilism #post leftism #prisoner support #flower bomb #anti-psychiatry

30 notes · View notes

glitteryfacemagazine · 3 years

Text

It’s all fun and games until you’re lying in bed and suddenly have a flash of what it FELT like to be depressed. I remember when all I could manage to do was lie in bed and daydream about all the things I wanted to accomplish but didn't have the energy to do any of it. I had mostly healed from it, but I think caffeine is a trigger and heavy emotions dont help either.

I am being triggered by my mother’s long forwards on the pandemic because she doesn't often care to fact check and is becoming the exact creature I fight outside the house. It feels like a personal defeat each time she does it because if my own family falls prey to fake news, then what hope do I have with other people? My politics unfortunately doesn’t let me be two-faced about this and I behave reactively in a way that I’m not proud of and only know how to help when I apply my head to it. Conflict resolution or healthy conflict resolution is not something I have any examples of at home, so taught myself it yet dont implement it at home. Maybe as punishment? To point out exactly how they make me feel when they attack me and send my whole body into panic? This morning my mother saw a bottle of coke in the fridge and yelled at me. She said she would throw it out if another bottle came home. I’m done cutting her slack and masking this as a mode of caring. Yes, I have thyroid and she reacted from a space of panic. But at 53, she’s an adult who should have learned how to regulate her emotions instead of taking her raw panic out on me even if it was induced by care and fear. I’m no one’s punching bag just because they’re having a chemical reaction in their own brain because then I dont see it as a form of care, but of aggression. It’s also a shit message to send out to your child? That someone operating from a space of care is ALLOWED to be verbally violent and threaten to take away something that’s brought you joy?

I was disgusted in that moment, but my nervous system was thrown into deregulation for the whole morning. It fucks with the work I have to do, and takes away from my ability to calmly focus on something. Most importantly, this behaviour brings out rebellion in me where I start to OD on the behaviour that brought out that reaction as a challenge against her. It’s self harm, but it comes from a space of raw anger that I’m still learning how to channel.

To be honest, I’m angry about a lot of things.

I’m angry that I’m being controlled and have no way out except for the way they decide is the way out. The problem with being furious with but also caring about the people who hurt you is that you learn to turn your anger and rage inward and when they react to you with rage and you react to yourself with rage, it’s easy to place yourself in the position of doormat. I let myself be taken for granted because they forced me to. If I’m being hateful, it’s only because I’m done being asked to hate myself for not following the path they think is best.

No, I shouldn't have to work extra hard to prove to my parents that I deserve freedom or a good education. They have crippled me, so now I have to do the work of picking myself up and walking. But this is so unfair, because I have next to no support while most people learning to walk in their early adult years had family rooting for them and a peer group learning to walk at the same time.

My journey is solitary because by virtue of being either uneducated (not his fault at all and I hate my grandfather for this) or disinterested in education (her fault because my maternal grandfather was completely supportive of her studying further) my parents think I’m supposed to fit into the mould of a traditional woman and push me to do things they think I’m not doing because THEY are afraid. My failure is the result of fear that wasn't even my own but was forced on me to carry along with the burden of shame.

I will not apologise for yelling at her today, no. She was thoughtless, and then turned my specific problem into a statement of me always having issues with her, which is untrue. I dont need to engage with her gaslighting or emotional blackmail any longer.

I’m literally getting married to escape being controlled and it’s sad how she knows this but still won't apologise to me because her ego gets in the way. My father might be the reason she’s doing all this, but I specially feel rage towards her because she’s the one enacting things that he left unsaid. She’s got agency of her own, but she chooses to squander it where required, but use it in full force to hurt me and my dreams of where I want to be and who I want to become. My life unfortunately has been confined within their ideas of what structures should resemble and I s2g I will not come back to live with them on their terms if I can help it.

But this is so bitter a realisation that I cant help but cry. Gautam doesn't love me and yet I feel the gutting loss of what could have been had my family been... not this way. We could have had a real future. We still can, but he doesn't love me, and this shouldn't hurt like this but it does?

Am I too old for heartbreak? I am, am I not?

He must think I’m absolutely obsessive and codependent, but I’m really just a person dealing with emotional abuse that’s lasted all my life (along with some good old physical beating with belts, hands, cutlery, brushes, whips, lol I’ve had a mirror broken on my leg a day before we were supposed to leave for a holiday when I was 10) and all I really want is to be able to look at him and securely call him mine because I’ve been carved out from the inside by complete lack of emotional support. I look at him and recognise someone who’s a little like me with a history of different kinds of abuse and each time he rejects me, I feel like I deserve to reject myself. Which is a very problematic approach to self love. I cant expect someone like me to love me because I’m lazy to do the work. Actually, I’m not lazy. I just feel so defeated that I keep lying down dreaming of the future and hoping he will love me enough for me to fill my insides with it and that will resurrect me. And each time I get knocked down I take it as my cue that things for me are destined to be hard and self loathing is the only relationship I can have with myself. But it’s not. I shouldn't be. This body has seen a literal whole lifetime of violence because it was brought into this world through violence. I wasn't wanted. So when I was born I was 97% dead and stories of how my own blood relatives are trash were told to me when I was very young and I didn't need to be told stories of such violence at 4 and 5.

I didn't need to be told that my grandmother wanted to burn my mother alive or that my mother didn't care enough about me and had run away when she’d left the house for a bit. She was tortured by them, so she took it out on me even if she claimed to love me. I know this because she still does it every time my father screams at her. I cant keep rationalising these things and understanding. I only have this empathy because I was used as her crutch for as long as I can remember. I cant do this anymore because despite emotionally depleting me she’s also violated my space and privacy multiple times and used violence against me to score brownie points with my father.

I’m just disgusted with her and women like her who show women down for approval from men. She bit me because she couldn't bite her oppressor, even though I was literally just a child. And now I bite myself when I cant bite my oppressors and really need to unlearn it.

G made the right decision by not picking me. I’m a literal mess and his family is most definitely more stable than mine. He will never be able to hold me and witness me without pity/horror. Is it too much to want a stable life at home?

1 note · View note

wlw-in-space · 5 years

Text

Little!Luthor Reader

Do you mind writing one where Little!Luthor starts to fall into a depressive slump? One where she starts ditching school and ignoring her friends. Kara notices the strange behavior when she catches LL skipping school. She tries to ask about it, but Little!Luthor shrugs it off. One night, Little!Luthor feels overwhelmed from negative emotions she has a break down in Kara’s bathroom when hanging out with her and Alex. They overhear and comfort her. Still, she refuses to tell Lena about the incident because she’s afraid of burdening Lena with her problems. Fed up, Kara and Alex stage an intervention where LL lets it slip that it’s not the first time she’s had a breakdown because of ongoing depression which only concerns the sisters more. In the end, Little!Luthor agrees to tell Lena about it, and when she does, she’s met with love and support.

requested by @qualitytrashtho

(this has taken me allll day but it was 1000% worth it)

warnings: depression, a lot of crying

Your best friend had just called you for the fifth time in a row and you were getting annoyed so you just decided to shut your phone off completely and focus on the tv that was playing in front of you.

“Why didn’t you answer?” Kara asked from her seat beside you on her couch.

“Didn’t feel like it,” You shrugged ending the conversation right there, or so you hoped.

“Yeah, but it might be something important. She wouldn’t be calling so much if it wasn’t important,” Kara pursed her lips and tried to stay quiet, not wanting to bother Lena or Alex who were also watching the movie.

“Please, she’s probably calling me to say that her crushed looked in her general direction,” You rolled your eyes and moved your phone to the coffee table, not wanting to think about it anymore. “It’s fine, just forget about it.”

—

“(Y/n)?” You heard a familiar voice call your name and winced before you turned around to face Kara.

“Hey, Kar, what’s up?” You asked nonchalantly, as if you weren’t skipping school, going to the park with two of your friends, and it wasn’t the middle of the day on a Thursday.

“Why aren’t you in school? You’re supposed to be in school right now,” Kara seemed so shocked that you would skip, but she was starting to realize that in the past couple of weeks you were acting less like yourself.

“I dunno, I guess I just wasn’t feeling it. It’s fine though, I have all the homework, I’ll just be wasting my time in there anyways,” You shrugged and waved a bit before walking off to catch up with your friends. “See ya, Kara.”

—

You stood outside Kara’s apartment, waiting for her to let you in after you’d been dropped off by your driver to hang out with her and Alex for a bit.

You were on your phone when Alex opened the door and you hugged her tightly, “Hey, Al.”

Alex smiled and hugged you back, “Hey, kiddo, I was just about to call you to make sure you were okay.”

The two of you went inside and Alex closed the door behind you.

Just then, Kara emerged from the bathroom and super sped over to you to hug you, “(Y/n/n)! You’re finally here!”

You groaned as Kara squeezed you a bit too hard and nodded, “Yep,” Faking a chuckle.

Kara released you and smiled, “You ready to watch a movie?”

“I’m always ready to watch a movie,” You faked another laugh and sat on the couch in between once they both sat, making room for you in the middle.

Kara started The Princess Bride, which was apparently what you guys were going to be watching and your mind wandered not even five minutes into the movie.

You tried to focus on your feelings to figure out why you felt so upset all the time but you just couldn’t think of anything.

You knew you were depressed. That much was obvious, at least to you.

You just couldn’t figure out why, and that was only making you more upset.

There wasn’t a reason for you to be depressed. Your life was great, your sister and her friends were all godsends, and you had everything you could ever need. But at the same time you couldn’t help but feel a heavy weight in your chest and the desire to be completely alone.

You continued to let your mind go where it pleased before you decided that it was too much and excused yourself to the bathroom, “I’ll be right back, don’t stop the movie for me.”

Before you could even close the door, hot tears were streaming down your face uncontrollably.

You leaned on the sink and held onto the sides of the countertop as your body shook with sobs.

It wasn’t long before you heard a light knock on the door and you cursed to yourself for being loud enough for Kara to hear.

You wiped away your tears (they didn’t stop falling down your face though) and turned to the door, opening it to see Kara and Alex standing there.

They brought you back to the living room where Kara turned off the tv and you laid back into Alex’s arms while you sat on the couch once again. Your crying had calmed but didn’t stop.

“Can you tell us why you’re crying, (Y/n/n)?” Kara spoke softly and rested a hand on your knee.

You shook your head ‘no’ and sniffled, subduing your tears while you spoke, “I - I don’t know. That’s the problem, Kara. I never know.” You clung to Alex’s arm tightly, without hurting her, of course.

The crinkle in Kara’s brow grew as she looked at Alex anxiously, biting the inside of her lip.

“I think we should call Lena so you can talk to her,” Kara said.

Your eyes widened and you looked panicked, “No, please don’t! She already has so much going on, I don’t want to burden her with my dumb problems. I can figure this out. And either way, she’s on a business trip, you guys know that.”

“(Y/n/n), you know that Lena doesn’t think of you as a burden. She would want you to tell her about this and I know she would prioritize this over a business trip any day,” Kara brushed away your tears and frowned, feeling bad for you.

“Kara, please,” You looked up to her with pleading eyes, you were the last thing Lena needed to deal with.

“Okay, but will you at least talk to us about it?” Kara wanted to make a compromise. If Lena didn’t know now, she and Alex would convince you to tell her soon enough.

“Yeah, okay,” You nodded and rested your head back on Alex, letting yourself relax into her embrace now that you weren’t worried about Lena finding out anymore.

Alex brought one of her hand up to run her fingers through your (H/L) hair repeatedly to soothe you.

You laid in Alex’s arms until you had fully calmed down before Kara started to talk to you again, “Hey, since Lena’s away, I don’t wanna leave you alone tonight, are you okay sleeping here?”

You nodded softly and sighed a bit, “Yeah, I’ll stay.”

—

In the morning, Kara and Alex woke up before you and talked about what had happened last night.

Something that you said had stuck in Alex’s mind and she couldn’t stop thinking about it, “She said that she never knows why she cries like that. As in, she’s done this before.”

Kara’s eyes widen a bit when she realizes that she hadn’t even picked up on it herself, “I know she doesn’t want to tell Lena but I really think she should.”

“We’ll talk to her when she wakes up,” Alex sighed softly and drummed her fingers on her leg. “I think she might be depressed, Kara.”

“She doesn’t know why she’s upset though, that can’t be it,” Kara shook her head.

“Sometimes depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in your brain. (Y/n/n) wouldn’t know why she’s depressed but she still would be if this is the case,” Alex explained, hoping that it made sense to Kara.

“Yeah, I get it,” Kara nodded and thought she heard rustling, so she used her super hearing and took note that you were awake, “She’s up.”

You walked out into the kitchen where Kara and Alex were and waved a bit while yawning before hugging both of them and saying ‘good morning’.

“How’d you sleep, honey?” Kara asked when you’d sat down on one of the barstools and taken a banana from the fruit basket.

“Good,” You nodded and started eating.

“We actually wanted to talk to you about what happened last night, now that your mind might be a little clearer,” Alex started, approaching the situation carefully.

“Okay, go ahead.”

“When you were talking about how you didn’t know why you were upset, you said that you never know. Like, as in, this has happened before,” Alex looked at you, wanting to make eye contact, but your eyes were focused on the banana you had in your hands.

You stayed silent and you began to bounce your leg a bit.

“(Y/n/n)?” Kara called your name in an attempt to get an answer.

“Fine, yes, this has happened before. It’s been going on for a few months but this month is when it’s gotten the worst,” You sighed and finished your banana, getting up to throw away the peel.

“Sweetheart, I think you’re depressed,” Alex said when you sat back down in front of her.

“I know,” You roll your eyes, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “Chemical imbalance, but it’s still frustrating. I still feel like there should be a reason I’m upset.”

Kara seemed a bit shocked that you had admitted it so quickly, not even bothering to argue or deny it.

“Maybe you should see a therapist,” Alex suggested as she got up for a second to get you a bottle of water.

“Alex,” You shook your head, trying to think of something to say that would get you out of this.

“I also think you should tell Lena because -“

“No, I told you guys I didn’t want her to know -“ You interrupted Alex but she interrupted you back, determined to finish her sentence.

“I think you should tell her because she’ll only get upset if she finds out later and we kept this from her. It’ll hurt her more than anything and I know that’s the last thing you want to do. Besides, Lena will never see you as a burden or a problem. I have never seen her care about anything or anyone more than she does about you and if you’re able to ignore that and use her as an excuse to not talk about your feelings because you’d rather keep them bottled up inside, I’ll still love you but I’ll be very disappointed in you.”

You sat in shock, processing everything Alex had said and then opening and closing your mouth again, trying to say something, “You’re right.” You started to tear up, this time only because of guilt.

Alex sighed softly and walked around the kitchen island before pulling you into a hug, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you cry, I just wanted you to realize that by keeping this a secret you’re hurting Lena too.”

“No, no. It’s okay. I don’t think I would’ve understood unless you said it like that. Thank you,” You sniffled into Alex’s hoodie and pulled away before wiping your tears.

Kara had been watching silently and at first was worried about how Alex was going about addressing talking to Lena but she soon realized that there was no better way to do it.

You sat back down and smiled softly at Kara, holding both of your hands out to them.

In unison, they took your hand and you sniffled a bit, “Thank you guys, really. I’ll tell Lena when she gets back.”

—

When Lena returned from her business trip to Bulgaria, she came to Kara’s apartment to surprise you and pick you up to take you home, rather than having you meet her there.

You were sitting on the couch, cuddling with Alex, as you watched The Princess Bride (but this time paid attention).

Kara smiled mischievously as she got up and you gave her a weird look before you focused on the movie once more.

At the sound of Lena’s stilettos clicking on the wooden floor of Kara’s apartment, you shot up from the couch and stumbled, running to her before throwing yourself in her arms, “Lena!!”

Lena hugged you tightly and kissed the top of your head, smiling wildly, “I missed you.”

“I missed you too, but I’m glad you’re here now.”

Kara and Alex both greeted Lena before you asked, “Do you wanna finish the movie with us?”

“Of course, lovey. What are we watching?” Lena asked as she sat down.

You sat close to her and she wrapped her arms around your waist making you chuckle, “The Princess Bride.”

Kara and Alex smiled at each other and sat on the other end of the couch, letting you enjoy your time with your big sister.

Before watching the movie, you’d promised them that you would tell Lena when you guys got home, wanting to sit down and talk to her about your situation rather than doing it in the car and rushing it.

You kept your promise.

—

“Lee, can we talk?” You asked after you guys had been home for a few minutes and we’re settled in.

“Yeah, of course, is everything okay?” Lena sat on her white sofa and patted it, gesturing for you to sit with her.

You sat on the other end so you could both see each other properly, “Yeah, uh - so, for the last few months I’ve been depressed. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but if you haven’t, don’t worry because I’ve been working harder to hide it around you. I guess I didn’t want to deal with it and I just decided that I would be better for me to not telling anyone. While you were away, though, Kara and Alex figured it out and we talked about it and honestly, I didn’t want to tell you at first when they told me I should because I convinced myself that you wouldn’t want to deal with my dumb problems and I didn’t want to be a burden to you, but then Alex talked some sense into me and I realized that if I did that then I wouldn’t be being fair to you because you care about me a lot and I know you would want me to tell you. I’m really sorry that I went so long without telling you.”

Lena nodded as you spoke and took a second to take everything, “That’s a lot - uh. Okay, um. Did I do anything to make you feel like you couldn’t tell me? If I did, honey, I’m so sorry -“

“No, no, you didn’t, Lee,” You shook your head and took Lena’s hand, squeezing it gently. “Trust me, you’re the best big sister anyone could ever have.”

Lena nodded tearfully and smiled softly, “I just wish I had known. I could’ve helped you, (Y/n/n).”

“I know, and I’m so so sorry for not telling you before but you know now and - you’re not mad are you?”

“Oh, god, of course not, baby,” Lena shook her head and moved over to pull you into her arms. “I’d never be mad at you for something like this, okay?”

“Thanks, Lee,” You let out a breath of relief and closed your eyes, relaxing in her arms. “You’re the best big sister ever.”

127 notes · View notes

hookedontaronfics · 4 years

Text

First Contact series - Part 12

Title: First Contact - Part 12 Read the previous installments here: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 Rating: M Pairing: Taron x OC Warnings: Some slight smut A/N: Finally, the chapter you have all been (hopefully) waiting for! This part of the story finds Jess and Taron finally getting their relationship back on track. There are mostly just some incredibly sweet and heartfelt moments in this chapter, and I hope you cheer right along with me as Jess tries to break through her fears. Enjoy! x

The morning broke bright and sunny, and with it a thousand promises. I’d woken up excited for today, excited to reconnect with Taron, and to hopefully give back to him somehow for all his faith in me. I wanted to know I had earned that faith, and while I knew he had promised he’d wait for me, I didn’t want to keep him waiting forever. Because for truly the first time since Kevin’s attack, I felt happy. I felt like some kind of heavy burden had lifted. I felt hopeful. Every hard truth I’d talked about in therapy, every wound I’d reopened and examined, every painful memory I’d tried to root out and mend, had culminated in this day. I wanted to move forward with my life, and the way to do that was right in front of me.

I sat up in bed, stretching out slightly, and feeling literally like a new person. I couldn’t tell you if something chemically in my brain had shifted, or if I just had unlocked a new state of mind, but the reason behind it didn’t matter. Everything felt new again; the way the sunlight filtered through the blind slats and warmed me, the whisper of the fabric of my pajamas over my skin, even the familiar scent of lavender from the satchel I kept under my pillow. Nothing had changed, but everything had.

Okay, so maybe that sounds like a completely Disney-fied version of reality, but I just felt different and I couldn’t put my finger on it. I was looking forward to being awake, not dreading it, and that made a massive difference in how I appreciated all the small things too. I wasn’t in sensory overload any longer, though I was certain I could easily slip back into that mode. I wanted to enjoy this small break of clarity for as long as I could make it last.

Before I fully got out of bed, I decided to call Taron, as it wasn’t exactly early. Saturdays were most certainly for sleeping in. He answered just before the call would have gone to voicemail, his voice still thick with sleep. “Mmmmmello?”

“Oh, did I wake you?” I asked, unable to keep the giggle out of my voice.

“Just a wee bit,” Taron yawned slightly, rustling about in his bed. “But it’s bloody late in the morning already so I guess it’s about time I got up.”

“You’re adorable when you’re sleepy,” I smirked.

“That so?” he replied, and I could hear the grin in his voice. “Would be better if you were next to me, you know.”

“Would it now?” you smiled at that.

“I do mean it, why can’t I have you here with me again?” he asked in a pouty voice.

“You know why, T. I’m working on things here,” I replied softly.

“I know, I know. I just miss you dearly. The bed feels far too big now without you in it,” he said, and I could hear the bedsheets rustling some more, and then a slight involuntary grunt as he stood up. I imagined him running his fingers through his inevitably messy hair, his nightshirt a bit rumpled, and I sort of wished I could run my fingers over it, smoothing out the wrinkles.

“Anyway, I called to talk about our plans,” I said quickly, wondering at the thought I’d just had. I hadn’t had much of an urge to touch Taron since Kevin had interrupted everything. But now I wanted nothing more than to feel that warm, firm chest under my fingers. I longed to hear his heart beating, just for me.

“I’m all ears,” he said, yawning again and making something else open up in my chest as I imagined him leaning over the bathroom sink, peering at himself in the mirror. I felt my heart trip a little at the thought, fully aware of how much I hadn’t appreciated that enough during the month I had crashed at his place. Then again, I had been actually crashing in my depression and anxiety and unable to appreciate those things. I had a lot of time to make up for.

“I just need you to pick me up at 6 sharp. I’d say I’d pick you up, but then we’d be riding the tube and seeing as it’s getting colder out now, your car is probably the better option,” I grinned.

“Yep, got it. 6 p.m. sharp. What are we doing?” he asked.

“I can’t tell you that, it’s part of the surprise!” I laughed lightly. “But just wear jeans and a nice jumper and a coat or something. We don’t have to be super dressed up for this.”

“Coat. Jeans. Jumper. Got it,” he replied. “Do I have to wait until 6 to see you?” he asked again, the longing so evident it squeezed at my heart.

“I- …” I trailed off, not really sure what to say. That hadn’t been part of my original plan either, but in many ways it felt difficult for me to wait to see him too.

“Just ignore me, I’m being ridiculous. I will be patient, and I will see you this evening love, and we will have an amazing time together,” he answered for me, probably mistaking my hesitation but I didn’t correct him.

“I could never ignore you, Taron,” I said, running my fingers over my lips in a sudden memory of his kisses. “Yes, 6, until then enjoy your day,” I replied distractedly.

“Of course. It will be so much better after 6 though, so the first part might be quite forgettable,” he smirked into the phone at me.

“Oh shush,” I had to laugh. “Just go do whatever it is a Taron does on Saturday,” I teased.

“Mostly cleaning my place, it’s a hideous wreck,” he chuckled.

“I doubt that,” you laughed with him.

“Alright, I best get to it. See you later, my love.”

“I am looking forward to it,” I said, blushing despite myself. We managed to say our good-byes and hung up, and I laid back on my bed for a long moment and sighed happily. I pulled the ring out from under my nightshirt and examined it in the sunlight, letting the diamond sparkle. Tonight was going to be special, I could feel it.

I finally managed to get up and, in a fit of inspiration from Taron himself, decided to spend my morning cleaning our flat. I felt like my depression had kept me from contributing anything to my roommates and I wanted to make up for it, so I started with the bathroom, scrubbing it down until it shined, and then going to do the same with the kitchen.

That’s where Mary found me, sprawled out on my hands and knees, head under the sink, containers of bleach and dish soap and sponges scattered around me.

“What in the world are you doing?” she asked, scaring me so that I jerked and whacked my head on the underside of the metal sink.

“Owww, fuck!” I said, backing out and resting on my heels, pressing a hand to my smarting forehead. “I’ve been cleaning!” I laughed lightly. It would be just my luck to give myself a shiner right before my date.

“Oh, well, it looks really nice,” Mary smirked at me. “I can see my reflection in the toaster now.”

“We all didn’t know what we were missing,” I giggled lightly, finishing what I was doing and stacking everything back in the under-sink cabinet. “Now we can make sure our makeup is on point while we eat our toast. Much more efficient this way,” I continued to joke, making Mary giggle even more.

“You’re ridiculous, Jess,” she grinned.

“Here, give me that,” I said, checking my forehead in the toaster reflection and rubbing the red spot that was already starting to darken. “Well I’ll be wearing my bangs down today,” I said, blowing the hair out of my face for emphasis.

“What’s tonight?” Mary asked as she poured herself a bowl of cereal. I handed her the milk absent-mindedly, already lost in thought.

“You know, I’m taking Taron out later,” I smiled. “He’s been so patient with me while I went and lost my marbles. I just feel like I should try and make an effort to give back, you know?”

“Lost your marbles?” Mary asked, sounding confused, and I forgot that sometimes phrases that were natural to me in American English were confusing as hell to her.

“You know, lost your marbles… Went a little crazy. I mean, I use that cheekily because I wasn’t crazy but I certainly wasn’t easy to deal with either. I crashed and crashed hard after Kevin and I moped around Taron’s place for a month and had very little motivation to do anything or basically exist. He’s really been a saint,” I tried to explain, as Mary gave me a sympathetic look.

“But you went through something really awful. You should be kinder to yourself. I think you’ve been incredibly strong, and I’m sure Taron would think the same thing,” she said sweetly.

“It’s just difficult to reconcile how hard I fell though. I thought I’d made better progress after three years of dealing with the fallout from the first time Kevin attacked me. So I feel a bit ashamed for falling apart so much to be honest,” I admitted.

“But the only person judging you is yourself,” Mary pointed out, words I’m sure I’d said to her before. I was good at giving advice; not so much at actually following it myself.

We chatted a bit longer before Mary decided to join me in my cleaning frenzy, and we ended up tackling the living room together, Tim protesting at us when we shoed him off the couch so we could vacuum it free of his hair. He promptly jumped back up after we were finished and glowered at us while we swept and dusted and organized everything, getting rid of old newspapers that had stacked up and even washing down the windows. They say cleanliness is next to godliness for a reason; the whole place somehow felt lighter and better for our efforts.

While Jules was still at work, Mary and I decided to run to the grocery, and I found I was truly enjoying her company as we laughed and sent Jules stupid Snapchats with jokes about various food products. It was probably juvenile, but we were in fits by the time we finally checked out. Emotionally, this was probably one of the best days I’d had in a long time. I couldn’t believe how happy I felt, and it gave me hope that there were better days coming. I could feel the darkness still waiting for me below the surface; I knew there was still work to do to keep from sliding back into it. But for now, I felt like I had gained a little freedom and I didn’t want to let that feeling go.

Once we got home, we put the groceries away and I ended up straightening up my room a bit before trying to read a little while I waited for the clock to tick closer to 6. Eventually I deemed it was time enough to start getting ready for the evening. I chose a pretty yellow silk blouse and layered that under a black pinafore with thick black tights and black boots. It was comfortable and effortless and that’s how I wanted to feel tonight. I also made sure to dig my winter jacket out of the closet, and stuffed my gloves in the pockets too. I’d probably need them later, for what I had planned.

I quickly did my makeup, able to take the redness out of my new bump but not the bruising, so after also hiding my scar, I made sure to pull my bangs down over my forehead. I was a mess, but Taron wouldn’t care; he’d only tell me I was the loveliest woman he’d ever seen. I could very nearly hear him say that in my mind, and I couldn’t help but smile. He never saw the superficial things, the flaws I tended to obsess over. He’d really seen me at my worst, no makeup, unshowered, exhausted and unkempt and depressed as hell, and he still wanted to be with me so that said a lot for his character.

I paced my room slightly before my phone chimed with a text. I grabbed it and saw that Taron had texted that he was on his way. I felt a small thrill of excitement run through me, nearly like it was our first date again, and in some ways I supposed it could be counted as that; the first actual date since Kevin had altered my path, again.

When Jules finally made it home from work, she screeched at me in a decibel probably only dogs could hear about why I hadn’t told her and Mary. I tried to explain I’d only decided on this date the day before, but I’m not really sure she heard me.

By the time Taron arrived I felt like I’d worked myself up into a tizzy. Even though it was custom for Taron to come to the front door I decided to preempt that and meet him halfway so he wouldn’t have to deal with all the screeching from my flatmates. “Alright, I’ll see you ladies later,” I laughed, swinging the door open only wide enough for me to squeeze through. “Byyyee,” I laughed as Jules tried to wrestle the door away from me.

“You know Mary and I won’t mind if you don’t come home tonight, alright?” Jules said, only half-teasing me, I think.

I rolled my eyes in appreciation and then hopped down off the stoop, making Taron chuckle as I nearly ran down the walkway to him. “What’s the hurry?” he smirked, waving at Mary and Jules, who had their faces pressed to the window I’d just cleaned earlier.

“Those two, that’s the hurry. Come on,” I laughed, tugging his hand as I walked toward the car. Taron just seemed amused as he opened the car door for me, always the gentleman, but he stopped me for a second before I could sit down.

“You look absolutely stunning tonight, Jess,” he said sweetly. “And I like this,” he added, touching the ends of my wavy hair, which was now just barely sweeping over my shoulders. “When did you get it cut?” he asked curiously.

“Um, Tuesday? I think? It all sort of blurs together, but I completely forgot to tell you,” I laughed, realizing that we really hadn’t seen each other in person for a week. I suddenly felt compelled to hug him, and so I did, wrapping my arms around his middle tightly and pressing my face against his chest, breathing him in as he hugged me back. We held onto each other for probably a moment longer than was necessary, but the need was there, obvious and permeable as it hung in the space between us. He tilted my chin up to gaze in my eyes before his eyes drifted up.

“What on earth did you do here?” he asked, tapping his finger lightly on my forehead.

“Oh, that,” I cringed lightly. “I fought the sink and it won,” I said, and Taron laughed before shaking his head.

“That’s my Jess,” he said affectionately as I carefully placed the duffle bag I’d been carrying in the backseat. Taron raised an eyebrow at that in question but didn’t ask and I finally managed to duck into the car, my stomach growling. He handed me his phone after also getting in the car and I punched the address into Google Maps for the restaurant I had chosen, and soon enough we were on our way, enjoying the views of the city in the evening light. He dutifully followed the directions from Google but once we were close seemed to recognize exactly where I was taking him, and we were able to find parking quickly because he knew where to go. We walked hand in hand down the few blocks to Oxo Tower and I couldn’t feel giddier at the moment.

“Excellent choice. I’m quite fond of this place but I don’t get here enough,” he said as we took the elevator up to the eighth floor. Taron held me to him while we were in the elevator, lightly kissing my forehead and making my heart yearn for something more, but there would be time enough for that. We knew each other and yet we were just getting to know each other again in my new normal.

I gave my name at the front, thankful I had made reservations at the Brasserie as the place was rather crowded, and we were led to a table right by the large floor to ceiling windows with the very best view of London over the Thames. We got seated in the mod blue chairs and Taron stared out at the view for a long moment, looking thoughtful and handsome as ever in the black jeans and grey jumper he’d worn over a red collared shirt. He looked deeply vulnerable for a moment as he looked back over at me, and we were suspended in that moment, exchanging thoughts without a single word until our server came up, introducing herself and taking our drink orders.

“Isn’t it lovely?” I said, also staring out at the calm waters, the sun starting to sink toward the horizon and painting the clouds every color imaginable.

“Not as lovely as the view right across from me,” Taron replied, reaching over and taking my hand in his and I think noticing for the first time that I was wearing the ring on a necklace, not tucked under my clothes as before but on full display. He sucked in his breath for a moment, seeming a bit overwhelmed, and I tore my gaze away from the sunset to catch his full reaction. His eyes were twinkling a bit as the smile grew over his whole face, crinkling the corners of his eyes in the way I so loved. “You’re wearing it,” he commented softly, running his thumb over the back of my hand gently.

“I have been for a little bit,” I nodded with a smile. “I heard you, you know, when you said it was a promise. I’ve held onto that, and I think it’s helped keep me going. None of this was about running away from you, I hope you know that.”

“I didn’t understand it that day, I don’t think. I was a bit hurt and miserly but I also knew I wasn’t willing to lose you over being butthurt,” he smiled. “I’d take any kind of pain you could send my way if it just meant I got to be with you.”

“But I don’t want to hurt you, T,” I said, resting my chin in my hand and biting at my lip nervously.

“You don’t hurt me. What you went through hurts me. What I had to witness you going through, that hurts. Because I feel for you, I hurt for you, do you see? I can’t just be over here only feeling my own feelings. There are a lot of things I feel for you too. Things I wish I could inspire in you also - joy, happiness, love,” he said, his eyes actually misting up a bit.

He had to quickly recover as the waitress dropped our drinks off and we put our orders in. I asked for the pan-fried sea bass with cauliflower puree, potato gnocchi and cavolo nero, while Taron ordered the pancetta-wrapped pork filet with a lentil and treviso salad. Everything sounded so good and I wanted to order it all, but I figured we would try bites of each other’s meals, at any rate, and probably split a dessert too. The lights on the buildings were beginning to twinkle on, one after another in the darkening horizon, and the last bit of sunlight really gave us a show, oranges and reds dancing with blues and purples in the sky.

“Hey, I have an idea!” I said, getting up from the table suddenly and pulling him with me. He laughed in surprise but followed as I pulled him out onto the balcony with me. There were a couple brave souls at the tables outside but they didn’t seem to give us a second glance as we posed with the sunset backdrop, trying to take a decent selfie but Taron kept making funny faces and the harder I laughed, the worse the pictures kept turning out.

“Taaaron, I want a nice photo before it gets dark!” I giggled into my hand.

“But I love this laugh,” he grinned, wrapping his hands around my waist and pulling me in close, my hips nearly against his as he gazed at me for a minute, his expression full of adoration. He leaned in and kissed me and the rest of the world seemed to stop. Everything else just faded away, and it was just Taron and me, the feel of those soft lips against mine, claiming me, wanting me, loving me.

“Now, a proper picture,” he said after breaking away and turning me back into the crook of his arm, his head resting against mine as he held his phone out and snapped a couple of photos. I’m not even sure what my face was doing in that moment, but it didn’t matter. I was with him, and everything felt right as the day faded into darkness. By now the chill in the air had crept in under my coat and I was starting to shiver, so we ran back inside, our cheeks a bit reddened from the nip in the air too, but feeling a lot of things other than cold.

In the subtle lighting of the restaurant, the shadows danced across Taron’s face a bit, deepening his expressions as we talked about whatever came to mind, enjoying each other’s company immensely. The food was as amazing as it had sounded on the menus, and we were all too happy to dig in.

When we were quite done with our meals, stomachs full to bursting, Taron looked over at me, about to say something but the thought died before it left his lips. But I’d gotten to know him well enough to know when he had meant to say something and chose better of it. “What’s on your mind, T?” I asked him, and he shook his head.

“Nothing,” he hedged slightly, and I sighed.

“You can talk to me. Be honest with me, please,” I pleaded softly.

“I was just thinking about what I’d said earlier, before the waitress came to take our orders, that’s all,” he said after a moment.

“I heard what you said, Taron, it was very sweet,” I replied with a smile.

“Yeah, you heard me here,” he said, indicating his ears. “But did you hear me here?” he asked, tapping my chest lightly.

“I… yes, of course,” I said, watching him watch me in that introspective way he had that always made me feel like he saw more in me than I did.

“You have to let me in, Jess. There’s only so much I can do from the outside,” he said quietly. “I will always be here, no matter how much or how little of yourself you’re actually willing to give me. But I want it all, desperately.”

I had trouble sorting all of this out in my head as Taron realized I wasn’t going to respond and he resorted to paying the tab to fill the silence. But it wasn’t that I hadn’t heard him; I’d heard him loud and clear and I was at a complete loss for what to say. His words had struck me deeply because I knew he was genuine in that feeling, and I had to grapple with my fear and figure out a way to push past it if I were truly going to let him behind the walls.

“I think we should go somewhere else,” I said, a bit breathlessly, my heartbeat pounding in my ears even though I knew he couldn’t understand why I was suddenly nervous.

“Alright, anything for you, love,” he said, helping me back into my coat. We departed the restaurant and packed ourselves back into the car, and I once again plugged the address into Taron’s Google Maps. We drove in silence for a small space of time, his music our only accompaniment. This was the part of the plan I was most excited about, and as Taron drove us further away from the lights of the city he went “ahh” in recognition.

“You remember what happened here, don’t you?” I asked at that, and he nodded but didn’t say anything at first as we took the winding road past thickets of trees that signaled the preserve was near. We eventually got parked and I pulled the lanterns out of my duffle bag, handing one to Taron and hefting the bag over my shoulder. I slipped my gloves on and then entwined my gloved fingers in his as we walked along the worn path, our breaths puffing out into the chilly air.

“I remember the last time we were here I was a complete and utter dick. What kind of man leaves his lady in the middle of the woods to fend for herself?” he sighed, his voice loud and clear in the still night air. There was no bonfire today, not a single soul in sight as we made our way to the hidden pickup truck in the clearing in the woods, a place where we’d first really connected, and the place I had caused us both so much pain. We clambered back up into the bed of the truck after Taron had uncovered it again, settling into the cushions and covering ourselves with the blankets I’d brought with me, snuggling up to each other and staring at the stars twinkling far overhead.

“You didn’t understand what you were up against. I don’t hold that against you, at all,” I said softly, feeling his warmth radiating out as I hugged onto his body and he enveloped me with his arms. The lanterns gave us just enough light to see each other by, and he had such a soft, warm expression on his face at the moment it made my heart beat even faster, if that were possible. “I’ve tried to explain it, tried to help you understand. The things I think in my head aren’t always rational, the fears I have feel insurmountable. But it’s not about you, at all. And I need your help to grow beyond these things. Your patience, your faith in me, your love. I have been happier and I have been healing ever since I somehow tripped into your life, and I needed to speak honestly about that. It’s been a long journey, and I can’t imagine there won’t be more difficult days ahead, more times where I seem to take steps backwards and not forward. But Taron, please, don’t ever doubt how much I love you back. No matter how afraid of that I can be, the joy waiting on the other side is worth it to keep fighting. And I will fight, for us. Through everything Kevin has put me through,” I rambled slightly, my voice growing passionate at times, teary at others, trembling with the rush of my words.

I felt his arms tighten around me as I talked, watched the way his expressions changed as he reacted to what I said. “I’ll fight for you too, every damn day you let me,” he said, brushing my bangs back slightly. “I know I can’t protect you from everything, I couldn’t protect you from this. But you’re mine, and if I can help it nothing else will ever hurt you again,” he said a bit fiercely, his eyes burning with a bit of passion that I felt reach into my soul.

“I told you I needed to make a promise, and so this is it; I promise to be as kind and true to you as you’ve been with me. So,” I said, sitting up enough to unclasp the chain from around my neck, and sliding the ring off of it, tucking the chain in my pocket and taking his hand sweetly. “I think it’s time for you to put this on my finger,” I smiled softly at him, and the sheer unbridled happiness reflected back at me was worth every bit of this moment.

“Yes ma’am,” he grinned, gingerly picking the ring up and taking my left hand in his and sliding it carefully on my finger before lifting my hand to his lips and placing a sweet kiss there. “You know I’ll do this proper, of course, but you have no idea how happy this makes me,” he smiled sweetly.

“I know how perfect this moment feels,” I smiled back, wishing we could stay in that moment forever, but I already couldn’t feel my fingers or toes, and Taron wasn’t even wearing gloves, the tip of his nose already reddened from the bite of the air.

“It is perfect. I feel a bit on fire,” he said, his voice going a bit gravelly as he pulled me to him and kissed me deeply, passionately. Oh to be kissed by Taron, it was unlike anything else. He was never pushy even when he made his desires known, but there was always so much emotion behind it too. I knew without a doubt that he was never going to leave me alone in how I felt. He was always so giving of himself, and I was falling ever so much more in love with him as we kissed under the stars, wrapped up in each other until we couldn’t stand the cold anymore.

I laughed as I struggled to wrestle the blankets back in the duffle, and on half-numb legs we managed to totter our way back to the car, our teeth chattering but our laughter light and our hearts even lighter. We blasted both the heat and the Elton, singing at the top of our lungs, and I couldn’t have felt more like I belonged anywhere but by Taron’s side. He kept looking over at me as he drove, so much love in his expression I could barely stand it. This was what it was like to let him in, I thought. It wasn’t so scary after all. I knew I could trust him; I also knew that this would take a lot more work on my part to keep the gates open. Tonight was easy; tomorrow might be a struggle. But we were both ready to face that together, and making this commitment to stay together, to be each other’s one and only, bonded us far deeper.

He pulled up in front of my darkened flat and put the car in park, brushing his hand over my thigh slightly and sighing. “Really wish I didn’t have to leave you here tonight,” he said softly.

I looked up at my flat and then back at Taron, realizing that I truly didn’t want to leave him either. “You don’t,” I said quickly. “Take me home, Taron.” He gazed at me for one long instant before quickly putting the car back in gear and taking the streets he knew oh so well, driving us back to his home. We made it just inside the door before he had pushed me up against the wall, kissing me with an intense need I could only try and match. We had only been intimate once after the attack and I’d sunk into my depression; I hadn’t been able to give this to him and though we’d never spoken about it he had always respected my need for space.

But the heat and tension and desire between us now was undeniable, a force greater than my fears. I needed and wanted to give in to him as we shed our jackets in the hallway, dropping our clothes along the way to his bedroom. We fell into bed in a strange assortment of half-dressed; I was in my bra and tights while Taron was still in his jumper and boxers and one sock still on. We couldn’t care less though as we deepened our kisses, lust taking over any sort of logic as he climbed over me.

“Is this okay?” he breathed into my face, checking in with me even as his fingers dragged along the skin of my waist, leaving a trail of fire wherever he touched.

“Yes, please, I want you now,” I gasped slightly, feeling how hard he was for me already. He made quick work of our remaining clothes, his hands traveling over the curves of my body, seeking out the places that made me moan for him, still learning his way around me as I gave in to him in every way. He remembered to grab a condom and slid it on before joining our bodies, making both of us groan for each other. The sensation was heady, certainly, and I could only crave more of this intimacy. Because this was more than just having sex, or being used, or even worse, abused. Taron gave so much of himself over to me, trusted himself to me, and I knew we were only just standing at the beginning of something really beautiful together.

Neither of us needed long to find our highs together, and when he finally collapsed on top of me, his weight both familiar and comforting, I felt sure that our souls had collided too. I felt completely calm, the constant storm inside of my head subsided, at least momentarily. I ran my fingers through his messy hair, watching him as he tried to keep his eyes open, having worn himself out. It made me smile to know what we had, what I was capable of opening my heart up to. Taron made me feel strong and fierce and worthy, things I had never fully known about myself.

“I’m so grateful for you, T,” I spoke into the comfortable silence that surrounded us.

“You are my world, Jess,” he said sweetly, running his finger lightly over the band that now encircled my finger. “I won’t let you forget it,” he smiled sleepily at that. Getting to see this side of him always felt like the best part; the way he looked at me just before he fell asleep that told me we’d be together even in his dreams. And maybe we were really living inside those dreams, I thought to myself as his eyes drifted closed again and stayed that way, his body relaxing into sleep beside me.

“Oh you beautiful, beautiful man,” I said to the quiet bedroom, hardly believing I was even here right now. I closed my eyes and pulled the blankets up around us both, getting comfortable while snuggling into his body, happy for this one perfect moment at least. Laying there next to him, knowing his heart belonged to me, truly felt like being home.

While her relationship with Taron feels certain, can Jess keep the storms at bay? Or will their happiness run out? Find out in Part 13 - Coming soon!

#taron imagine #taron egerton #taron x reader #taron fluff #taron fanfiction

40 notes · View notes