#it gets hard to see it as anything but justified abandonment trauma on repeat

[lili-elbe]

g-d i wish i had just one real friend

#saskia screaming into the void #rant #it's been years #and last time was... traumatic to say the least #despite all my jokes to the contrary i'm actually really really bad at this whole shut-in life thing #i don't even know anymore if i'm drowning or swimming or if i've just learned to just barely breathe at rock bottom #i keep trying to numb myself with drugs #but i would give all the benzos and oxy and alcohol in the world for just some genuine human intimacy from someone who actually cares #but it's always my role to be the expendable one #the one who always has to initiate every conversation or they just forget about me #and as soon as someone better comes along it doesn't matter how hard i try either way #i wish i could brush all this off as overemotional paranoia #but once it's happened to you with literally every relationship you've ever had. including your own parents... #it gets hard to see it as anything but justified abandonment trauma on repeat #and it makes it so hard to continue to try to reach out again and again #knowing you'll probably just end up even more hurt and disappointed

[lassieposting]

Does Lucifer have ptsd? I remember that a cast member said that S5 Lucifer would have it but I haven’t seen it yet, unless they mean after God shows up. Which I think is possible considering Lucifer’s reactions towards his mother.

Okay so, I am not a psychologist and can only really speak to my own experience with certain aspects of PTSD, so I’m gonna use the symptom criteria given by the mental health charity Mind, which goes thusly: 

Reliving aspects of what happened

This can include : 

vivid flashbacks - we’ve seen Lucifer have one of these, when he Goddess reveals that Chloe is a miracle. 

intrusive thoughts or images - his constant fear that his dad is controlling/targeting/manipulating him probably qualifies

intense distress at real or symbolic reminders of the trauma - Lucifer gets very upset and stressed about how humanity sees him and that his father essentially vilified him for eternity as well as throwing him into hell

Alertness and feeling on edge

This can include: 

hypervigilance - there’s a screenshot of Linda’s file for Lucifer that mentions he feels “paralyzed” struggles to relax because he feels like he’s being watched constantly by God. 

lack of sleep or disturbed sleep - the same screenshot mentions sleep issues and that he can, presumably, lay awake worrying “for hours before falling asleep” (apparently he’s also iron-deficient, which...probably ties in with the fact that hell doesn’t get a lot of sunlight)

being easily upset or angry - just look at how upset he gets whenever someone says “the devil made me do it”

avoiding feelings or memories

which includes: 

avoiding anything that reminds you of the trauma - see: repeated, messy amateur-hour wing amputation because he can’t stand to be reminded of what he was/what he lost or to be linked to his father again

feeling emotionally numb or cut off from your feelings - the man hasn’t emotionally matured in billions of years

self-destructive or reckless tendencies - i mean. lucifer’s self-destructive spirals are legendary. like the time he tried to goad that rookie into shooting him, or the time he stood in front of a sniper and begged him to shoot and nobody ever mentioned it again

inability to express affection - he can’t tell chloe he loves her. if he says it out loud, it makes it real, and she becomes something his father can take away from him and know it will hurt him. as long as he doesn’t say it, he’s got some plausible deniability, he can pretend he doesn’t care. also, while he’s getting a lot better about it, early seasons lucifer clearly doesn’t understand nonsexual physical affection (i.e. being hugged) and his attempts to express affection to chloe are often mistimed, inappropriate or bizarre. this is a man who’s grown up in a completely loveless environment. he didn’t know how to love or be loved. humanity had to teach him. 

alcohol and drug use - lmao. “Only if you call ingesting millions of dollars worth of cocaine a problem. I call it a Tuesday.”

difficult beliefs or feelings

which includes: 

feeling like you can’t trust anyone - his reaction to chloe’s betrayal in 1x13, when she tries to arrest him. it’s been a while since I watched the ep, but he says something like “The one person I trusted - you - I thought you were different. I was wrong.”

feeling like nowhere is safe - again, that screenshot. he thinks he’s being watched All The Time. his own family has repeatedly tried to kill him. he’s never been allowed to feel safe on earth before because he was always trying to outrun amenadiel showing up to drag him back to hell. him choosing to stay and make los angeles his home - and then fighting for it when lux was at risk of being demolished - was a huge step for him.

feeling like nobody understands - he’s outright said this to chloe and linda a few times. “why bother [talking to chloe about his problems]? you won’t believe me anyway, you think everything i say is a metaphor.” and the “how can you possibly presume to know god’s intentions? stick within the limits of your own intellectual capacity” conversation

there’s also complex ptsd (c-ptsd), wherein sufferers experience ptsd symptoms as well as additional issues such as: 

feeling permanently damaged or worthless - clearly. early seasons lucifer can’t conceive of a relationship that doesn’t revolve around a human wanting something from him; sex, or a favour, or a desire fulfilled. it doesn’t even occur to him that he’s loveable in his own right, the only value he assigns himself as a person comes from what he can do for or give to others. lucifer is very vain, but he also uses that vanity to hide his non-existent self-esteem. 

feeling like nobody can understand what happened to you - i mean, he’s kind of justified here in that what happened to him was eons of torture and divine retribution, and nobody can understand because a) we don’t live that long and b) the majority of his human friends think he’s harmlessly insane, but he’s said as much to chloe and linda

avoiding friendships and relationships, or finding them difficult - until chloe, lucifer’s relationships with humanity had all been surface-level sexual liaisons with no attachment or commitment. “the best night of my life”, say all those people in their interviews with chloe, but none of them considered it to mean anything, even though it clearly meant something to lucifer. he pushes people away or flees when they get too close, because he’s terrified of emotional intimacy. he’s terrified that they’ll eventually realise that he’s evil and worthless and all the things humanity says he is, and that he doesn’t deserve their love. poor thing has been in therapy for years to try and navigate Baby’s First Friendship. lucifer is naturally sociable, but he’s so traumatized and messed up from the billions of years of solitary confinement that he’s terrified of connecting with people even as he’s desperate for it

suicidal feelings - we’ve had at least two onscreen suicide attempts, even though neither was ever really addressed by his loved ones. both times he tried to goad someone into shooting him, knowing that chloe was nearby and that he was vulnerable; he knew he would be killed if either gunman took the shot. he even tells amenadiel he was trying to achieve a “nice, messy” death. 

in conclusion: yeah he’s traumatized as fuck, god barging into his life after several billion years of abuse and abandonment is probably gonna fuck him up hard, and someone should address his suicidal tendencies. like...@chloe wrap your devil in a blanket and cuddle him, maybe? he’s Sad? look after him? 

#lucifer on netflix #lucifer on fox #netflix lucifer #lucifer morningstar #lucifer meta #tw suicide mention #tw self harm mention #tw abuse #obligatory disclaimer that i am not a shrink but? he sure fits the symptoms #Anon #fire message

[ruby-whistler]

Srry but i noticed in one of ur dream posts u Referred to tommy's cat as hope. I must correct u, that cat was born pussbou and died pussboi. /lh Also tommy killing that cat was nothing compared to dream killing mushroom henry in exile btw just wanna say Also for ur posts about dreams trauma or wilbur manipulating him can u provide links to vods or other proof? Srry if i seem rude i mean that in a "genuinely curious way"

Aaa sorry if my ask came off as rude im just genuinely curious :(((

hi! dw, you don't seem rude at all, and i'm extremely happy someone with a different perspective has found my blog! i really appreciate that sort of attitude and am happy to answer :]

/dsmp /rp

the cat was called pussboy by tommy, but dream only called it "the cat" and then said that "it was hope", which is why it sort of became a symbol (his hope is dead, basically) - that's why i kind of made its name capitalized, because it was more of a metaphor than anything.

most c!dream fans call the cat hope because it's just really nice and really symbolic, and also really sad when you think about it. that's why the name was used in the essay, just to clear up the confusion!

tommy killing that cat was nothing compared to dream killing mushroom henry in exile

i don't really think so? mooshroom henry was entertainment more than anything, and even if it was bad, when watching the stream i don't remember seeing him mourn that much - on the other hand, dream was very quickly and very obviously attached to the cat, with it being his only companion in months of isolation, along with the hope that even when tommy left it would keep him company.

keep in mind c!dream has been deprived of stimuli and human contact for so long it's officially classified as psychological torture at that point.

i don't mean to compare trauma or even compare deaths - because honestly, what c!dream and c!tommy have gone through individually is incomparable and i think neither should be diminished in favor of the other since they're both terrible situations.

that's why i disagree that it "was nothing compared to" - it had an obvious effect on c!dream, and was still c!tommy killing an animal specifically to hurt him, no matter what reasons he had.

when i'm talking about effects people's actions have had on c!dream, i'm not talking about those people. i'm talking about him. :) /lh

as for the trauma, a lot of people agree that a lot of the things he says or does are trauma responses, and hence it's very possible that he's had trauma before he went into prison!

this includes being repeatedly called a tyrant via propaganda by about half of your friends who decided to betray you, trying to keep peace and being pushed deeper into villainy instead, repeatedly being put in between a rock and a hard place in order to make sure the people you care about don't start killing each other, then being betrayed by your closest friends after merely trying to keep peace (sapnap & george) and just in general having no control over your life or image and grasping at straws to gain it back.

i know a lot of people with trauma who heavily relate to certain trauma responses, which aren't always just shaky breaths and flashbacks, but trauma often also manifests itself in extremely ugly and destructive ways, both inwardly and outwardly.

trying to control the people around you is also very often a response to going through trauma, as well as emotional repression which is... rather evident on c!dream during season two. it only seems to get worse with repeated abandonment.

in the end, during the vault scene, the way he acts really just isn't at all the way a healthy person would act, and a lot of his really bad mindsets come from the way he was taught by the world around him.

the character is very reserved however, and since we don't have his pov we can't really say for certain - a lot of people claim it in good faith because they have a lot of evidence for it, and i think they're certainly valid in that.

that is just before the prison, however. from what happened during the prison arc? there is no denying he's traumatized at this point.

he's been emotionally and physically abused by c!sam since the very beginning of being imprisoned, and being in solitary confinement for over two weeks is generally considered psychological (and maybe also physical?) torture. that alone shows up in a lot of symptoms of his mental deterioration while in pandora's during people's visits, and quackity's "sessions" just absolutely drove the point home.

what he's gone through during this arc is absolutely incomparable to anything others charactes have faced before, and it's just plain suffering being endured by someone who is, despite everything, still a human being.

as for the wilbur manipulation thing!! it's talking about the whole vassal scene (though even beforehand a lot of their interactions are pretty iffy), and here's a post about that :]

I also have a small question about the analysis u last reblogged cus it says "why dream needed lmanburg gone rightfully" and like. The house analogy is poor because for one cus the land is infinite. And 2 cus punz's yard was literally larger then lmanburg. And also stuff about dream being a mediator? Can u provide examples?

i wouldn't say it was poor. dream's said a lot of times that he didn't care in the slightest about the land - a lot of his problems with l'manberg arose with the fact that wilbur basically built it on lies and tried to disallow half of the server to come there. c!dream was mad about the division and the fact that wilbur wanted "freedom" to have authority in his lands - over others, as can be seen in this post also.

the table analogy was fitting not because dream was some overlord, but because these were literally friends he invited to hang out and live in a place he wanted to call home. claiming a part of it for yourself and saying people of a certain nationality can't come in is directly opposing those goals.

in the early days of the smp, dream's always been a mediator between his friends - sapnap and george, who would often get into fights and go around killing each other! he would always do his best to stop the conflict, which continued after tommy joined when he took him to court and then later tried to mediate conflicts he was a part of, which resulted in tommy killing him unprovoked, stealing his gear, and starting the disc wars when dream was trying to get his stuff back. later, during pogtopia, he is also most concerned with peace over everything, and this seems to continue indefinitely after.

Today i was thinking about how messed up the final control room was. Like. Dream arranged the betrayal and punz and sapnap killed tommy and tubbo who like. Were literal children and their pals (because the author, wilbur soot, is dead/j but srsly if u take the streamers words tommy said he was 9 during the revolution sooo)

Sorry im gonna ramble about how dumb canon ages are for a second cus like. Streamers can say the characters are one way or another (wilbur saying he is mentally 30-something, etc.) But in the end the characters act like they(or at least their streaming personas) do.

i... honestly don't find it that bad? they were in a war, and the final control room was basically just supposed to end it quicker. the l'manbergians made it clear they were going to fight to the death, so they really left c!dream no other choice. and it's not like he didn't give them chances to give up.

also yeah the 9 year old thing was retconned, because in that case c!dream would've been 14 and i don't think that's true.

c!tommy and c!dream were both young and once again, in a war. the final control room was an attempt to assure victory, which both sides would've taken if possible, but only c!dream saw he had the option.

i do agree the whole child soldier thing was bad but... complain about that to c!wilbur, methinks. he talked naive kids into fighting for his personal power. however, the age argument isn't really valid either way. they had enough agency to sign up for it, and whether or not c!wilbur pushing the intense nationalism onto them had something to do with that is another debate entirely.

Bacl to final control room cus like??? Also fun fact punz took 2 of wilbur's canon lives. And like that probably is what started wilbur's paranoia which later lead to his spiral and i. Many thoughts full of lmanburg today.

i'm pretty sure cc!wilbur said what lead to c!wilbur's spiral was a "dark, twister view of possessions" and "disregard for his fellow citizen whom he claimed to love so much", but i really wouldn't say it was the control room; if anything the sudden loss of power after the elections seems to me like the trigger for his spiral.

I watched the exile arc live and. I feel dirty almost for feeling little to no sympathy for c!dream (srry ive been forgetting to add that aa) because of his actions toward c!tommy and like. The whole probation was so humiliating and unfair and c!dream was planning to frame him for the crimes he and puffy did under the the guise of "pranks" and c!quackity was planning to seize the vice president role.

i mean... to be fair, if you didn't watch the prison arc much yet or only watch tommy's perspective i understand not feeling that sympathetic - however, i encourage you to maybe watch a few prison visits, since they could help you see the whole picture better!

i also watched it live, and i also thought it was terrible, but i share very much the same sentiment for the prison arc because. absolutely no one should have to go through either of those things, you know?

i don't think probation was that humiliating? he was just. being asked to not start conflict with the other factions for two weeks. of course, what happened as a result is in no way justified, but i don't think probation itself would've been bad at all. either way yeah the framing and c!quackity's behaviour was. very yikes, i agree.

Also c!tommy antis are dumb because they say "he deserved exile angry emoji" i dont see u saying that about ranboo. Just say you hate cc!tommy and go. Also people say c!tommy was just as toxic to c!dream and i??? No. One is the victim and one is the abuser and like. :/// man. This part is rambly srry

i wouldn't say they hate cc!tommy? cc!tommy has a persona who people think is annoying at first ( but then they subscribe because he is super entertaining big man! ) but a lot of c!tommy's actions are straight up toxic to certain characters, such as c!funndy and c!jack. he has a very dismissive attitude towards others and their trauma and it does affect the people around them very negatively.

examples; his repeated bullying and behavior towards fundy:

Tommy: “Fundy, I’m just here to kinda let you know that I – if you weren’t Wilbur’s son, you would be out of L’manburg, alright? Just remember – you need to keep that relationship with your father. I saw how asshole-y and bratty you were acting in the courtroom the other night. You need to pull your shit together young man.”

......

Fundy: “I’m wearing glasses…are you making fun of my eyesight?!”

Tommy: “Yes.”

Sapnap: “Your father would be very disappointed.”

Fundy: “Wh – disappointed for wearing glasses?!”

Tommy: “You got glasses, like what are you wearing…”

Fundy: “What do you mean?”

Tommy: “Sapnap, Sapnap, over here. Fundy, Fundy, Fundy, I’m really sorry to say this – I’m just here to publicly denounce you.”

Fundy: “…What?”

( credit for transcript: @/findingjoynweirdstuff )

he's also responsible for a big chunk of c!jack's trauma, both with actions and words, and that's why i think certain people might dislike the character, and i don't think that's wrong of them. anyone can dislike any character they want if they don't attack people for liking them, in my opinion.

also c!tommy was most definitely toxic against c!dream in the cell. it's of course understandable but that doesn't change the fact he was constantly hitting and insulting him (without dream doing anything back for a long while until he snapped) which is toxic behaviour.

i wouldn't say he was "just as" though, so i agree with you on that. they're different and they behave differently.

i made a dream blob keychain today. Is it possible to send images if u wanna see? Idk cus i havent used tumblr before. I think that's all for now. Thx for letting me talk :D peepoShy -curious anon (but fr a connoreatspants c!dream redemption arc would be cool)

yooo that's cool! i don't really,,, know if it's possible to send images? try it out and if it isn't i'll try find a way to turn it on.

also, no problem! just please remember this is a c!dream sympathetic blog, and me as well as my followers are uhh,, oftentimes emotionally attached / personally relate to the character, so if you could avoid sending hate on the character (not that you have or that i expect you to, just a friendly reminder) in the asks that would be great! we already see a lot of it unwillingly so, i'd rather not see more, but as long as the discussion is civil i'm absolutely ok with you asking more and with me answering more questions if you'd want to! :)

if anyone else would like to reblog this and add some things i might've missed with my answers, feel free to, just go easy on her (she uses she/her pronouns!) and keep it factual.

i hope u had a good or at least ok time at school today :D

thanks! i gtg now because exam tomorrow but i'm going to try write the redemption essay tomorrow as well because ohhh boy i have a lot of ideas about what all i could write around the concept.

also sorry this was long, i can't keep my tongue on the leash :[

#c!tommy critical #c!wilbur critical #my asks #curious anon #long post #history #tw torture #tw manipulation

[bubonickitten]

Fic summary: Jon goes back to before the world ended and tries to forge a different path.

Chapter summary: An examination of endings and how to realize them.

Previous chapter: AO3 // tumblr

Full chapter text & content warnings below the cut.

Content warnings for Chapter 24: brief claustrophobia; some RSD/fear of abandonment stuff; extensive discussion of death (this chapter’s all about Terminus, babey); allusions to past suicidal ideation on Jon’s part; mentions of eye gouging/blinding (not graphic); some internalized victim blaming; anxiety symptoms; spider mentions; swears. Let me know if I missed anything!

Chronic fear has been Jon’s baseline for so long, it’s difficult for him to conceptualize what he would be were it to abandon him. In some ways, he’s become acclimated to it. On the other hand, fear is a volatile, prolific thing, its many shades relentlessly coalescing and mutating to form new strains. It all but guarantees that the Eye will never truly be sated: there will always be some heretofore unknown species of terror to discover, experience, and add to its collection.

Sprinkled in amongst the more noteworthy moments of abject terror and the constant background pressure of existential dread, there are smaller fears: everyday anxieties; pervasive insecurities; acute spikes of panic and adrenaline. Each discrete instance may pale in comparison to life-threatening peril, but muddled together and given time to ferment, they compound. They feed into one another. Sometimes, they come to attract the attention of larger, far more forbidding monsters.

In this way, Jon is no different from the average person – and one of the oldest, most deep-rooted of those comparatively banal fears is his fear of rejection, of disappointing, of being seen and found lacking. It guided his path long before his first supernatural encounter, and in many ways, it still does. His self-awareness of that fact does little to dampen its influence.

So it’s vexing, but not surprising, that the foremost concern vying for his attention right now is whether this might be that final straw that chases Georgie away for good. She sits with her hands clasped in front of her mouth, eyes closed and brow furrowed as she gathers her thoughts. The longer she remains silent, the more time Jon has to run through all the worst-case scenarios.

It’s already difficult for him to capture a full breath under the crushing weight of anticipation. It doesn’t help that his intermittent claustrophobia has decided that right now is the perfect time to manifest. A tunnel collapse would probably damage the Archives above it, though, and there’s no way Jon would be so lucky. He isn’t sure whether to consider that a consolation or not.

Finally, Georgie takes a breath, opens her eyes, and leans forward.

“Okay.” She tilts her folded hands towards him in an indicative gesture. “Explain, please.”

“Right,” Jon says, rubbing one arm nervously. “S-so, Oliver –”

“I knew his name wasn’t Antonio,” Georgie mutters.

“No. That was an alias he used when he first came to the Institute to give a statement, back in 2015.”

“The prediction about Gertrude’s death?” Martin asks.

“The same.”

“And what was a harbinger of death doing looming over you while you were in a coma?” Georgie presses.

“I don’t know that I’d call him a harbinger –” Jon’s mouth snaps shut immediately when Georgie shoots him an impatient glare. “He wasn’t – he wasn’t trying to – to reap my soul or anything like that, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“Then why was he there?”

“He was called there,” Jon says. “By the Web, according to him.”

“Oh, and you don’t think that makes him dangerous?” Martin says, throwing one arm out in a surge of exasperation.

“He isn’t allied with the Web,” Jon replies, fiddling with the hem of his jumper. “It just… got into his head, and it was easier for him to go along with it, rather than fight it indefinitely. Oliver tends to have a fatalistic outlook. If he sees something as inevitable, he’s not inclined to try to stop it.”

“So, what – he’s serving an evil power not because he’s sadistic but because he’s just apathetic?” Georgie couldn’t sound any more unimpressed if she tried. “How is that any better?”

“It’s, ah… it’s really not that simplistic,” Jon says, adopting a delicate tone. “And I don’t think I’d call it apathy so much as…”

“Acceptance,” Georgie says stiffly. “Everything has an ending.”

“Yes. Oliver is an Avatar of the End, and the End is characterized by its certainty–” Jon pauses when he catches a glimpse of Georgie’s hands, fastened to her knees and trembling with tension. “We don’t have to talk about this.”

“No, I –” Georgie sighs, relaxes her grip, and flexes her fingers. “Just – tell me why you invited him here.”

“It’s like I said upstairs – there were things I couldn’t tell him about outside of here.”

“Why do you feel the need to tell him anything?” Martin asks.

“I just thought… he might be able to help us.”

“Why would he,” Georgie asks, “if he’s so fatalistic?”

“Because, he…” Jon hesitates, biting his lip. “I suppose I thought that maybe – maybe he’s like me.”

“He’s nothing like you,” Martin says vehemently.

A flicker of a smile crosses Jon’s face. “You don’t even know him.”

“What, and you do?”

“Not well,” Jon admits. “But I do think I understand him.”

Martin crosses his arms, transparently miffed. In an attempt to suppress his amusement, Jon presses his lips tightly together. It doesn’t work, evidently.

“What?” There’s a flat, defensive edge to the demand, highlighted by a suspicious scowl. “What’s with the smirk?”

Jon already knows the answer to the question he wants to ask, but he can’t help himself: “Are you jealous?”

“No!” Martin yelps. “Why would I be jealous?”

Jon shakes his head, chuckling softly. “Well, you don’t need to be.”

“I’m not!”

“If you say so,” Jon says with a shrug and a sly grin.

“I am not jealous,” Martin insists – and now Georgie is snickering, one hand clamped over her mouth to (unsuccessfully) stifle the sound. Martin glowers at her, betrayed.

“Sorry, sorry,” she says. “Just – didn’t realize you were quite so jealous.”

“I’m not,” Martin says for a third time. “But – but even if I was, I would be completely justified.”

“Because he woke me up,” Jon says, toning down the smugness now.

There is an uneasy boundary between affectionate teasing and perceived mockery, and here in the past, he hasn’t quite mapped the shape of that line. Between seeing one another in the Lonely and anchoring each other through the apocalypse, he and Martin had been forced to confront long-held insecurities about themselves, both as individuals and as a unit. That shared history no longer applies. While Jon has no desire to repeat that chain of events – there are happier, healthier pathways to a relationship than bonding via trauma, or so he’s heard – it does mean that this version of Martin hasn’t yet had the same epiphanies.

Much like Jon, Martin struggles to take a declaration of love at its word. People lie; they mislead; they say what they think others want to hear – whether out of self-interest, sympathy, or simple social ineptitude, the results are the same. Sometimes they start out sincere, but little by little, their tolerance dwindles and they recognize their mistake: what they thought was genuine affection was at best a passing fancy for someone who turned out to be far more trouble than they were ever worth. Or worse: a caring façade born of pity or guilt or obligation, only to turn rotten and toxic when the burden grows too tiresome.

Add all of those deep-seated convictions to the lasting influence of the Lonely, and Martin needed proof before he could entertain the possibility of being loved. Following him into and then leading him out of the Lonely was a fairly convincing statement. Absent another life-or-death gesture to act as a catalyst, Jon suspects that this time around, building that confidence will come down to time, practice, and repetition.

“Okay, yeah, about that – what does that – what does that mean, he woke you up?” Before Jon can get a word out, Martin barrels on: “I mean, what makes him so special? I spent weeks – weeks – begging you to come back, and nothing. He visits you once and suddenly you’re fine?”

“I really did try to come back on my own,” Jon says – not accusing, not pleading, not even self-flagellating. Just plain, sincere assuredness. “I heard you calling me. Not at first, but – the last time you visited. It was the first time I’d heard your voice in… in so long, I – I never thought I’d hear it again, and then you were there, and I was – I was so relieved, so… so elated.”

Martin sulks quietly, glaring at the floor, but there’s a noticeable flush staining his cheeks now.

“And then – and then I heard you on the phone with Peter, and…” Jon swallows hard, the despair he felt in that moment still stark in his mind. “I tried to call out to you, but you couldn’t hear me. The Lonely was drawing you in, just like before, and there was nothing I could do. I wanted to wake up more than anything, but I just… couldn’t figure out how. I still don’t know why – I don’t know the exact mechanics of it all – but for whatever reason, I wasn’t able to wake up until Oliver’s visit. Same as the first time.”

At that, Martin seems to deflate somewhat, finally looking up to meet Jon’s eyes.

“If I could have come back sooner,” Jon continues, smiling sadly, “I would have. In a heartbeat.”

Martin pouts for a moment longer before surrendering, his rigid posture slackening as the rancor drains out of him.

“Yeah,” he sighs. “Yeah, I know.”

“So you think you owe him,” Georgie guesses. “For waking you up.”

“Partially,” Jon admits. “But that’s not why I invited him, really. He just seems… I don’t know. Lonely, I guess?” Georgie rolls her eyes. “He never – he never asked to be a death prophet. No more than I wanted to be a – a trauma leech. And arguably – arguably he was even less to blame for what happened to him than I am for what I’ve become –”

“Jon,” Martin says warningly.

“No, just – just listen.” Jon takes a measured breath as he puts his thoughts in order. “Oliver started having prophetic dreams several years ago. Just – out of the blue. As far as I know, he did nothing to tempt fate. Eventually, those dreams carried over into the waking world. Everywhere he went, every single day, he could see the evidence of imminent death. There was no escaping it.

“In the beginning, he tried to help people. But it never worked. When he was unable to save his own father, he stopped trying to change fate, for the most part. I think the last time he tried was when he dreamed of Gertrude. He saw how far-reaching her death would ultimately be, and he tried to warn her, even though he didn’t have much hope that it would make a difference. And he was right, in the end. He couldn’t save her, and he couldn’t prevent what came after.”

“So he just… gave up,” Martin says flatly.

“When you fail over and over again to do good in the world, when you witness horror after horror with no recourse to stop it, when you try again and again and again to escape and never even come close… at some point, you burn out,” Jon murmurs. “Lose all hope. It becomes your new normal. Exist like that long enough and you start to become numb to it all.”

“You lived through an apocalypse and you didn’t give up,” Martin counters.

“I did, though,” Jon says quietly.

Martin frowns. “What?”

“After I lost you.” Jon averts his eyes and folds his arms tight against his middle, holding his elbows. “I was lost. I couldn’t save anyone, I couldn’t change anything, I couldn’t even look away. I wasn’t allowed to sleep. I wasn’t allowed to die. So I just… survived, even though I wanted anything but.” When he glances up, he sees that Martin’s expression has softened. “You were my reason. Then you were gone, and I was alone.”

Jon hadn’t known that the world could end a second time, but there it was. With Martin gone, what little that remained of Jon’s own microcosm shattered. Yet the Ceaseless Watcher’s world dared to continue turning, to go on churning out horror after horror as if nothing at all had changed. And Jon was just another cog in that machine, going through the motions and fulfilling the purpose for which he was cultivated.

It wasn’t truly ceaseless, of course. Everything has an ending. But it felt like an eternity – and for Jon, indefinite waiting has always been a special kind of torture.

“So what changed?” Georgie asks, her tone gentler than before.

“For a while, nothing,” Jon says. “I sort of… drifted. Wandered aimlessly through the domains for… I don’t really know. When nothing ever changes, keeping track of time becomes pointless. The Panopticon kept trying to draw me in, of course, but I – I suppose there was still enough spite left in me to make a show of ignoring it.

“At some point, I got lost in a Lonely domain. Which was fine, really. Or – it would have been fine, had I been allowed to succumb to it. I wanted to just – fade into it, let it in, but” – Jon breathes a bitter laugh – “it wouldn’t take me. Wouldn’t let me go numb, wouldn’t let me forget – didn’t have the decency to let me disappear, no matter how long I stayed.”

No one got what they deserved in that future, but this was a rare exception to that rule: to be allowed to simply forget his role in creating that nightmare world, to sink into blissful ignorance, would have been a miscarriage of justice. Not that the Eye cared about what was just or fair, of course. No, it simply would not – perhaps could not – deign to relinquish its hold on its Archive.

“But the longer I stayed,” he continues, looking at Martin now, “the more I thought about you. In retrospect, maybe that’s why I didn’t want to leave. And maybe that’s part of why it wouldn’t have me – I couldn’t let you go. But being there, it kept reminding me of the first Lonely domain we came across after the change. We were separated, and I was – I was so afraid you wouldn’t come back to me. But you did.” Jon smiles to himself, remembering the relief and gratitude and awe he felt in that moment. “You rejected the Lonely all on your own. Found your own way out – found me, and… every time I thought about that, I imagined your voice in my head. Telling me off for wallowing. For giving up.”

“Sounds like I would have been justified,” Martin says delicately.

“You would have,” Jon confesses with a contrite half-smile. “I was in peak brooding condition. Eventually I wore myself out wallowing there, though, so I left to go wallow somewhere else. I needed a change of scenery, and – well, I got one. Stumbled into a Spiral domain. Ran into Helen, and… funny enough, that was the last straw.”

Jon can still recall the encounter down to the smallest detail.

‘Still drifting aimless, are we?’ Helen bared an unsettling number of teeth as her grin stretched – literally – from ear to ear. ‘Exactly how long do you plan on moping about, Archivist?’

Jon did not answer; did not even meet her eyes, instead staring vacantly over her shoulder. The incessant reel of horror scenes playing in the back of his mind made it difficult to focus on any one thing at a time, and there was nothing he cared to see so much that it was worth the effort it would take to grant it his undivided attention.

‘You know,’ Helen said, tapping an elongated, crooked finger against her lips, ‘I wonder what he would say, if he could see you now.’

It didn’t matter. Martin was gone. Those parts of the world that hadn’t already been thoroughly razed were slowly but surely withering. There was nothing left to salvage.

‘Disappointed, I imagine,’ Helen continued, distant and muffled by the din of a splintering world. (Somewhere deep below their feet, a man was screaming himself hoarse in a labyrinth made of mirrors and fog.) ‘But not surprised. It’s not the first time you’ve let him down, is it?’

Jon gave a listless shrug. Her words stung, certainly, but they were a far cry from some of her more artful jabs. A pointed insinuation to send him spiraling into his own self-destructive conclusions would always be more corrosive than outright disparagement.

(The man in the maze gazed into mirror after mirror, hoping to find himself within. In every one, his reflection had no face.)

That said, Helen wasn’t wrong. Even as a child, Jon had always been a burden. He never did manage to prove himself worthy of all the many unwilling sacrifices made on his behalf. Never measured up; never put nearly enough good into the world to balance out the cost of having him in it.

(The man in the maze had misplaced his name. Did he drop it somewhere? He checked his pockets only to find holes. Yet another eyeless reflection stared back at him from beneath his feet.)

‘You were always headed here, weren’t you?’

Yes.

(The man in the maze tried to retrace his steps, but everything looked the same: an endless, recursive corridor of mirror images. He asked one of the doppelgängers for directions, only to realize that the man in the mirror had no mouth with which to answer.)

‘To think – all that time he spent coaxing you along, and you crumble the moment you don’t have a prop to coddle you.’ Helen cackles, high and cruel. ‘What a waste.’

She wasn’t telling him anything that he didn’t already know.

(The man in the maze was scouring the mirrored ground, searching for… something he’d lost; he couldn’t quite remember, but he knew that it was important. He checked his pockets, only to discover that he had no pockets.)

‘Although, I guess the blame doesn’t fall squarely on your shoulders. He was naïve. It isn’t your fault he was foolish enough to hope for–’

The words jolted Jon back to the present like an electric shock. Whatever else Helen had to say, he’d never know. He tuned her out, and he started walking.

“She was having a go at me – nothing new there – but then she brought you into it, and…” Jon shrugs. “I don’t think it was her intention, but it nudged me back on track. You and I had a plan, before, and… honestly, I didn’t have much hope that it would work, but you had. That made it worth trying.”

It wasn’t like Jon could break the world more by parleying with the Eye. At worst, it made no difference, but at least Jon did something to honor Martin’s memory; at best, it put Jon out of his misery, one way or another.

“I’m glad I did, because… well, it changed things, obviously. You were right.”

“Sorry,” Martin says with unmistakable self-satisfaction, “could you say that again?”

“You were right, Martin.” Jon rolls his eyes, but the effect is undercut by an indulgent smile he can’t quite repress. “You often are. All of this is to say – I’m only here because you gave me a reason to be. If not for that, then… well, I meant what I’ve said before, about needing a lifeline in order to stand any chance against the Fears. I was – I am lucky enough to have one.”

More than one, he thinks with a sense of wonder. The support he has now is such a far cry from the ostracism he experienced the first time he was here. It still gives him pause every time he dwells on the contrast. Sometimes, it almost seems too good to be true.

“Oliver didn’t,” Jon continues. “It’s hard to begrudge him for resigning himself to fate, especially considering how the power that claimed him is defined by fatalism. He never asked to be chosen, he was given no hope of escape, and he had no one to reach out to, let alone anyone to reach back. It’s unsurprising that he would come to accept the inescapable when the only anchor he had was the certainty of oblivion.”

“‘The moment that you die will feel exactly the same as this one,’” Georgie says quietly.

Jon nods. “And without a dependable reason to see the moments in between as significant, it’s… well, it’s hard to see the point in anything. I’ve been there.”

As has Georgie, Jon knows. She exhales heavily, massaging her temples, visibly conflicted.

“I still don’t think you should trust him,” Martin says.

“I’m not suggesting we trust him wholesale,” Jon says, “but I’m certain that he isn’t an enemy. He might not resist the End, but he doesn’t work to end the world in its name, either. He’s… thoroughly neutral.”

“Then what makes you think he’ll lift a finger to help?” Martin asks.

“I doubt he’ll go out of his way to help,” Jon admits. “He might be willing to trade information, though. I just thought… Avatar of the End – he would have more insight into the limits of Jonah’s supposed ‘immortality’ than I do.”

“You think he can tell you something about the dead man’s switch,” Georgie guesses, rubbing at her forehead.

“That’s my hope, yes. He can see the route that a person will take to their end. Or, he can when their death is imminent, at least – I’m not sure how far into the future his foresight stretches these days.”

In the hospital, Oliver implied that he could see something in Jon’s vicinity. Whether that suggests Jon’s own end is near enough for Oliver to foresee it, Jon does not Know. Given his proven resilience, he suspects it’s just as likely to be a quirk of his strange existence. There’s no shortage of idiosyncrasies that may mark Jon as an outlier: he’s the Archivist; he’s traveled through a rift in time; he’s the primed and practiced focal point of the Watcher’s Crown, and the fate of the world hinges on his ability to keep that potential in check.

And if his situation is an exception to the rule, perhaps Jonah’s is as well.

“Maybe he’ll be able to see whether our routes flow into Jonah’s, so to speak,” Jon says. “When Oliver dreamed of Gertrude’s impending death, he saw how much of the world’s fate was intertwined with hers –”

“– the veins, whose domination of the dreamscape had only ever been partial before, had thickened and now seemed to cover almost the whole space of every street – the destination – into which all the veins flowed – The Magnus Institute – choked with that shadowed flesh – following that red light that would now pulse so bright that I knew were I to see it awake it would have blinded me – and every one of those veins – where they ended – a person sitting at that desk and it was them that all of this scarlet light was flowing into.”

“Gertrude,” Martin says.

Jon nods, then holds up one finger: Wait. The Archive has more to say; Jon can practically feel the words bubbling up his throat and crowding behind his teeth. As discomfiting as it is to have it hijack his voice, sometimes it’s easier to ride out that compulsion than to tamp it down.

“I have no responsibility to try and prevent whatever fate is coming for you – such a thing is likely impossible – but after what I saw I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t at least try – there is something coming for you and I don’t know what it is, but it is so much worse than anything I can imagine. At the very least, you should look into appointing a successor.”

Statement ends, Jon thinks, working his jaw to soothe the unnatural tension that has taken root there. Happy now? Anything else to add?

As expected, it doesn’t answer. He’s well aware that addressing the Archive essentially amounts to talking to himself, but carrying on an internal dialogue with the more frustrating aspects of himself was a habit long before he took on the mantle of Archivist.

After a few seconds, he feels the Archive’s imposing presence start to recede, releasing him from the compulsion. It’s still there, of course – it’s always there, looming over him like a vulture, as impossible to ignore as a knife to the throat – but for now it seems content to fall back and observe once more.

Georgie sighs. “That’s why you’re sympathetic to him.”

“He tried.” Jon shrugs. “He didn’t have to, but he did.”

“That still doesn’t mean he’s going to help this time,” Martin says.

“No, but he has no incentive to hurt us, either. There’s no harm in asking him questions. He’s not going to run to Jonah to inform on us. The worst that happens is he says ‘no’ and goes back to minding his own business. But if he agrees to talk… well, it might be our best chance to determine how much of what Jonah says is true.”

Georgie chews on her thumbnail for a few seconds before looking back up at Jon, a pensive frown on her face. “Why’d he go out of his way to come here at all, if he has no motivation one way or the other?”

“Honestly? Curiosity, I think. But… I suppose I’m also hoping that there’s a part of him that might sympathize.”

“Do you really think there is?” Martin asks.

“I don’t know. In my future, probably not. He wasn’t enjoying himself like some of the other Avatars – I mean, he was feeding on the fear produced by his domain, but even then, he didn’t strike me as cruel. It was just… acceptance in the face of a conclusion at ultimately stayed the same regardless of the path leading up to it, and…”

And maybe it speaks to Jon’s mental state at the time, but there were a few points in Oliver’s statement that struck him as almost merciful. After all, in the face of seemingly endless torment, death was a covetable escape.

“I have no power to stop it,” the Archive recites, “and even if I did, I would not do so. For to rob a soul of death is as torturous as its inevitable coming – I fear the annihilation you would gift me as little as I desire it – perhaps once it might have horrified me, or given me some sense of pursuing the ultimate release of the world that you have damned – I am now, as the thing I feed, a fixed point, that has neither the longing nor ability to change its state of existence – even you, with all your power, cannot keep the world alive forever. All things end, and every step you take, whatever direction you may choose, only brings you closer to it.”

“That Oliver again?” Martin mutters tetchily. “Doesn’t sound to me like he’ll be particularly inclined to help.”

“Well–” The word comes out as a rasp, and Jon has to pause to clear his throat before continuing. “That was – that was the Oliver of the future. After the change, he was too much of the End not to live its truth, just as I was too much of the Eye not to walk its path and archive its world. We were both conduits, inseparable from the powers that laid claim to us. Here and now, though, I’m hoping he might still be…”

“What, benevolent?” Martin says incredulously.

Jon is quiet for a long moment, trying to find the right words to explain.

“At my most hopeless,” he says slowly, “I still cared, even though there was no meaningful way for me to put it into practice. I don’t think I ever managed to reach the level of acceptance that Oliver did – and sometimes I envied him for that. But embracing the End as a foregone conclusion doesn’t necessarily mean he’s completely unmoved by what happens in the interim. Not yet, anyway. And as of right now, whether it’s out of curiosity or compassion, obviously he still interacts with the world from time to time, even if he prefers to exist in the background for the most part.”

Martin and Georgie both look unconvinced.

“I’m not asking him to help us change fate,” Jon goes on. “In his view, there is no obstructing fate – not in any way that genuinely matters to his patron. Oliver isn’t particularly concerned about when the End will come – he’s just secure in the knowledge that it will happen eventually, with or without the interference of any mortal actor. Passive or active, nothing he does or doesn’t do will change that. But I’m thinking it’s been a long time since someone has asked him for help that he actually has the power to provide, and… I know what that’s like.”

Despite the immense power that Jon could exercise after the culmination of the Watcher’s Crown, he was ultimately powerless to change things for the better. It’s why he leapt at the chance to help Naomi in her nightmare: even a small, low-effort act of kindness after so long without the opportunity was overwhelmingly liberating.

It was insignificant against the vast backdrop of the universe, perhaps, but it still left a mark. It prompted a cascade of little changes that completely rewrote their dynamic; it curtailed some of the suffering in which Jon had previously been so unwillingly complicit; it's even acted as an inoculation against the loneliness that had permeated both of their lives during this stretch of time when Jon was last here. Those little changes mattered to him, and they mattered to Naomi – not only in that first moment, but in all the time since.

All of that had to count for something, right? It took fourteen ill-fated marks to end the world, after all. With any one of them missing, the Ritual wouldn’t have worked and the world at large would never have noticed. But that didn’t make any one of those marks wholly insignificant on its own. They scarred him and the people around him; every encounter changed him, whittled away at his sense of self, left him progressively vulnerable and set him up for successive marks.

The repercussions still linger. They probably always will.

In his sporadic moments of cautious optimism, Jon cannot help but wonder: If a series of little cruelties can create such a perfect and terrible storm, is it really inconceivable that a pattern of little rebellions could keep it at bay? And Jon has long since come to the conclusion that compassion in the face of unimaginable cruelty is its own form of rebellion.

“As much as Oliver talks about fate and inevitability,” Jon says, “he still seems to believe in free will to an extent. That we all make choices. When he last spoke to me, he offered me a choice. Now I’m offering one to him.”

“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but…” Georgie releases a weary exhale and tosses her head back to stare at the ceiling. “You’re sure this won’t come back to bite you?”

“We have nothing to lose by asking,” Jon says. “And he has nothing to lose regardless of what choice he makes, but… it feels right to at least give him the option. Whatever he decides, I won’t begrudge him for it.”

“Fine,” she says tersely. “Do what you want.”

Jon just barely suppresses a wince. “Georgie?”

“Sorry, that came off as –” Georgie heaves another sigh. “I’m not angry with you. I get it. It makes sense. I just don’t like it.”

“I know.”

“Just… be mindful, alright? You don’t owe him any answers you don’t want to give. And he doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt just because you relate to him.”

“I know,” Jon says again.

“I mean it, Jon,” she says sharply. She takes a steadying breath before continuing, more diplomatically this time. “It’s… sweet, I guess, that you want to empathize with him, but you have a tendency to…” Georgie pauses, weighing her words. “I mean, I’ve seen you compare yourself to Helen, too. And Jonah.”

“Well, I don’t think anyone would deny that there are certain… similarities,” Jon says, not quite under his breath.

“Yeah, you’re always going to have something in common with other people if you look hard enough. But sometimes you see the worst in people and you fold it into how you see yourself. Like you’re looking into a funhouse mirror, but you can’t see how the reflection is distorted.” Jon avoids meeting her eyes, shifting uncomfortably in his seat. “Look, I know you don’t want to hear it, but you have a history of comparing yourself to your abusers. Sorry,” she adds when he flinches, “but it’s the truth, and you need to hear it. Just… think about it, okay? Ask yourself whether this is compassion or if it’s just another way to dehumanize yourself.”

“I –” Jon swallows around the lump in his throat, his mouth gone dry. “Okay, I – I get your point, but – I swear that’s not what this is. With Helen, and – and – and Jonah, it’s – they’ve actually gone out of their way to – to manipulate, to cause real harm. Oliver is different.”

“You were marked by the End,” Georgie says pointedly.

“Yes, but that wasn’t Oliver’s fault. He didn’t hurt me, never tried to trap me or trick me – never pressured me into making one choice over another, even at the end of the world. I really don’t think he’s evil, or sadistic, or – or scheming, weaving some grand web. He’s just watching things unfold, because he had a crash course in the stages of grief forced onto him and the end result was… well, acceptance. He doesn’t fear the End, but he doesn’t worship it, either. He just embodies it, openly and authentically.”

Georgie is silent for nearly a full minute, scrutinizing Jon intently, before she capitulates.

“Alright. I’ll… trust your judgment, I guess,” she says, but she shares a knowing glance with Martin – who looks just as leery as she does – when she says it. “Still, be careful.”

“I, uh… I imagine you don’t want to be here when I talk to him?” Jon ventures, though he’s certain he already knows the answer.

“No,” Georgie says summarily.

Jon releases a breathless chuckle. “Fair enough.”

“I really should be getting home to Melanie, anyway. It’s stay-home date night. Pizza and a movie.” Georgie offers a tentative grin, her shoulders relaxing minutely. “She hasn’t seen the new Ghostbusters yet, somehow – something about having been preoccupied with real paranormal bullshit for the last few years – but I checked and the DVD version has audio description, so I bought a copy. She’d be cross with me if I stood her up for the grim reaper.”

“I imagine so.” Jon tilts his head. “Although, Oliver isn’t actually the–”

“Jon,” Georgie sighs, “I was being facetious.”

When the three of them leave the tunnels, they find Oliver still waiting awkwardly at the bottom of the stairs out of the Archives, Basira standing sentinel nearby. Daisy leans against a far wall, eyeing him from a distance.

Georgie gives a long, doubtful look at Oliver before turning to Jon and offering a hug that he gladly accepts.

“Text me later tonight?” Georgie says. “And keep me updated on your travel plans.”

“Will do. Tell Melanie I said hello. And tell the Admiral he’s a national treasure.”

Georgie snorts at that, shaking her head in amusement before turning towards the stairs. Oliver nearly jumps out of the way as she strides in his direction, but she doesn’t stop to confront him beyond a glare as she passes. A prolonged, awkward minute of silence passes after she leaves, charged with suspicion and tension.

“Tunnels,” Basira says eventually, her tone and expression giving nothing away. She doesn’t wait for a response before stalking off down the hall, Daisy falling in line behind her.

Basira barely waits for the others to take their seats before she launches into her interrogation. Although her eyes remain fixed on Oliver, her first question isn’t directed at him.

“Why is he here, Jon?”

“Like I said, I invited him.” Jon glances at Oliver, apologetic. It feels odd to talk about him as if he isn’t present.

“Why?”

“Mutual curiosity, I expect,” Oliver cuts in, inclining his head towards Jon. “You have questions for me.”

Jon returns a nod. He has ulterior motives, and Oliver knows it. To pretend otherwise would be pointless, not to mention insulting.

“Oliver is an Avatar of the End,” Jon tells the others. “There might be a chance he could tell us how much of what Elias says is true.”

“And what’s the price tag?” Basira asks.

“He has questions of his own. He could tell in the hospital that there’s something… wrong about me. Obviously, I couldn’t talk about it where Elias could hear.”

“You shouldn’t disclose it at all,” Basira says. “If any of it gets back to him –”

“Oliver has no reason to betray our confidence.” Jon’s gaze flicks to Oliver. “Right?”

“Consider me a neutral party,” Oliver replies.

“You’re going to just… take him at his word,” Basira scoffs.

“The End has no Ritual,” Jon says, “and it has no reason to prevent any of the other Entities from successfully pulling off their own Rituals. No matter what happens to this world, the End will claim everything eventually. The when and how are irrelevant to it. In the meantime, the world as-is suits it just fine. It has no desire to postpone or hasten the end of all things.”

“Terminus is what it is,” Oliver agrees. “I have neither the power nor the desire to contradict it.”

“Then why would you help us?” Basira asks.

“I never said that I would.”

“I’m not asking you to actively intervene,” Jon says before Basira can offer a retort. “I just want to talk. That… is why you came here, isn’t it?”

Oliver hesitates for a moment before answering. “Your curiosity must have rubbed off on me.”

Unbidden, Oliver’s statement rushes to the forefront of Jon’s mind: I still remember the first time I tried to touch one…. I don’t know why I did it; I knew it was a stupid thing to do. But I just… maybe I wanted it this way.

“Don’t know about that,” Jon says quietly. “Curiosity is only human.”

And the worst part was that, somewhere in me, I – I liked it, the statement plays on. Underneath all that awful fear, it felt like… home.

“Perhaps,” Oliver says, noncommittal.

“So you’ll tell us what we want to know,” Daisy finally speaks up. Despite her veneer of calm – leaning back in her chair, arms crossed – her bouncing leg belies her agitation.

“It makes no difference to me.” Oliver shrugs. “Though I can’t promise my answers will be satisfying.”

“I still don’t like this,” Basira says, glaring askance at Oliver.

“Look,” Jon says, “this is the only way I can think of to figure out what stakes we’re working with. Jonah has been cheating death for centuries–”

“Jon!” Basira hisses.

“It’s important context,” Jon argues back. “And anyway, it’s going to come up when I tell him my story. It’s not exactly a detail I can gloss over; it’s central to the plot.” He sighs and looks at Oliver. “Elias is Jonah Magnus, the original founder of the Institute.”

Basira throws her hands up with a frustrated snarl. She turns to Daisy for support, but Daisy only offers a sympathetic grimace and a half-shrug.

“I thought there was something odd about him,” Oliver says blandly. “He’s long past his expiration date.”

Daisy snorts at that. Judging from the bemused, almost startled expression on Oliver’s face, he hadn’t expected to garner anything other than aggression from her.

“Whenever one of his vessels is… compromised,” Jon elaborates, “or nearing the end of its usefulness, he takes a new one.”

Recovering from his fleeting bewilderment, Oliver turns his attention back to Jon. “He wouldn’t be the first.”

“Maxwell Rayner and Simon Fairchild,” Basira says.

Oliver nods. “Among others.”

“Does that… I don’t know – offend the End?” Martin asks.

“No,” Oliver says. “They can’t outrun it forever, as so many have discovered firsthand.”

“Like Rayner,” Daisy says.

Once again, Oliver looks thrown off-kilter by Daisy’s diminishing hostility, but he does offer a wary nod in response to her contribution to the conversation. “And in the meantime, their fear of their own mortality ages like a fine wine.”

“Is an unnaturally long life somehow tastier for the End, then?” Martin asks. “I think most of the statements I’ve read about it involved somehow cheating death.”

“Perhaps. If my patron has a conscious mind, it has never spoken to me directly. Everything I know to be true is just… feeling.”

“So it’s as cagey as the other Powers, then,” Daisy says with a derisive chuckle. “Good to know.”

Oliver smooths his hands across his coat, draped across his lap, before glancing at Jon for guidance.

“I gave you a story,” he says reticently. “I would like to hear yours. Then I will answer your questions.”

“Fair enough,” Jon says – and abruptly realizes that he has no idea where to start. “You, uh… you don’t need to hear my whole life story, do you?”

“I did give you an outline of mine,” Oliver says with just a hint of amusement. “I admit I’m curious as to what led you here, but I imagine if you went into detail, we would be here for hours.”

“Much of it doesn’t bear repeating, anyway,” Jon says. “Just the highlights, then?”

“If you please.”

“Right,” Jon mumbles. He takes a deep breath. “Had my first supernatural encounter when I was eight, never got over it, and a combination of lifelong obsession and unchecked curiosity brought me to the Institute. After Gertrude died, Jonah chose me as her replacement because he knew I would be easily molded into the catalyst for his Ritual, and I was.” He looks up. “Is that enough?”

“Which of the Powers marked you first? If you don’t mind me asking.”

“The Web.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah.”

“I thought you seemed… entangled.”

There’s something… off about you, Oliver had told him when they last spoke. The roots, they look… sick. Wrong. And the threads are – tangled.

It’s possible that Oliver was speaking in metaphor – alluding to the threads of fate, so to speak – but the question has been simmering in the back of Jon’s mind for months…

“When you visited me before,” he blurts out. “You said the Web sent you.”

“Yes,” Oliver says candidly. “Not an explicit command, of course. It was more a… well, a feeling. A tug. The Web usually prefers subtlety, but there are times when it wants its marks to know the hand that moves them.”

“S-so, when you said the threads around me were tangled, was that figurative, or could you… see the Web’s influence?”

“The Spider might make its presence known sometimes, but Terminus doesn’t give me the ability to see the shape of its web any more than the Eye does you.”

“Not unless the Web allows itself to be Seen,” Jon says absently.

Despite how much he could See in his future, the Web always remained something of an enigma. It wasn’t until after his standoff with the Eye that he was able to follow the Spider’s threads.

But then, the Eye hadn’t been the only watcher lurking in the Panopticon. The Web had woven itself into the foundation of that place from its conception, and the Spider made no effort to hide. More than once, it stationed itself where he was sure to notice it. The more he thinks on it, the more he suspects that the ensuing ability to See its threads, to Know where they converged, was as much an allowance by the Web as it was due to his communion with the Ceaseless Watcher.

“When I spoke of threads, I meant more…” Oliver opens and closes his mouth a few times as he struggles with his phrasing. “Well, I’ve not yet found a perfect description for it. Think of a life and fate as… a jumble of intersections. Some people feel like thread-and-nail art. Others feel like a snarled ball of yarn. You,” he adds, looking at Jon appraisingly, “are something of a Gordian knot.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Martin demands, a protective edge in his voice.

“It’s not a compliment or an insult,” Oliver says mildly. “Only an observation. Come to think of it, Gertrude was much the same way. The fates of many hinged on the routes she took. Less of a butterfly effect and more of a hurricane.”

“So you can see fate?” Basira asks. A genuine question, but the flat skepticism in her tone makes it sound rhetorical.

“To a limited extent,” Oliver says haltingly. “I see the near-future as it relates to death specifically. When people near the ends of their routes, I can make out the details of their–”

“Seeing those awful veins crawling into them, into wounds not yet open, or skulls not yet split – they sneak up and into throats about to choke on blood, or lurch into hearts about to convulse – webbed over the face of a drunk old man stumbling into his car – one snaking along the road, over towards the railing – I’ll never forget seeing a field of cows the week before they were sent to the abattoir…”

Jon trails off with a tired groan, rubbing his eyes furiously.

“You have a good memory,” Oliver says.

“Sorry,” Jon mumbles. “Archivist thing. Can’t always control it.”

“S-so,” Martin redirects, “if any of us were about to die, you would be able to see it, right?”

“Yes. But I don’t make a habit of telling fortunes,” Oliver clarifies before Martin can ask. “Knowing your end is coming does nothing to prevent it. It only ensures that you will live your final days in fear.”

“Wouldn’t your patron like that?” Daisy asks.

Basira immediately latches onto that thought. “We have a statement here about a book that tells you how and when you’ll die.”

“Case number 0030912,” Jon cites. “Statement of Masato Murray, regarding his inheritance of an untitled book with supernatural properties. Each time the reader rereads their entry, they’ll find that the recorded date of their future death draws closer and the cause more gruesome.”

“Thanks, spooky Google,” Basira says sardonically. “Who needs an indexing system when we have a walking, talking card catalogue on staff?”

“One of my predecessors in ancient times once filed a complaint with the Eye, aggrieved by all the terrible powers it foisted upon him,” Jon says matter-of-factly, not missing a beat. “Being a benevolent patron, it granted him and all future generations of Archivists a convenience feature as compensation.”

“Smartass,” Basira says, but it sounds almost amiable, and Jon allows himself a tentative smile.

His tolerance for making light of this part of himself tends to be variable. Unpredictable, even. On good days, shared gallows humor is a balm, bringing with it a sense of solidarity and camaraderie; on bad days, even the gentlest dig feels like a barb.

He also tends to be selective about whose teasing he can weather. Martin and Georgie are safe more often than not. Daisy can usually get away with it; she’s prompt to let him in on the joke whenever he doesn’t pick up on her sarcasm. Given how blunt Melanie can be, it at least tends to be obvious when her pointed comments are meant in jest or in umbrage; and anyway, he hasn’t yet spoken to her directly since she quit.

Basira, though – she’s always been difficult to read. They have a similar sense of humor, but part of his brain is still living in a time when she saw the worst in him. No matter how many times he tells himself that things are different now, he can’t quite shake that feeling of being on indefinite probation. Hostile attribution bias, he recognizes, but having a label for it doesn’t make it any easier to silence those perennial fears. It’s only recently that he’s been able to take such joking from her in stride. Not always, but sometimes.

“Anyway,” Basira says, looking back to Oliver, “I take it that book is affiliated with the End. It feeds on the reader’s fear of knowing the details of their death.”

“Almost everyone has some degree of fear regarding mortality – their own or that of others,” Oliver says. “For some, that primal fear permeates their entire lives. Others only spare it any thought when it closes in on them. Terminus feeds on all of it equally. I suspect that active encounters with it are more about…”

“Flavor?” Basira suggests.

“So to speak,” Oliver says. “Welcome variety in its diet, but not necessary to sate it.”

“Which is why its Avatars have such wildly different methodologies,” Jon says, nodding to himself. “Justin Gough was allowed to survive a near-death experience, but acquired a debt that had to be paid in the lives of others, killing them in their dreams. Tova McHugh was granted the ability to prolong her own life by passing each of her intended deaths onto others, adding their remaining lifespans to her own. Nathaniel Thorpe was cursed with immortality after trying to cheat his way out of death. He was only one of many gamblers who played such games of chance–”

“Jon,” Basira sighs, “you don’t have to go through the whole roster of personified death omens.”

“Sorry.”

“So what kind of Avatar are you?” Basira asks, looking Oliver up and down. “How do you feed your patron?”

“For me, Terminus has not been particularly demanding. I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s because I never attempted to cheat my way out of death. It simply… chose me – or I wandered across its path – and it never left. Thus far, it seems content to have me play the observer.” He glances at Jon. “You can probably understand that.”

“The Beholding isn’t satisfied to have its Archivist simply observe. It wants its knowledge actively harvested, recorded, curated.” Jon huffs, not bothering to contain his disgust. “Processed.”

The conversation lapses into a tense silence for several seconds before Basira changes tack.

“About Gertrude,” she says. “You tried to warn her about her death.”

“Yes,” Oliver replies.

“Why?”

“The evidence of her death snaked its roots all across London – as far as I could see, and perhaps further. At the time, I’d never seen anything like it. Such a sprawling web of repercussions stemming from a single death – I felt like I had to say something. As I expected, it made no difference in the end.”

Jon worries his lower lip between his teeth. “You said the roots surrounding me seemed sick.”

“You saw roots around Jon?” Martin says urgently, jolting up ramrod-straight in his seat.

“They’re… different from the ones I’ve grown accustomed to,” Oliver says slowly. “There’s no light pulsing within them, no life flowing to or from them. And looking at them, it’s almost like…” He frowns, squinting down at the floor as if it might offer up the words he needs. “It’s like they’re there and not there simultaneously. Faded, like an afterimage – one that can only be seen from a certain angle.”

“Okay, and what does that – what does that mean?” Martin asks.

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?”

“I was hoping Jon could shed some light on it,” Oliver says, raising his head to meet Jon’s eyes. “I may not have the same drive to know that you and yours do, but I find myself returning to the question frequently over the past few months.”

“R-right,” Jon says. “Let me just, uh… where to start…”

Jon rubs at this throat with one hand, the other clenching into a fist where it rests on his knee.

“Jon,” Daisy says, “are you sure about this?”

“Yes, I just, uh –” Jon breathes a nervous laugh. “This never gets any easier.”

“Do you want me to say it?” Martin offers, schooling his tone into something approaching calm. His posture remains rigid, though, hands balled into white-knuckled fists in his lap.

“No, it’s fine.” Jon takes a few deep breaths and then looks Oliver in the eye. “In the future, I ended the world.”

Oliver raises an eyebrow. “I didn’t think the Beholding gave you any precognitive abilities.”

“It, uh – it doesn’t. I didn’t foresee the future, I lived it. For… for a long time, actually, so I –” Jon exhales a humorless chuckle. “I probably meet your definition of past my expiration date.”

Oliver tilts his head, considering.

“Hard to say,” he settles on. “You’re… a bit of a paradox. Feels as if you exist in multiple states at once, and it’s difficult for me to tell which one is true.”

“Maybe all of them are,” Jon says distractedly. “But, I, uh – I eventually found a way to come back to before the change – or, to send my consciousness back, anyway. But only as far back as the coma. I… I wish it had taken me back further – back to the very beginning, though I” – Jon huffs – “I suppose it’s hard to say what counts as the beginning.”

“It depends on how you want to define a beginning,” Oliver says. “In a way, the advent of existence marked the beginning of the end. Everything since then has been just another domino.”

“Well,” Jon begins, but Daisy cuts him off.

“Nope,” she says bluntly. “You go down that semantic rabbit hole and we’ll be here forever.”

“Fine,” Jon says with a petulant sigh. “Anyway, I couldn’t figure out how to wake up on my own, so just like the first time I was here, I had to wait for you to come along and help.”

“I still don’t understand why,” Oliver says.

“Neither do I, I’m afraid.”

“Not to encroach on your sphere of influence, but I think in this case, not knowing the answer might bother me even more than it does you.” Oliver releases a quiet sigh. “So you came back to stop yourself from starting the apocalypse.”

“It’s not like he chose to end the world,” Martin says, immediately leaping to Jon’s defense once more.

“Apologies,” Oliver says with an earnest nod in Martin’s direction. “I didn’t intend to imply otherwise.” He glances at Jon. “I’ve known of many who seek to bring on the end in the hopes that they will be able to choose what shape it takes. You don’t strike me as the sort.”

“No. But Jonah is.” Jon ducks his head as he speaks, fingers twisting in his jumper. “He wanted – wants to rule over a world reshaped in the Beholding’s image. He needed an Archivist with particular qualities to serve as the linchpin of his Ritual. So he created one. By the time he showed his hand, it was too late. I was the key, and Jonah didn’t need my consent in order to open the door.”

“I imagine it didn’t go as he planned,” Oliver says.

“No,” Jon says with a grim laugh. “No, it didn’t. He suffered as much as anyone else did in that reality. It all started because he was afraid of his own mortality, and yet – in the end, he met a fate worse than death.”

“Whatever it was, he deserved it,” Martin mutters.

“Maybe so,” Jon says. “But it was never about deserving. There was some poetic justice there, seeing him brought down by his own hubris, but… at the end of the day, he got the same treatment as anyone else. Just – pointless suffering, utterly divorced from the concept of consequences. Had a way of… diluting the schadenfreude, honestly.”

Martin’s spark of vindication appears to fizzle out as Jon speaks, his shoulders slumping and his eyes softening.

“Regardless,” Jon continues, “Jonah wanted to be a god, but at his core, he was no different from any other human. Fodder for the Fears. And the one he feared the most – it was in no hurry to finish the meal. I imagine by the time Terminus finally came for him in earnest, he would have welcomed it.”

“Those who seek immortality always come to see it as a curse in time,” Oliver says sagely. “When they come to terms with the fact that there is no such thing as a truly immortal existence, it comes as a relief.”

“I walked through your domain once,” Jon says after a pause. “You gave me a statement about the End’s place in that world. The domains were reluctant to let their victims die – they’d bring them to the brink, then revive them and repeat the process – but the Fears are greedy. Eventually, they would suck their victims dry –”

“– bones – every one of them – picked clean and cracked open – desperately gnawing – trying to reach whatever scant marrow might have remained inside – sucked from them to leave nothing but dry, white fragments – the hunger he saw in their eyes–”

Jon bites down on his tongue. That’s quite enough of that.

“You alright?” Martin says, leaning over and putting a hand on Jon’s knee.

“Sorry,” Jon says gruffly. “That one was…”

“Grisly?” Daisy says.

“Yeah,” Jon huffs. “But – not necessarily inapt? That reality was a closed economy. No new people were being born. The ones who already existed were destined to die, no matter how unwilling the other Fears were to grant that release.”

“As has always been the order of things,” Oliver says.

“You predicted that eventually the Fears would start poaching victims from one another’s domains – and they did. There were…” Jon grimaces. “There were a lot of territorial disputes, towards the end there. Domains encroaching on one another, monsters fighting over scraps. The Eye got its fill Watching it all play out, of course, but given enough time, it would have starved, same as all the rest.”

“And once the world was rendered barren,” Oliver says, understanding, “Terminus itself would die.”

Jon nods. “And until that happened, both you and your patron were content to let things play out.”

“Terminus is patient.”

Too patient, Jon thought at the time.

“I don’t think it was your intention,” he says, “but your statement did come as a relief. I already expected as much – that eventually it would all end – but having it corroborated by an authority on the matter was… very welcome.”

“People may fear death,” Oliver says, “but anyone who outruns it long enough finds that there is a much deeper fear hiding underneath – that of having the release of death withheld from them.”

“We have a lot of statements to that tune,” Basira says.

“I imagine so.”

“So,” Daisy says brusquely, “is that enough of a story for you?”

“I suppose,” Oliver says. “Although it raises more questions than it grants answers.”

“Our turn for questions, then?” Basira asks. She doesn’t wait for an answer. “The… veins, or… roots you saw around Gertrude. You’re saying they didn’t just foretell her death, but showed how it would impact everything else. So, what about the ones you saw around Jon?”

“It’s difficult to observe them for any length of time, but they do seem… more sprawling.” Oliver studies Jon for a moment, considering. “Like you are the heart of a watershed moment destined to happen.”

“So that’s it, then,” Jon says dully. “I’m still the spark for it all.”

Pandora’s box with a ‘use by’ date, he thinks to himself, somewhat hysterically.

He already knew it to be true, but that doesn’t make the confirmation any less harrowing. Everything hinges on his ability to keep his head above water, but the fate of the world weighs ever more heavily on his shoulders, pressing down, down, down –

“Does that mean…” Jon hugs his middle, slowly curling in on himself. “Does that mean it’s going to happen again?”

“I cannot say.” If Jon’s not mistaken, Oliver sounds… almost sympathetic. “This is unprecedented. I can only theorize. It’s possible that you’re like Gertrude, and what I see is a premonition. Or maybe the reality you came from still exists, parallel to this one, and it still clings to you. Perhaps it’s a Schrödinger’s cat, and it both does and does not exist, right up until the point where you do or do not bring it into being. Or maybe it doesn't exist, and the roots I see are only… imprints, so to speak. Echoes of a time and place that this world will never overlap.”

“Like trace fossils,” Jon murmurs. “Ghosts.”

“If you like.”

“Could you – could you follow them?” Jon can feel his pulse quicken, his heart thrumming in his throat. “See where they originate?”

“They originate from you.”

“O-oh.” Jon’s gaze darts uncertainly around the area before fixing on Oliver again. “Then, uh – can you see where they end?”

“You have a suspicion,” Basira says, watching Jon carefully.

Jon swallows around the breath caught in his throat. “What if they go back to Hill Top Road?”

“As far as I can tell, they reach out in all directions,” Oliver says. “There may not be a single end point. Regardless, I have no desire to visit Hill Top Road.”

“Oh,” Jon says despondently. It’s not like he expected Oliver to go out of his way to help, but…

“Would it really tell you anything of value anyway?” Martin asks.

“I don’t know,” Jon says, running a hand through his hair, one finger getting caught in a knot and pulling hard at his scalp. “But – but it feels like something I should at least check –”

“To what end?” Daisy asks. Jon looks at her blankly. “No offense, Sims, but the most likely outcome is you get no real answers, you lose yourself obsessing over theories, each more catastrophic than the last, and you spend the next few weeks compulsively checking yourself for spiders. Some things aren’t worth chasing after.”

“I just – I feel like I should know one way or the other –”

“Is that you or the Eye talking?” Martin asks.

“What’s the difference?” Jon says flatly. He immediately regrets it when he glimpses the expression on Martin’s face – a very familiar mixture of concern and frustration. “I’m sorry. Just… I don’t know. I don’t Know.”

Jon tugs on his hair once more, focusing on the dull ache it produces. He’s always had trouble letting things go. Letting questions go unanswered; letting mysteries go unsolved. The Beholding just nurtured that obsessiveness, encouraged that impulse to proliferate in his head like a weed and choke out his inhibitions.

“You’re here now,” Martin says firmly. “You can’t go back, so you may as well go forward.”

“Yeah,” Jon says, guilt heavy and searing in his chest.

“Like I said,” Oliver says, rubbing the back of his neck, “my knowledge of the future is narrow. I can’t tell you anything about parallel universes, or branching timelines, or the ability to alter history. The only certainty is that anything that begins will have an end, one way or another. All the rest is just… details.”

Martin folds his arms across his chest, examining Oliver with narrowed eyes. “You say that like the details are irrelevant.”

“I wonder about that,” Oliver says softly.

“Well, I think our experiences matter,” Martin says. “The fact that we were here at all, it’s… it’s not nothing.”

“Even those who make the greatest impact are forgotten in time.”

“So what? It will always have happened, even if no one is alive to remember it. And – and you never know when something little will have an impact on someone, which contributes to them doing something that makes a greater impact – that changes history.”

“Even time itself will end eventually. History will be forgotten, and nothing will remain to register its loss.”

“And?” Martin persists. “We won’t be around to see it. In the meantime, we’re here. We’re alive. If we’re going to end no matter what, why not make it worthwhile? Sure, there are no equivalent powers of hope and love to counter the Fears, but – but who cares? That just means that we have to make up for that absence.” Jon smiles to himself as Martin builds momentum – shoulders pushed back, chest thrust out, head held higher, speech growing more impassioned as he argues his point. “If a few mistakes and some asshole with a god complex can end the world, who’s to say a few deliberate kindnesses can’t save it?”

“Am I the asshole with the god complex?” Jon says drily. Judging from Martin’s disapproving scowl, he is not in the mood for self-deprecating humor. “Sorry, sorry. But, uh – in all seriousness, I think it was more than a few mistakes on my part–”

“You know what I meant, Jon,” Martin snaps. “And – and fine, maybe a few kindnesses can’t save the whole world, but – but they can save someone’s world. They can save a person. Doesn’t that mean something?”

“Yes,” Jon says with a small smile. “Yes, it does.”

“R-right.” Martin blinks several times, momentarily stunned by the lack of resistance. “It doesn’t change the world – except for how it does. Just – the universe might not care, but we can, and that’s exactly why we should. It’s… it’s what we owe to each other. That’s what I think, at least.”

Martin goes quiet then, arms still folded with a mixture of self-consciousness and sullen defiance.

“How long have you had that rant queued up?” Daisy teases.

“A while,” Martin says, rubbing his arm sheepishly.

“You’re quite the romantic,” Oliver says. He says it like a compliment, albeit somewhat wistful.

“Yeah, well.” Martin blushes at the praise in spite of himself. “Someone has to counter the fatalism around here.”

If you ask Jon, there are many reasons to love Martin Blackwood. This is doubtless one of them.

“Besides,” Martin recovers, apparently on a roll now, “it seems to me there’s as much evidence for fate being changeable as not. Yeah, sure, eventually everything dies, but who’s to say that the details are set in stone? Like – like that book, the one where the details of a person’s death change every time they read it.”

“But does their fate actually change, or is it just the book messing with their heads?” Basira says, tapping her fingers against her lips and looking down at the floor pensively. “If the End has foreknowledge of a person’s death, maybe the last entry a person reads before dying was always their fate, and all the previous accounts were just lies intended to seed fear.”

When Jon opens his mouth to chime in, the Archive seizes the initiative, unceremonious as ever.

"When did it change?” comes the cadence of Masato Murray. “Was it when I turned back to read it again? Or perhaps when I had made the decision to never visit Lancashire? If the book knew the future, then how much did it know me? My decisions and choices were my own, so was it responding to them or simply to the fact that I opened the book again? Perhaps it changed every time I opened it, even if I didn’t read the page, every interaction changing my fate…. When I close the book I wonder: are those same words still there, squatting and biding their time, or have they already changed into some new unknown terror that I can neither know nor avoid, waiting to spring on me.”

Jon holds his breath in anticipation. After a few seconds of suspense, the pressure recedes, the Archive having spoken its peace.

“Archive’s talkative today,” Basira observes.

“Apparently,” Jon grumbles. “What I originally meant to say was that I’ve wondered the same thing – whether the book was really telling the future or simply playing on the fears of the reader.”

“Maybe offering textual support is another convenience feature?” Daisy keeps her tone carefully neutral, gauging his mood.

“The Beholding is known for being exceedingly generous,” he retorts.

Basira ignores the banter and speaks directly to Oliver. “Do you know?”

“I’m unfamiliar with the book in question,” he replies. “All the deaths I’ve personally foreseen have come to pass so far. That says nothing about whether or not the End always reveals the truth to all who cross its path.”

“Right.” Basira shakes her head. “Not sure why I expected a straightforward answer.”

“Maybe there isn’t one,” Martin says. For a fraction of a second, Basira tenses. Jon suspects she’s just as repulsed by such a prospect as he is.

“Whatever,” she says curtly. “It isn’t important right now. What I want to know is how to deal with Jonah Magnus. So” – she pins Oliver in place with sharp, unblinking eyes – “what can you tell us about his mortality?”

“In short? He won’t live forever, regardless of how much he wants to deny that reality.”

“Yeah, you’ve said,” Daisy says, tossing her head back with an impatient groan. “Him dying eventually doesn’t help us now.”

“I’m not a mind-reader,” Oliver says. “If there’s more to your question, you’ll need to elaborate. What are you actually asking? How to kill him? For me to tell you whether his death is on the horizon?”

“Jonah claims that he’s the ‘beating heart of the Institute,’” Jon explains. “He says that if he dies, everyone else who works here dies as well. You were able to see the ripples created by Gertrude’s death. I suppose I thought – maybe you could tell us if there’s something similar with Jonah.”

“If his death was imminent, perhaps.” Oliver averts his eyes as he twists a ring around his finger, growing increasingly tense under such concentrated scrutiny. “But as I said before, I don’t make a habit of telling fortunes.”

“So you won’t tell us,” Martin says.

“To be frank, this place is rife with potential.” Oliver casts his gaze around the area, as if seeing something the others cannot. “It would be… difficult to untangle it all.”

“Fine,” Basira says tartly. “Then can you tell us whether it’s possible for him to set up a dead man’s switch in the first place? Seems to me something like that would be the End’s domain, wouldn’t it?”

“It would.”

“Then would he be able to exercise any real power over it?” Basira persists. “There’s nothing inherent to the Eye that suggests its Avatars should be able to bind others’ lives to them. Even the Archivist doesn’t work like that – we’re linked to Jon as far as being unable to quit goes, but we won’t die if he does. I think it’s more likely that Jonah did something extra to bind the Institute to himself.”

“Assuming he’s even telling the truth,” Daisy says.

“So, is there an artefact that could let him do it?” Basira asks, still staring Oliver down. “A ritual? A favor from an affiliate of the End, maybe?”

“Terminus has a variety of ways in which it operates,” Oliver says cagily, “same as all the other Powers. I don’t seek out instances of those manifestations. Given the sheer number of statements collected here, it's likely you’re all more familiar with the breadth of its influence than I am.”

“You’re very helpful,” Daisy scoffs.

Oliver hunches his shoulders, chastised. It’s an odd sight – Jon wouldn’t have expected him to be particularly affected by such an accusation. Oliver never promised to be helpful; does not owe them his cooperation. Before Jon can pursue that thought any further, though, Oliver continues.

“I will say that Terminus is its own master. Those who believe they have tamed it are only fooling themselves. Orchestrating their own misery. The moment in which they finally realize that fact – that they have never had the upper hand, that the entire time they have never strayed from the route to which Terminus binds them…” Oliver chews the inside of his cheek, considering. “The existential terror that moment creates – I wonder sometimes whether it’s a delicacy to my patron.”

“Sounds a lot like the Web,” Basira says. The suggestion must pique his interest, because Oliver sits up straighter and leans forward ever so slightly.

“Except the Web reviles its extinction as much as the other powers, and as much as any mortal mind,” he says – not quite excited, but more engaged than before. “Terminus, on the other hand – its eventual oblivion is part and parcel of its existence. It does not fear the conclusion of its story. The Web will never surrender to such a fate. It will always seek an escape route, some way to appoint itself the weaver of its own ends. Its threads can never stray from the confines of the routes dictated by Terminus, but the concept that it may itself be under the guidance of another… such a thing is incompatible with its definition. Still, the shape of the Spider’s web will always mirror the blueprints of a greater architect.”

“And you think the same is true for Jonah,” Jon says.

“I know it is.”

“Okay, but – but Jon changed fate,” Martin protests. “In a million little ways – some we probably don’t even know about – and some big ones, too. So who’s to say that every step of the route is part of the End’s blueprints? What if – hold on.”

Martin stands and moves to Jon’s makeshift desk, rummaging around for a few seconds before coming up with a pen. He snatches one of Melanie’s therapy worksheets from the top of the pile and turns it over to the blank side.

“What if the only things set in stone are – are certain points along the route,” he says, scribbling a scattering of dots across the page, “but all that matters is that the route eventually intersects with those points?” Martin connects two points with a wavy, sine-like line. “Maybe it doesn’t even matter how convoluted” – he draws another line, this time with several loop-de-loops – “or long” – yet another line, this one traveling all the way up to the top of the page and making several winding turns before plunging back down to connect with the next dot – “the path is.” He holds up the finished product for everyone to see. “As long as the dots connect, the rest is free reign.”

“I like to think that choice plays a role,” Oliver says. “That fate is less of a track and more of a guideline. But honestly, there’s no way to know for certain. I only know the end point. The rest is speculation.”

“It’s also possible that the rift brought me to an alternate reality,” Jon says, eyes downcast. “If the reality of my original timeline still exists, I haven’t changed fate at all. I’ve just jumped to a different track.”

“Okay, and if that’s the case, and this is a different dimension,” Martin says heatedly, “then that means it has its own timeline and its own future, and whatever happened in your future has no bearing on ours.” Martin glares, daring Jon to argue. He doesn’t. “So it’s a moot point. If we can’t know one way or the other whether the future is already written, then let’s just act as if it isn’t. Prepare for the worst and hope for the best. At least then it will feel meaningful.”

“The worst isn’t something you can prepare for,” Jon says darkly. “Trust me, I know.”

“If I want ominous proverbs, I’ll let you know,” Martin immediately counters – and Jon loves him for it. Daisy chokes on a startled laugh; Martin ignores her, instead pivoting to face Oliver. “We want to kill Jonah Magnus. Or, at least make it so he can’t perform his Ritual. But preferably kill.”

“Never realized you were so bloodthirsty, Blackwood,” Daisy says approvingly.

“The world will be a better place without him in it,” Martin says without a hint of indecision, not looking away from Oliver. “Jonah’s original body is in the center of the Panopticon. Except his eyes, because apparently transplanting them into innocent people is how he cheats death, because of course it is, why wouldn’t it be some messed up–”

“Martin,” Basira sighs.

“Okay, fine, moving on,” Martin sasses back. “It makes me wonder, would destroying his original body hurt him, or do we need to destroy his original eyes as well, or would destroying just his eyes be enough? And – and would it kill him, or just – blind him, disconnect him from the Beholding? Or – or would that kill him, because the Beholding is what’s keeping him alive?”

“Your guesses are as good as mine,” Oliver says. “Much of this really does come down to speculation and thought experiment, and it seems you’ve done plenty of that amongst yourselves already. I’m afraid that the only certainty I can offer is the certainty of an ending, and I don’t think that’s as much of a consolation to you as it is to me.”

“No, it’s not,” Martin says.

“But, uh – thank you for your honesty,” Jon jumps in. “For trying.”

“I really do wish I had better answers for you,” Oliver says, not quite meeting his eyes. “The End is… somewhat of an echo chamber at times. When you’re already on the inside looking out, it can be… difficult, to shift perspective.”

“I wouldn’t be able to offer many straightforward answers about my patron, either,” Jon admits.

“Wait,” Martin says. “Could you… could you at least tell us whether you can see anything about our deaths?”

Oliver draws in a deep breath and releases it slowly. “In my experience, there’s nothing to be gained from such knowledge.”

“Tell us anyway,” Basira says.

“Why?” Oliver says tiredly, his hands curling into loose fists. “Why do you want to know?”

“Because if you can see something, it could help us narrow down possibilities,” Basira replies. “If you see all of us dying in the same way, maybe it means we all die when Magnus does.”

“Or it just means you all die in the same freak accident.”

“Wait, do we?” Martin asks, his voice pitching higher in alarm.

“It was just an example,” Oliver says, scrubbing one hand down his face. “I’m just saying that this kind of knowledge doesn’t tend to give people the answers that they want.” Met with nothing but four determined stares, his shoulders sag in defeat. “Are you all certain you want to know?”

Everyone nods. Oliver equivocates for a full minute, rubbing at his forehead in complete silence. Eventually, he releases a long, low sigh.

“Right now,” he says, “I don’t see death closing in on any one of you.”

“Shit,” Martin says on a heavy exhale. “The way you were putting it off, I was sure you were going to predict a massacre.”

“Honestly,” Daisy mutters. “Bury the lead much?”

Jon ignores them, preoccupied with the implications of Oliver's revelation. If they were planning on killing Jonah tomorrow, it would say nothing about whether they were to succeed, but it would suggest they don’t die in the process, which would at least offer some reassurance going in. But Jon has no idea when they’ll be able to execute any sort of plan. This only confirms that none of them are likely to die in the next few weeks – and that’s assuming that Oliver’s premonition is accurate. Up until now, his predictions have come true, but there’s a first time for everything.

Judging from the contemplative frown on Basira’s face, she’s running through the same calculations.

“How far out can you see?” she asks.

“It varies,” Oliver says. “Weeks, usually. Sometimes months.”

“And it could change in a few weeks,” Daisy says.

“It could change tomorrow. It could change an hour from now.” Oliver looks between the four of them with a faint, melancholy smile. “I did warn you that it wouldn’t offer much sense of security. It only makes you want to know more.”

“Look where you are,” Basira scoffs.

“Point taken,” Oliver says with a startled laugh. “But honestly, ask yourself whether it’s all that different from Masato Murray and his book. If it’s worth living your life around the question of when and how – especially when the answer, should you receive one, will never put your mind at ease.”

“Just to be clear, ah – was I included in that prophecy? Or do you still see the veins around me?” Jon asks. Oliver raises his eyebrows. “I know, I know – the answer won’t satisfy me. Just – humor me?”

“Yes,” Oliver sighs, “I can still see them, if I look for them, but as we covered quite exhaustively, they look atypical and wrong and I don’t know what to make of them.” A tinge of indignation breaks through Oliver's characterisic mild manner – and then the moment passes. “I don’t think they indicate an imminent demise, but much about you is an enigma.”

“And there’s nothing else you can tell us about Jonah Magnus?” Basira asks.

“It isn’t a matter of if he can be killed, but how. Unfortunately, you’ll have to figure that part out for yourselves. As for whether or to what extent he could bind his fate to the rest of the Institute… there are any number of strange phenomena and improbable feats in this world. I would never claim to be an authority on the scope of it all.” Oliver offers another wistful ghost of a smile. “I’m afraid you might just have to take a leap of faith.”

Again, Jon thinks with an inward sigh.

But at least he can say he’s had practice.

End Notes:

Citations for Jon’s Archive-speak are as follows: MAG 011; 011; 168; 121; 156; 070. The “I still remember the first time…” & “And the worst part was that…” Oliver quotes are from MAG 121.  

Yes, “what we owe to each other” is a nod to The Good Place.  

So. This… was a beast of a chapter, and the last half of it really kicked my ass, which is why it’s taken so long to finally finish it. Still not sure how I feel about it – it’s a bit of a digression, but I’m hoping it still fits in thematically. Either way, next chapter we’re moving on to Ny-Ålesund.

Hopefully it won’t take me an entire month this time to write the next chapter, but… we’re down to two episodes left, folks. Chances are, next time I update, we’ll have heard the series finale. Are you all ready? Because I categorically am NOT. aaaaaaaaa

(That said, I already have a handful of epilogue standalone fics planned for this AU once the main story is done. Because hurt/comfort and recovery fics are going to be at the top of my hierarchy of needs once Jonny Sims destroys me in two weeks, I s2g.)

Thanks for reading!

#tma #the magnus archives #tma fic #tma spoilers #long post

[gohyuck]

4+4+17 with haechan

surgical resident!haechan and surgical resident!reader

i’ve been watching a lot of grey’s recently lol. the college is more “just out of med school” and the coming of age is more “feeling pain and coping” because that’s a life skill hard-learned and also because I had a VERY similar request to this one for renjun (found here) and I don’t wanna repeat that

warning: minor character death

4) college

4) coming of age

17) “It feels like I’m suffocating.”

donghyuck’s head is buried in his hands when you find him sitting on a spare gurney in one of the more empty hallways of the hospital. his lab coat is in a wrinkled pile on one side of him, while an empty - and totally crushed - plastic water bottle is on the other.

he doesn’t move at all when you move his lab coat aside to sit down next to him.

“bad day?” you ask, realizing that he isn’t going to tell you to leave like you’d been afraid he would. tentatively, you place a gentle hand on top of his hunched back. at feeling your touch, your boyfriend heaves a heavy sigh.

“dr. jung... let me scrub in on a ventricular restoration to treat heart failure in this heart attack victim today and it-it...” he chokes on his own words, and you find yourself running a hand up and down his back, doing your best to soothe him as he tries to find the words to continue. “the patient was so... young. he’d just had a second kid - a newborn - and he was fine one day and i was cutting into him to look at his heart the next, fuck!”

donghyuck quickly lifts his head out of his hands as he swears, his volume reaching a high out of nowhere as his shoulders stiffen. you pull your hand away from him immediately, as if stung, but you’re quick to place it back in the same place as he deflates in on himself once more.

“dr. jung had to tell the patient’s wife about her loss. maybe if she’d - it she’d cried, or screamed, it would feel less real, but she just stood there and-and-and stared right through jaehyun and right through me for the longest time until she just nodded, sat back down, and asked if she could be alone with her sons for a moment, please, and that she was grateful we’d done all we could. she was the one grieving but in that moment of her strength it... honestly, it felt like i had lost someone, too. she couldn’t cry in front of her boys but i wanted to cry for her it- god, this job fucking sucks. it sucks! it feels like i’m- like i’m suffocating, sometimes.”

you can’t say you aren’t taken aback by donghyuck’s outburst - after all, you’ve spent your entire internships and residencies together, and have been dating for about a year, and he’s never once sounded so distraught about the horrors that come with practicing medicine, specifically with practicing surgery. if anything, he’s one of the most enthusiastic residents you can think of, especially when it comes to traumas and sudden surgeries. while pretty much all surgeons are swift, you’ve never seen someone as quick on their feet as hyuck. he’s saved plenty of lives while having seen plenty of deaths. nothing he’s speaking of is new to him, but the way his tone shifts along the troughs and peaks of his story make you feel as if maybe even the most radiant people have breaking points.

“hyuck... babe...” you start, trailing off almost immediately as you try to think. after a moment - it hits you. you know exactly what to do.

you don’t try to say anything, knowing it’ll be to no avail. he’s justified in how he feels - patient deaths may happen often, but surgeons are expected to grieve them quietly. it’s only natural that everyone has a breaking point with them. hell, you’ve been there - for you, it was a young woman with muscular dystrophy.

you don’t try to say anything - you just stand up and reach your hand out, directly in his line of sight. donghyuck looks up at you, brows furrowed and eyes looking as if he’s drowning inside.

“put your coat on and take my hand,” you wiggle your fingers at him. “i want to show you something.”

he’s dumbfounded.

“this isn’t really the time-”

“i promise you that it is. trust me, yeah?”

donghyuck blinks slowly once, twice, thrice before he sighs and places on hand in yours, using the other to grab onto his lab coat. you smile at him and pull him up to stand beside you. he won’t feel this way forever, but if you can ease the process, you’ll do it.

♕ ♕ ♕

“are you sure we’re allowed in here?” hyuck’s voice is raspy as he whispers directly into your ear. one of his hands is situated on your lower back, though you aren’t sure whether it’s to keep you close or keep you away. you nod your head.

“i was on pediatric service today, it shouldn’t be a problem,” you respond, leading him into the newborn nursery. “besides, we’re doctors. we work here. anyways, most mothers will keep their newborns with them, but sometimes they’ll feel it’s safest for their baby to be in the newborn nursery.”

“some of them are also abandoned babies, right?” he murmurs, following you through the door.

“right. pretty much all of them get adopted reasonably quickly because the hospital is so accredited, and because babies are adopted fast in comparison, anyways. they’ve been given a life, and we give them the ability to live. sounds like a good deal to me, right?” your last sentence deteriorates into a form of baby speak as you talk at - though not to - the sleeping little boy in the crib closest to you.

donghyuck leans over the crib next to the one you’re at, smiling tentatively at the awake baby in it and allowing himself a small laugh when she gurgles back at him. neither of you dare to touch them, but you suspect just seeing them will put your boyfriend in better spirits.

he smiles down at the baby girl for a bit before looking up and slowly surveying the nursery. finally, donghyuck turns to look at you, his soft smile growing slightly.

“it’s kind of cliché to show me the ‘miracle of life’ after i’ve witnessed a death, isn’t it?” he teases, stepping towards you and resting his hands on your waist. you allow yourself a short laugh before responding.

“i was just thinking that babies are cute, to be honest,” you say, and hyuck chuckles softly before leaning and pressing a kiss to your forehead.

“whatever the thought process was, it worked,” he assures you, and you grin at him before looping your arms around his neck for a hug. donghyuck can’t help but move his lips to rest by one of your ear’s before speaking again, his voice low this time.

“you know, these babies are kind of adorable. what say we make one of our own in an on call room some time?”

“you little-” you unwrap yourself from his arms, gently smacking his chest. he notes the blush and the smile on your face, though, and can’t help but place his lips on your forehead again. just as you let your eyes slide shut to savor the moment, a loud - or as loud as one can be around newborns - exclamation startles you.

“lee. (name). what the hell are you two doing?” the two of you find one of the attending pediatric doctors - dr. suh, actually - looking down at the two of you, though there’s no anger in his eyes. still, you and your boyfriend fly apart from each other, rushing to explain yourselves.

“we wanted to experience the miracle of life-” you start.

“babies are really, really, cute-” donghyuck speaks at the same time as you. you both stop abruptly to look at dr. suh, then at each other, then back to dr. suh again. he’s grinning at the two of you, thoroughly entertained. you can feel the gears start to grind in donghyuck’s head. before you can stop him from opening his mouth, he speaks, tone sly when he does.

“actually, (name) and i were thinking that we want to make one of our own-”

“donghyuck!”

#thekpopnetwork #haechan #haechan scenario #haechan scenarios #nct #nct scenario #nct scenarios #nct dream #nct dream scenario #nct dream scenarios #donghyuck #donghyuck scenario #donghyuck scenarios #nct 127 #nct 127 scenario #nct 127 scenarios #haechan angst #haechan fluff #donghyuck angst #donghyuck fluff #haechan imagine #donghyuck imagine

[ears-awake-eyes-opened]

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes — my first impressions

(I’ve shared my thoughts and feelings about the book in the spoilers chat group, but I’ve waited awhile as a courtesy before posting them on my blog. The book has been out for over a month now so ***TBOSAS spoilers ahead***. These musings are not particularly organized and are a bit rambling and repetitive.)

***

I read the book over the course of 3 days, and then recovery afterward took several days beyond that. I love the disturbing coming of age tale that Suzanne Collins has crafted for Snow. Everything she wrote for him was trauma-informed. He experienced the severe early life attachment trauma of losing both parents between ages 3-7, which is old enough to have developed the capacity for love because he received that from his mother, and young enough for the severity of the trauma to be difficult to impossible to integrate, especially in an environment of poverty, hunger, manipulation and deception to hide the family misfortune. He spent his whole life trying to control the chaos which was really just trauma on repeat within himself. This showed up as perfectionism in school and ambition for more than survival. He was the ideal candidate to be groomed by Dr. Gaul. Under all those conditions, the kid didn’t really have the capacity to become anything other than a tyrant.

I enjoyed the unfolding of his relationship with Lucy Gray. I felt the intensity between them (trauma bond), and I felt their mutual recognition in 12 that the intensity didn’t mean they were compatible. The running off together near the end was a last-ditch effort for both of them at survival. If they hadn’t found the guns and actually had run north, then in time they probably would have abandoned one another, since they wanted opposite things: safety and control VS freedoms and song. In a short time I believe they would have resented and detested each other. 18 years old was too late for him. His patterns were already well established.

I think SC showed us every ounce of fluff that Snow had in him. There just wasn’t much fluffiness to work with. The book ended with me believing he had a capacity for love; he wasn’t a psychopath just a deeply traumatized person. I think it’s telling how in the middle he said something like, “I think she (Lucy Gray) may be in love with me.” Rather than, “I think I may be in love with her.” In that relationship he felt excitement within idealization which faded in reality and would have moved toward increasing disgust toward her if the ending had played out differently. It’s hard to have fluff when the characters motivations are self-centered. The opposite of Katniss and Peeta whose relationship unfolded as they were both trying to protect others. Snow felt as much for Lucy Gray as his capacity allowed, but the chaos in feeling and in relationship was the opposite of what he wanted for his life. When he started being irritated with song, that was ultimate sign of death for that relationship. Lucy Gray WAS song. And beyond the idealization phase he would have detested her.

The plot was so thick with characters and details. SC used 3rd person perspective for this one but it wasn’t omniscient. We only got to see through Snow’s eyes. I enjoyed those moments that felt more fluffy where we saw clearly the complexity of his character and humanity. This really is a coming of age story. He’s becoming the man he already is. Gaul’s influence was the clincher. She was a predator and manipulated Snow on the path he actually wanted most. I feel for him. Throughout the book and still. I even feel now for the tyrant he becomes. That’s masterful writing right there.

I like how in the end Snow vowed to marry someone he didn’t love, recognizing that love was too chaotic. I’m thrilled that Lucy Gray added verses to the hanging tree song for him and then all those years later Katniss sang those verses. I love all the insight into Snow’s obsessive hate for Katniss, not just everything she stood for but also everything she reminded him of that couldn’t be controlled. I like understanding how Snow grew his affinity for using poison. I believe he’s haunted his whole life by the memory of Lucy Gray, but he flips it around in his mind that he controls the haunting. Maybe he eventually poisons his wife because he grows tired of sharing space with someone he doesn’t care about and doesn’t desire possession of. He’d justify the killing of course, like with all the killings. Self-justification and execution will only get easier for Snow as time goes on, especially under Dr. Gaul’s tutelage/mind-control.

My favorite aspect of this book was SCs willingness in this sociopolitical climate to make bold statements about the value of freedom and its ability to endure as a human quality despite years of tyrannical control and propaganda. I view her as a hope-giver. Her writing is courageous. I felt deeply for young Snow, even knowing how his story would play out. The predictability of the novel was my only complaint. After reading a couple of chapters I said to my daughter, “I think Lucy Gray will win the Games and then Snow will end up killing her.” When Gaul showed up, I said to my husband, “She’s going to groom him. She’s going to manipulate him and in the process turn him from a manipulator into a master manipulator.” Done. Possibly done. And done. I like the idea that Lucy Gray lives on and makes a free life for herself. I like that Snow would be eaten alive his whole life by that possibility which is beyond his control.

I mentioned in a previous post that the conversation between Snow and Lucy Gray about safety and control vs freedom and song is the most important conversation of our time, and SC has solid guts to acknowledge that freedom will endure long after the Capitol is gone. And the conversation ended there. Because it’s the deep truth about humanity that propaganda is designed to fool us into not believing: People are fundamentally enduring whether or not they have the “protection” of government control. I was beyond thrilled to read that conversation in YA novel because it’s fringe now to speak this truth openly and her readership is gigantic. I loved watching the connection between Snow and Lucy Gray begin to disintegrate in this mutual understanding that they wanted different worlds, and the world that they each wanted was fundamentally appalling to the other, regardless of those moments when they felt an aliveness in each other’s presence , the kind of aliveness that’s always present in the idealization phase of a trauma bond.

This book was so raw in its presentation of starvation in the Capitol, cannibalism, the Snow’s salvation in those awful lima beans. All the pressures that would drive a young person to grow to detest chaos and wild. This lineage of trauma in the Capitol informs my understanding not just of old tyrant Snow, but the other Capitol characters. And makes the likes of Cinna and Cressida and Plutarch all the more awesome to have chosen a different path. Even Effie who is so much about control and appearances in this singularly thinking way ultimately sees through the veil and understands this kind of control is a profound injustice. I view the book as a prequel in that it’s so intimately connected to the series of 3 and makes those characters, plots, settings, and other details so much more rich. It’s been years since I last read the books. I’ll do so again next time with more clarity.

Dark novel. Not graphic, but oozing with the darkness of humanity. It’s great, and I’m not sure I can ever read it again. There’s so much real. Though I’d LOVE to see it on film. It would be easily translatable to a couple of screenplays. They’d need to cast a Lucy Gray who can sing well and act even better, and a Snow who can carry both the film and carry a tune but without the quality of a professional singer.

I didn’t expect to feel so deeply for young Snow. SC is deep into midlife, and she knows real shit about trauma. She is able to convey it to a YA audience without being overly graphic or disturbing — unless people are ready to be wholeheartedly disturbed. There were a few plot points that felt contrived, like housing tributes in the monkey enclosure, otherwise this book was smashing. I know this because days later I was still smashed. I’m recovered now and ready to reread The Hunger Games trilogy.

I can’t see myself writing TBOSAS fanfiction, but I feel like the bit of writing I do about that universe has already been influenced by the prequel.

#tbosas spoilers #tbosas #the ballad of songbirds and snakes #suzanne collins #coriolanus snow #lucy gray baird #hunger games musings #childhood trauma #trauma bonding #attachment trauma #freedom vs safety #chaos

[bellamygateoldblog]

how do we feel about bellamy abandoning a suicidal octavia in a toxic forest in the name of monty, 'monty gave his life for us so we could have another change, and im not going to let you destroy it' who repeatedly made it clear in his final season that he wished he did more to save jasper

…we don’t feel great about it. Lol.

Got a little carried away. Apparently I had a stronger opinion on this on this than I thought I did.

There’s an LT;DR at the bottom if you don’t feel like reading the whole thing :)

The Blake relationship is a really complicated one. And I think how you see this event in particular depends on how you interpret this dynamic during the rest of the show, and how sympathetic you are towards Octavia as a character.

I want to start with this: the second chance was Monty’s to give, and only Monty’s. Bellamy doesn’t get to dictate who that message does and does not apply to, because Monty made it perfectly clear he holds no grudges, and wants the best for what’s left of the human race regardless of who they’ve been in the past or what they’ve done. That’s the whole point of ‘doing better’. He just wants everyone to do better than they did, whichever way that is. Monty didn’t specifically say ‘oh but not Octavia she can choke’ so therefore Bellamy had no right to be cowering behind Monty’s words.

He’s telling them to try a bit harder to be more understanding, compassionate, and rational. He wants them to choose to be farmers rather than warriors- to rebuild rather than destroy, to grow rather than deforest, to choose peace over war no matter what. It means a lot more than just ‘hey! maybe don’t go on another genocidal rampage?’

And by abandoning/banishing Octavia, Bellamy did the opposite of what Monty wanted. It almost felt, as i was watching, like he’d sentenced her to death. Like Clarke was banishing Murphy all over again. Or like he was Clarke abandoning him to die in the fighting pits. And I don’t know…repeating old mistakes doesn’t exactly scream ‘doing better’ to me.

Maybe this was Bellamy’s way of ridding the toxicity from the group?

But deciding she’s a lost cause and leaving her there, a clearly mentally unstable woman (and not only just some ‘woman’, but the baby sister he’s shared his life with), on an alien planet that none of them even know is safe at this point, or if it’s inhabited with hostile entities, from some moral high horse/manpainTM point of view is so low. It’s unearned at this point in the series.

Our attention was drawn to how hard it was for him. How upset he was after he did it. Rather than to Octavia and how she felt about it. It brought me back to that moment in season five, to how the camera focused in on Clarke’s pained teary-eyed expression while the child she was electrocuting was a blurry spot the background. Just what the fuck? Is all i have to say about that. He was very much Clarke in this moment; pulling a lever, leaving someone he loves on the outside *for the people* and feeling a bit ashamed but justified about it regardless.

She was trying to do the S1 Bellamy thing and stowaway to an alien planet to protect the one she loved. But the emotional fallout of season five was immense and both of them were way too amped up for any of it to go as planned. Which makes me wonder why the writers even attempted it in the first place?

But let’s just take a minute to think about how reckless and borderline insane this whole decision is from Bellamy- this is the girl who started out an illegal child, unwanted by the people she was born into, who assimilated with the indigenous people, earned their respect, found belonging with them until ultimately she became their leader. Like, if you really thought she was this much of a hazard, throwing her adaptive ass into the wilderness ready to meet another set of warrior people maybe isn’t the best idea you’ve ever had?

HOWEVER

I’m not actually opposed to a detail like this. Because of the unhealthy and sometimes poisonous nature of the Blake sibling relationship. And because they both absolutely needed time apart if Octavia were ever to grow out of Blodreina.

No matter what Monty never gave up on Jasper. But Jasper was usually self-destructive and didn’t act out emotionally using violence like how Octavia does so naturally. He could be a pain in Monty’s ass from time-to-time, but Jasper was never a threat to anyone but himself.

Bellamy cast Octavia out because she killed those guards unnecessarily. She hadn’t yet reflected on what became of her, nor had she processed any of the trauma from the bunker and following battle for Eden, in which some of the heaviest casualties were her most important relationships, with Indra, and with Bellamy. As convinient as it was to utilise violence as a tool for maintaining power, law, and order within the bunker…they aren’t in the bunker anymore, and she is no longer someone with a crushing responsibility.

Was any of that Bellamy’s fault? No.

Was it Bellamy’s job to ‘fix’ her? No.

(Do I think Monty would encourage him to mend their relationship anyway after losing his best friend and brother? Yes.)

But as her big brother and psudo-father, someone that spent his entire life protecting and taking care of her, the bare minimum i’d expect from him in a situation like this is for him to show some empathy, listen to the whole story from her point of view rather than basing his entire livelyhood on the biased accounts of a couple of Wonkru defectors, and make an attempt to understand why she is no longer the baby sister he remembers her being. If anyone was in the position to understand her- her behaviour, her mindset, the weight of leadership and how it shapes a person, and the pressure of making potentially morally corrupt decisions to ensure the people’s safety putting your humanity on the line for it- it’s him.

This was just cheap drama in place of where they could’ve written a meaningful conflict between them.

It was an oppurtunity to address Octavia’s past treatment of him, their co-dependence, their mother, Bellamy deeply believing his life was stolen from him and Octavia feeling she never had a chance to begin with, Bellamy’s inclination to make himself smaller so Octavia can take up as much space as she possibly can, both of their perverse insecurities that manifest in equally debilitating ways, Bellamy’s skewed sense of self pushing him to orbit around her, Octavia’s identity issues and lack of socialisation and resulting narrow black-or-white mindset, I could go on and on. There’s so so much content here to explore. There’s so much stress and pain in this relationship. It’s a shame that despite all that they decided to go omg cannibalism!!!!!!!!

Octavia took forever to forgive Bellamy for what happened to Lincoln, she demonised him, she attacked him over it in one of the most grotesque and unhinged displays of violence i’ve ever seen, and that wasn’t even his fault. I think we can afford Bellamy the same amount of room.

If this ‘banishment’ was the long-time-coming storm of past trauma of their intertwined existences that has long since been buried, if the time of physical peace spent on the ring building a family of his own pushed Bellamy to make a realisation or two about love and family, and the stressful draining qualities of his relationship with Octavia began to morph into resentment of her, and all this abandonment is, is just a beautifully crafted, carefully maintained facade collapsing between them, I WOULD LOVE IT. It’s understandable. But I need to see them have it out with each other first. If nothing is addressed, if they still go on carrying those things around and never find closure, not only is that hindering Octavia’s growth, but Bellamy’s, too.

But none of that happened in season six. Instead i got to see yet another female with her autonomy ripped from her and i got to see manpain.

Over time she supressed any parts of herself that would make her appear weak. It was always going to take time to pull herself out of that dark place and find a way to shape an identity that isn’t based in something that can easily be ripped away from her. So removing her from the group to find ‘the self’ is a good choice. But it had to be her choice.

I think if everything had blown up and Octavia had chosen to leave on her own volition because she recognises her own tragedy and calamity and wants to do what’s right, it would’ve been the perfect place to begin a redemption/reflection arc for her. With self-awareness. What do they say? The first step to fixing a problem is admitting you have one in the first place?

In an answer to another ask I said it would make some sense for Bellamy (and Clarke & Spacekru) to be unintentionally hypocritcal and judgemental considering the time distance between their last violent experience and how long they’ve had to make peace with the past. While Octavia was in the most stressful position she’s ever been in, and right in the thick of things for the six years that everyone else spent healing and maturing in.

So we have Bellamy as his most reassurred, most contented self- and he comes to Earth, he comes face-to-face with an unhinged Octavia, and is overwhelmed immediately with biased and incomplete information recapping the last six years during an erratic situation with enemies. I’d be confused and paranoid, too tf?

Bellamy loves Octavia more than life. But she’s morphed into a woman he no longer recognises and it could even come as a personal betrayal to him. He’s been disconnected from her for six years. He’s no longer intoxicated by his love and devotion to her. And he’s having a hard time accepting that the baby sister he thinks the world of is capable of such cruelty. So he’s having trouble forgiving her for it. I think it makes a lot of sense. Except, again, they never addressed anything like this.

Season five Bellamy I get. I’m sympathetic to him just as I am Octavia.

But in season six he appeared, not like he was acting on years of supressed emotional turmoil, but like he was on some moral high horse looking down on her from it.

The end of season five left things open, and there was a lot of potential there for things between them to improve, but season six took it and threw it out the nearest window. And we saw Octavia crawling on her hands and knees begging for forgiveness from a man that 1) doesn’t want her, 2) doesn’t respect her, 3) refused to listen to her, and 4) only accepted her once she was the woman he wanted her to be, who was now no longer traumatised.

TL;DR: I’m not opposed to the whole idea of them seperating in season six, with Octavia being the castaway, but it should’ve been Octavia’s choice, not Bellamy’s. And I think Monty might be disappointed that this was what (season six) Bellamy took away from his video on ‘doing better’. To ‘do better’ he decided to choose just one person that can represent all the evil that exists within both his people and himself and throw her out the dropship door. Problem solved! But there are many ways in which I think the writers could’ve done a lot more with this idea, and a lot better, too.

#hopefully this i objective I tried to make it so #the 100 #octavia blake #pro octavia blake #bellamy blake #rosie tag: share with the group #took me a couple days to answer so i hope whoever sent it will see

[aquagenesis]

This is by no means a vent post or anything I just need to discuss topics and ideas.

It’s so bizarre how, for most of my life, I did have psychotic tendencies and explicitly schizophrenic symptoms.  I would get disoriented on a school bus and want to make a big show of it; storm up to the bus driver in a fit of rage and demand to know where I was being taken.  I would ask incoherent, nonsense questions in class that would get me a resounding look of “what the fuck are you talking about”.  Friends in particular would always take the time to step in and allow me to re-phrase what I was asking because they would learn to understand sometimes information is jumbled in my head, which I am not aware of.

It happens on here too, though I’ve gotten better at it.  What begins as a cohesive argument in my mind eventually spirals into a whirlpool of me repeating the same three things, the same three points, the same three everything while pretending it’s something different.  Because I have voices in my head that take over and make it hard to focus.  I thought everyone heard voices, because how else do you process information?  But for other people, it’s not voices.  Not ones they can hear, at least.

The only thing that ever stopped me was, incredibly, what I think my paranoia was.  I was too afraid of making a scene because I thought, assuredly, they’d always tell me they were going to kill me.  I would stand up to assert myself only to get pulled back down in my own head with “if you cause problems, you will die”.  I thought that was survival instinct.  I prided myself, in fact, on my survival instincts because of things like that.  Because I believed every person who utilized and prided their autonomy was doomed to die for their arrogance.  How can you exist so unabashedly in life when you know death is something you cannot hide from and cannot know the origin of?  Standing up for yourself is putting yourself in harms way; the lines between “what is paranoia” and “what is formative child abuse” are too blurred for me to even care “which one it is” because they’re both the same.

It’s just knowing I was so schizophrenic.  Knowing I was so blatantly delusional; I’d get called delusional all the time because I wasn’t living in reality.  My original self was already forced to be so separated from its body because of infant-aged trauma when I felt “normal” it already wasn’t me.  Every time I’d stabilize myself in a deeper level of my own psychosis I’d get punched down through another one, like a personal version of Dante’s Inferno.

Of course I developed a dissociative disorder.  How else was my psyche supposed to survive losing family members who cared about me, how else was it supposed to survive losing everything.  The personality I shifted into to appease my conditions were never good enough; they never protected me enough.  It’s so fucked up my brain already had to put me in another reality to cope with not receiving basic physiological needs as an infant and then had to shatter and reform reality after reality because anything was better than living in real life but nothing protected me enough, nothing justified anything enough, nothing could make me feel like I was living how I was meant to.

And then I wonder why I got so deep in it.  I wonder why that’s all I knew.  It was.  Living in delusion was the only thing that kept me from being suicidal, because it made me believe something grand was meant for me at the end of it all.  I only broke down because, after everything, after five years of eviction and homelessness, there was still only despair ahead.  Now I’m 26. an entire high school education away from 30 but abysmally depressed I had to spend all this time helping myself, and continue to, in the vain hope one thing would ever happen to me to make life worth it.

All I needed was to be pushed into reality, to be shown and taught nothing happened to me in some grand plan.  All I needed was a therapist who would listen for long enough in my Anime Tragic Backstory to tell me, “Hey man, that was fucked up, but it’s not like you have to forgive them.  You don’t have to be tortured by anything.  You can leave other people; you can leave them too.”  But therapists are no longer trained to listen to trauma and try to work out anything formative that could have happened to someone.  I didn’t know I was schizophrenic.  Nobody cared enough to tell me I was unless it was through the “well...you have The Disorder.  we have to keep you to make sure your SCARY PSYCHOTIC EPISODE--you’ve seen American Psycho, right?--doesn’t make you do that to yourself or someone else.” lens of “take this medicine and it’ll fix something you don’t think is a problem, because psychosis deludes the brain into thinking it isn’t delusional”.

And there was nothing anyone could have done; my untreated schizophrenia prevented me from being able to work.  My delusions would go unchecked, people wouldn’t know I was stretching the truth and neither did I.  Through the lens of insanity I doomed coworkers to bitter rivals, others to beloved friends, and still others to unworthy of my respect with nothing in between.  My life was a grand path to luxury and respect from the bottom of the earth; who wouldn’t be adored to know me?

I would tell people time and time again I was schizophrenic, I was psychotic, I experienced delusions.  I was cast as “the good outcome” of a psychotic condition and my experiences, the only true part of my life, were chalked up to “well there Luke goes with his silly little rants again”.  I was abandoned to spiral because I was “okay”; I didn’t experience delusions where I thought I was God (anything remotely attached to that was different, I said it was different), my psychosis never drew me to suicide.  Everyone else who claimed they were schizophrenic were automatically compared to me and regarded as “good” or “bad” with no regard to what was swimming around in my brain.  If I didn’t have a god complex before (I did, but I said I didn’t, so there’s no blame here), I certainly developed one then.

But I knew I wasn’t someone to be compared to, because I did experience delusions where I thought not that I was God but some higher being, I was drawn to suicide at the drop of a hat.  But then I couldn’t admit to those things being so much deeper than they were, because everyone else who experienced these things were “bad” schizophrenics.  I was supposed to have this together; I knew I had no right to judge people with my same condition because I knew I was no better than them.  If I had a best friend I’d known all my life, I would probably go to them with my ever-wavering mental condition too.  That’s what I craved; the ability to tell someone about what was happening to me.

And it’s not like I ever thought I was entitled to people, you know, listening.  I never expected anyone to look me in the eyes and tell me “Hey buddy you know you don’t really seem in reality” because if someone said that to me I’d probably freak out and doom them to “Bitter Rival Plus” for the rest of my life.  It was the attitude that I was redeemable because of how well I handled everything, the way I never let my symptoms show, the way a one-time freakout seemed more preferable to everyone else but me because “at least he only got that bad once”, as opposed to the risk of smaller breakdowns more often.  I lost my ability to realize I had control over myself because the admittedly bad symptoms everyone else experienced, which I did too, never were offered support.  I was told a story of a mutual once-friend who threw herself off a roof in the midst of a schizophrenic breakdown.  The pitilessness of it all told me I would never find sympathy in admitting my faults.

It’s hard because if it were depression, if it had been depression, this would have been solved eons ago.  Anyone can go to a friend and talk through a depression; nobody can go to a friend and talk through a psychotic episode without your companion growing frustrated as you’re unable to grasp reality.  Once is fine, twice is annoying, thrice is overwhelming.  I can feel it just as anyone.  Nobody wants to talk to crazy people.

And what do people think that does, exactly?  Do you think your delusional friend can really have a talk once, be told they’re psychotic, and immediately know?  How do we have thousands of articles dissecting every aspect of anxiety, from work to generalized, but none to tell the everyman that “psychotic people suffer from a condition that prevents them from differentiating reality from fantasy”.  or, we do tell people, but it still follows the same rules of once is fine, twice is annoying, thrice is overwhelming.  Depression is a mental condition that causes extended states of misery.  Anxiety is a mental condition that causes extended states of stress.  Psychosis is a mental condition that causes extended states of, well, delusion.  Someone who wakes up already delusional is not going to be able to tell you “when it started”; everything has always felt this way.  Now that they can see clearly, because they feel energized (because they are delusional), “nothing is wrong” and they are left to spiral into whatever rabbit hole they fall into.

If we know it’s harmful to tell people with depression and anxiety to “get over it”, why are psychotic people different?  Why is it so hard to go into a relationship and be told, explicitly, “I have a psychotic condition”, and follow through as you would anyone else?

“Because psychosis is different.”  No further context needed.

#hi guess who it is #it's me and i'm complaining about ment of illness loves #not mine just in general #you know. my lifetime topic of psychosis.

[thebastardofgloucester]

So...The Rise of Skywalker (Spoilers, obviously)

No Star Wars movie is anywhere close to perfect. Frankly, they all have serious flaws of logistics or plot logic or characterisation changes or deus ex machinas or lack of originality (which includes A New Hope when you look at its inspirations). It's pointless and silly to pretend otherwise. At its best, Star Wars overcomes that with captivating characters, glorious spectacle, and John Williams.

I think you'll all be familiar with how much I disliked The Last Jedi (and chafed at being lumped in for disliking the movie in with bigots, unimaginative fanboys, and the like).

I liked The Rise of Skywalker. A lot. It had more than enough to offset its major shortcomings, in my opinion. It was not 'soulless,' it was not a complete recreation of Return of the Jedi anymore than The Last Jedi was a rough retelling of The Empire Strikes Back, and it was not as bad or incoherent as Attack of the Clones, jfc are you high

There are certain areas where I am more sympathetic to that not being the case for some people than others. I don't think it completely junked The Last Jedi, but it did demonstrate a huge gap in creative visions, preferred plot structures, and other priorities. Blame for that should not lie with JJ Abrams (or Chris Terrio) or Rian Johnson, who did what they thought was best, and what they were hired to do, and what they thought audiences would enjoy. It should lie with the Lucasfilm story group and Kathleen Kennedy, who had every opportunity to make a trilogy with a united vision and simply declined to do so. (There are a set of different issues with Disney that I'll get to)

Anyway, here's my take on individual components.

Rey ‘Palpatine’

We might as well start with the single most contentious part of the film, and where it is perceived (wrongly, in my opinion) to clash the most with The Last Jedi: Rey being of the Palpatine bloodline.

Rey's arc was about pushing past her own past traumas and doubts and the repeated attempts of other people to define who she was to make her own identity. It is about the refutation of destiny, of genetic determinism. I'm not really sure how anyone really came away with a different impression. I understand being annoyed that Rey couldn't just come from nothing, but call me an annoying fanboy - I wanted some explanation for how Rey was a match for the grandson of literal Space Jesus. Anakin being the most powerful Jedi ever born (and how he was failed by those who were supposed to guide him to that destiny) is kind of central to the entire mythology of Star Wars. Is it reductive and elitist? I guess. I certainly enjoy having Jedi not born of the Skywalker bloodline in the old EU and the Clone Wars/Rebels story. I was frustrated by killing off all of Luke's students as part of resetting the universe in The Force Awakens, and never learning anything about them.

Honestly, as somebody who was in the Rey Skywalker camp (and wrote fanfiction to that effect!), I was glad to be wrong. This was better. It gave Rey more agency, and emphasized found family.

The exposition is weird and clunky. JJ clearly meant for Rey to have some kind of blood link to the previous mythology of the series - you cannot watch the sequence in Maz's castle and tell me otherwise. Rian didn't want to tell that story. JJ did. Kathleen Kennedy and Lucasfilm threw their hands up in the air and Disney raked in the cash. Looking at that Maz castle beat, there's a very good case to be made that Rey was supposed to be either a Skywalker or a Solo, and Palpatine was JJ's attempt to not completely throw out Rian's idea (that her parents went into hiding, becoming 'no one,' abandoning her and being killed somewhere else - their motivations in TLJ (drunks ditching her) are imputed by Kylo and Rey's own fears of abandonment, remember).

Weirdly, I think that of the outcomes, Palpatine was the best one. Explaining how Rey ends up alone on Jakku when she's related to either Luke or Leia is pretty hard without further damaging their characters. Palpatine having lovers, mistresses, whatever before Mace melted his face is gross but entirely plausible. The timeline is...confusing - I guess there's enough basis for Palpatine still having agents running around, chasing down Rey, that even years after his death Rey's parents would leave her behind in an attempt to protect her. It's a bit muddy, but so was Anakin being Luke and Leia's father before we had the prequels. A novel here would probably help if it is written competently)

The point is that Rey's arc refutes genetic destiny. Instead of being afraid of her, as the Jedi were of Anakin (and to an extent, the Skywalkers were of Ben) Luke and Leia (specifically Leia) allow her to grow into her own person, and ultimately she chooses to take the name Skywalker to honor them (and Ben's sacrifice). The problem in my mind is less that Rey is a Palpatine by blood or a Skywalker by choice, and more that she's the only Jedi standing at the end of the trilogy. Making Finn's absolutely obvious force sensitivity a bigger deal narratively in TROS would have helped a lot (more on that later). And we still have the important implications of Broom Boy! He's not erased from existence, there simply wasn't room for his story in these 2.5 hours.

The First Act (and a bit)

The first 30 minutes or so of The Rise of Skywalker are...nuts. They feel less like a movie and more like a series of trailers or a 'previously on' for a movie we never saw. It's about as well done as it could be at establishing plot threads, the situation of the Resistance v the First Order, and where characters are starting from, as you could reasonably expect, but it's like cramming the entirety of the Jabba's Palace segment of Return of the Jedi into about half its runtime, at most.

What it comes down to, and I said this at the time, is that The Last Jedi is a very bad sequel to The Force Awakens. That doesn't (REPEAT: DOES NOT) make it bad film, or even a bad Star Wars film. But in terms of what the middle movie of a planned trilogy should be. It is. Not Good. JJ had seeded hints of Rey's origins and opened a bunch of mysteries. You can contend that he never intended or was never capable of answering them, and I think that's entirely unfair and reducing JJ's opus to the unsatisfying ending of 'Lost' is stupid and lazy, but they were there. The Last Jedi threw all of that out with extreme prejudice. I deeply disliked that; other people didn't. Either way, you had a problem (and you would have had even more of a problem if Colin Trevorrow had directed Episode IX as planned - this could have been SO. MUCH. WORSE.). The Rise of Skywalker is a natural sequel to The Force Awakens, though Palpatine's return could have been foreshadowed much better (or at all, if we're honest?) and it really makes me wonder how much changed from the first drafts of The Force Awakens to the version of The Rise of Skywalker we saw on screen.

I saw some criticisms that we had to read the tie-in material (including a bit from Fortnite??) to understand all the specifics of what planets these were, who Kylo Ren was murdering, etc...I don’t really think any of that was particularly important. It actually opens up a ton of new storytelling opportunities and made the universe feel big again, which The Last Jedi didn’t, at least for me. Apparently the planet Kylo is fighting on is Mustafar. That...doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense (maybe we finally have a Star Wars world that isn’t a single biome?) but it wasn’t actually that important. We saw Kylo searching for the Sith Wayfinder and murdering anybody in his way, we saw Poe and Finn being pursued from one end of the universe to another, and we got the 16 hour deadline before the fleet was ready (which was...weird, admittedly, but not in the slightest less weird that the fleet running out of fuel on a slow-motion chase or needing to fly off to an entirely different system to find a ‘code breaker’ to counter a techo gadget thing that let you trace people through hyperspace.

And yeah, if you are going to forgive The Last Jedi the dumb codebreaker/fuel shit which led to the detached Canto Bight B plot, you have to just acknowledge the Wayfinder thing as a macguffin that gets the plot moving in a certain direction and gives a clear path from narrative point a to narrative point b. Rian is not ahead of JJ on this aspect.

The subsequent fetch quest is less about the macguffin and more about the character beats on the way. Kylo and his boy band pursue Rey, Rey realizes her powers are kinda scary and hella impressive (including the healing mechanic, which is entirely precedented in past canon), you get to see some brilliant, funny, and touching moments between the trio we were not allowed in The Last Jedi, Rey discovers hints about her past, and Lando shows up.

We also get to my least favorite part of the film.

Poe Dameron is Better Than This

I do not understand why they ret-conned Poe into having a past as a smuggler, or why Keri Russell’s character was even necessary. You could explain it as youthful rebellion, maybe after Poe’s mom Shara Bey died (both his parents were Rebel veterans - that’s a lot of pressure), but it fits awkwardly into the established timeline.

The one good thing that came out of it was a moment where Poe is tempted to leave the Resistance, but that only makes sense because of Poe’s terrible hotheaded, reckless characterization in The Last Jedi, neither of which at all fit with his portrayal in the Poe Dameron comics (which are excellent). Poe eventually gets where he needs to be, and the conversation with Lando after Leia passes is one of the best moments of the film, and justified bringing Lando all by itself. Oscar Isaac is apparently really frustrated with Poe’s character and I cannot blame him. Rian Johnson started this weirdness, and it is one of the greatest flaws of The Last Jedi and more people need to acknowledge how racist it was to reduce a 30-something brown-skinned veteran to an impulsive, out of control idiot who gets physically and verbally smacked around by two white women, and JJ didn’t really try to fix it. I guess his arc kinda works in a vacuum. I still deeply dislike it. Cutting that entire section down to the bare bones would have made more room for...

Finn and the Triad

The dynamic between Finn, Poe, and Rey was fantastic. There is abundant basis for Finn and Poe to be canon romantic interests, and I cannot conclude it was anything but Disney’s cowardice that prevented that from happening (and honestly, same for Finn and Rey). JJ is no more to blame than Rian - I genuinely believe this came from higher up. It sucks. A lot. What we do get is precious, and frankly makes Rian’s argument for separating them (that they would get along and it would be boring) kinda silly. They are also incredibly funny together - John, Isaac, and Daisy play off each other so damn well, and I was cackling when the Falcon was on fire and Poe was mad about BB-8.

Finn is absolutely force sensitive. It is apparently what he was trying to say to Rey, he has feelings that turn out to be correct like three times, he wielded a lightsaber with some proficiency in The Force Awakens. It’s canon. Why it isn’t explicit is a function of the Force User plot becoming divorced from Finn and Poe in The Last Jedi. JJ and Terrio also could have fixed that, and chose not to.

We got a tantalizing glimpse of what could have been with Janna and the other defectors. It was really good, but it wasn’t nearly enough, and I am Mad about it. To borrow from some great ideas on twitter, Janna could have revealed that her unit heard about Finn on Jakku and it inspired them to defect. They could have together swayed a bunch of reluctant stormtroopers to rebel (they were otherwise just treated as facist canon-fodder, which, not great when a lot of them are child soldiers!). It was perfectly set up from TFA and they just...dropped the ball.

Like I said, I’m Mad. TLJ did nothing with Finn as a defector or the child soldier thing in general, and TROS did the bare minimum. Huge, huge wasted opportunity. We got promises that we’d get to find out more about who Finn is and...we didn’t, or at least, not in the theatrical cut. TLJ had a scene of Finn and Phasma talking about his being a traitor/defector. Rian cut it down to a fight scene and the ‘Rebel Scum’ line. Writers jail for both of them, tbh, though JJ clearly cared about Finn (he’s why the character exists as he does, as why Boyega was cast, and maybe if TLJ doesn’t make Kylo into Rey’s co-protagonist we get something different. I'm not going to blame Rian for something JJ could have fixed if he cared to.

And least we got something, I guess.

Kylo Ben

I think the first time I actually cared about Ben Solo as a character was when Kylo symbolically ‘died,’ and Ben was saved by Rey’s healing abilities. That was excellent writing, even if it was not subtle. I liked Leia and Han (as part of Ben’s memories) have a role in helping him find some sort of redemption. I was frustrated and mad that Anakin Skywalker’s grandkid could be a straight up space fascist with even fewer redeeming qualities. He still deserved to die. He had no family to go back to and he was directly responsible for thousands of innocent deaths and closely linked to the death of trillions. Like Vader, you don’t just come back from that.

Like Anakin, Ben made his own choices. Was he manipulated by Snoke/Palpatine? Sure. He still had multiple occasions to chose differently and did not. It’s part of his flaws as a character. Han and Leia did their best as parents - we find out Leia even abandoned her Jedi training because she was afraid for her son. Ben’s inevitable fall (which mirrors that of Jacen Solo, a truly fascinating character who I will always be Mad about) soured the sequel trilogy from the start in some ways, but it is hard to envision it without Ben turning. I don’t know. I think without Ben being who he was we simply have a different set of movies.

The kiss is...I don’t even know. Rey clearly cared about Ben, and believed he could change, but also refused to compromise who she was in order to pull him back to the light. I would have vastly preferred a forehead kiss or something along those lines.

On balance I’m glad he got a Vader redemption. I think Palpatine came back in part because Ben simply was not a particularly captivating villain, and without him to provide contrast and make the stakes clear, Ben’s redemption is not possible, and that’s arguably an even worse outcome, especially given how he was manipulated so much at an impressionable age. I’m really glad Leia had a chance to influence his turn as her final act in this life (Carrie deserved a better ending but it was the best they could do after Carrie’s death imo).

Grandpa Palps

First, Palpatine finding a way to survive and setting up multiple contingency plans to return to power is completely in keeping with his portrayal in both the old and Nu EUs (a big part of the post-Endor stuff is Operation Cinder, where Palpatine posthumously ordered the scouring of dozens of Imperial loyalist worlds to spread fear and prevent the Empire from continuing without him). Palpatine also LOVES his superweapons - he built two Death Stars, ffs. A fleet of them is not exactly a stretch in terms of strategy. The Rise of Skywalker definitely felt like it owed a debt to one of the more divisive bits of the old Star Wars EU - the Dark Empire series of comics by Tom Veitch and Kevin J Anderson, which have cloned Palpatines, Luke turning to the Dark Side, an ungodly number of superweapons, and a planet where Palpatine hides and builds them after his defeat.

I don’t think his survival ruins Anakin’s arc - Anakin’s actions still destroyed Palpatine’s Empire (that he helped to build) and its 26 year reign of terror. The galaxy got 30 years of relative peace and then a war that was not nearly as destructive or large scale as the Galactic Civil War. People saying it makes Anakin’s arc irrelevant are just being silly.

Retconning Snoke to a cloned puppet (probably an unwitting one) is actually not a bad writing choice. It explains why he was such a cardboard cut-out villain, and why he was so easily defeated. Honestly, I’m far more okay with how he died in The Last Jedi now that I know this (even if the pacing and the placement of that scene is still utterly bizarre).

The new EU set up cults and fanatics around the Dark Side and its avatars in the emperor and Vader. None of that felt particularly implausible to me as a result.

Legacies in the Sequel Trilogy

I really loved the ‘thousand generations live in you’ conceit. I loved the power of the old Jedi, snuffed out by Palpatine, helping Rey defeat him one last time (including my girl Ahsoka, RIP, I'm sure you went out like a badass). These are legacies and powers that don’t require blood ties or dynasties, they just rely on the force spanning the whole of the GFFA.

Ben is offered the chance to either turn away from his grandfather’s dark path early enough to warrant redemption, or to follow it through until the end. He actually chooses to do neither. With Leia’s dying intercession, he ends up following Anakin’s path to an extent, but his story is ultimately about the tragedy of expectations, fears, and the immense weight of the Skywalker name and legacy. All of his family are caught up in it. Rey is mostly apart from it, and then explicitly subverts her destiny to be Palpatine’s heir, and faces her fear of ending up there, by intent or just fate. As Luke says, some things are stronger than blood. Rey’s story is the ultimate testament to that, and it’s a pretty powerful message.

Leia. Oh god. I was absolutely thrilled when we found out she trained as a Jedi, and then served as Rey’s Jedi Master after Luke failed Rey so badly (after failing Ben). I think Luke’s story from TLJ to TROS is easily the most consistent, honestly. He made mistakes, both with Ben, and then with Rey, and he recognized it. The Rise of Skywalker acknowledges that Luke wasn’t right in how he handled training Rey either, and that went a long way to making me better accept how Rian portrayed him as flippant and dismissive and cynical.

Carrie’s absence was so badly felt. As I’ve said previously, I think they did the best job they could with the footage they held back and Carrie’s recorded audio. They managed to give her a relatively coherent story and an effect on the plot which she didn’t really have in The Last Jedi. I’ve seen speculation that it was supposed to be Leia, not Luke, who gave Rey that pep talk on Ahch-To, and in some ways it might have made more sense. Selfishly, I’m still glad it was Luke, because it helped reconcile my feelings about him in The Last Jedi. But they really did a great job in a really, really tough situation.

Rose Tico

Let’s just get it out there: the film’s treatment of Rose Tico and Kelly Marie Tran was inexcusably bad. Whether her character was a great addition to the cast in the Last Jedi or not, KMT faced horrendous abuse from various bigots and assholes, and after making a lot of public promises they reduced her to barely a minute of screen-time and no real impact on the plot. It’s shitty, it’s bad, and JJ and Disney should feel bad.

Introducing a character like Rose mid-way through a trilogy is risky, and while it worked with Lando, JJ clearly had no idea what to do with her. It’s just a mess, it’s the biggest black mark on the film, and on the sequel trilogy more broadly. Nobody comes out looking good here, and Rose Tico needs a Disney + series of her own or something. Protect Kelly Marie Tran at all costs.

The Rest

- Lando was great. So great. I wish we’d gotten the line that his daughter had been stolen by the First Order (and thus was potentially Janna) - we’d better get a book or a film or something. Lando’s conversation with Poe salvaged his character arc. Billy Dee Williams did a damn good job getting in shape for the role. He came out as genderfluid recently. He’s an absolute treasure and thank god they didn’t waste him.

- I just wanted to reiterate how HAPPY I AM THAT JJ ABRAMS MADE LEIA A JEDI HOLY SHIT

- It was a blink and you’ll miss it moment for people who didn’t read Chuck Wendig’s Aftermath series, but the death of Temmin ‘Snap’ Wexley in a battle where his step-dad (Wedge Antilles) made a brief appearance was devastating and I still don’t know how to feel about it.

- The space battles were awesome. Lando and Chewie bringing in the cavalry was what we were so cruelly teased for in The Last Jedi, which I am still mad about. Forget the logistics, forget the story logic, it was awesome. Maybe in the future I’ll be more annoyed. I honestly doubt it.

- Hux lives (and dies) for drama. He’s the pettiest son of a bitch in the GFFA, he would absolutely turn informant to win his fight with Kylo Ren, especially if he suspected that Kylo had killed Snoke and then was an incompetent child. His dying shortly thereafter is honestly exactly what the character deserved.

- On the cavalry moment, and the galaxy rising to destroy the First Order - I loved it in Return of the Jedi’s special edition, I love it here. There’s a thematic resonance with our heroes overcoming their fear and the galaxy at large being stirred to action. I just wish we’d gotten a few ragtag forces to show up at Crait, but that was a choice Rian made. I’m glad JJ chose differently. It was incredibly Star Wars.

- The 3PO stuff was weird, especially given how emotionally centred it was in the final trailers. It was also tied up in the Poe stuff I disliked. I don’t really know what else to say. At least R2D2, BB-8, and him felt like characters, not purely plot devices.

- Chewie - his reaction to losing Leia was absolutely devastating, his relationship with the next gen trio was great, and his death fake-out was...weird. I could go either way with that - killing him would have been a huge risk I could have respected, on the other hand if he was going to go out he deserved better than that (like, say, a moon getting dropped on him saving the life of Han Solo's kid). His ‘death’ did set up a crucial character beat for Rey. And there were, in fact, two transports, I remember that.

TLDR;

It was a fun movie! It tried to do way too much because The Last Jedi was not an effective sequel to The Force Awakens, and that’s on Kennedy and the LFL story group more than anyone else. It nailed the broad strokes of the Jedi/Force plot in my opinion, including subverting genetic destiny and the power of blood ties over everything else. In the process, it let a number of characters down, who were unfortunately also the characters of color, which is: not great.

I found it rewarding as a fan. It rewarded my faith in the goodness of the denizens of the GFFA and the power of found family. I’ve loved Rey from the start and I’m thrilled with how her arc ended with her burying the Skywalker legacy and making a new start with her new family in Poe and Finn (and Rose, damn it). I’m glad it made me feel better about Luke Skywalker and finally made Leia a bona-fide lightsaber wielding Jedi. I was exhilarated coming out of it, instead of exhausted and frustrated like I was in The Last Jedi. It didn’t make me hate Star Wars. It had extreme Return of the Jedi energy, and that is literally all I needed out of this film.

Here’s to a load of more complex, nuanced, and adventurous storytelling that the Skywalker saga never really allowed. I’m still excited for the prospect of Rian working with his own characters in the universe. I think JJ should probably be done.

Chuck Wendig said that the Star Wars universe was junk. Fun, whimsical, exciting, but ultimately not really a well-crafted piece of art. I’m inclined to agree.

#martinus watches the star war #tros spoilers

[middle-of-crash-and-fly]

I have been really trying to process a lot of trauma from when I was younger. It is strange to me how things that didn't even bother me when they were happening have become so dread-inducing to think about now.

Like being alone and isolated so much of my childhood. It's like the older I get, the more I'm like... damn, I was a really good kid and really fun to be around. I did not deserve to be isolated the way I was, even if it was to "protect me". I am a goddamn delight.

The people who actually got to see me really liked me and I am still friends with to this day, but a lot of them didn't come along until I had already been alone and starved for affection for so long. I don't know why my brain keeps going to, "What did I do wrong?" And, "Why did that all have to happen to me?" I was so young and everyone around me failed me, but only because everyone around them failed them firs, RIGHT? So, I can't blame them, right? Like why did it all have to be that way? And I think about the things I know about psychology, specifically growth and development, and it all makes sense why it be that way. However, the fact that the behaviors and patterns exhibited by those around me are explainable, doesn't justify them at all or make them hurt any less.

I don't want to cause anyone to suffer the way I did. To feel unloved by the brunt of my family, to feel untrusting toward the one's who acknowledged my existence and became so important to me, just to turn around and deeply betray me. Like everyone who was important to me has shown me time and time again that I cannot trust them and that I can live my life without them. But why? And why did my suffering go so unnoticed? I think about my nieces and nephews all the time and I hope they know I love them. Fuck. Even if I don't like them, I want them to know I love them. I think about the kids in my life all the time. Are they doing good in school? Do they feel happy and accepted? Are they eating good and being taken care of in regards to their health? Are they recieving good and proper attention from their parents and friends? And as much as I think about them... I think, "Why didn't anyone think of me like that?" Did everyone just go, oh yeah, she's 8 and writing about wanting to die. She has never stepped foot in a school, that's fine. Her dad is abusing all her sibilings, but reallt making it seem like he isn't and specifically hasn't done anything to her so like, it's probably all gucci, right? Did they all just collectively decide I didn't matter or was inconsequential? Did my mom push them away? Did my dad ruin that? Is it even that deep?

I feel like my life has been a series of people disregarding me, but like... I guess it's understandable. Adults are busy and life gets the better of me, frequently. Everyone can't be there for everyone, I guess in the end it is really up to your parents to be there for you becauae they made the concious choice to bring you into this world. I guess that is why I feel so sad and dissappointed that they just kinda shit the bed when it came to raising me. But they did indeed come from WAY worse, maybe they didn't really know how to be good parents and maybe that really was their best. Maybe my grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, were all just repeating that cycle of uncaring failures. Whatever reason they were there, it just is what it is. And I don't really know how to be soft and tender because I never recieved that, so I often feel like I am just repeating the cycle.

I feel so damaged and withdrawn sometimes. Like I have disassociated so hard from all the things that made me who I am because they hurt so much I just don't remember who I am or what I want anymore. I use to have this big idea that I was like... this super loving, artsitic, kind, empathetic person that was put on this earth to heal and create... but now I just feel hurt. I feel like, emotionally, I have been through the fucking trenches and didn't do anything to warrant the kind of shit that has been my life. So I sink further and further into this mind set that... well, nothing actually matters. Everything is up to chance, there is no greater purpose, and you either live selfishly or give yourself away until there is nothing left to give. At this point in my life, I am just trying to find a balance between looking out for myself, but also remaining compassionate and loving and it is so fucking hard and I don't even know why I try. You know, it's a comfort thing. If none of it actually matters, then I am free to decide what does and doesn't matter to me, right? And I choose me. I choose me to matter. I am of consequence. My health matters. My education matters. My personal relationships and how they make me feel is important. I am allowed to fail. My problems are real. Not everyone is going to abandon me. I am beautiful. I deserve better.

One last thing I am salty about- my health. I think about all those years I faught with myself... my body image, my energy levels, my motivation... all that weight I gained, all those days I spent so sad and feeling like such a failure because I had no energy to do anything.... i spent so long playing catch up on 1/8th the battery of a normal person because my fucking parents tried to fix my issues with Jesus instead of taking me to a goddamn doctor. I was going to kill myself and got institutionalized and they did blood tests and THAT'S HOW I FOUND OUT I HAD A SERIOUS FUCKING THYROID DISEASE THAT THEN CONTRIBUTED TO ME GETTING DIABETES?!? Like, when your fucking 10 year old comes to you and tells you they are sad, have no energy, and feel like dying all the time TAKE THEM TO THE GODDAMN DOCTOR. Don't tell them to go pray about it?! The FUCK. it's not the devil, it's not demons, it's their fucking health, bro. Fuck. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you!!!! I DESERVED BETTER. WHY DIDN'T ANYONE SAVE ME? WHY DIDN'T ANYONE SEE ME? WHY WAS I SO INVISIBLE?

Why was I so invisible....?

Tldr: my ultra religious parents never took me to school or the doctor. Everyone knew about me but no one cared to step in. My entire family has spent most of my life making it known that they didn't want anything to do with me; either because of my mom or my dad, but I am nothing like either of them so how the fuck is that fair? I have serious health issues that could have been prevented or lessened had my parents not tried to cure me with Jesus and church. I'm salty about it, but I just wanna feel whole and happy and that's hoenstly all I am gonna keep working toward.

#thought dump #spilled ink #sourire #sourire poetry #writing #spilled thoughts #trauma #trauma dump