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#i’m looking at this size chart now and i think i literally somehow ordered a dress that is 4 sizes too big like. idk what i was smoking but

keilemlucent · 4 years

Text

i am your salvation

(r18+)

hawks | takami keigo x reader

ao3

word count: ~13k

For years, Keigo had trained his body, fucking perfected it’s abilities. Every part of him was honed and forcibly designed to be the winged-hero, Hawks. But, now? He was the defunct number two, ‘Hawks’ and at home— reality? He was the comically broken Keigo Takami who struggled to do basic physical therapy.

Only you know him like that.

warnings: manga spoilers, suicidal ideation, abuse, ANGST with a capital A, just sad :^(((

this piece is hellish, enjoy ;^))) beta’ed by the lovely @keiqos, bless u

----------------------

Keigo was fucked.

He was so beyond fucked.

He was dead.

Basically.

He was half-alive in a hospital bed. An IV drip in each arm, pumping him full of god knows what. He didn’t care to ask. All he knew was that he fucked up.

He’d gotten sloppy.

Stupid.

Pompous.

And now his wings were fried off his back.

(By fucking Dabi no less.)

The first conversation he’d had with his doctor upon waking at the HPSC hospital was one where he legitimately contemplated suicide for the first time in a long while.

“Hawks... There’s no good way to say this. There just isn’t,” The doctor began, looking through Keigo’s chart, sighing deeply. There was something so grave about the way he moved through the sterile hospital room.

The doctor handed him a handheld mirror.

Hawks slowly raised it up with weakened arms, knowing what he’d see.

A gruesome burn tore down the left side of his face. It puckered the skin around his eye, narrowing his field of vision (thank god he still had any vision at all). The soft flesh around his eye was so angry and blistered, pockets of puss gathering beneath the surface of his skin.

But what was worse than the scar, so much fucking worse, was the absence.

The complete absence of his wings.

No stubs, no nubs. Just nothing.

His back ached against the hospital bed as he handed the mirror back to the doctor.

The doctor sighed again. He spoke to Hawks like he didn’t think the hero already knew what he was going to say, “Your wings are gone. Fully. The scans we’ve taken show that the... well, roots of them in your flesh are still present, they’re encased in scar tissue. Even the sections that the feathers grow from are cauterized. In our professional opinion, we don’t think that they’ll ever grow again.”

His heart fell in his chest.

It fell so deep.

So far.

He didn’t let himself cry.

Instead, he contemplated how hard it would be to overdose on morphine they were undoubtedly dosing him with.

The doctor continued as Keigo stared sightlessly at his lap, “As established, the muscles that control the roots of your wings are still intact, yes. But, they’re heavily damaged in a way that will affect your everyday life. Even without your wings, the recovery to stabilize your injuries is going to be strenuous.”

Who fucking cared.

Hawks had spent the vast majority of his life training to be a hero and now the very thing that made him the best was literally burned from him. It felt unholy. It felt awful.

Fire wasn’t cleansing, it was putrid. Desecrated was his body as well as his mind.

He didn’t listen to much else of what the doctor said. He let himself go blank, wishing tears would fall.

...

That was yesterday.

Today, he was allowed visitors. His PA came, informing him that the Commission was putting him on extended, indefinite (thankfully, somewhat paid) leave in exchange for media appearances. They also informed him that half of the top ten were dead after the war with the PLF. Ryuku, Miruko, Edgeshot, Kamuiwoods, Crust, all lost. And countless others, too. Even some students. It seemed that there was no clear winner of the fight that took so many and changed so much.

One of the most hard-hitting pieces of news was that Endeavor was in a coma, on life support, with a brain injury that would most likely kill him. At best, he’d be a vegetable.

Keigo felt nothing but hollow as he laid in his hospital bed. He was half machine, based on all of the tubes and monitors that he was hooked up to. He felt truly mechanical and falsely alive. Truly, he was used up. He wanted to die. He was sure of it.

Keigo wanted to ask his PA to smother him.

He didn’t.

The next person to visit him was you. His PA had informed him that they were legally obligated to see him first, otherwise, you would’ve been clawing his door down.

You.

Keigo didn’t want you to see him like this. All the reasons you had fallen for him were gone. There was no confidence, no lip, no charm, no drive, no stunning scarlet wings— nothing. He even had the bonus deterrent of a nasty scar covering half his face. He was so sure that you’d take one look at him and turn right out the door.

Leave him for good.

Maybe spit on him for good measure.

The old muscles of his wings twitched as you walked through the door. It burned like an old hell.

You’d clearly been crying, face and eyes puffy.

But you were strong for him.

You pulled a chair up next to his bed wordlessly. You sat, laying your head on his antiseptic smelling sheets and mattress. Your eyes went half-lidded, just barely looking up at Keigo’s terrified expression. You reached out, grabbing one of Keigo’s clammy hands. You squeezed it.

“I’m here, Kei’,” Your voice was so quiet. “It’s alright. I love you. I’ve got you.”

It made him break.

The machines that he was reliant on screamed as he desperately grabbed at you, dragging you up with the little strength he had. You pushed him down, moving to half kneel on his bed. You didn’t make Keigo work for your touch.

You cradled his head to your chest as his scarred hands fisted your sweater. He screamed into your sternum. Keigo wailed and cried with everything he had. He was losing himself, raging for far more than just his current injury.

He bawled for every single time he couldn’t in his hero training, forced to be broken by the demands of the Commission. He sobbed for every casualty and death that was on his hands, righteous or otherwise. And, selfishly, he cried for himself. He let tears fall in mourning for the version of himself that died by Dabi’s hand.

He let himself shatter in your arms for the burning muscles and scars of his back, the ache of his face, and the emptiness and vulnerability that his lack of wings graced him with.

You more than let him; you encouraged it.

You stroked his hair, matted with sweat and grease. You whispered soft adorations, validations and love into his ears. He can hear your tears too, but it didn’t stop you.

“I love you, Keigo.”

“I’m here.”

“You’re safe.”

“I’m not leaving.”

“I’ve got you, Kei’.”

“No one else will hurt you. I won’t let them.”

You were far too late on the last one. But, you were quirkless. Powerless to stop the destruction that ravaged his body and now, his mind.

Additionally, Keigo was relieved you didn’t say that ‘everything will be okay’.

He knew it wouldn’t be.

You let him crumble against you for hours.

Finally, he was spent, falling back in his bed, and letting you slump back into your chair. You took the liberty of finding a warm towel to wipe his face down with.

The rest of visiting hours, you laid your head on his mattress, holding his hand as he drifted in and out of sleep. Nurses came and poked and prodded him. They didn’t bother making conversation with either of you.

They understood, to some degree.

You were both together in mourning.

A nurse came by later, night had fallen, telling you visiting hours were over.

Keigo audibly whined.

You shook your head, running a thumb over Keigo’s knuckles.

“It’s alright,” You soothed both him and the nurse. “I’m not leaving.”

The nurse didn’t fight you, merely exited the room.

Keigo watched, awed. You retrieved a decently sized duffle bag and pillow that you’d brought (he hadn’t noticed). You set up a blanket and the pillow on a couch in the corner as a makeshift bed.

“Y-you’re staying?” Keigo asked, voice raw.

You, somehow, smiled. So gentle and precious, nodding, “As long as you’d like me to. I told you, I’m here.”

Keigo relied on you for comfort in the past, sure. But not like this. Not like you were his anchor, tethering him to his existence now that his pride and preen were plucked from him. You were his salvation in that hospital room. You were the ground that he desperately and necessarily needed to learn to walk on.

You both fell asleep quickly, dreaming of better things outside of your waking nightmare.

---------------------------

Keigo was discharged two weeks later.

It is thoroughly confirmed that, unless by some medical miracle, his wings were truly toast. Gone for good.

The Commission brought in at least a dozen folks with spectacular healing quirks. Truly, the best the country had. Turns out, the Commission was clawing for hope too, in the wake of everything.

The efforts were in vain, of course.

Nothing stuck.

The scar tissue wouldn’t shrink. The damage was too severe. The cauterization was so intense, it altered him. Forever.

You stayed with him the whole time.

You went home, just a bit, maybe an hour a day. You showered then, changed clothes.

You’d come back and do what you had been the whole time.

Just being there.

You didn’t make him idly chat or make him watch shitty, hospital cable. You let him ruminate, stew, and simmer. You let him be crushed.

You were smart enough, empathetic enough to know that nothing you could do or say would lift him right now.

He just needed you there.

And so, you were.

After being discharged with several prescriptions, orders to limit activity to allow for his other injuries (and concussion) to heal, the two of you went home.

Your first task was Keigo getting properly washed.

At first, Keigo resisted.

“N-no, I’m fine, I’ll take one tomorrow,” Truthfully, he wouldn’t probably, not without your help. He just didn’t want you to see him so intimately in this state.

You shook your head, speaking as you brought several plush towels into the bathroom. You turned to Keigo who had wrapped his arms around his frail-looking form, looking at the floor.

You brought him into your arms, rubbing at his neck, not wanting to aggravate the injuries on his back, “I know you don’t want to, but it’ll feel good. Let me take care of you, please.”

You spoke so earnestly, it made Keigo fall apart. He hated being so helpless.

He nodded against you.

You sat him on the toilet seat while you ran a bath in Keigo’s spectacular tub. You poured in epsom salts and some lavender bubble bath, filling the room with a familiar, herbal scent.

You helped him strip, mindful to not linger on any part of his body. Carefully, you lowered Keigo into the water. He could help but be surprised by the strength in your body to do so. Perhaps foolishly, he had never taken you as physically strong. After stripping yourself, you got in as well, across from him, so you wouldn’t see his scars. You were perhaps a bit too considerate.

The water burned his wounds, yet calmed his muscles. It was a different sensation than the ones he’d had for the past weeks. He welcomed it.

Keigo sagged in the bathwater, looking somewhat relaxed for the first time in so long. You knelt in the water and suds, lathering up his hair and body. So carefully did you wash away the sweat, smells, and lingerings of the hospital and the war that preceded it. You went through his hair with your own conditioner, figuring that the familiar smell might help keep him calm. Keigo didn’t say anything, just let you do as you needed. You carefully untangled any and all knots from his tresses, rinsing him down.

You dried him off, putting a few scented body oils on his dry patches of skin, parched from his time in the hospital. You still didn’t look at his back.

He felt ashamed and thoroughly disgusted. He smushed his face into your shoulder, gripping onto your like if he wasn’t, he’d die.

You find him fucking repulsive, right?

“Kei’,” Your voice quiet still, “You okay?— Wait, don’t answer that.”

You chuckle at yourself. Keigo would’ve laughed too if he could.

Keigo dressed himself, a semi-self sufficient act that made him feel better. Though, you picked out the clothes. Some of your own, soft, old garments that Keigo had seen you in a hundred times.

It was only before he put on a shirt that you gave his back the quickest once-over, “You can put your shirt on now, Kei’. I just wanted to make sure it looked okay. It’s okay, you’re okay.”

Even that much sight and contact of the old roots of his wings made him feel so ashamed. It burned the corpse of his ego like the hot fire that crisped his wings.

Despite those nasty feelings, the simple act of wearing your shirt made him feel better. It felt so good, so good, to be surrounded by you instead of the sterility of the hospital.

You had been kind enough to leave the hospital for a bit longer than normal the day prior to go shopping. You bought Keigo a large, fluffy, ivory blanket. You even washed it, so it smelled like home (and you) too.

After you helped him to the wide couch, custom made to accommodate Keigo’s now torched wings. It was a small burn (ha) to his psyche, but he tried to let it go as you got him comfortable.

You gave him your special pillow. The one Keigo loved to steal and take naps with. You covered him in the new blanket.

“Is that okay?” You asked, tucking him in. Keigo would normally be embarrassed by something childish like that, but he couldn’t make himself care. It felt so good to be comforted.

So softly, he replied, “You made it feel like home already.”

You let a sad smile drift to your face, massaging Keigo’s scalp as he sobbed into his new blanket.

He was so glad to be surrounded by you, no matter how rotten he felt.

-------------------

The first week home was the hardest. Sleeping was painful, even next to you. Eating was a fucking labor as he had no appetite. Nothing interested him in the slightest other than staring at walls and pretending he would wake up from this nightmare soon.

An at-home physical therapist was brought in. He had to retrain the muscles in his back to relax, now that they weren’t carrying the weight of his wings. The constant tension in his back would cause long term damage (not like he wasn’t already riddled with chronic injury), least of all tension headaches.

Your job let you work from home. Thank god.

...

Keigo hated his exercises. They hurt so bad.

For years, Keigo had trained his body, fucking perfected its abilities. Every part of him was honed and forcibly designed to be the winged-hero, Hawks. But, now? He was the defunct number two, ‘Hawks’ and at home— reality? He was the comically broken Keigo Takami who struggled to do basic physical therapy.

Only you knew him like that.

Keigo’s fists slammed against the floor as he strained with his PT exercises, the therapist themselves long gone for the day. You worked from your laptop on the couch. You weren’t supposed to aid him with his exercises unless necessary, as the therapist had instructed.

“Do you want me to help you?” You asked, almost coaxingly.

Keigo beat his fists once more, crying out almost like a petulant child, (he hated himself for it oh my god—), “I don’t want to fucking do this! I can’t do this!”

And Keigo sobbed into the floor with abandon.

You moved from the couch to haul him into your arms, pressing his face into your neck. You said nothing, you just let him scream and die against you.

“I can’t do this!”

“I hate this!”

“Make this fucking stop!”

“Just make this all fucking stop!”

“JUST FUCKING KILL ME ALREADY!”

This got you to speak, not shushing him, but just trying to soothe—

“IF YOU REALLY FUCKING LOVE ME, THEN YOU’LL SLIT MY THROAT IN MY SLEEP AND LET THIS FUCKING NIGHTMARE BE OVER!—”

You froze.

He didn’t.

Keigo kept begging you to kill him.

Incessantly so.

He didn’t know what to do.

This was a tantrum, maybe. More like a breakdown. It felt dramatic. But, his thoughts were real. He’d be happy to die, especially by your hand. Then you wouldn’t have to take care of him and he wouldn’t be able to feel as awful as he did.

You kept holding him, squeezing him harder and harder still.

Finally, Keigo tuckered himself out and sagged against you.

You reached up to the side table, grabbing your own glass of water, and offering it to him. You still hadn’t spoken.

Part of him thought to apologize, crack a joke even. But he couldn’t make himself do either. Instead, his shaking hands grabbed the glass. You didn’t fully let it go, just guided it to his lips where it dribbles down his chin.

Keigo sputtered a sob.

He couldn’t stand being so weak.

“Love,” You spoke so softly as he sipped. “I will never hurt you like that. I won’t let anyone else, either.”

Keigo suddenly started fucking laughing, for the first time in so fucking long, ripping the cup fully from your hands and throwing it across the room. It shattered in a wild display of raining glass and water. He hadn’t laughed in what felt like months. He let it loose, grabbing your face and directing it right at you, breath curling over your cheeks.

He knew it was cruel, to take it out on you. He hated himself for it even as he was doing it.

“How the fuck do you think you’ll protect me?” Keigo cackled into your face, horror beginning to overtake your features. He didn’t care. It felt good— “You’re just some stupid, weak, quirkless civilian— how the fuck do you think someone as powerless as you can protect me when I can’t even protect me—!”

He kept laughing, but he was crying. He couldn’t tell which was which. Keigo could only tell he was hysterical.

This whole time, since he had woken up in the hospital, you had been nothing but the perfect partner. You had been so kind, asking for nothing in return.

And yet, he’d verbally strike you like this for no other reason than his own hurt.

How fucking cruel.

You let Keigo go, unable to disguise the pain in your expression. You didn’t say anything back to him. As you left the room, you were covering your eyes with your arm. Keigo caught one of your sobs as you fled to the bathroom, almost slamming the door.

Keigo heard your muffled cries for hours until you fell asleep on the bathroom tile as his old burns and guilt ate him alive.

He tried his exercises again.

-------------------

That night, Keigo was too deep in sleep to hear you enter your shared bedroom. Part of you didn’t want to sleep next to him. You thought about returning to the bathroom or moving to the couch. But, you couldn’t make yourself.

Keigo’s words hurt so bad.

Partially because they were cruel. They gnawed at your insecurities, the fears you were desperately suppressing for him.

Partially because you hated the fact you couldn’t do more, despite already doing so much.

Partially because you knew that Keigo would never say things like that to you if he wasn’t being eaten up on the inside.

Partially because the love of your life asked you to snuff his life out.

It all hurt. Stung. Ached. Burned.

There was a small detail that hurt in a different way.

He called you quirkless.

You weren’t quirkless.

Your quirk was so weak and so taxing, sure. It was basically unusable. For fucks sake, you never even bothered to tell Keigo directly as you never used it. He had access to citizen quirk records, and you figured he checked in the several years the two of you had been dating. Apparently not.

But, you did have a quirk.

You stood next to your bed, Keigo covered in the comforter and soft white blanket you’d gotten for him. You could see the peakings of his back. His skin was marred with burns, cuts and scars that looked unimaginably horrible. You’d been avoiding looking at it, for him. You’d seen how it made him cringe.

But now with Keigo sleeping so deeply? You took it all in.

You looked at the nearly black scarring where the roots of his wings were. The fanning out of puckered, red skin from the burns. His back, which once rippled with the muscles that controlled his crazily powerful wings, was now a charred plain.

...

You had an awful, far-fetched, fucked up idea.

You sat, sinking into the bed as you contemplated your idea.

You brought your hands to your face, concentrating on your fingertips.

Small, tiny vines and green shoots left your fingers.

There’s absolutely no way that this will work.

But, you’d hate yourself if you didn’t try.

Life reclaimed life, you supposed.

You drummed up a half-assed plan. It was a weak, frail idea— it would need a lot of support. Even then, you didn’t want to give yourself false hope. You couldn’t give Keigo false hope. It would ruin him.

...

You’d have to fix your diet. Eat lots of nutrient-rich food. Take more vitamins too.

You slotted yourself next to Keigo who, in sensing your warmth, turned into you, pressing into your front. His head nuzzled into your chest, an arm wrapping around your waist.

You heard him wince at the motion, flinching in his sleep.

You had to try.

One of your hands went to his back, brushing down the comforter to reveal the particularly gnarly scars where Keigo had lost part of himself. You laid your hand flat on the fire-flayed skin, praying you don’t wake him. You concentrated, watching small greenery go from your fingers to his flesh, desperately trying to repair the damage that had been done.

------------------------------------

Keigo apologized to you the next morning. He clutched your chest and told you how sorry he was. He told you how he knows he’s acting out, he’s just so fucking sad—

You told him that he didn’t need to justify himself. Not to you. Though, you accepted his apology and asked him to not say those kinds of things to you again.

“I’m trying my best, and I know it's not enough sometimes... but it's all I’ve got,” You speak to him in your own small voice. One that portrayed a weakness that you hadn’t shown since Keigo had been injured.

He felt even guiltier.

But, the second week was better.

His exercises were getting easier. Eating came a little better too. You started cooking more, not getting as much takeout. Part of him missed the comfort of familiar street foods, but another part of him craved the home-cooked meals you made so much more. They helped him feel better too, packed with veggies and lean proteins.

Keigo didn’t notice, he was far too out of it, but you were already looking more haggard.

It came with using your quirk in general, let alone to the extent you were pushing it. It was a pitiful quirk and you’d never strained it half as far as you were then.

It had a price.

To heal others, even something as small as a paper cut would take from your own body.

And, you were dedicating at least thirty minutes a night to attempting to ‘heal’ (read: reconstruct) the tissue of Keigo’s back. You had to start so deep in his muscles; it hurt to push your quirk that far down. Within the first five minutes, that first night you tried, you were silently crying from exertion.

But, you didn’t relent.

Each day, it was a little easier.

Sure, you had bad nights where it was extra hard. You blamed it on not eating well enough, using up too much of yourself during the day.

It was a shitty excuse, notably. Your quirk was weak and self-destructive, it was beyond your bodily capabilities. There was no way to tell if it was even working to heal Keigo’s body. It was a gamble.

And your wager was your health and body.

Even eating optimally and taking a bevy of new vitamins each morning before Keigo awoke, you could tell your physical health was suffering. You were losing a bit of fat already. Dark circles were punched under your eyes from the exhaustion. You had developed the slightest shake when you moved.

And the worst part was, you knew that you’d only get weaker from here on out.

So, you upped your calorie intake. You kept careful track of the foods you ate, the same with Keigo’s. He didn’t seem to mind the delicious meals you now coveted crafting, no matter how tired you were. If he was eating better, it would probably help you too, right?

You could only hope, resting it all on a long shot.

--------------------------

Week three was good, but hard.

The HPSC commission forced Keigo to do a media appearance. He told them, bluntly, that he couldn’t fake it right now. Probably, forever.

They told him to suck it up, get out there, and put some hope into their society that was being pulled apart at the seams.

Keigo refused to let you come. He didn’t want to think about how you’ll look at him when he’s all dressed in his hero uniform, wings absent from his back, forcing him to bear the two empty slots of his jacket.

When he mentioned it, you offered to sew them up.

Keigo felt horrible, but he just gave a nod, handing you his jacket without looking at you.

You stitched the slits shut for him. Keigo requested red thread for the stitching and you obliged him.

(You made note that Keigo truly had no hope. You couldn’t tell him a thing about your quirk usage until you were positive that it would have results.)

The media appearance went okay. Not great, but okay. ‘Hawks’ was dead, and Keigo was not a performer like he was. Though he still went by his hero name, his real name only known by himself, the Commission, Dabi (may he rot in hell), and you. He coveted that you had the intimacy in knowing his identity, but it felt dirtier now that Dabi (Touya?) had that name in his throat as well.

When Keigo came home from the media appearance, he was keyed up. He flitted around the apartment while you made dinner. There was an anxiousness in his movements.‘Hawks’ would’ve taken to the skies to fly off some of this fractious energy. Keigo just had to wait for food to be ready and pray that the feelings went away.

Just before dinner, he decided to try exercises outside of the one his physical therapist assigned him. He was feeling energetic enough, right? Might as well pull out some of the easier moves from his hero training.

Keigo moved to his now seldom-used at home gym. He picked up a dust-covered five-pound weight and proceeded to try and curl it. The moment Keigo brought it above his head, his back tensed and burned something fierce.

The weight fell from Keigo’s hand, half-thrown, luckily missing any and all of his toes and feet.

He cried in frustration, stuck staring at himself in the wall of mirrors.

Keigo truly thought he looked pitiful.

He was still wearing his hero uniform sans the jacket. He’d lost a lot of muscle mass with his more sedentary state. His hair was too long. He had gotten more pale, losing his few freckles. His eyes were bloodshot and his teeth curl over his lips in a snarl—

“Keigo?” You opened the door to the gym, eyes wide with shock, but your tone didn’t change. He just glowered at you from the mirrors. You spoke again, staring him down with an almost scarily neutral poker face. “Dinner’s ready. Would you like to eat? Otherwise, I can save it for you.”

Keigo didn’t reply. He went back to trying to pick up the weight, screaming each time and hating how his back burned so intensely.

You left without saying anything.

---------------------------

Week four was hard because you and Keigo’s relationship is beginning to suffer. Or, it had been, but it was reaching a fever pitch.

Keigo’s lack of human contact, lack of physical activity, and general cabin fever were getting to him. He was lashing out more and you, kind as you were, were having trouble dealing with it.

Your own run downstate was eating you alive, literally. No matter how much you put into your body, you needed more to heal Keigo. You were up to two hours a night of working at Keigo’s tissue with your quirk. By the end of your ‘sessions’, you would simply pass out and fall into listless slumber. You were losing a lot of sleep each night, but you were determined to keep going.

Your exhaustion, in general, was making you a bit more prickly towards Keigo’s increasing frequent outbursts.

It all came to a head on a Sunday night.

The two of you were curled up on the couch, half-cuddling and half-watching TV.

A notice for breaking news showed red on the screen.

Both of you tensed. Before Keigo’s injury, he’d be rushing to throw on his hero gear and fly to help. Now, he just sat next to you, stiff as a board with pin-pricked pupils.

A picture, pre-PLF injury Endeavor flashed on screen.

“The Hero Public Safety Commission has just made the press release the former number one hero, Endeavor, is no longer in comatose.”

You watched a real, happy smile, spread on Keigo’s face. For a moment, there was a sliver of hope—

“But, he still remains in critical condition. Due to injuries affecting his central nervous system, he is reported as being in a state of paralysis. As of now, his life still hangs in the balance, though he is lucid.”

Keigo stiffened again.

There was rage painting his face.

And pain.

You stiffened with him.

You did not have it in you that night to deal with one of Keigo’s explosive moments.

“Endeavor has left us all with this message—”

The camera flashed to an old video of the old ‘number one hero’, healthy and strong with a fist raised in the air.

You braced for impact as Keigo stood, shoulders hunching over.

Endeavors voice washed over your living room,

“Go Plus Ultra!”

And Keigo, honest to god, shrieked.

He fell to his knees and beat the floor beneath him. He slammed his fists in the hardwood over, and over, and over again. You slipped to the ground with him, trying to grab at his fists.

“Keigo, you’re gonna hurt yourself—” You tried to tell him. You managed to capture one of his fists, urging it to stay down-

But, you looked up to see Keigo giving a feral look with a frenzied, white-hot sneer all for you.

And his free fist flew towards you. It connected hard and solidly to your jaw.

You hadn’t been expecting it. Keigo had never struck you before, not even close. For fucks sake, he had never even raised his voice at you before his injury.

So, how could you expect to brace yourself for it?

The force of Keigo’s blow knocked you back. You jolted, falling onto your side and turning your head to the side, away from Keigo.

You brought a hand up to cup and shield your face, your jaw and eye socket throbbing.

All you could feel was shock.

And sadness.

And horror.

And anger.

And terror.

Keigo snapped out of it.

The news report was still playing, but he couldn’t hear it.

There was only the rushing of blood in his ears.

His mouth turned bone dry.

He had watched you move with his strike, falling more to the ground, hiding yourself—

“Oh my g-god, (Y/N),” Keigo’s voice was slippery and warbling. “I-I d-didn’t—”

“No,” You stood up, still holding and hiding your face from him. His heart was crumbling in his chest.

You looked at him with only fear and heartbreak.

Keigo scrambled up, trying to apologize, hold you, mend this before it got worse—

But you put the hand that wasn’t cupping your face out, just barely touching his chest. You refused to let him any closer.

“H-hey Kei’?” Your voice sounded so, so shaky. It’s hardly there. You were holding back tears and it was so obvious. It made every part of Keigo burn with shame. “I can’t today. Maybe another day, I could deal with this, y-ya know? But not today, okay? Have a g-good night.”

You walked away before he could say anything else.

You dashed off to the guest room, shutting and locking the door before falling against it and breaking. You cried and rocked yourself as you tried to self-soothe your shattered body and mind.

The month prior had been so hard. The person you love was hurt so deeply, and though you were trying with everything you had to help, it didn’t seem like enough. You were getting verbally beat up semi-frequently and now Keigo had fucking hit you.

You were scared. You were terrified that this would become the norm. That Keigo’s outbursts would continue to worsen, as they had been, and you would become a physical punching bag for him.

It especially hurt because you were trying so hard to help Keigo.

You weren’t delusional enough to think you could really fix him, were you?

The fact that you were secretly and silently trying to regenerate Keigo’s body with a quirk he didn’t even know you had struck you bluntly in your mind.

“I’m just so fucked up, aren’t I?” You laughed and sobbed to yourself at the same time, slamming your head backward on the door, relishes the pain that floods your skull. It was a reprieve from the bruises blooming across your cheekbone.

You eventually managed to cry yourself to sleep, literally. You curled up in a ball on the floor next to the door, worn down to the bone.

In the early morning, far before dawn, you pulled yourself into half-wakefulness.

You were relentless and you were coming to hate yourself for it.

You needed to work on Keigo, no matter how you shitty felt.

You crept into the master bedroom, trying to be silent. You didn’t want to wake him. Only when you were fully in the room did you notice a soft lamp is still on despite it being early, early morning.

Wide awake and upright, Keigo looked horrified to see you. He looked at you, shaking and half-sobbing into a pillow he clutched to his chest.

You both seemed shocked to see each other.

You sniffled as you turned off the lamp, stripping down to just a t-shirt and panties before climbing into your side of the bed.

You refused to face him while he was awake. You got as comfortable as you could (which wasn’t much).

There was half an hour of disgustingly awkward silence. It coated the room, bearing the two of you who refused to sleep.

“I’m s-sorry,” Keigo had yet to move. He was frozen in place as you were turned away from him in the dark. “I’m so sorry, (Y/N).”

Silence.

Your mouth felt dry and your mind parched.

“Keigo,” You spoke like a being empty. You truly felt like it too. “If you ever touch me like that again, I will do worse than just leave you.”

It was a threat.

You let yourself have it, in all of this. You deserved one low blow.

Keigo slowly slid down into the covers, babbling apologies and beginning to cry again.

“Stop, Kei’,” You finally turned towards him, cupping his face. He blinked at you, eyes wide and glassy. “I love you. Just stop. Apologizing doesn’t make something like this better. I can’t do this if you keep hurting me, you know that. Just be better.”

Keigo winced at that. He knew it was true, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t painful.

You fell asleep on each other that night. You let your headrest nestled up against Keigo’s chest. He breathed softly above you, arms wrapped securely around you, holding you tightly like he was afraid you’d leave. You wouldn’t. You made the decision to stay at the beginning of all this. Your threats would always be empty.

Idly, you had an arm thrown over Keigo’s waist, snaking up the back of his shirt to press your fingertips against his scars. Your roots and greenery didn’t have to go as deep now, as far as you could tell.

But, it had been a month with no discernable progress, visual or otherwise.

But, you held onto hope.

Because you had to hold onto hope that Keigo would get better.

All of him.

-------------------------------

The second month was... different.

Keigo tried with his whole heart to earn back your trust.

You flinched at him for the first week or so.

He hated himself so fucking much each time you did. But, he never blamed you. He couldn’t.

(Even as you twitched away from him in the daylight, you tirelessly worked on his scars in his sleep. You couldn’t give up, no matter how awful you felt).

Keigo did his exercises several times a day. He made a few more media appearances but refused to be seen with Endeavor. He (and truthfully, the Commission) knew that he could not psychologically handle it.

You were rapidly getting weaker, but you didn’t care. You ate more, slept when you could, and pushed on. You were up to three hours of healing a night. Tears rolled down your cheeks the whole time.

You were clinging to the prayer that you could unburn Keigo’s back like it would save you from your personally made hell.

This was despite the fact he was already crawling out of the pit himself.

Your existence was eased slightly as Keigo was starting to help out more.

Keigo wasn’t anywhere near normal— normal Keigo was dead in a disintegrated building, miles from your shared home. But, he was getting better.

His muscles felt better. He wasn’t sure how, but they did. His PT exercises must’ve been working. The outbursts he had thrown so often during the first month pittered out to maybe once or twice a week. They were calmer now. You were still his anchor, of course, that was undeniable. But, it was mostly crying and clutching and not screaming and breaking.

It was a welcome shift.

Most of the time, Keigo would pull you into his lap and wrap you in his embrace. Softly, he’d sway and rock the two of you, like he was trying to lull and calm not just himself, but you in tandem.

A lot of the time, this was true.

Your flinching subsided and Keigo had no more close calls with any physical violence towards you. In a few high strung moments, he still snapped at you. He’d apologize, and do better. At least, you told yourself that. That’s how you saw it anyways.

Keigo was thoroughly traumatized. His mind was an open nerve and that had consequences. You were so endlessly tired. What kind of wounds and trauma were you incurring?

You forced yourself not to think about it.

Part of you, during this month, wanted to simply pack a bag and leave without a trace.

But, you stayed with Keigo. You stayed determined.

(Or, you stayed out of spite. On your bad days, you really had trouble figuring it out.)

Your body looked like shit. You were endlessly glad Keigo still wasn’t in a position to be having any sort of sex because he probably would’ve noticed how fucked up your body was getting.

You shook constantly, always quaking like a leaf in a rainstorm. Your skin bruised with almost any contact beyond light touch. Your eyes, once vibrant and expressive, had sunk in.

Your body, no matter the several thousand extra calories you forced yourself to eat a day, still ran through your fat reserves. It was leeching muscle from you. It made your joints feel raw.

It almost hurts that you noticed how Keigo is so pained, but he didn’t notice you falling apart.

-----------------------

The third month was when shit hit the fan.

It was near the end of the month.

You were doing so badly. You stretched yourself far beyond your body's abilities.

You felt particularly sick, but you needed to get groceries. Keigo couldn’t himself for a host of reasons, which made it your job. You kissed him on the cheek as you left for the market.

Meanwhile, Keigo’s physical therapist dropped by for a check-in appointment.

Keigo did his exercises beautifully. He had to admit, his muscles didn’t ache in nearly the same way they used to. They only really hurt when the weather changed, like he was some old, arthritic man.

“Wow!” His therapist gasped, watching him complete his exercises. “It’s looking great, Hawks. It looks like you’ve gained back a lot of strength.”

The small amount of praise made him beam as he sat up.

“I just want to check the actual wounds around your back, if that’s alright? Just feel the scar tissue,” The therapist asked. Keigo bit his lip, slowly pulling off his tee-shirt. He didn’t like the idea of anyone’s hands being that close to the intimate roots of his dead wings.

But, it was necessary.

Keigo faced his back to her.

All he got was an audible gasp as the therapist’s hands traced at his spine.

“The progress back here- Hawks this is insane,” The other was alight, pressing a thumb somewhere near the root. It hardly even hurt. “The scar tissue— it’s not gone, but it's a lot more tender than it should be. Like it's actually healing.”

“Is that why it doesn’t hurt so bad?” Keigo asked, letting a few slivers of joy light him up from the inside out. During his initial prognosis, multiple doctors had said that he was going to be on fire for years, not months.

The therapist nodded, “Looks like it. Even the scarring on the surface looks pretty good. Must have some damn good genes to be healing like this.”

The two laughed, Keigo feeling more lighthearted than he had in months.

You, on the other hand, were greatly struggling.

You were so, so fucking cold; yet another bi-product of your overextension. You were wrapped in an oversized cardigan on top of one of Keigo’s mock necks. You couldn’t stop trembling as you try to shop as quickly and effectively as possible. Anything to get you home as soon as possible.

You had a great deal of difficulty doing this, though.

If you moved too fast, your vision blacked out. It had been like that for a while, a week or two. You’d lost track. You figured it was your iron, maybe blood pressure.

It was an easy thing to hide at home, but much harder in public.

You reached for something high on a metal shelf, tossing it into your cart. You needed another item, on the bottom shelf. You dropped to your knees, your body aching and rolling.

Almost done.

So close.

Then you can go home and rest.

You stood up too fast. Your vision went black ringed for a second. You stumble, trying to catch yourself as you lost sight.

You felt weightless for a moment, spinning, Though your limbs felt weighed down, impossible to move. As your vision returned, its field wouldn’t move, pointed up at the ceiling of the crowded market.

There were people speaking, shouting around you.

Alarmed.

Speaking to you?

You didn’t care.

You were so, so tired.

You let your eyes slip shut.

------------

Keigo had been waiting for you for several hours longer than it took to go grocery shopping, sure. And, to have you gone from the apartment so long made him itch too. It had been eating him, making him pace around. You hadn’t been answering your phone either. He figured you had made a detour and let your phone die.

When he received a call from the local civilian hospital about you, he feels his blood freeze in his veins.

“You’re listed here as (Y/N)’s emergency contact as a partner, yes?” The nurse asked. “They collapsed at a local market. They’re stable, but we’d recommend coming to the hospital as soon as you’re able to.”

Keigo nodded, head swimming.

You’re hurt.

You’re safe, but you’re hurt.

...

Keigo was whisked to the back of the hospital in a poor disguise. He gets recognized, given some extra security. The scar that marred his face was enough of a marker even if he didn’t have wings. He hardly cared. He couldn’t.

Your door opened to a very dark room, soft beeps and hums filling it.

He imagined that he must've been feeling close to how you felt, seeing him in such a similar position those few months ago.

The nurse enters ahead of him, clicking around on a tablet to pull up your chart.

Keigo could hardly pay attention. He felt like he was going to die, seeing you like that.

You had an IV, pushing fluids into your thinned arms. Your face was hollow looking, sockets sunken, especially with your eyes closed like they were. You had several blankets on you, piled over you. Yet, you were still visibly shivering.

The nurse whispered, “They’ve been asleep for a while now. A doctor will be in soon. Just sit tight.”

She left the room while Keigo pulled a chair up to your bed.

The smell of the hospital burned his nose. It reminded him far too much of his own time. All that pain.

The ache in his back flared, but he figured it was somatic.

Keigo reached out as he sat, holding one of your frail-looking hands in both of his own (had you looked this purely death stricken this morning? Keigo couldn’t recall either way, and he hates himself for it).

Your eyes slowly opened.

Keigo met your gaze, breath caught in both of your throats.

Neither of you got a chance to speak, not a moment of fucking comfort, before a doctor barged in, flipping through your chart with a bored look on his face.

“We finished up your testing. Lucky for you, no concussion or fractures from your fall,” The doctor nods. He doesn’t even seem to notice Keigo, or rather, Hawks. “The rest of your results aren’t looking so great though.”

Your hand stiffened violently in Keigo’s grip. Your face went from worn and exhausted to filled with terror and... guilt?

You were fucked.

The doctors and nurses had mentioned to you that they were fairly certain that all of your symptoms came from quirk overuse. You started weakly crying at that, your nurses looking confused. You didn’t elaborate then. You knew, the moment you woke up in the hospital that you were going to have to confront your own damage to your body.

You were going to be forced to explain it.

To Keigo.

The doctor continued.

“Low levels of nearly all essential vitamins and minerals. Particularly low iron, magnesium, and potassium. In general, your test results and physical state would lead me to think you’re suffering from malnutrition. But, your panel shows that your metabolic rate is actually going abnormally quickly in a way that could only be linked to-”

Wait for it.

“Quirk overuse-”

Keigo barked out a laugh, letting go of your hand, “I’m sorry, but what? They’re quirkless, it has to be something else.”

You didn’t say anything. Your eyes, glassy and unfocused, are trained on your lap. You’re taking sharp, quick breaths.

You’re going to have to tell him everything.

The doctor flips through your chart again, shaking his head and bringing it over for Keigo to look at, “I apologize if this seems out of turn, but they’re listed in the public files as having a quirk... It’s marked as a weak healing quirk, but all the same, any strength of quirk has overuse.”

Keigo is stone still.

There’s tension so thick in the air of the room that the doctor excuses himself.

Keigo, for months now, had been in a traumatized stupor. His normally sharpened senses, aided by his wings, were the key to so much of his cunning. Both his physical and mental states were affected, which had made him less observant.

It had caused him to disregard so much.

But now, in your stupid, acrid hospital room, he was quickly putting it together.

His back burned again.

You felt frozen. You couldn’t force yourself to move. You couldn’t do anything other than look at your lap and roll in your head. Your body hurt so bad, your head hurt too, and so did your fucking heart.

“Can I clarify? Because I think I have an idea of what’s going on.” Keigo had physically moved away from you. He leaned back in his chair, staring down with a mix of expressions you couldn’t suss out. It made you feel even sicker.

You nodded.

“Breath, (Y/N),” Keigo reminded you. He watched you take a massive inhale, followed by tears beginning to gather. You still wouldn’t meet his eyes.

“Have you been... using your quirk on me? Without me knowing?” Keigo asked, trying to keep his voice firm, but truthfully, it wanted to waver and bend so badly. “Please be honest.”

You nod, breaking down to rub at your eyes.

Keigo doesn’t stop the instinctual way he moved towards you, leaning over your bed and wrapping his arms around me.

With his cheek pressed to the top of your head, he broke the illusion:

“Please tell me what’s going on. Please.”

And so, you did.

It came out tearfully, you spilling and cracking as you did. You felt stupid and guilty and awful, but at least you were out of this fucked up lie.

It all poured out of you. Your fear and your desperation were all laid out and Keigo was reading the cards.

You explained that your quirk has always been weak in addition to taxing on the body. Hence, you had seldom, if ever, used it as an adult. You were effectively quirkless and you were okay with that. Keigo had never asked so you never told him.

You tell him, voice shaking, what happened the night Keigo had pleaded with you to kill him.

“I-I, Kei’,” You push out, pressing your face into his shoulder. “I didn’t know what to do. You were so hurt and so sad and I had this stupid fucking idea that maybe, maybe I could use to my quirk to heal you.”

Keigo’s breath catches. He doesn’t say anything for a moment before asking, “Why didn’t you tell me? Ask me?”

“I didn’t know if it would work. I still don’t know if it does. It didn’t wanna... I didn’t want to get your hopes up. E-especially since it would’ve been coming from me.” You pressed harder into him like you’re scared of him disappearing. “You were already so crushed.”

Keigo didn’t know what to say. There was a swirl of emotions bubbling and writhing in his body and mind and he didn’t know what to say for the first time in a long time.

So he didn’t say anything.

Keigo sat back in his chair, putting his elbows to his knees, using folded hands to rest his head on, parsing through his own feelings.

“K-Keigo?” You asked, wiping a tear away. As much as Keigo hated seeing you like this, he also recognized your state was by your hand.

Right?

“Sweetheart, I love you—” Keigo stopped himself, sighing deep in his chest. “But, I can’t... I just need some time.”

You nodded, tears coming back to drip down your face.

Keigo just watched with a neutral expression.

-----------------

Despite not being able to handle talking to you, Keigo was more than willing to help you out of the hospital. You were discharged with a prescribed diet and vitamins as well as a followup appointment in a few weeks.

“And, most importantly,” The doctor made eye contact with you. “Don’t use that quirk of yours until further notice. Honestly, with it being so destructive, I can’t understand why you would in the first place.”

You burned with shame.

The night you came back from the hospital, Keigo took incredible care of you. He didn’t talk much during it, not to you anyways. He was nearly constantly speaking under his breath, all unintelligible. From his tone and myriad of expressions, you guessed he was verbally processing.

Keigo gingerly gave you a bath, scrubbing away the smells and stickiness of the hospital. He managed to cook you one of the nutritious recipes you had shown him a few weeks ago. You sheepishly had to ask for another portion, explaining how your metabolism burned so quickly.

“Have...” Keigo finally spoke while making you another plate. “Have you always been eating this much?”

You nodded, sipping your water, “For a long time, yes.”

He hated himself for not noticing such obvious things.

Keigo kept carrying you from place to place, no matter how much his back hurt. He didn’t care. He couldn’t.

He laid you in bed at some point, sliding in next to you. He still hadn’t spoken much since you’d left the hospital.

You had tried to babble apologies and beg for forgiveness, but selfishly, Keigo wasn’t listening. He was trapped in his own head. Even when you clung to him in the bath, he could hardly make himself hold you up from sliding too far into the water.

It almost hurt to touch you.

It was late when Keigo finally verbally, directly regarded you.

“Why?” Keigo asked. You’re both turned away from each other. The bed had been vibrating with your harsh breathing and crying for an hour or so now. “Why did you do all this?”

You stop shaking, but only for a moment.

Your voice is so soft, weak, “Please don’t blame yourself. It was my choice.”

“That’s not what I asked.” Keigo could hear the anger in his voice. “Why. Did. You. Do. This?”

You’re silent for a moment.

And then you’re sitting up, yelling.

“Because I didn’t know what else to fucking do!” You gripped your hair at the roots, pulling. “You asked me to fucking kill you, Keigo! You begged me to!”

Keigo sat up, staring you down. He felt so much anger and rage in him, it was bubbling up, “That doesn’t mean you had to hurt yourself like this for me!”

“I didn’t want to hurt myself! I wanted to help you! Using my quirk was all I could do!” You looked over at him, digging your nails into your exposed thighs. “What else was I supposed to do!”

“Exactly what I thought you were doing, helping me!” Keigo screamed back at you. “You were doing so good at it!”

“You wanna know why I could even help?!” You shouted. You grabbed Keigo’s shoulders and brought him inches away from your face. “Because, every night, I got to give myself just a shred of hope that you would get better. That maybe, maybe your wings would come back and you’d smile like you used to instead of yelling at me, and hitting me, and asking me, begging me, to slit your fucking throat!”

You couldn’t stop crying. Your body was so run down, so depleted, but it still musters up the energy to drip tears like a flooded creek. You wanted to run and leave the bed, retreat to the bathroom where you can break down on the tile in peace, alone where Keigo wouldn’t have to watch. You’d done it enough prior to know he wouldn’t check on you.

Keigo stared at you with wide eyes.

He didn’t know what to say at first

He was feeling so much—

Keigo didn’t know what to do or say.

So, he just twisted the knife, one could say.

“You should’ve just left if you were really that miserable with me.” Keigo regretted it the moment it left his lips. You tense up, looking at him with a gaze he could only call broken.

“No,” You grabbed your shoulders, rocking yourself. “No, Kei’, I couldn’t, I won’t—”

“Then stop complaining.” Keigo shrugged. God, this was awful, wasn’t it? Why wouldn’t he just shut up? “You’re the one who stayed and tortured yourself. That’s on you.”

“So you’d rather have that I... left?”

“Duh,” Keigo laughed, staring down your crying form. You’re so decrepit in your current state. He hated looking at you, purely because he knows he was at least a portion of what led to this. But, he’d never admit it. “Fuck, (Y/N), you didn’t have to kill me, and you didn’t have to kill yourself either.”

He’s splitting inside as he watches you break in front of him. Some fucked up, sadistic part of him relishes it. The other, muted, more sane part is screaming at him to stop fucking talking-

“You really got yourself hospitalized for overusing a quirk on me that I didn’t even know you had. You were so desperately trying to get me my wings back, all while acting soooo supportive of me trying to live without them?!” Keigo bellowed at you. You cowered, bent legs beginning to slide off the bed — “Do you realize how fucked up that is? That, behind closed doors, while I was fucking asleep, you were trying to fix me? Well, guess what, (Y/N), I’m broken beyond fucking repair, and no cute little shit you pull is going to fix me!”

Keigo shrieked his last words.

You fell off the bed, slamming onto the floor. A sickening crack filled the room as your head, basically unsupported, met the hardwood.

“Stop it!” You were screaming yourself silly from the floor. Your head hurt so badly. Maybe you were bleeding. You didn’t care. “Stop it!”

You knew you couldn’t handle this.

You were raw. You couldn’t do this. You couldn’t confront any more than you had already that day. Your body hurt so badly and your mind hurt too. Everything Keigo said just rubbed salt in the wounds he helped to create.

“Keigo, just fucking stop it!”

Your vision spun. You thought that maybe you were hyperventilating. You couldn’t feel your hands, numbness beginning to pull at your extremities.

“I’m fucking sorry!” You wailed. “What would do if you were in my position, Keigo?! Just watch me suffer and not do anything even if you could?!”

Keigo leaned over the bed, giving you the most empty look you’d ever seen him wear.

“I would’ve just fucking left, (Y/N),” He spoke in a monotone, eyes like dead coals. “I would’ve just left.”

You stared up at him.

This horrible feeling had filled you from toes to top and you couldn’t escape it.

Keigo didn’t say anything else as you panicked on the floor. He simply got up, left for the guest room, and slammed the door.

Neither of you ever felt as awful as you did that night.

--------------------

Keigo didn’t sleep that night.

Neither did you.

He figured (he hoped) you’d be gone by the morning. Maybe you would just pack your dusty suitcase and get the fuck out.

...

Truthfully, not a single fragment of Keigo wanted you to leave. No piece of him wanted you to go out of his life. God, if he really thought about it, the prospect of not being side-by-side in this world together threw him into bends of anxiety and pure grief.

Truthfully, as Keigo silently, tearfully, examined your actions, he felt his anger ebb away.

He understood.

Why you did what you did.

But it didn’t mean that it didn’t hurt.

Guilt was eating him, too. For all the horrible things he had said. The things he’d done that hurt you without regard for months now. The fact he never noticed you deteriorating. And all the nights you crept back into your shared room, for comfort and to keep trying to help him, though perhaps cruelly.

It was dawn when Keigo exited the guestroom. He figured that you were either gone or would be soon.

He was clearly mistaken.

Keigo stopped when he saw you at the kitchen table, head down, and resting on your folded arms. You were wearing a huge sweater, one of his, and a blanket around your shoulders.

Keigo had, incredibly selfishly, somewhat forgotten your physical state.

He ached.

“I made coffee,” You said quietly. You looked up, meeting Keigo’s gaze with bloodshot, puffy eyes. “It’s still warm.”

“Why are you here?” Keigo asked, heart starting to beat too fast again. “Why haven’t you left-?”

“Do you really want me to leave?” You asked with an unfamiliar edge to your voice. It’s not anger or malice, but something different. You stand, bracing yourself on the table, wobbling. Keigo wanted nothing more than to scoop you into his arms and apologize. But, he doesn’t.

You looked at him with this edge of fierce determination, asking the penultimate question, the core of this all, “Keigo, do you want me to leave because of my actions, or do you want me to leave because you don’t think you deserve help?”

There was a poignant quiet over the apartment.

The birds of the new day interrupted it from outside, chirping with the eos of dawn.

“I don’t think... I—” Keigo was speechless again, stuttering. “You shouldn’t have hurt yourself so bad.”

“That’s been established, I went too far. I should’ve told you, offered and asked, and go from there. It ultimately was a complete breach of boundaries and for that, I’m sorry. Fuck my good intentions, it was selfish.” You squeezed the edge of the table, eyes low. Your gaze turned up sharply to meet his, that edge of determination and fierceness in it that Keigo was unfamiliar with. “My question is, do you want me to leave?”

Keigo stared at his feet. His head was swimming, “You should leave.”

“I asked if you want me to,” You asked again. You were being more firm than you had ever been. You sounded unbreakable. It was that stubbornness that kept you there with him, right?

Keigo met your eyes with a sharp glare, “You should’ve left the night I asked you to kill me.”

You sighed, shaking visibly, but still keeping yourself so strong, “Please just answer me. Do you want me to leave? If we’re going to break up, let’s just call it that, and get it over with, okay Kei’?”

Oh, hearing you say ‘breakup’—

That broke Keigo.

Having to truly think and reckon with a reality where you weren’t with him and you weren’t facing the horrors of the world together was purely the stuff of nightmares.

The stupid little facade Keigo had so carefully crafted broke. The burns on his body started to ache anew, somatically. The scar over his eye twitched as tears were gathering anew.

“N-no,” Keigo hugged himself, shaking his head. “N-no— I don’t want you to go—”

You didn’t say anything, just watched him with a sad expression.

“Then I won’t.” You sat back down. “Keigo, I know that this is all fucked beyond belief. I know. But, I won’t leave. I really, really don’t want to. I won’t, not unless you want me to go.”

And Keigo was breaking for you again.

He somehow stumbled next to your chair, managing to fall to his knees and rest his head on your cold, cold thigh. He pressed his nose into your flesh, trying to fucking absorb your smell like you could disappear any moment.

“Why did you do it-” Keigo sobbed into your skin, nails biting in the flesh of your calves. It made you jerk in your seat. “WHY DID YOU HURT YOURSELF FOR ME!”

You didn’t have a good answer for him, so you didn’t reply.

Keigo’s grip on the flesh of his leg started to break skin as he wailed into your leg.

You just looked down at him with this expression of pure remorse, melancholy coloring your eyes.

You grabbed his clawed-hands, recalling the last time you tried a move like this with a twitch. You held his hands in your own, pulling him up, “You can’t do that, Keigo. You’re hurting me.”

“All I DO is hurt YOU!” Keigo crushed you into a tight hug, knocking the wind from you. You jolt forward into his death grip.

“It was my choice,” You remind him, so much weakness in your choice. “A very, very selfish one. If I was going to try to heal you, I should’ve asked.”

You started crying with him.

You both were just torturing yourselves, truthfully.

At his core, Keigo was a fucked up man who was so thoroughly repressed and manipulated, it was hard to see his psychological shortcomings. They were all so meticulously hidden.

But not then, not after losing his wings.

“I’m so fucked up,” Keigo kept crying into you as you had his hands locked together. “I hate myself for being this upset at you when you were trying to help me.”

“Love,” Your voice was so soft, releasing Keigo’s hands to pet his hair. “It wasn’t right for me to try and do what I did. You can’t help how you feel.”

“I could before I lost them!” Keigo muffled himself with your flesh.

Them being his wings, obviously.

You hauled him upwards, forcing him to sit in your lap. Keigo had always had a bit of size on you, but in your shrunken state, it was even more pronounced.

“Then you weren’t feeling,” You pressed your face to Keigo’s chest, wrapping your arms around his waist. He entangled himself with you, and you both just held each other for a long, long time.

------------------------

In the following six months, a many very important things happen.

Keigo got a place for you for two entire months, just so you two have some separation. After actually having a calm talk about your relationship dynamic since Keigo’s injury, it was comically apparent there were so many fucked up things that had happened and that you both needed a bit of time to collect yourselves.

It was a hard separation, but you still see each other at least half of the days of your time apart, and even a few that you snuck over for the night to stay over. Keigo was so, so thankful. Being wrapped in each other was a different experience, something actually healing.

You both got therapists, next. A couples therapist too.

Thank God.

Keigo had oodles of trauma to sort through, and you had your own shit to deal with as well. Not to mention the whole ‘Keigo being a dick to you because he was hurt doesn’t justify it’ kinda broke your brain for a second. Also, Keigo having to process ‘he was capital A abusive to you after he got hurt, and your only stability being the hope in healing you is much more complicated than just them trying to ‘fix’ you’ was a case of note.

It was weird, really.

When you moved back, fully, to Keigo’s (you weren’t sure if you could call it ‘your’ apartment anymore), it was nerve-wracking. It was under the understanding that you could move out if you needed to, that separation and an ending were just a corner away.

It made you feel more unstable than you had in months, but you kept up with it.

Keigo noticed, much more observant than he had been. About two weeks into you returning to the apartment, he asked the question, “What if we moved?”

You had been quietly eating your breakfast, but this startled you, “Move? Why?”

“I mean,” Keigo sheepishly rubbed the back of his neck. His gaze flickered to the living room, recalling the times he broke down and was so awful to you. It shifted to the bedroom door where you broke boundaries over and over. “A lot of bad stuff happened here. If we’re going to have a fresh start, might as well live somewhere new, right?”

You mused on it for a moment, then nodded, “Yeah, that would be good.”

The next few weeks were the most healthy and productive that you and Keigo ever had, pre- or post-injury. Apartment hunting turned into purchasing a two-floored, highrise, insanely nice condo across the city. Keigo suggested buying a house, but you refused. You both liked the views too much to live somewhere so close to the ground.

You packed your things, mutually. You both threw away plenty, bits and bobs that had been relatively unused for a long time. Lots of old memories were thrown out to make way for new ones. Though it was sad and there was plenty of grief in it, you actually had each other this time.

When you found Keigo sobbing, clutching an old picture of him and Touya, one of the only of him from his childhood with the Commission, you held him and rocked him. You cried with him, not just settling for ‘dealing’ with him anymore.

When you cleaned out the kitchen, you found the two dozen extra vitamins and extracts you had been taking while healing Keigo. You stared at him, idly, for ten minutes, somewhere far off in your head. Keigo came up behind you, wrapping his arms around you. Softly, he pulled you back from your mind. He helped you throw away each bottle, talking reverently to you so your gaze and mind would stay in that moment, and not those past and unsavory.

You helped each other, or, were learning to.

You and Keigo both had to agree that shopping for furniture was probably the most fun the two of you had in a while. With a facemask and a beanie on, Keigo appeared a lot less like his former self, allowing for the two of you to covertly search for new homewares without prying crowds.

The old apartment had originally been Keigo’s from his early years of being a hero. You simply moved in with him, adding yourself to his space. This time, you were making it together.

“What do you think of this one?” You turned to Keigo, next to you. Both of you laid on top of a fairly nice mattress, the store relatively empty aside from the employees and the two of you.

“I think it's good, it’s not too soft,” Keigo turned and smiled at you, speaking from behind his mask.

You couldn’t help sitting up, tugging the cloth mask just a bit lower to drop a sweet kiss on the side of his mouth, “Get out the credit card then, babe.”

The condo was sorted within a few weeks, full of furniture and slowly being decorated.

You also had the opportunity to christen the mattress, if you will.

...

How long had it been since you and Keigo had laid together like this?

Your bodies were sticky with sweat and cum, several rounds having passed throughout the night. Your new mattress was going to need a fresh change of sheets after this.

“Hey, angel, come over here,” Keigo tugged you closer to him, laying your head on his chest. You smiled softly, pressing closer. You missed it, truly, the warmth of his body and the feeling of his skin on your own like this.

“Alright, check-in,” Keigo pressed a kiss to your damp forehead. “You feeling okay?”

“I feel great,” You hummed, throwing a leg over his waist. “I can honestly keep going.”

“Should you?” Keigo raised an eyebrow and chuckled, nudging a knee between your legs. You flinched, knowing how sore you’d be in the morning already.

Though your body had recovered somewhat, you weren’t fully back to where you were before Keigo’s injury. You didn’t mind, though. Keigo had taken to doting on you a bit more than he used to.

You shrugged and Keigo just chuckled, bringing you ever-closer.

“Are you okay?” You straddled Keigo’s hips, cocking your head to one side.

Keigo was silent for a moment, stormy almost. He bit his lip, tracing hands and eyes over your figure, finally landing on your face. His softened hands cupped your jaw.

“Yeah, I’m okay,” His thumb rubbed over your lips. There’s something so melancholic about him. “I just missed you.”

You knew exactly what he meant by ‘miss’.

It was a feeling beyond sex, but rather intimacy. Sure, Keigo had been balls deep in you for the first time in months and that was ecstasy you wouldn’t trade the world for. But, this feeling Keigo regarded was different.

It had been so long since the two of you had been so softened around each other.

Guards, after months of being raised high, had begun to fall.

Thank God.

Your eyes watered as you lowered your face to his, ghosting your lips over his, “I missed you too, Kei’. I missed you so, so much.”

How many minutes of hell had your both endured? And how many were there still to go? Thoughts of fear and anguish constantly swirled within the two of you for so long. They certainly hadn’t stopped, but they were lessening. Therapy helped. Being in the new place with a fresh start did wonders for the two you. Keigo’s passion for cooking continued to grow and you had taken up a few new hobbies of your own.

It was the mundane, you supposed, that was the stitching for broken relationships. The real healing of proverbial flesh and bone was intimacy, vulnerability, and love.

“Hey, Kei’,” You kissed him breathless, once, twice, three times. “I love you, you know? A lot.”

“Yeah?” Keigo giggled, something high and light that he wouldn’t have released a year ago. “I love you too. So much.”

The night continued in tender fucking, the two of you visibly watching wounds begin to grow smaller and scar, no more fire, and no more forced stitchings.

Salvation came from time and small things, you supposed, half-asleep and nestled neck to Keigo, feeling better than you had in a long time.

---------------

You supposed, some time later, that karma gave the two of you a small gift. In the eyes of all things, it must’ve been just a spec, but God, it was something.

...

They had come back over a year and half from when you had tried to heal Keigo.

The attempt wasn’t forgotten, no, but it certainly wasn’t at the forefront of your minds like it used to be. Except the one morning that Keigo got up before you, sleepily yawning his way to the bathroom.

You heard his sharp gasp, loud exclamations in your half asleep state.

“Babe?” Your voice hoarse with sleep, you spoke. “You okay?”

Keigo jumped onto the bed, straddling over you and the comforter.

“(Y/N)!” Oh, his eyes were wet. Soft, gooey tears were streaming down his face as he shakily grabbed your wrists. He pressed them to the scars of his back.

Your eyes went wide as your hands brushed against small, soft feathers.

“Keigo!” You shouted, sitting up, urging him to turn around so you could take a better look.

Keigo trembled as he bared his back to you.

Your breath caught as your hands trailed down his marred flesh.

The scars, old and worn now, had faded a great deal. The charred plain calmed with time, perhaps by your own touch and very much so by Keigo’s own cells and flesh.

But, in the center of his back, where the roots of his wings once were, was something growing anew.

Small, burgundy feathers were growing from spindly looking, down-covered bones and skin.

They were small, nothing like his old wings. More aged, with their darker color. The feathers felt softer as you ran your hands along the largest, no bigger than your hand from wrist to tip.

Keigo shuddered.

“Do... Do they feel like they used to?” You asked, transfixed.

Keigo shakily shook his head, “N-no, they feel less sensitive I think. They feel different.”

...

As Keigo had healed and changed, so had his body.

His wings never grew to their own old size and power, not even close. They couldn’t support his own body weight, so Keigo never flew again. But, the feathers, wine-colored and almost bruised looking, could be sent to do small tasks, much like his old ones.

At first, it seemed cruel. After so long and so much, his wings grew back but in such a decrepit form. For days, the two of you waited and waited to see what the final form of his regrowth would be. In the end, at their best, they stretched out to about the span of Keigo’s arms. The feathers weren’t symmetrical either, even at their peak regrowth. Some grew in fluffy and rounded, while others were jagged, sticking out awkwardly from the rest of his form.

Over time, the inherent disappointment and despondence turned into appreciation.

Because they had come back, it just took time.

...

With enough time, Keigo wore them proudly, no matter how oddly they stuck out from his marred skin. Keigo’s body was still too damaged to do hero work proper, but he still was kept around.

At the end of the day, the feathers colored like dried blood represented something far larger. If the completely destroyed number two hero could come back to even a fraction of his former, angelic glory, that was something, right?

It was like in the eyes of all things, you were both awarded a physical manifestation of healing. The gnarly wings that grew from Keigo’s body may have been off-putting to some, but to the two of you, it was a testament to it all.

It just took time.

#salem writes #hawks #hawks x reader #hawks x y/n #keigo takami x reader #keigo x reader #reader insert #my hero x reader #mha x reader #fanfiction #reader x my hero academia #takami x reader #keigo x y/n #angst #manga spoilers

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incarnateirony · 4 years

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You analyzed audiences in the past, right? Is it true we're hitting the lowest ratings ever in these recent episodes or it's just an exageration? I know ratings seem to be a science on themselves so I would like your opinion on the subject. Also, is there somewhere I can read that "Profound bond" book? Or at least part of it? I love GA stories.

Oh god here we go. And that’s not at you, it’s “Shut the fuck up Cereal Club, you’ve already had literal executive producers explain this shit to you and you deny it” – not your fault but it sure is theirs for continuing to circulate it.

Okay so first note – I’m going to be shorthanding this. ALL RELATED DISCUSSIONS AND CHARTS CAN BE FOUND ON THE #RATINGS HASHTAG.

TLDR: It only sucks like that if you think *literally the entire television universe is collectively having the lowest ratings ever*

TV has been on the decline since… like, TV started. Because one channel became 2 and then there was about 50/50! And then 2 became 4, and it was 25! And then 8! And then cable! And the 2008-9 digital mandate enaction Misha somehow kept this show from falling in the toilet over while show cancellation rates doubled in that period while TV figured out what the FUCK was going on and why THEIR ratings were falling. That’s HOW Supernatural vaulted so much and finally entered top like, 100 discussion on the regular and very quickly by S5 top 50. And then DVR! And then digital! *Digital doesn’t even track by Neilsen methods*

Here have a chart of nielsen ratings average since TV started.

Why yes, there WAS a time when Nielsen was regularly clocking a 40.x average. By the time people were watching TV around Y2K it had dropped beneath 10. By 2005, 10 was a hit. And so on. Q3 of 2010 with the digital boom/smartphones, you name it.

The unilateral ratings collapse is so bad that some networks have *said they’re going to stop reporting Live+SD ratings on certain slots or products by 2020*. CBS has had pissing matches with Nielsen over if their services are even worht putting money on anymore. The average ratings on thursday nights across the board in the general primetime slot, if you remove sports which the nation still DOES watch live, is averaging like a 0.7 right now.

That may sound like greek, but basically, the average back when SPN started was like… 6. Which is why the show was in so much jeopardy all the time.

In terms of performance with the rest of the world, S15 I don’t have an average on yet and I’m just far too tired to go through that before even midseason, but I can get you a chart of the last 14 years as compared to the rest of the world’s loss, including from other shows in the same time period.

Obviously follow the legend at the bottom.

CW has always been a small network. The above works on making aggregates of all TV ratings by year and using it to make a median of what qualified as average performance on the year. But the thing is, you go look at Grey’s Anatomy? It started at was a 9.x. It’s now like “YAYYYY WE MADE A WHOLE 1.2 TODAY GOOD WORK GUYS T_T” -- and if you haven’t noticed THEY ARE ONE OF THE LEADERS IN LIVE RATINGS RIGHT NOW.

SPN looks stable from this size, but when we come to realize that it’s USED to running about ¼ the ratings of other shows, let’s like, take this into perspective without being shrunk by Big Brother Networks

SPN’s performance currently is *roughly* in the areas of seasons 4, 5, 8. And frankly, this was almost a matter of time thing with fewer and fewer people willing to hop into a show this late. The amount of “high” Dabb has managed to keep SPN riding, which since S11 has been at performative base with the high buzz premiere season (that… quickly dropped as you can see). There’s also that S9 success bump I told you about, and LOL S7. You’ll notice it inarguably still performed better than S2, 3, 6, and 7 (and frankly, the back half of 1, but that’s rounded up due to Shiny New Show Buzz early before the ratings dropped in half)

If you explore my ratings tag, you’ll see a lot of talk about this history, be it on the show or just general ratings worldwide. But if you google something like “TV ratings falling” you’ll easily come across things like THIS (x)

There’s expectations that we’re going to lose 55million+ people from the TV universe by 2022 right now, or at least live TV, because digital. Also, as just about every historic projection since 2010 has been wrong and they’re like “EXCEEDED EXPECTATIONS” that could very easily end up being like, 60+ million. Cuz. Boomers+ that don’t use their phones and get confused by computers are kinda dying out, and numbers rarely calculate like “rate of death of people confused by gmail”. To put that into perspective, Nielsen TV universe estimates 305.4 million heads across 119.9 million houses. That not-quite-3-heads-per-home base right there, we’re talking about like 1/6th of viewership, entire homes are digitizing, fuckin’ smarthomes are being built with walls that are TVs that don’t hook up to fuckin… Charter unless you LITERALLY are part of their desperate marketing where they’ll literally fund a smarthome renovation JUST to keep you in their TV universe.

Nah fam. Alexa turn on Netflix alexa play supernatural *washes dishes to imax shit*

Anyway, back to center (because yes, this still IS the shorthand version, if you wanna find the source material, you can navigate the years of posting)

If we were to take seasons 1-14 and modulate them in reverse to the rest of the TV universe curve, S1 etc would look like this in order:

The highs and lows are part of the respective average performer across networks. 100 is always “average”. However, “Average” on the CW is always a different affair.

25-34: Marginal for CW35-44: Solid for CW45+: Hit for CW

So… lowest ratings ever? Lmao no not unless you yell that at the whole TV world. But declined a bit in scale? I mean, yeah. Live, mostly. Digital calls, AFAIK, are still doing fine.

Even still the live ratings dropping that sliver wouldn’t… dramatically… matter. As you’ll find if you actually do dig back in my blog, on average performing TV shows, digital and +3 DVR viewing is already more than 4x the volume of any given show’s ratings on *average*

And… SPN isn’t average. It’s been in the top 20 digital leaders in the likes of Walking Dead and Game of Thrones and a bunch of DC properties since about S11~ (positions 19, 18, 16 S11, 12, 13 – I haven’t dug up 14′s yet but I HIGHLY doubt their digital call just *STOPPED and bounced 100% in reverse* lmao)

Realistically, the volume of SPN’s calls puts its digital audience S11-13 at about 20x the mass of its live viewership. Netflix, hulu, amazon, the CW app, *gestures off into the distance* Digital ways to make ad revenue that aren’t clocked by nielsen, but are measured in other ways. So for every 0.3 you see in a live rating, there’s basically a 6.0 equivalent running online. Whereas the average show, even if it has a 1.0 rating it’s managed to hold onto (which is something literally even the biggest shows have to fight to break past these days), it’s more likely to be closer to a 4.0 equivalent online. SUPERNATURAL CRUSH SUPERNATURAL STRONK.

CW has been AGGRESSIVELY marketing to convert people into their digital universe, because they’re digitally focused. Whether that holds out now that the Netflix deal broke, we’ll see.

Accessory reading:“Parrot Analytics’ Global TV Demand Report Finds Netflix Captured 62.6% Of Worldwide Demand For Digital Original Series In Q2 2019“

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akaiikowrites · 6 years

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war ready pt. 1

Summary: “Drift compatibility is more of an art than a science.” It doesn’t matter if no one would’ve thought to pair the kaiju blue powerhouse with the exiled soldier. They’re gonna save the world today. [Pacific Rim AU]

Notes: for @zutaramonth 2017, day four, enemies to lovers. this kids is what we call self-indulgence.

All her test scores are off the charts. They have to literally rewrite algorithms for her. Power is pulsing in her—monstrous and fierce as kaiju blue—and everyone in HQ knows they need her on the frontlines.

Months pass as they put her through drift trials. Hopeful pilots spar with her, solve puzzles with her, fly with her. Some of them are good enough that she knows they’ll be like her. Cycled through until they find someone. Most are just fodder thrown in hopes that they’ll somehow stick.

“Drift compatibility,” Commander Pakku says, “is more of an art than a science.” He’s trying to be comforting but he’s far too stiff for that. “Maybe we should bring in your brother.” They both know it won’t work. Even if they were truly drift compatible, instead of merely passable as prelim tests suggested, Sokka’s brilliant tactical mind is needed elsewhere. Katara nods anyway because what else are they supposed to do?

The longer she trains, the stronger she gets, until they have to rewrite the algorithms all over again. Whispers come in. They’ve been testing jaegers built for one. It would be more efficient. War demands efficiency. It’d almost be a death sentence, but they lost the Philippines yesterday, and Katara thinks she could rip apart a kaiju with her bare hands.

“It might not kill you,” the Mechanist says. More hope colors his tone than conviction. “The kaiju blue in your blood might have made you more resistant to the effects. We need more jaegers on the frontline. Single pilots are necessary. And, Katara, you’re the only one who might...” Survive.

Deep in the Anchorage Shatterdome there’s a jaeger built for her. No callsign. It’ll go to someone else now. Someone who’s got drift compatibility and a modicum of self preservation.

Katara signs the waiver.

They get Ranger Zuko Himura in May. Part of a show of cooperative goodwill between Shatterdomes. Mostly, in practice, it’s a form of exile because they never send their best or their brightest. Gossip’s already flying before his plane even lands.

Everyone remembers the tragedy of King Killer. The mother-son piloting team of Ursa Himura and Zuko Himura had met the three kaiju that came swarming from the sea outside Seattle. They’d taken out one. Held the line with another. Damage took out the comms. Based on forensics the last kaiju must’ve gouged out the chest of King Killer and taken Ursa with it. Zuko tried to hide from the kaiju up in barrier islands. Its’ death throes took out a half dozen fishing villages.

Including the one that had been Katara’s childhood home.

As the shining star of the Anchorage Shatterdome she’s expected to greet him and she does. No one can force her to smile though. They put her at the end of the line. Like maybe in the time it takes Himura to work down the line she’ll suddenly decide she likes him. Himura reaches her. Katara’s still scowling. They shake hands.

“Katara Foster,” he says. Briefly his fingers tighten around her own. Not like he’s trying to punish her, but like he wants to hold on to her. Golden eyes focus on her with startling intensity. “The kaiju blue girl.”

It doesn’t matter that his hand is nearly twice the size of hers. There’s strength in her that she’s not afraid to let him feel. So she squeezes once, hard, and then rips her hand out of his. A thin thread of pleasure winds through her at the way his eyes widen in response to her obvious fury.

“Zuko Himura,” she mimics. “The exiled soldier boy.”

Himura’s got a twitch in his jaw. “I’m not exiled.”

“But you are a soldier boy?” Honestly, she’s not sure why she’s provoking him. The plan had been to avoid him. When she was dragged out the plan shifted to staring at him in silent mutiny until she could avoid him. Now she’s going after him and that thin thread of pleasure is a rope knotting up in her.

Deliberately he settles back. It’s a fighting stance, loose limbed and easy confident, the kind of posture that idiots in barfights think means prey but actually means predator. “Yes,” he says. “Aren’t you?”

No, she thinks. Because she’s not a soldier. Anyone in this Shatterdome could tell him she doesn’t take orders well. Except, looking at him, she finds herself thinking of the waiver form she signed. Of the months pushing herself to her limits. Of how desperate she is to finally have an enemy to attack. “We’re in a war,” is what she settles on. “I am what I have to be.”

People start to ignore their arguments. They’ll be yelling at one another in a hallway, faces inches apart, and some engineer will just shove straight through to get to the cafeteria. Or they’ll be snarling at one another in the sparring room, hitting harder than regulation allows, and the training instructor will tell the others to move onto the next set of katas. Or they’ll be glaring at one another in the jaeger hangar, mouths set in identical scowls, and literally everyone will pretend not to notice. Because if everyone paid attention to their arguments then nothing, bar nothing would get done in the Anchorage Shatterdome.

Hopefuls are still sent her way. Efficiency is key in this war. If they can find someone drift compatible to put with her in that unnamed jaeger, then they do not have to invest in building a jaeger meant to house only one pilot.

Before, Katara hated every one of these tests. At best, it was a useless exercise that only served to occupy her for a few days. At worst, it was a reminder that she was still stuck sparring with strangers instead of fighting on the frontlines for humanity’s survival.

These days the worst of the fire that’s constantly burning in her is reserved for Himura because he’s the only one that bites back hard enough.

All that means is that failed hopefuls go away with fewer bruises. Commander Pakku mentions this with obvious approval. Fewer bruises mean fewer apologies when the hopefuls are cycled to the next Shatterdome. During the last trials for September, he looks at her and says thoughtfully, “It’s more of an art.”

If that’s his idea of a warning it’s a shit one. Because when the October trials roll around, Zuko’s there among a half dozen other would be pilots, the familiar line of his shoulders and curve of his lips a taunt.

Katara doesn’t even wait before throwing herself at him. After almost a half year of sparring with one another he catches her easily. Throws her over his body and watches as she rolls into the landing. Other people fade away, even Pakku with his clipboard, as she loses herself in the easy push pull of their fighting. One of her elbows lands in his solar plexus and air escapes him in a rush even as he gets her other arm pinned. They fight dirty but they’re on equal ground and she loves the way that neither of them ever really win.

“Halt!” Commander Pakku’s voice splits the air.

Sucking in desperate gasps of air, Katara rolls off Zuko. It’d been a draw, anyway. When she glances over, Zuko’s eyes are closed and he’s breathing deeply. He can’t fool her. He’s just as winded.

Lolling her head to the side, she takes in Commander Pakku and the half dozen hopefuls. They don’t look so hopeful anymore. Rather dejected, actually, one of them is eyeing the door. Normally they don’t look like that until she’s personally handed each and every one of them their asses. But Pakku...

Zuko, she realizes too late, is drift compatible. With her. They’re drift compatible. Of course they fucking are.

Katara’s still awake twenty-nine hours after the latest attack. Everything’s pleasantly fuzzy at the edges until she looks up and there’s Himura scowling down at her. They haven’t talked since that disastrous trial even though they see each other what feels like all the time. Apparently they still aren’t talking so she just stares at him while clutching her mug of coffee. Stares and stares and stares until, eventually, he lets out this long exhale that’s not quite a sigh.

“Yeah?” she asks. Katara could smack herself because they’re not supposed to talk. They could but they shouldn’t. So she puts down her mug and begins pushing her blueberry muffin around on her plate with a fork. And then adds, a touch defiantly, “Are you planning to just stare at me?”

That seems to be the trick because he swings a chair around and straddles it. Lean muscles bulge as he folds his arms. Then he props his chin on the cross section of limbs and stares at her.

Somewhere in there, his scowl faded into contemplation. “They tried to send you out,” he says. “Why?”

Blinking at him numbly, Katara tries to process through how he would possibly know that they’d been desperately rigging her into a jaeger with the intention of her solo-piloting. Right up until Iron Arrow punched straight through the kaiju’s chest and yanked out it’s heart. Cafeteria chatter is still about that daring but dangerous stunt. Not about her.

“Because,” she says. “I’m the kaiju blue girl. If anyone can survive solo piloting, it’s me.”

After months of hearing this, of repeating it herself, it feels normal. Katara almost expects him to agree. Everyone else has—except Sokka, because the tactical advantage isn’t as strong as his love for her. But Zuko’s silent.

Under the florescent, his eyes darken almost to amber.

Finally, he asks, “Would piloting with me be so bad?” The thing about Zuko is, he’s always seemed invulnerable, like nothing can dent the armor he’s put around himself. Like he’s a jaeger. With or without the robot.

“Yes,” she says. “You’re the reason my mother is dead.”

God, it sounds so awful. Hanging there in the air. The thought’s been gnawing at her for months but in moments where she’s not exhausted and terrified and furious she knows it’s unfair. The moment she says it she waits for him to refute it but he doesn’t. Just looks at her.

When he does speak, his voice has a raw quality that makes her want to cover her ears. “I’m the reason my mother is dead.”

Katara opens her mouth. Closes it.

“I know you lost your mother because of King Killer,” he says. “I know you’ve got kaiju blue in you because of King Killer. I know, okay? I know that you being here instead of in some medical school in the Safety Zone is my fault.”

And he’s saying all the worst things she’d thought in her heart since she first heard that he was coming to her Shatterdome. But now that she hears them out loud, in his raw voice that aches with self loathing conviction, she doesn’t think they’re true.

“Stop,” she says. Before she can think better of it she reaches across the table and grips his hand. “You led the kaiju out into the border islands because you didn’t think you could hold the Sound, didn’t you?” Because here’s another thing she’s been thinking since she first met him that rainy day outside the Shatterdome. That he’s a heavily scarred soldier who piloted a jaeger on his own for eight minutes. The the kaiju went into the islands without obvious injury and came out with a mortal wound. That the jaeger didn’t even make it onto an island before it collapsed. “You wanted to kill it before it took out Seattle.”

“Yes,” he admits. He turns his hand palm up and lets her fingers twine with his. “I thought...” I would die. “I don’t want that for you.”

Twenty nine hours without sleep and she knows abruptly that it’s going to be more. Paperwork, especially when registering new co-pilots, is always the fucking worst. “Okay,” she says. “Okay.”

#zutara month 2017 #zutara #war ready #i originally had a different idea for this prompt #but i love pacific rim #and once the plot bunny bit #i was well and truly fucked #so here we are #here indeed we are #kaii writes zutara

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deadcactuswalking · 3 years

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REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 09/01/2021 (Justin Bieber, SZA, Jason Derulo)

Happy New Year, everyone, and welcome to 2021 on REVIEIWNG THE CHARTS – or I guess you could call it “Season 4”. I’m going into this year with cautious optimism – that goes for pop music, mind you, and not actual world events which I suspect will just get even direr as the years go on. For 2021 on the charts, I’m hopeful and I hope that’ll show in this next year as I’m in a better place than ever, partly thanks to my decision to renew this series in the Autumn, and we’ve got a busy week – or year – ahead of us. I can keep up with new releases every Friday like I used to and generally kick myself back into a routine with all these musical hobbies. I stay cautious in my optimism for 2021’s pop music because frankly, looking at this top 20, I can’t say I like a lot of this at all. I mean, I guess I’m fond of some of these tracks but I suspect a fair few of these songs to have their last shred of success this Winter and not turn out as year-long hits. I can’t say that for our #1, which is “Sweet Melody” by newly-collapsed girl group Little Mix, the fifth credited #1 for the group and their first since 2016’s “Shout Out to My Ex”. Admittedly, I feel like Little Mix ends here, hopefully with a bang as this was one of the few bonafide smash hits that lasted through Christmas, and I see it lasting a couple more weeks at #1 as a good send-off because I don’t predict the band getting back together without Jesy anytime soon... not that I care about pop-group politics, of course. On that note, let’s divert to our rundown. Welcome back to REVIEWING THE CHARTS.

Rundown

There is a single song in the UK Top 75 – which is what I cover – that has not gained, returned or entered for its first week, and that’s “Love is a Compass” by Griff from Disney’s Christmas advert down to #50 – it’ll be gone next week, but I honestly don’t really understand why it lasted an extra week. Maybe Soul and Disney+ had something to do with it, because I cannot see this getting consistent streams. Otherwise, look: I’m not mentioning every single drop-out because I would just be repeating every single drop-out because I would just be repeating all of the Christmas songs that I’ve already listed every single week since late November. I will say this: “Last Christmas” by Wham!, last week’s #1, is gone from the top 75, alongside “All I Want for Christmas is You” by Mariah Carey, “This Christmas” by Jess Glynne, “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” by Justin Bieber, “Fairytale of New York” by the Pogues featuring the late Kirsty MacColl, “Merry Christmas Everyone” by Shakin’ Stevens, “Step into Christmas” by Elton John, “Do They Know it’s Christmas?” by Band Aid and “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” by Michael Bublé are all gone despite staying in the top 10 in last week’s awkward grouping of holiday trite and regular pop. Everything else I’ve said over the last few weeks in the returning entries and gains sections, Christmas-wise, is gone, and I don’t want to list any other drop-outs, including even all of last week’s new arrivals. The only other notable song dropping off from the chart that’s not explicitly Christmas-related is Liam Gallagher’s charity single “All You’re Dreaming Of”, and that’s not exactly a surprise to anyone. Okay, so for our returning entries and gains, I’ll list them in some kind of janky order. Starting with returning entries, the category that fits most of these songs is: “year-long hits that have had one final and brief second wind after the holiday season that will later be replaced as Spring comes”. This includes “Giants” by Dermot Kennedy at #75, “Breaking Me” by Topic and A75 at #74, “Roses” by SAINt JHN and remixed by Imanbek at #71, “Rain on Me” by Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande at #70, “ROCKSTAR” by DaBaby featuring Roddy Ricch at #68, “Don’t Start Now” by Dua Lipa at #67, “Lighter” by Nathan Dawe and KSI at #61, “Ain’t it Different” by Headie One featuring AJ Tracey and Stormzy at #60, “Savage Love (Laxed – Siren Beat)” by Jawsh 685 and Jason Derulo and remixed by BTS at #58, “Before You Go” by Lewis Capaldi at #56, “WAP” by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion at #47, “Take You Dancing” by Jason Derulo at #46, “Watermelon Sugar” by Harry Styles at #41 and “Looking for Me” by Paul Woolford and Diplo featuring Kareen Lomax at #39. Our next category is: “really old – and massive - songs riding off the coattails of a weak chart for a cheap additional week to add to their repertoire”. This includes “Shallow” by Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper at #73, “Baby Shark” by Pinkfong at #72, “Perfect” by Ed Sheeran at #66, “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac at #64, “Someone You Loved” by Lewis Capaldi at #45, “Dance Monkey” by Tones and I at #38, and I guess even “Train Wreck” by James Arthur returning big at #18. Our third category consists of: “mostly more recent and decently-sized hits coming back because they’re still popular but won’t be re-peaking any time soon”. These include “Gnat” by Eminem at #69 (although you’d be stretching to call that a hit exactly – would have been without Christmas), “Show Out” by Kid Cudi, the late Pop Smoke and Skepta at #62, “Lasting Lover” by Sigala and James Arthur at #57, “Princess Cuts” by Headie One featuring Young T & Bugsey at #55, “no body, no crime” by Taylor Swift featuring HAIM at #54, “pov” by Ariana Grande at #52, “Tick Tock” by Clean Bandit and Mabel featuring 24kGoldn at #51, “Diamonds” by Sam Smith at #49, “Body” by Megan Thee Stallion at #44, “Plugged In Freestyle” by A92 and Fumez the Engineer at #43, “champagne problems” by Taylor Swift at #42, “What You Know Bout Love” by the late Pop Smoke at #36, “i miss u” by Jax Jones and Au/Ra at #34, “See Nobody” by Wes Nelson and Hardy Caprio at #33 and “Lonely” by Justin Bieber and benny blanco at #32. Our last category consists of songs that returned and peaked this week, including many in the top 40. These include “You’re Mines Still” by Yung Bleu and remixed by Drake at #59, “All Girls are the Same” by the late Juice WRLD at #53 (still very strange to see that song from 2017 peak nearly four years later), “Heat Waves” by Glass Animals at #48, “SO DONE” by The Kid LAROI at #40 (more on him later), “The Business” by Tiesto at #31 and “Golden” by Harry Styles at #26. These are the most important returns because they signify what could be coming down the line for our genuine Winter hit parade, or at least the post-Christmas half of it. What might better show this are our gains, however, as these songs were sticking through the holiday season and took advantage of it this week to poke through even higher in the top 40 and often top 10. We have “Forever Young” by Becky Hill at #35, “Midnight Sky” by Miley Cyrus at #29, “Lemonade” by Internet Money and Gunna featuring Don Toliver and NAV at #27 (as soon as I can stop saying that full song name the better), “Monster” by Shawn Mendes and Justin Bieber at #25, “No Time for Tears” by Nathan Dawe and Little Mix at #24, “HOLIDAY” by Lil Nas X ironically up to #23, “positions” by Ariana Grande at #22, “Holy” by Justin Bieber featuring Chance the Rapper at #21, “Loading” by Central Cee (still growing on me) at #20, “Head & Heart” by Joel Corry and MNEK at #19, “Dynamite” by BTS at #17, “Mood” by 24kGoldn and iann dior at #16, “Therefore I Am” by Billie Eilish at #15, “Really Love” by KSI featuring Craig David and the Digital Farm Animals at #14, “Blinding Lights” by the Weeknd still here at #13, “willow” by Taylor Swift at #12, “Prisoner” by Miley Cyrus featuring Dua Lipa at #11, “Paradise” by MEDUZA and Dermot Kennedy at #10, “you broke me first” by Tate McRae at #9, “34+35” by Ariana Grande at #8 and “WITHOUT YOU” by The Kid LAROI at #7. I can reassure you I’m overjoyed about that last one – not because the song is good, quite the opposite, I just like having easy targets ready for the end of the year when I actually end up doing a worst list. Oh, and that’s not the end of it: “Get Out My Head” by Shane Codd is at #6, “Levitating” by Dua Lipa and remixed by DaBaby is at #5, “Whoopty” by CJ is somehow at #3 and finally, “Afterglow” by Ed Sheeran is at #2. We already mentioned “Sweet Melody”, so now finally, it’s on to our new arrivals. What did you gain from reading me list sixty-odd songs in rapid succession with minimal commentary? Nothing. What did I gain from it? Whatever’s just above nothing, but as is the UK Singles Chart in early January.

NEW ARRIVALS

#65 – “Your New Boyfriend” – Wilbur Soot

Produced by Wilbur Soot

Before I put two and two together, I was incredibly confused to who this guy was and why he was charting – he’s doing particularly well on Spotify for this indie singer-songwriter, right? I did one quick Google search – literally typing in “Who is Wilbur Soot” – and soon found out that I actually already know the guy from “SootHouse”, a YouTube channel I think I might even be subscribed to. Huh, I guess that shows how faceless social media platforms can be – his name is in the videos and I should have assumed from “Soot” but that missed me until now. Right now he’s part of that whole worryingly popular group of content creators that tread the very thin line separating Minecraft let’s-players from commentary YouTubers and Twitch streamers from paedophiles. I’m too old to understand any of this garbage but from what I see trending on Twitter all the time, it seems toxic and frankly I don’t want in any part of that. I don’t want to have my grandparents’ graduation photos leaked to the Internet alongside my address, thank you very much, so I think I’ll distance myself from the whole “Internet celebrity” and just talk about the music. This is the last in a trilogy of E-boy indie-pop songs, because of Goddamn course that exists. Song number-one, “I’m in Love with an E-Girl” is a dreary acoustic duet that forgets that comedy songs are supposed to be fun or witty, relying on obscure inside jokes and references to recently-outed paedophiles. I do like some of the jabs later on about romanticisation of mental illness and Chevy’s voice is really nice, whoever that is, but it’s too little too late to be a worthwhile track. Now for song #2, “Internet Ruined Me”, which is a slightly livelier rendition of what is pretty much the same song, with lyrical gems like, “My Twitter feed’s like my brain ‘cause I have it on dark mode.” At least it feels like a more honest attempt at a song, but song #3, “Your New Boyfriend”, the one that’s charting, is obviously the most realised out of these acoustic demo skits, with some pretty sweet piano melodies and Wilbur getting into his comically struggling high register to depict his naivety as a teenager when attempting to get into both a long-term relationship and career as an entertainer. Sure, the song’s janky and awkward, but the chorus has a genuine punk groove, even if it wants to stop to interject ad-libs for no reason and kind of ruin whatever momentum is there in the first place. By the second verse, the punchlines devolve to “No homo, though” and though I do like how those horns sound, they are somewhat clouded in a messy mix that does not help Wilbur out vocally at all. Chevy’s background vocals do help here and add a lot to the floaty atmosphere of the song, and, okay, I’ll admit: the song’s good, if a bit ridiculous and almost Weezer-like in lyrical content... but hey, I like Pinkerton, and there’s certainly enough pointless noise in this song to fit the criteria, so... Goddamn it, I have to recommend this one. Let’s just date this episode – and song – even further by requesting Carson and Pyrocynical hop on a nonce-rock remix, perhaps. Bring Dream along too.

#63 – “Reminds Me of You” – The Kid LAROI and Juice WRLD

Produced by Aaron Joseph, Theron Thomas, Sam Sumser, Sean Small and Dr. Luke

Oh, and speaking of sex crimes by men in places of power, welcome back, Loctor Duke, Tyson Trax, or as I prefer, (alleged) rapist. I don’t like to get too moralistic on this show because it is about the music but I cannot think of any person who would in their right mind know of “Praying” by Kesha and still want to collaborate with this waste of space who uses his monopoly on pop songwriting to continue raking in cash from vulnerable young singers, to the point where I’m not sure if I can truly blame artists for ending up with Dr. Luke production or writing credits... oh, wait, yes, I can! I don’t let Saweetie, Doja Cat or even Kim Petras off the hook for actively collaborating with Luke seemingly in defiance of, you know, moral decency, so I definitely won’t give The Kid LAROI a pass, especially if he and the label are going to use this as another opportunity to milk the passing of a genuinely talented man in Jarad Higgins, or the late Juice WRLD, for the sake of a chart hit for this bumbling Australian wannabe and a sexual predator. This is not the first time, either, but I’ll admit the story gets fuzzy, as Kim Petras did reveal that this performance from Juice was in the studio as she was recording a song, supposedly, that is – I have no hesitation to say I think stories could be made up by record labels to make whoever’s involved look a tiny bit less of an ass. Oh, and by the way, this isn’t even originally a Kid LAROI and Juice WRLD track. Let’s talk about “Reminds Me”, a pretty mediocre Kim Petras song where she blatantly imitates Juice on a trap-pop instrumental that’s just pitiful, as is her vocal delivery that makes lyrics Juice clearly wrote unconvincing. Kim Petras isn’t doing a homicide, I mean, I hope she isn’t. So now we’ve got a “reimagination”, “revamp”, “remake” – or to put it realistically, remix – of an already worthless, disposable song made by a sexual predator and its enablers, spat on by The Kid LAROI’s unforgivably gross delivery where he essentially covers the Kim Petras song and does even a worse job of it, mixed bizarrely – especially in the vocal department – and topped off with a tacked-on Juice WRLD demo verse, so lazily put together that they just repeat his verse to awkwardly lead into an anti-climactic chorus where Juice is nowhere to be found. Everyone involved in the making of this song lost whatever shred of respect I had for them in the first place for putting this out – and that doesn’t include Juice, who’s clearly being mismanaged post-mortem. If The Kid LAROI sticks around, don’t forget this and don’t forget everything he’s done – intentionally or unintentionally – to heartlessly pinch pennies out of Juice’s legacy.

#37 – “Goosebumps” – Hvme

Produced by HVME

I’d make the easy, cliché joke that this isn’t living up to “goosebumps” by Travis Scott featuring Kendrick Lamar, but... this IS “goosebumps” by Travis Scott featuring Kendrick Lamar. HVME is this boring faceless nobody—I mean, “mysterious” Spanish DJ who made a garbage deep house remix of a pretty decent Travis Scott song, but not using the original vocals and stems, which would have probably made this listenable, but instead covering the song himself, stripping of it of Travis’ original energy that carried the eerie trap instrumental and pretty pathetically attempting to replicate the “Straight up!” ad-lib. The mix is fine but puts way too much emphasis on all the swooshing and nothingness synths that do little to get in the way of the typical pumping bass-line you hear in this type of house, and, yeah, this is pitiful once again and reeks of no-effort dance music made in a bedroom you wouldn’t even hear bumped in clubs. He doesn’t even try and re-sing Kendrick’s verse – good – and his attempts at picking up Travis’ masterful flow from the original is comical at best, to the point where I genuinely laughed out loud as his measly “brr-brr-brr” sound effects. I don’t understand why this is so high, yet it has 112 million Spotify streams as his only release on the platform, and I can only assume this is thanks to Ministry of Sound and some Lithuanian record label (don’t ask; I don’t know either). I don’t see this surviving January, thankfully, so you can say goodbye to this guy and his awful, awful cover for good... hopefully.

#30 – “Love Not War (The Tampa Beat)” – Jason Derulo and Nuka

Produced by Nuka

I don’t think there’s any “Tampa Beat” to speak of so Jason Derulo, are you just putting “(Blank) Beat” at the end of all of your songs now? What do you even gain from that? Except there is a “Tampa Beat” – unlike Jawsh 685’s original track, however, it wasn’t called that. Nuka is a New Caledonian producer and she made a song called “4 Bryleans (WayzRmx2018)”. Alright, well now it’s the “Tampa” beat, because I’m sure Florida is close enough to a French territory in Oceania, right? Maybe he’s talking about the ghost town in Australia, or the... small Transylvanian mountain. Okay, I’ll stop kidding myself: this title is complete nonsense. At least he asked for the sample before using it this time, and if Derulo makes careers out of this, then I’ll be glad for these underground Oceanian producers. The difference is here it just feels lazy and co-opting a style he’s clearly not in tune with for the sake of hits for himself. It would make more sense for him to keep on working with Jawsh if he really had good intentions for producers out there in the Pacific. Anyway, much like the title, this song, produced by someone who claims to make the best cheesecake in the Pacific (which I wouldn’t think is that hard of an award to claim), is nonsensical. It’s stuck in 2014 with gross synth leads, clipping percussion and finger-snaps straight out of DJ Mustard’s older stuff, along with what I guess is the sound of the Pacific: Jason Derulo doing fake accents over incessant horns and over-produced garbage that seems like its sole purpose is to annoy... and I liked “Savage Love”! I think my favourite part of this production is when he pitches the horn line down for the verse and then it comes back mid-way through as annoying as ever, even if this mix is crowded enough for you to just barely ignore it. Derulo isn’t doing much here either other than straining his voice for a belt no-one asked for and having a complete dissonance between verse and chorus in terms of lyrical content. Oh, and there’s a copious amount of remixes that are all garbage. The instrumental’s on Spotify too under “Waterfall”, so I guess that adds another name to the list of names this song has for no reason. At least with “Savage Love” I got to hear BTS drop F-bombs, this is just worthless.

#28 – “Good Days” – SZA

Produced by Los Hendrix, Nascent and Carter Lang

I came into this episode all optimistic and ended up just moaning about sex crimes and Jason Derulo but I think if there’s going to be any shred of true quality from our new arrivals, it’s the new SZA track that’s shaping up to be genuinely big organically on radio and streaming, “Good Days”, from that new album, whenever Top decides he’s going to let her release it. I’m not the biggest fan of SZA; you probably don’t remember that she ended up on one of my worst lists a couple years back, although that’s mostly at the fault of Travis Scott more than her. This doesn’t mean I’m not excited to hear from her, though I did like some of the stuff off of CTRL, particularly “Prom” and “20 Something”... and, yeah, in terms of what I want from contemporary R&B, I’m not mad at “Good Days” at all, though it’s going to take a lot of growing on me because I immediately hate this mix and production, which relies on slick, lo-fi guitars being drowned out by overweight percussion that sounds organic but pretty unfitting and awkward amongst the reverb-drenched vocals and unrecognisable mix that doesn’t compliment SZA’s at times awkward delivery. That’s a shame to say because I think she harmonises well with co-writer Jacob Collier, especially on the chorus, where she wishes for good days ahead, which is lyrical content I can get behind: coming out of a bad place and knowing you have no authority over your future but wishing for good days regardless. When the synths come in after the third verse at about three minutes and SZA’s voice disappears from the mix, becoming less overbearing than it is, I can appreciate the song more and especially when that final chorus comes in... except there isn’t a final chorus to leave this song off with much of an impact, rather just a tacked-on instrumental section that felt like Jacob Collier was tasked with just extending a snippet, which given how the song was teased in “Hit Different”, might actually be the case. I like the lyrics a lot, and do think it picks up after the song practically ends, but I’m not sure about this right now, and could see it growing on me as good days either become more imminent or drift even further away.

#4 – “Anyone” – Justin Bieber

Produced by watt, The Monsters & Strangerz and Jon Bellion

I’ve done a lot of writing and reviewing this week so I’m glad I can sum this up in a few sentences. Justin Bieber is an overexposed hack who I cannot feel any emotional connection towards at all, so him continuing to make any art is moot. This song has a loading screen of a synth melody, and that’s before that really ugly chorus that Bieber really can’t save with his Auto-Tuned whine of a voice, alongside acoustic guitars that clearly do not blend well. Jon Bellion’s production at the end of this just barely saves it by doing some kind of 180 shift into slow synth-pop, clearly coasting off of the Weeknd’s success in the same style without realising what made his record worthwhile. Camila Cabello recorded a demo that I’m glad isn’t the official version because her squealing would not sound good here either; really, I think Bellion could have kept this to himself but he knows he would put a lot more effort and character into his own lyrics than this – he would also write an actual bridge for his own album, I’d hope. It isn’t catchy, it isn’t intriguing and it is gutless, like Bieber has been for the past two album cycles and I guess it’s not changing this time.

Conclusion

What a downer for my optimism about pop music going forward this was! Even the best songs here I feel mostly ambivalent on, to the point where I can give Wilbur Soot of all people Best of the Week for “Your New Boyfriend”, which shocks me since I thought SZA would run with it, although “Good Days” does grab the Honourable Mention. Worst of the Week should be a toss-up if it weren’t for the fact that The Kid LAROI exists so he can get that for “Reminds Me of You” featuring the mangled remnants of whatever’s left of the late Juice WRLD’s Google Drive folders full of demos and leaks. I suppose Dishonourable Mention can go to HVNE for “Goosebumps”, but I’d understand it for anything else here. Here’s this week’s top 10:

Follow me on Twitter @cactusinthebank for more rambling – I swear I’m not usually this angry – and I can’t really predict anything going forward either, other than unfortunately more Dr. Luke, but we’ll see what the charts decide to bring us next Saturday when it comes. I’ll see you next week.

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junker-town · 4 years

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Dorktown: The quest for the six-win playoff team

Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

The NFC East is so bad that we’re in danger of seeing a six-win team in the playoffs. Maybe even a five-win team.

When the NFC East heads into Week 11, its leader will have three wins. THREE WINS! Ever since the NFL split into its eight-division format in 2002, there have been 152 opportunities for a team to drag its sorry three-win-having ass to Week 11 and find itself atop its division. This is the first and only time it has ever happened. Congratulations to the 3-5-1 Philadelphia Eagles.

At this stage of the season, you almost always need at least six wins to lead a division, but the Eagles hold sole possession of first without even having to resort to tiebreakers:

Eagles (3-5-1)

Giants (3-7)

Washington (2-7)

Dallas (2-7)

Know this: throughout NFL history, no team has started 2-7 or 3-7 and made the postseason – unsurprising, since even if they’d somehow turned around and ran the table the rest of the way, 9-7 is often not good enough. This year, the NFC East is harboring three such teams, and all three are right in the thick of the playoff hunt.

If this were intentional, it would take a lot of orchestration. This is a two-stage rocket, and the first stage concerns the games these teams play against each other. Time and again, we’ve seen a not-great team vault into a record like 10-6 after proving just good enough to pick up cupcake wins within its weak division. That won’t work here. All four of these teams have to be more or less equally bad, such that they notch equal wins and losses against one another. So far, they’re doing a great job of this. These are their records within the division:

They’re sharing wins and losses as equally as the schedule allows; as of this date, the Giants and Cowboys are stuck with odd records only because they’ve played an odd number of division games. There’s every reason to hope that this equal winning and losing will continue: the Eagles have lost to Washington, who have lost to the Giants, who have lost to the Cowboys, who have lost to the Eagles, who have lost to the Giants, who have lost to the Cowboys, who have lost to Washington.

Now, the second stage of this rocket is a far more demanding one: these teams have to go out and lose to everyone else. And have they ever:

Look at all that orange. When NFC East teams are kicked out of the house by their exasperated parents and told to go play with the neighborhood children, they almost always lose. They’re 2-18-1 against the rest of the NFL this season. Let’s examine those three games that weren’t losses:

Eagles 25, 49ers 20. Philly squeaks by an injury-depleted Niners team that was missing their starting quarterback, their top two running backs, their starting center, star edge rushers Nick Bosa and Dee Ford, star cornerback Richard Sherman, and several other key guys. They did so after mounting a fourth-quarter comeback and barely surviving a last-minute drive led by their third-string quarterback.

Eagles 23, Bengals 23. Eagles quarterback Carson Wentz leads a last-minute drive to tie a Bengals team that is universally understood to be bad. Overtime goes like this: Bengals punt, Eagles punt, Bengals punt, Eagles punt, Bengals punt, Eagles punt, end of game. During their final two possessions, the Eagles make it well into Bengals territory before penalties pushed them back to their side of the field.

Cowboys 40, Falcons 39. Atlanta leads 39-24 with under six minutes left in the game. In one of the most spectacular comebacks I’ve ever seen in the NFL, Dak Prescott mounts three quick, heroic drives to pull out the squeaker. Of these three non-losses, this is the only particularly impressive one, although three things must be said about it. First, it hinged entirely on a recovered onside kick, which in today’s NFL counts as an incredible stroke of luck. Second, this happened against the Falcons. Not the Raheem Morris-coached Falcons who have really shown some fight over the last month, but the Dan Quinn Falcons who went 0-5. Third, Prescott was sadly lost to injury a few weeks later, robbing the NFC East of their only guy who’s proven himself capable of this kind of magic.

Two wins, 18 losses, one tie. Since ties are conventionally counted as 0.5 wins and 0.5 losses, this gives us a winning percentage of .119. Let’s flip that around: this season, teams who get to play an NFC East team this season have a winning percentage of .881. They’re juggernauts.

Consider how tough it is to find any split that will get you more favorable results than .881 over a span of at least 21 games. Let’s stack up a few splits that would seem favorable, with the help of Pro-Football-Reference’s Stathead tool.

Let’s have even more fun or even less fun, depending on who’s reading:

Brief aside: this is due to the sample size really thinning out toward the summit, but it is pretty funny that NFL teams’ winning percentages actually dip just slightly if they pass 42 points, and only recover once they hit 50. Similarly, that .881 winning percentage is based on a sample of just 21 games, so this chart wouldn’t quite hold up in an academic paper, but the fact remains: teams that score at least 30 points still have a less impressive winning percentage than literally any non-NFC East team that plays an NFC East team in 2020.

Now, it is true that the interdivisional schedules of these four teams have been pretty damn tough. Let’s use Football Outsiders’ DVOA rankings (through Week 9) to sort the quality of these teams from top to bottom, and count how many times our poor heroes have had to play them:

Rough stuff. Most of the time, they’ve run into good or very good teams. They’ve had to play the team with the NFL’s best record, the Steelers, three times (although it could just as easily be said that the Steelers have the NFL’s best record in part because they’ve gotten to play the NFC East three times).

Of course, the above chart omits the NFC East’s worst opponents: them. Come on out, fellas! There’s a bunch of folks here and they wanna laugh at you! Come on now!

This is why we can’t feel bad for any of these teams individually. Any tough opponents they’ve had to face elsewhere are more than balanced out by the privilege of being able to play their sorry selves.

You know, if I had the ability to assign teams to any division I wanted before the season started, with the objective of producing a division leader with as few wins as possible, I don’t know if I’d change anything. I think reality might have given us our best shot here, or at least something very, very close to it. If I just chose what I felt were the four very worst teams in the Jets, Bengals, Jags and Broncos, that could be trouble, because I suspect the Jets are miles worse than even the Bengals are. That would give the other three a punching bag that would allow them to pad their wins, which would blow the whole thing.

Instead, give me four teams who are both unmistakably bad, and almost the exact same degree of bad. Four teams who are dog shit in quadruplicate, and don’t appear to be much better or worse than each other in any material way.

So. Are we gonna see the NFL’s first-ever six-win playoff team? It’s absolutely in play, maybe even likely. I’m going to add a few more words in the hope of speaking them into existence:

We might see a five-win playoff team.

Let’s run through the remaining schedules of the Eagles, Giants, Cowboys and Football Team and see where we sit entering Week 11. Once again, we’ll rely on Football Outsiders’ DVOA.

Dallas Cowboys

The Cowboys would need to win five of these seven games to reach seven wins and ruin our day. While they did play the Steelers close over the weekend, and they have four very winnable games ahead, this is a team that’s lost four straight. I just can’t see Andy Dalton coming back from the bye and winning five of seven.

(I’m not factoring home-field advantage here, although it’s worth noting that home teams only hold a slight advantage this season. The omnipresent NFC East loser vibes are far stronger in my view.)

Washington Football Team

Same story as the Cowboys. Washington needs five wins to kill our dreams. I find the most useful way of framing this is: do we even trust them to get to three? I don’t.

New York Giants

The numbers are just slightly more friendly to the Giants: to make us unhappy, they need to win four of six, rather than five of seven. Their most likely path would be to beat the Cowboys and Bengals, then find some way to beat two 6-3 teams out of four.

I don’t see this as likely, but for purely unscientific reasons based on previous Giants team with entirely different rosters who stumbled backwards into sudden success, I think these guys are the most likely of the four to reach seven wins.

Especially because the Eagles’ upcoming schedule is so difficult.

Philadelphia Eagles

On paper, the Eagles have the easiest path to seven wins, as they only need to win four of their next seven. Four of these opponents are good-to-great (although the recent injury sustained by Drew Brees may mean beating the Saints is less unrealistic). The other three teams are subpar. All seven, though, hold a better DVOA than the Eagles.

The odds of Philadelphia reaching seven wins feel somewhere around 50-50 to me. I’ll take it! They still get to play two of their division rivals, and if they beat them both – which they’ll probably have to do in order to have a shot at 7-9 – that consequently deals a serious blow to all their seven-win aspirations, hopefully leaving the Eagles as the only team we’ll have left to worry about. From there, we hope that all five of the other teams, which are currently 6-3 or better, beat them.

Now, a five-win division champion? The road to that is tougher, but it’s absolutely possible. The math gets a little tricky, since in division games one team’s loss is another’s win, but you’re not at work here. You’re having fun. Simply scroll back up to those four charts and find:

four teams that can beat the Cowboys

four teams that can beat Washington

four teams that can beat the Giants

four teams that can beat the Eagles

If you can do that, you can imagine a team that lurches into the playoffs with a record of either 5-11 or 5-10-1. I need this. I need such a team to reach the playoffs while a very good team, like the Saints, Bucs, Cardinals, Rams or Seahawks, gets shut out of the postseason. Please, NFC East. Deliver us this future.

For further reading on the NFC East, check out this history lesson from Will, who points that these teams have been producing bad football since the 1930s.

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holytheoristtastemaker · 4 years

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The news of Zeit Vercel raising $21m (slide deck here) is great occasion for taking stock of what is going on with cloud startups. As Brian Leroux (who runs Begin.com) observes, with reference to Netlify's $55m Series C last month:

Between just Netlify and Vercel the VC community has put over 70MM in cloud focused on frontend dev in 2020.

Haven't AWS/GCP/Azure owned the cloud space? What is the full potential of this new generation of startups basically reselling their services with some value add?

Cloud's Deployment Age

I am reminded, again, of Fred Wilson's beloved Carlota Perez framework that I wrote about in React Distros. First you have an Installation Age, with a lot of creative destruction. Then, with the base primitives sorted out, we then build atop the installed layer, in a Deployment Age:

I think the same dynamics I outlined with frontend frameworks is happening here with cloud services. I'm obviously a LOT less well versed with the history of cloud, so please please take this with a grain of salt.

The "Failure" of PaaS

The argument is that the Big 3 Cloud Providers are mostly providing the new commoditized primitives on which the next generation of cloud services will be built. AWS is AWS, Azure maybe caters to the dotNet/Microsoft crowd better, whereas GCP maybe differentiates on Kubernetes and Machine Learning. Basically everyone has a container thing, a data thing, a file storage thing, a serverless thing, and so on.

A nice way to think about it, which I attribute to Guillermo (but I'm not sure about), is that these basic services are the new "Hardware". Instead of going to Fry's and picking up a motherboard, we now go to the AWS Console and pick up a t2.micro or to Azure for a Durable Function. Instead of debating Sandisk vs Western Digital we match up AWS Aurora vs Azure DocumentDB. The benefits are clear - we don't get our hands dirty, we can easily (too easily?) scale with a single API call, and thanks to Infra-as-Code we can truly treat our infra like cattle, not pets.

When the Big N clouds launched, the expectation was that Platform as a Service (PaaS) would win out over Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). I mean - look at this chart! - if you were running a Software business, would you want to run it atop an IaaS or a PaaS? It made intuitive sense, and both Google App Engine and Azure originally launched with this vision, while Salesforce bought Heroku within 3 years of founding.

But this thesis was wrong. As Patrick McKenzie recently noted:

I'm surprised that Heroku's model didn't win over AWS' model and that DevOps is accordingly a core competence at most SaaS companies. This seems obviously terrible to me every time I'm doing DevOps, which probably took ~20% of all engineering cycles at my last company for surfacing very little customer value.

This rings true. As moderately successful as Heroku, Parse, and Firebase were, they are dwarfed by the size of the big clouds' IaaS businesses. It turns out that most people just wanted to lift and shift their workloads, rather than start new apps from scratch on underpowered platforms. Assisted by Docker, this acquired the rather unfortunate name of "cloud native". (Unfortunate, because there are now "more native" versions of building cloud-powered apps than "containerize everything and somehow mention agile")

But I don't think the PaaSes were wrong.

They were just early.

Developer Experience as a Differentiator

The thing about hardware providers is that they don't cater well to specific audiences. By nature, they build for general use. The best they can do is offer up a default "Operating System" to run them - the AWS Console, Google Cloud Console, Microsoft Azure Portal (Dave Cutler literally called Azure a Cloud OS when it began).

Meanwhile, the "undifferentiated heavy lifting" (aka Muck) of wrangling datacenters turned into "undifferentiated heavy lifting" of messing with 5 different AWS services just to set up a best practices workflow.

So increasingly, intermediate providers are rising up to provide a better developer experience and enforce opinionated architectures (like JAMstack):

Netlify

Vercel

Repl.it

Begin.com

Glitch

Render.com

Amplify

KintoHub

The working name for this new generation of cloud providers, used by Martin Casado, Amjad Masad, and Guillermo Rauch, is "second layer" or "higher level" cloud providers.

Nobody loves these names. It doesn't tell you the value add of having a second layer. Also the name implies that more layers atop these layers will happen, and that is doubtful.

Cloud Distros

I think the right name for this phenomenon is Cloud Distros (kinda gave this away in the title, huh). The idea is both that the default experience is not good enough, and that there are too many knobs and bells and whistles to tweak for the average developer to setup a basic best practices workflow.

Ok, I lied - there is no average developer. There are a ton of developers - ~40m, going by GitHub numbers. They don't all have the same skillset. The argument here is that cloud is going from horizontal, general purpose, off the shelf, to verticalized, opinionated, custom distributions. There are ~300,000 AWS Cloud Practitioners - yet, going by Vercel's numbers, there are 11 million frontend developers.

In order to cross this "chasm", the cloud must change shape. We need to develop custom "Distros" for each audience. For the Jamstack audience, we now have Netlify, Amplify, Begin and Vercel. For the Managed Containers crew, we have Render and KintoHub. For the Hack and Learn in the Cloud folks, we have Glitch and Repl.it. What the business nerds call verticalization or bundling, developers call "developer experience" - and it is different things to different people.

What's funny is these startups all basically run AWS or GCP under the hood anyway. They select the good parts, abstract over multiple services and give us better defaults. This is a little reminiscent of Linux Distros - you can like Ubuntu, and I can like Parrot OS, but it's all Linux under the hood anyway. We pick our distro based on what we enjoy, and our distros are made with specific developer profiles in mind too.

The Future of Cloud Distros

What we have now isn't the end state of things. It is still too damn hard to create and deploy full stack apps, especially with a serverless architecture. Serverless cannot proclaim total victory until we can recreate DHH's demo from 15 years ago in 15 minutes. I have yet to see a realistic demo replicating this. Our users and their frameworks want us to get there, but the platforms need to grow their capabilities dramatically. In our haste to go serverless, we broke apart the monolith - and suffered the consequences - now we must rebuild it atop our new foundations.

Begin and Amplify have made some great steps in this direction - offering integrated database solutions. Render and KintoHub buck the serverless trend, offering a great developer experience for those who need a running server.

There's probably no winner-takes-all effect in this market - but of course, there can be an Ubuntu. This generation of Cloud Distros is fighting hard to be the one-stop platform for the next wave (even the next generation) of developers, and we all win as a result.

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answrs · 7 years

Text

long ramble about good finds! and also burned out question about a cougar skull in ohio and rant at the bottom. i have slept 5 hours total in the past 2 days. ple.as.e do n.ot r.ebl.og this.

so went to this reenactment thing with grandparents down in the middle of fuck-all nowhere in inch deep mud. but right a few booths in comes this majestic, extensive fur and pelt stall. was just gonna look at the prices and laugh at the huge overpricing on things like tail keychains (and i did, seriously, 25$ for a scrappy coon tail? pff) but. then there were these racks and racks of pelts and. the prices were all actually really good? for nice wallhangers? and tons of them? like 10 different morphs/wild and ranch foxes (side note like I knew kit foxes were small but never -that- small i mean holy shit.) (also some of those ranch guys were as large as the coyotes wtf. they had a ranch arctic/white next to a wild and !!!!!! it was nearly taller than me and just, well, !!!!!!), bobcats, coyotes, badgers, coons, beavers, ringtails, etc etc. even a wolverine with full set of claws! (and what was either the sorriest sized, furred, and colored wolf, or just a random coyote they stuck a big sticker on, but ehh.) then going up to the actual booth to pay they have a little collection of skulls on top of everything too!

basically what I'm saying is I got 3 of my dream collection goals (or partials, in the case of the skulls, but shush) for less than what a single one of them would run me elsewhere.

except.

i just... don't feel anything? like i should be at least happy-ish? but i just don't? like i know im in a bad state rn but like even at the (smoke. smoke EVERYWHERE. idfc about historical accuracy when almost every single one of 100-ish tents has their own big smoker/fire going) fest i was like, not dancing per say, when i fell in love with the most beautiful cross fox and had him all nice and bagged up, but def pretty happy.

maybe it's because when I went back to nab those skulls they were really, and i mean really, pushing me to buy the other i was looking at. that they were adamantly calling a bear. like i literally had them next to each other and they looked absolutely nothing alike. but "yes it is, the nose just... broke off! it's a bear! totally!". i should have really taken it as a warning when all three jumped on me as soon as i was "ooh, a bear and cougar skull!". but i was too excited to think about it until just this past hour. it was the only one without a species written on the tag too im now realizing. like dudes (and lady), you've all been in the business for like 30+ years each, you know what a cat looks like. or at very least can look at two skulls and say "yep, those aren't the same" (when you've been able to differentiate between like 5 broken mustelids correctly and all the others on your table)

anyway back to the story so now i have a nice fox (legal), upper bear skull (legal) (with canines too!), and a probable partial upper cougar skull that i may or may not actually be able to own (and that they have plausible deniability to have sold) (i was thinking about other species which are fine selling interstate, thought it was one (mope like, wait no you can't sell x from section ii in these states but others are fine and it isn't that species which seems is rarer) and didn't think to double check even if i did have reception there. stupid me.)

before you ask, yes I have used the vc state legal masterpost/chart, it was the first thing I went to.

from the various gov and wildlife and guides and etc i... honestly have no idea anymore. i got 4 hours of sleep last night and 2 the previous, slogging through legal-ese, even dumbed down legal-ese, is not something i can really handle anymore. it's not an ohio furbearer or anything, so the part about being able to trade in-state with ii section native animal species (if i even read that part of the regulations right) doesn't actually apply? but it's also not being imported anywhere, even just across state lines, and almost all the info i can find only relates to import/export and international border crossing (which is the same technically, but you know). (there's some sort of vague clause i dont quite understand about personal collection items sometimes being exempt from needing permits when moving out of the country. but again, not helpful). don't know if someone had it in captivity/whatever either, though with the condition it's in I doubt it

so on one hand, I might need to throw away (two thirds of) an upper skull of a dream species because i couldn't read the stupid warning signs and thought i knew the rules for it. on the other hand, it was 7$. ive paid more than that for every individually purchased skull (when you include shipping) in my collection. (not counting bulk/bundle orders, but even then...)

basically what it boils down to (hah. boiled. bc it looks professionally cleaned/whitened if it wasn't for the condition/missing sections.) im completely burned out, have been for the past month, and just. cant deal with any more of this. i cant even enjoy my dear cross (currently airing out downstairs hanging from the fan in gm and gp's living room bc of all the GODDAMN SMOKE I HAD TO CARRY IT THROUGH) bc of this, and also dreading tomorrow bc there's literally zero chance gm/gp won't tell mom abt it at the picnic thing and she's gonna be completely pissed to hell since im supposed to be selling all but my most beloved everything (even if it was technically a gift from them and i didn't buy it myself) since she's out of a job and im getting minimum wage at mine and need to take more hours but also sign up for classes and take those somehow too at the same time and also fill out all the govt paperwork to try getting me (her) help and. yeah. I'll post pics up maybe, if nothing else one of the creepy ~floating phantom~ gp saw going upstairs through the living room half asleep. phone doesn't do color justice at all so :/

#vulture culture #shut up answrs #shut the fuck up answrs

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componentplanet · 4 years

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A New Study Indicates Humans Self-Generate Misinformation

A delightful mess of Google-colored cables

A new study into sources of misinformation suggests that humans self-generate it on a regular basis by misrecalling information they’ve previously learned in ways that fit already-existing opinions and biases.

The term misinformation is specifically defined as Merriam-Webster as “incorrect or misleading information.” It is distinct from terms like disinformation, which is defined as “false information deliberately and often covertly spread (as by the planting of rumors) in order to influence public opinion or obscure the truth.” One of the major differences between misinformation and disinformation is motive. Disinformation campaigns are always deliberate, misinformation can be spread in good faith.

The sources of misinformation matter a great deal if your goal is to deepen people’s understandings of facts and improve the quality of public discourse. If you think about how information is distributed, you probably picture some version of a top-down model: Something happens, eyewitnesses and journalists converge on it, and the information they collectively report filters down to all of us through whatever media we use to consume it. The education system uses more-or-less the same model.

Typically, when people think about fighting misinformation, we think about it in terms of fact-checking sources and ensuring the data in an article or textbook is as complete and up-to-date as possible. I check facts like die sizes, launch dates, and benchmark results on a regular basis to make certain that I’m writing factual data.

A new paper published in Human Communication Research suggests, however, that we’ve been overlooking a significant source of misinformation — and it’s going to be far more difficult to fix: Humans appear to self-generate misinformation even when they’ve been given the facts. This study focused on numerical misinformation — i.e., mistransmission of data related to specific factual information that study participants had been given. The fundamental goal of the experiment was to measure whether or not humans would remember numbers better if the claims they were given were consistent or inconsistent with the beliefs of the individual.

To test this, individuals were presented with data on topics like support for same-sex marriage in the US, gender preferences for one’s boss, the number of Mexican immigrants in the United States, and the total number of white people killed by police in 2016 versus the total number of black people. The individuals being tested were polled for their own pre-test expectations on these topics and the data presented to them was given in a manner that was both consistent with what individuals believed would be true or was chosen to present facts they were less likely to believe are true. Table 1, shown below, shows the framing for the experiment:

Individual polling of the test group showed that the poll results aligned with expectations, which is why this is called “schema consistent.” In the case of Mexican immigrants, people expected there to be more immigrants in 2014 than in 2007, when in fact the opposite was true. The first group of participants were asked to answer questions based on the data they had just seen. Their answers were then used to inform the questions that were shown to a second group of people. The answers from that group were used to inform the questions asked to a third group of people.

The image above shows how the system worked. The test was administered using numerical sliders to give answers and using text input. Effectively, this replicates a game of telephone — each person is transmitting the version of data they remember. Before you look at the next slide, let’s quickly review: Americans generally expect there were more Mexican immigrants in the US in 2014 than in 2007, they believe police killed more black people than white people in 2016, they prefer a male boss to a female boss, and they favor support for same-sex marriage. Now, look at what the test results showed. The values on the far left of the graph are the actual statistics, in every case. Wave 1 indicates the answers of the first group, Wave 2 the second group, etc.

When presented with data that conflicted with their own previously held beliefs, humans get really bad at math. The drop in Mexican immigrants that occurred from 2007 – 2014 reverses in Wave 1. The very first people who saw the data literally couldn’t remember the answer correctly and flipped the values, associating 2007 with fewer immigrants and 2014 with more. Importantly, these results continue to diverge when transmitted to Wave 3. In other words, it’s not just that people think that the overall Mexican immigrant population must have risen because of the passage of time. Wave 1 overestimated the number of Mexican immigrants by 900,000. Wave 3 overestimated it by 4.1 million. In this case, the initial figure of total immigrants doesn’t drop all that much and most of the inaccuracy is introduced by grossly inflated estimates of how many Mexicans moved to the US over this period.

With police shootings, Wave 1 manages to remember that more whites than blacks were shot, even if both values are wrong. Starting with Wave 2, we get the same crossover that we saw with Wave 1 — except in this case, the initial value keeps being shoved lower.

The data on police shootings shows a little more staying power. While the absolute values both moved towards reversing, Wave 1 still remembered which group was larger. By Wave 2 — remember, that’s the group that used the answers Wave 1 gave — that effect has completely reversed. This time, however, both numbers have come unmoored from their original data points in both tests.

But if you give people data they do expect, they show completely different mental patterns — not so much necessarily in terms of absolute accuracy, but at least in terms of relationships. In the case of percentage of Americans who prefer a male versus a female boss, the percentages climb towards the group-reported estimate of belief rather than maintaining the initial levels given, even though the initial percentages show clear preference for male over female bosses (aligning with general group preference). In the last case, the number of Americans who favored same-sex marriage was underestimated, while the percentage opposed declined in Wave 1 and then moved back towards the actual value.

Participants in the NIH ResearchMatch version of the study were told that numerical percentages could not exceed 100 percent in the slider version, and also told that the total number of immigrants did not exceed 20 million, which may explain some of the differences, but the charts are in general agreement.

People Remember Facts Less Well if They Disagree With Them

There are two interesting findings here. First, there’s further evidence that people literally remember facts less-well if they don’t agree with them. For all the people who claim they change their mind if confronted with facts, the reality is that people tend to change their facts, not their opinions — even when asked to answer questions about information they literally just read.

This has serious implications for how we think, as a society, about the transmission of information from one mind to another. About a year ago, I wrote a story debunking some rumors about AMD’s then-future 7nm Ryzen CPUs. At the time, some individuals were arguing that AMD’s 7nm CPUs would simultaneously deliver huge price cuts, more cores, large clock speed increases, and a giant leap in IPC, simultaneously. My debunk article wasn’t 100 percent accurate — I guessed that AMD might not use chiplets for desktop Ryzen and reserve them for Epyc instead — but the final chips AMD launched bear absolutely no resemblance to the rumored configurations.

I addressed this topic several times over six months because this set of rumors simply would not die. I bolstered my arguments with historical CPU data, long-term CPU clock scaling trends, AMD’s statements to investors, AMD’s statements to the press, and long-term comparisons on the relationship between AMD’s margins and its net profits. I discussed increasing wafer costs and how chiplets, while a great innovation, were also a symptom of the problems AMD was facing.

Now, let me be clear. I’m not arguing that everyone who read those stories was somehow automatically obligated to agree with me. My prognostication record is anything but perfect and reasonable people can disagree on how they read broad industry trends. There’s a difference, however, between “I think 7nm clocks might come in a little higher than you do,” and “I think AMD will simultaneously slash prices, slash power consumption, and revolutionize semiconductors with generational performance gains we haven’t seen in almost a decade,” despite the fact that there was literally no evidence to support any of these positions.

If you showed up to argue the former, or something that even reasonably looks like it, I’m not talking about you. I’m talking about the vocal minority of people who showed up to argue that AMD was about to launch the Second Coming in silicon form. Those who didn’t predict my firing often suggested I’d be writing a tearful apology at some later date.

My point in bringing this up isn’t to rehash old arguments or toot my horn. My point is that there’s a real life example of this very phenomena that you can go and read about. I don’t know where these rumors started, but once they took hold, they proved quite tenacious. As good as Ryzen is — and 7nm Ryzen is great — the rumors about it were better than the CPU could ever possibly be. When confronted with this, some people got angry.

Short of giving the planet some in-depth training in overcoming cognitive bias, it’s not clear how to reduce the spread of person-to-person misinformation, and the authors conclude that more study is needed here. As important as it is to ensure the factual accuracy of primary sources, the fact that humans appear to generate misinformation in an effort to make that data align with pre-existing schemas means focusing solely on the primary source problem will never address its full scope.

Now Read:

Technology Enables ‘Fake News.’ Can It Help Stop It, Too?

YouTube, Like Facebook, Ignored Toxicity Warnings in Favor of ‘Engagement’

No One Wants to Talk About How Completely We Were Lied to

from ExtremeTechExtremeTech https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/303881-a-new-study-indicates-humans-self-generate-misinformation from Blogger http://componentplanet.blogspot.com/2019/12/a-new-study-indicates-humans-self.html

#A New Study Indicates Humans Self-Generate Misinformation

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