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astxrwar · 3 months

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drops of blood [1/4]

SYNOPSIS: Bucky Barnes has some wires crossed. He fixates on a barista at a coffee shop near his apartment, and tells himself it's fine as long as he keeps his distance. Except you keep making that distance smaller.

Rating: M

Word Count: 7k

CONTENT WARNINGS: Off-screen violence. Series will enter gray territory in later chapters; angsty guilt-ridden stalking, exhibitionism, consensual-but-not-safe-or-sane vibes all the way down. teehee.

Read on AO3

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When you’re a teenager— no, not even, when you’re a preteen, in middle school— a crew of surveyors for a Russian oil company finds a plane frozen in the Arctic. You’d just finished up the section on World War Two in history class; two weeks ago you’d been sitting in a hard-backed chair with the lights off trying not to fall asleep while watching a Netflix documentary about the life and death of Steve Rogers, the prototypical American Hero, that your teacher put on presumably to get out of having to actually teach. You had to fill out a worksheet about it. You had homework asking about the ways that national ideals of heroism have changed over time. You spent a whole class period talking about that, comparing and contrasting Captain America and Iron Man. You had to write a five-paragraph essay about whether or not you thought the American Hero archetype would even exist without Captain America’s death.

Except Captain America is not dead.

Captain America is alive.

It is 2012, and a lot of things are popular. The Hunger Games. Gangnam Style. The new Batman movie, the one with Christian Bale. A type of teenage and pre-teenage girl exists—has existed, will continue to exist— and while there was NSYNC and Backstreet Boys and whatever the fuck else in the 90s; right now there’s Twilight and One Direction and Justin Bieber.

Captain America comes out of the ice. Captain America is 6’4 and muscular and blond and blue-eyed and unfailingly kind, and then he goes on to join up with a bunch of other people—superheros— and saves the world.

The end result, the one that anyone with a brain could have seen coming a mile off, the one that gets referenced by late-night talk-show hosts and poked at in grocery-store gossip rags and sometimes said outright in interviews with the guy on national television, is that Steve Rogers— Captain America— kind of ends up rounding out the “teenage girl obsessions during the ‘10s” list.

And—

Well.

You were never big on any of that.

Your friends were, though, and so you let yourself be dragged through the onslaught of new Netflix specials and you dutifully and appropriately emoji-reacted to every Battle of New York youtube compilation and Vine edit they sent to you and you even went to the movies to watch the new remastered docudrama about the life and now the not-death of Steve Rogers, and—

You never really liked blonds, so.

His friend, though—

His friend was kind of cute.

Sergeant James Barnes. Twenty-eight, dark-haired and blue-eyed and attractive, in a charming, boyish kind of way.

Fast forward ten years. There’s some weird drama with a helicarrier and some entirely anticlimactic fight at an airport and then an alien kills half the population of the world and then they all come back again, courtesy of Iron Man’s sacrifice and your middle school history teacher one-hundred-percent predicting the future with the whole “the American Hero trope is dependent on the hero’s death” shit that you totally didn’t understand at the ripe age of twelve—

Anyway. Life happens, basically. You grow up. You’re not even friends with those girls anymore. Not uncommon. And that crush on cute little baby-faced James Buchanan Barnes lasted all of something like three months— one of those fleeting childhood infatuations you have on people who are safely unobtainable, like rock stars or fictional characters or guys who are very, very dead— after which time you never really thought about it again.

And now you’re twenty-three and working closing shifts at a coffee shop in Brooklyn while figuring out what your life trajectory is even going to be, adjusting as best you can to your fucking daily customer base having quite literally doubled in the last six months, that part of you that’d read his entire wikipedia page on a phone with an actual physical slide-out keyboard at two in the morning an entire eleven years ago so far away it feels like something even less than a memory.

Except one night in April this guy walks in. He’s dark-haired and blue-eyed and wearing a leather jacket and matching gloves; he comes up to the counter and he makes startlingly unbreaking eye contact that freaks you out a teensy bit— a lot— and orders a coffee, black, and nothing else, and you stare right back kind of temporarily immune to the weirdness of it because you know him, why do you know him—

It clicks as you’re pouring the coffee into a reinforced cardboard cup and it stuns you so completely that you almost overfill it and wind up less than a second away from burning the shit out of your hand.

Sergeant James Barnes.

He looks the same, kind of, but also not at all— you sneak glances at him while you fumble for a lid, the harsher angles of his cheekbones and the wider set of his jaw, the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes and the lines setting into his forehead and the way he doesn’t really have any of the baby fat left in his face that he had in all the photos you’d seen of him.

“Thanks,” he says, when you give him his coffee.

His smile, or his attempt at it, looks more like a grimace than anything.

You expect him to leave, then, but he doesn’t— he goes over to one of the tables in the lobby, the one by the window in the corner of the room, and he sits there and he drinks his coffee and he stares out at the street. It’s dark already; late November, almost December, the solstice approaching. It’ll be a long while before it’s still light later than 4:30.

He stays there for a long time, and the awareness of him prickles at the nape of your neck as you work, filling orders for a dwindling trickle of customers and starting the long and arduous process of cleaning up everything for close.

Sometime around 9:30 you go into the back to try to get started on dishes; the doorbell chimes when you’re about halfway through, and you grumble under your breath and rinse soap suds off of your forearms and resolve to pretend you hadn’t lost track of the hose and accidentally soaked the whole of your shirt from about the sternum down—

There’s nobody waiting at the counter when you come out, though.

And Sergeant James Barnes is gone.

You expect it to be one of those things. Everyone in New York has one of those things. They’re great party stories. One time I sat next to Denzel Washington on the subway. Michael Keaton bought a phone from me when I worked at Apple in Midtown. I ran into Steve Buscemi at this one mom-and-pop bagel place.

I served coffee to Captain America’s not-dead friend in Brooklyn.

Except next week, same day, he’s there again.

The lady in front of him is getting something stupid complicated and being annoying about it. Two pumps caramel, two pumps vanilla, two creams and two skim milk, three sugars and make sure to melt it first, if you don’t, I’ll know, Jesus Christ, make your coffee at home—

The guy who is maybe potentially Barnes laughs.

You said that out loud, apparently. Mumbled it under your breath, or something, quiet enough that the lady hadn’t heard, just shot you a suspicious look and sipped at her drink and then left without a thank-you, apparently satisfied. It’s just you and him now, your coworker off doing food prep in the back room and the lobby empty.

Somehow, he’d heard you. And he’d laughed. It was a weird sound, sharp and rough and cut short like he hadn’t meant to and like he’d tried to make himself stop; his expression is flat, and he’s not smiling, but there’s something— lighter, about it, than when you’d seen him last.

“Black coffee?” you blurt out, before he can say anything.

He blinks. He’s doing that thing again— the staring.

“Easy to remember,” you say, by way of explanation. “Simple.”

His mouth twitches at the corners, not really a smile, yet, but still— something. That lightness to his expression, impassive as it is, hasn’t faded. “Yeah, just black,” he says. “Thanks.”

You make it for him— ‘make’ is a stretch, you pour it, and that’s all, really— and he takes it back to that same spot by the window in the corner, nurses it as he looks out into the street, the sky cast that bruised purple color when the sun’s gone below the horizon but the light hasn’t faded, yet.

You try not to stare.

Same deal as the last time; he stays.

“Hey,” your coworker’s voice drifts from the back room, “You want to sweep the lobby or do the dishes?”

“Lobby,” you reply, extremely fast, thinking about last time and the hose mishap and how your shirt hadn’t dried until basically the end of your shift, but also thinking about maybe-Barnes sitting by the window and how part of you really fucking wants to know. Even if it’s not him, if it’s just some particularly uncanny lookalike, you wonder if it happens a lot. The being mistaken.

You make it through about maybe five minutes of actual lobby-sweeping before you become physically incapable of resisting your curiosity.

“I always got pretty good marks in history,” is what you tell him. Because saying “are you Seargant Barnes” seems kind of— rude.

He stiffens, and he drums his gloved fingers on the lid of his coffee cup, and he doesn’t look up or say a word.

“Your photo was in a bunch of the textbooks,” you add, twisting your grip on the broom handle, back and forth. It’s definitely him. The haircut. His face. Older, a lot less boyish, but the same eyes. “Sergeant Barnes. 107th.”

He doesn’t look at you. Speaks very deliberately. “Are you going to tell anyone?”

There’s this bright jolt of satisfaction at being right, followed pretty quickly by a pang of guilt at the thought you’d irritated him.

“Oh—um, no, definitely not, I’m sure it’s— annoying, probably, getting recognized,” you say, stumbling over the words. “I— sorry, I shouldn’t have— bothered you.”

He does look at you, then. He stares. You’d been fidgeting, still, but under the force of his gaze every muscle in your body goes tense and still, frozen solid, and nerves prickle up at the back of your neck, raising the hairs there. You have to fight back the urge to shiver.

“No,” he says. “It’s never happened before. Don’t— don’t be sorry.”

You open your mouth. Close it again. Your hands resume their twisting around the broom handle before you abruptly decide you do need to actually finish the chore you’d set out to do.

You tell him one last thing, before you go back to it. You’d always kind of felt weird about saying this kind of stuff; it gets touchy, particularly after Vietnam. Not really a great practice to get into, the whole “thank you for your service” schtick, because a lot of them don’t see it that way, and every war after that was even more complicated and your opinions on those are— similarly complicated. But World War 2– that was different. It wasn’t US military overreach. It was necessary. And he’d been drafted, you remembered that.

“Hey,” you say, very soft. “I just— Thanks. For— you know. Serving, when your numbers came up. It couldn’t have been easy, I mean.” you clear your throat, shift your weight, suddenly feeling very self-aware. “Coffee’s on me, next time, okay?”

Something flickers across his expression, like a ripple over the surface of a lake. Whatever it was, it’s gone before you can make sense of it.

You spend most of the week thinking he won’t come back next Friday. But he does. There’s nobody in front of him in line, this time, and like the time before your coworker is off in the back, which means it’s easy to slip him his coffee and conveniently forget to ring it out.

“Thanks,” he tells you, his voice a lot quieter. Softer, too.

You smile at him. His mouth twitches back, like maybe he’s not sure if he should return it, but wants to.

He takes the seat by the window again.

He keeps coming back. You try to make small talk but it feels stilted and awkward. It kind of makes you sad, a little bit, seeing him sitting there for hours, alone.

On your day off, in early January, you go grocery shopping.

You spend about 25$ in total and you make a split second decision to grab something out of the ordinary that’s on-sale. Dude was raised during the Great Depression, you guess he’s not the most experienced in the realm of the great big world of Weird Things You Can Purchase At The Modern Day Grocery Store. It’s meant to be a sort of peace offering, a look-I-can-be-normal-about-it, let’s-be-friends kind of deal, if he’s going to keep hanging around the coffee shop. You’re not sure if he, like— wants that, friends, or if maybe it’s just that he doesn’t want to be alone, but you figure it’s worth a shot.

Part of it is that he interests you. Part of it is that your job, as much as it sucks less than a lot of other service jobs, is very mundane, very normal, often very boring, and James Buchanan Barnes being a regular customer is easily the most interesting and least boring thing that has ever happened to you at work. Or— ever, honestly.

And maybe that’s selfish, to want to talk to him for that reason, but— whatever.

On Friday, like last week, you get there and you clock in and you try to casually scan the lobby, the floor littered with straw wrappers and crumpled napkins and empty sugar packets, the tables tacky with flavored syrup and coffee stains that you’d need to clean later, chairs around them arranged haphazardly and not pushed in, and—

And in the back corner, sitting low in his seat, baseball cap tugged down and shade over his eyes and fingers drumming restlessly against the side of a paper coffee cup, is James Buchanan Barnes.

The excitement you feel, then, is not really the kind you’d expected to— the last time you’d thought about him had been middle school, and even if it’d been just that three months, you remember with startling clarity that girlish, daydreamy kind of interest, how it felt, pleasant and mild and entirely harmless. Whatever you feel right now is not like that at all. It’s sharp and it’s visceral and it’s real, not a fantasy or the result of your imagination, not directed towards some fiction of a person that functioned as a safe receptacle for the things going on inside your head, but an actual individual human being.

It’s just interest, just curiosity, what you feel— you don’t have a crush on him, it’s not like you’re still in middle school and still interested, like that, in even just the general category of person that crush had represented. And the person sitting in the lobby isn’t the person– the fiction– you’d even felt that type of way about, anyways. You don’t know him, and he’s obviously nothing like the guy memorialized in every Captain America docudrama miniseries on Netflix. No, James Buchanan Barnes is a real human being, a very different human being, one that’s a stranger to you and you think— you guess— probably just as much of a stranger to that other, safer, softer, more boyish version of himself.

You keep thinking about how he looked at you, unbroken and unwavering and eerily fucking precise, how his eyes hadn’t even move at all, focused so intently that it’d made the hairs on the back of your neck raise and goosebumps prickle across the tops of your shoulders and all the way down your arms and your gut instinct yell, loudly, there is something not right about this guy!

You’d read his Wikipedia article again. It’s been updated since; lots of shit came out since 2012. You’d heard about the Winter Soldier stuff, but reading about it in detail— it’s bad. There are probably several things that are not exactly right about him, now. That’s fine, though. The way the world is these days, there’s stuff not right about everyone.

You’re occupied with a steady and annoyingly constant stream of customers until about 8:00, making coffees and sandwiches and trading on and off with your coworker in the back room, where you’re trying to get the brunt of the stocking and dishwashing done before they leave at 8:30. You’d been fucking busy, and you’re annoyed, you got cream from the dispenser machine all up one of the sleeves of your sweater so you’d had to take it off, and there’s fucking caramel sauce stuck to the hairs on the flat of your forearm near your wrist and gluing them to your skin and that grocery bag of fruit is sitting on the back table next to your jacket and your gross sweater and your house keys and it’s staring at you. Accusingly.

Your coworker leaves.

You steal a careful glance over the coffee machines at the lobby, just checking, just to make sure that he’s still—

And he is.

Cool.

It takes you a few minutes to kind of— dredge up the guts to go talk to him, another few more for the last trickle of late-night coffee-getters to start to finally taper out, and then you do it. You gather your resolve and your nerve and whatever else, courage, too, probably, and you go out into the lobby and you stand in front of his table and you wait for him to, eventually, look up from where he’s been staring, kind of sullen-looking, out of the window.

“I looked it up,” you blurt out when he does, before you can think better of it, “Online. Apparently supply chains were really small, in like. The 30s. So people could get stuff, right, but a lot more of it was— local. You know that, obviously, but, um.”

He just looks at you. Unblinking.

“Anyway,” you say, trying to ignore the weird kind of twisty feeling of your nerves in the pit of your stomach; jesus christ, he stares, a lot, “Anyway, I had this neighbor when I was a kid, right, and he was— his family, they were refugees. Immigrants. He was learning English, but I made friends with him by using my allowance to buy things at the grocery store, like, weird things, stuff that he’d never had before. So we could— try it. For– fun. And I thought– well. There was a sale, today, so.”

You gesture to your hand; awkwardly, helplessly, god, this is weird, like ice-breakers on hard mode, if the ice were less like a frozen-over pond and more like one of those miles-deep Antarctic glaciers. A tissue-thin plastic bag, the knotted top of it held in your fist, the lone fruit inside just kind of– sitting there.

He finally blinks, and then he shifts back in his chair, and he looks at you some more, his gaze unwavering and solid and heavy like it has actual, physical weight to it, like it’s pressing down on your shoulders and forcing you into the ground. “Are you— have you been trying to make friends with me?” he says, in a tone that’s kind of incredulous and a lot disbelieving and tells you absolutely nothing about whether or not he’d actually be amenable to that.

Whatever.

Fuck it, you think, and then you lift your chin and you meet his eyes and you make yourself stare right back, stubborn and deliberately unflinching. “Yeah,” you tell him. “I have.”

His expression– it’d been flat, impassive and unreadable, but something cuts right across it for a fraction of a second when you say that, quick and sure as a knife. For that one heartbeat of a moment he looks expressive and alive– you think he might even look stricken, actually, and you wonder far too late if maybe this had been a mistake, if you’d upset him. Done something wrong.

But then it’s gone, so quickly that you think you must have imagined it.

He leans back in his chair, and he looks down at his empty coffee cup as he taps it absently against the table, like he’s thinking it over. When he looks back at you the sum of his features are wholly neutral, except for his mouth, which is quirked up at the corners, just a little– not a smile, not with the way his lips are pressed together, into a hard, unwavering line, but it doesn’t look like something bad, either. It doesn’t look negative.

“Okay,” he says. “All right, shoot.” He jerks his chin towards the bag in your hand. “What’ve you got?”

You tear the side of it with your fingernails and dump the contents on the table. “Pomegranate. Had one before?”

His mouth twitches up more, and this time it does look like a smile, the beginnings of one, like he’s repressing it. He clicks his tongue and stretches his legs out under the table and shakes his head, just a little. “Yep,” he says. “Struck out on your first try.”

“No way Mr. Great Depression is more worldly than me.” You decide you’re going to interpret that as an agreeable reaction. There’s only one chair at his table, so you drag one over from nearby, the legs making this awful grinding sound against the tile floor. “I’ve never had one, so I’m taking half. Only fair.”

You fumble in your pocket for your knife to cut into it. He stares at it, when you pull it out, and then stares at you, “What do you have that for?”

Some nameless tension inside of you unwinds at the realization that he’s not just sitting there in stone-faced silence, anymore.

“Walk home after close,” you reply with an easy shrug; the conversation no longer feels like the world’s most awkward one-person performance or like actually physically pulling teeth, and that’s— pretty cool. Feels like a victory. “I usually finish at like, eleven-thirty. Not super dangerous, or anything, but better safe than sorry.”

Barnes makes a disapproving sound— what you think is a disapproving sound— under his breath when you flick the blade open, and grabs the pomegranate from the center of the table. “Too short,” he says, jerking his chin at it in your hand, “Gonna be a pain in the ass, let me.”

The knife that he pulls from what you think must be a sheath on his boot is a straight blade without a handguard, matte black and tapered to a point and without a doubt longer than four inches. Long enough to halve the pomegranate in one clean cut, sharp enough to bite into the laminate surface of the table underneath, just a little.

“That’s definitely not street legal,” you say, mostly joking.

Barnes stares at you. It takes you a second to realize that’s— new. Relatively speaking.

“New York made anything over four inches illegal, plus butterfly knives and switchblades,” you inform him. “I think in the 50s.”

He makes some noncommittal sound of what you assume is probably distaste, and stows the knife back in his boot.

“Don’t worry,” you say, “I’m not a snitch.”

He doesn’t smile, but his expression lightens a little.

On the table, the pomegranate is split neatly in half, and the little pebbled fruits inside the open skin glint in the warm light from the overhead fixtures. Like flecks of garnet. Or drops of blood.

“Could get these in the fall, sometimes,” he says, looking down at it. “Used to pick the bits out with a sewing needle. Made it last all afternoon.”

Your brain conjures up the image of the baby-faced Barnes, maybe sitting on the curb or the front steps of a building. You wonder what the details of the memory are. You wonder if little scrawny Steve had been there, or if he’d been alone.

You don’t ask.

“I don’t have a sewing needle,” is what you do say, “But—“ your nametag is clipped to your shirt, a flat slip of plastic with a pin on the back, and you unfasten it and slide it across the table.

Behind you, the door hinges creak and the bell chimes and you sigh, long-suffering, and get to your feet with an exaggeratedly affected eye-roll.

“I’ll be back,” you tell him, “Customer.”

You go to take the order and then midway through making it the doorbell sounds again. Midway through making that, same deal. This happens, at night, a trickle of customers just fast enough to keep you working nonstop, now that you’re the only person running the store. It goes on for something like ten minutes, which irritates the shit out of you despite the fact that it is technically your job. It’s nine-thirty at night and you’ve been at work for six hours and what you want to be doing is picking this dude’s brain, not making fucking coffee and bagels.

And also because a part of you is aware that he usually leaves around now.

He’s still there, though, when you come back; on the table there’s the husk of one half of the pomegranate, this pale and washed-out color like corn silk, and a neat pile of seeds on a recycled-paper napkin. Barnes has the other half and he’s poking out little grains of red with the safety-pin end of your name tag and biting the pieces off the tip, breaking the fragile skin between his teeth. He looks— calmer. Kind of wistful.

You realize this must be the first time he’s done this since he was a child, all the way back in a Brooklyn that doesn’t look anything like this one. Living alongside different people. Walking different streets. Breathing different air.

“That’s for you,” he says, nodding at the little bits of red, the empty husk, “I thought— since you’re working.”

You blink at him, and then you smile, a small, grateful one. Something flashes in his eyes, when you do; you aren’t paying much attention to it, still thinking about him, being so out of time. How strange this all must be. How much you really did mean it when you said you wanted to be his friend.

Barnes seems to realize when he brings the pin to his mouth again that it’s attached to your nametag. “Sorry,” he says, stilted and stiff and awkward-sounding, again, “I— you probably don’t want this back, now.”

“‘S fine, you can throw it out, if you want— I have so many.”You slide back into the chair and fish out of your apron pocket a blank one that you’d grabbed from the back, not knowing he’d gone and picked all the seeds out of your half already. “I forget them in my pockets, they keep ending up in the washing machine.”

His expression relaxes, a little. He catches the kernel of fruit at the end of the pin between his teeth and bites down until there’s a burst of red in his mouth. Stabs another, works it free of the shell, the flimsy little white membrane around it wilting in on itself. You watch him do that for a minute, contemplative and silent. His mouth is red. His tongue, too, when it darts across his bottom lip. Makes you think about rocket pops from the ice cream truck in the summer. Makes you wonder if they had those, back then.

“Did all that work for nothing, huh?” he says, after a while. You startle out of your thoughts and blink at him, nonplussed; he glances down at the pile of seeds on the napkin. “Thought you wanted to try it.”

“Oh,” you say, eloquently. “Oh, yeah. Duh.”

The first gem-glittering marble of fruit is softer than you’d expected and ruptures between your thumb and forefinger, staining the pads of them all red. You think about summer, as a kid, when you’d fall and scrape your hands on the asphalt hard enough that they bled. It’s almost the same color.

The second time the seed is firmer and it bursts sharp and tart and faintly sweet between your teeth. “Kind of like cranberries,” you say, taking another.

The pile is gone quickly, leaving just the napkin, the juice, like a dark wine stain. You lick your fingers clean. He’d been staring, the way he kind of always stares, but when your lips close around your thumb, he looks away.

You learn a bunch about food in the 1940s, mostly by accident.

Mangoes were a thing; they’d had some growing down in Florida, and you could get them seasonally. Pineapples used to be so rare that rich people would display the whole fruit as a centerpiece at parties and things, way back in the very early 1900s and up through the Great Depression, too; but by the time the 30s rolled around you could get the canned kind at the store. Watermelon was a thing, too, but they all had the solid, jet-black seeds you weren’t supposed to swallow; somebody’d bred those out of the commercial ones sometime after Barnes had slipped out of time.

“I gotta just go straight for the really fucking weird stuff,” you muse, mostly to yourself. It’s late and it’s quiet in the shop and it’s raining outside, the street slick and black and reflecting the light from the lampposts. He stays later, now, leaves closer to 10:30; you’re kind of proud of that. That he seems to like you, your company. Or at least doesn’t dislike it.

“You could just ask,” he says, sounding just the slightest bit exasperated, “If I’ve had something before.”

“No,” you tell him, deeply serious, “No, that fucking ruins it, Barnes, it ruins the surprise.”

He looks at you blankly. A few seconds too late, you realize you’ve never actually said that, out loud. His name. You don’t call him Sergeant in your head anymore, it seems too formal, but James seems too intimate, and you hadn’t asked— hadn’t wanted to ask, hadn’t wanted to pry— if he still thinks of himself as Bucky.

He doesn’t say anything.

Barnes it is, then.

Gooseberries used to be way more popular, all the way up into the 1920s, even though technically it was made federally illegal to grow them a few years before he was born. It was an attempt to stop the spread of this fungus that’d jump from the bushes to pine trees, killed huge swathes of them up and down the Northeast, decimated the lumber industry. He tells you his Ma used to make tarts and pies from them, in the fall when they were in-season, but eventually the farms upstate started getting shut down, and it was too expensive. The federal ban lifted in the 60s, you learn via Google, but production never really ramped back up again— they didn’t even have them at your regular grocery store, you’d had to go all the way to Trader Joe’s.

They taste kind of like green apples. He’d looked the way he did with the pomegranate, that first time, wistful and softer and like he’s remembering. It’s really the most you’ve ever seen behind whatever practiced and controlled exterior he maintains, beyond flashes of almost-smiles and eyebrow-raises and pointed looks. You want to peel that veneer off like peeling the skin from a fruit, get underneath it, get to the flesh of him; when this thought occurs to you, you bury it immediately, as deep as it will go.

“White pine blister rust,” you read aloud off of your phone, crossing the lobby to his table, coffee cup in one hand. You set it on the table for him and he reaches for it with a mumbled thanks. “That’s what it was called, the fungus-thing. According to wikipedia.”

Barnes blinks at you. He takes a long, slow sip of his coffee, even though it’s still probably a little too hot, not that it matters to him; and then he sets the cup down and frowns and says, “What the fuck is wikipedia?”

You laugh without meaning to.

The skin slips, a little, whatever’s underneath peeking out, bruised and soft and bloody, but then you blink and he’s fine. Watching you, expression light and practiced. Whole, again.

In February something happens.

Your coworker tells you before he leaves, pulls you aside in the threshold of the door to the back room to mumble, “there were some dudes out back by the garbage when I took it out before. I was getting bad vibes, I don’t know, just— be careful.”

There’d been a string of robberies through the borough, all within some convenient distance of the subway line, and the store is probably three blocks away from one of the platforms. The back door is one of those that opens only from inside the store, the other end flat and lacking a handle; you leave it propped open when you run to take the garbage out. You’re not stupid, is the thing. The guys, whoever they are— it could be nothing, but it could be that they’re waiting. Waiting for it to be just you, waiting for the door to open, waiting for the opportunity. You have a knife, but it’s a flimsy ten-dollar gas station piece of shit, mostly for intimidation and not for actual use; you’re also well aware that using knives in confrontations tends to make things worse rather than better. Bring that shit out and you’re asking to get it taken from you. Asking to have it used on you.

You could try to call the cops, but more than half of them have been requisitioned by the GRC, and you know what they’d tell you. Unfortunately at the moment we’re understaffed and can’t afford to respond to predictive calls. Please let us know if and when something illegal occurs. Practiced and perfunctory and something people joke about in your neighborhood, because there’s really nothing else any of you can do. Your coworker can’t stay, either; he can’t afford to pay the babysitter another hour, not on minimum wage.

“It’s okay,” you tell him, “I’ll be fine.”

And it is okay. You will be fine.

Barnes is there.

It’s a Wednesday, so it’s just sheer fucking luck that he’s here at all; he must be able to see it, in your face, when you come bursting through the little swinging gate-thing and out into the lobby, because his hands tighten into fists where they’re resting on the table.

“Oh my god I’m so glad you’re here,” you say, breathless and frantic and very much meaning it.

There’s a flash of something on his face that makes you think of heat lightning or splintering ice of the second right before a pomegranate seed bursts between teeth. You are not thinking enough about things that aren’t your immediate anxiety to register it.

“I need your help,” you tell him.

He grows progressively stiffer as you explain the situation, and when you’re done he says nothing, just stands up and pushes his chair in and says, real low, “I’ll go— talk to them. Don’t worry.”

The bell above the door chimes when he leaves.

You stand there at the edge of his table for what feels like some impossible amount of time, every muscle in your body wound up like a spring, jaw clenched so hard it’s starting to drive the beginnings of a headache somewhere on the top of your skull—

He comes back.

“Are you— did they—“ you break from nervously picking at your fingernails to make some vague and anxious gesture. Barnes looks fine, unscathed, cool and neutral and controlled as ever, but when he looks at you it makes something base and instinctive deep inside of you buzz with— alarm. Or— something.

“They were just— being stupid, just drunks,” he says, and maybe you’re imagining it, the thread of tension in his voice. “It’s fine. It’s all— it’s fine.”

You feel yourself visibly relax. “Oh, god, thank you so much, dealing with drunk guys is— it’s the worst.”

He flinches, when you say the first words, just a little, his eyes almost closing and the muscles around them going just briefly tense, like he’d managed to suppress most, but not all, of the instinct. “You don’t— you don’t need to thank me.”

You study him for a minute, like maybe if you look hard enough that flicker of whatever it was would come back, linger long enough for you to make sense of it.

“All right, fine, no thanks. Thanks rescinded,” you say finally, bemused. “I’m going to refill your coffee, though.”

You say it with your hand already half-outstretched, close enough that he can’t stop you even with his reflexes, and whatever entirely reactive and entirely accidental noise of triumph you make when his hand closes around empty space is— not on purpose.

His mouth twitches, the closest you’ve ever seen to an actual smile.

Something in your stomach flips.

You shove that shit down, too.

When you come back with the coffee he’s sitting back in the chair with his legs stretched out and he’s staring out the window again.

“Thanks,” he says, when you set it down.

“Oh, so you can thank me, but I can’t thank you?”

His mouth twitches again. “Yes.”

You make some entirely performative tch sound of affected annoyance as you retreat back behind the counter; you still have to take the garbage out, clear out the pastry display case, start emptying and scrubbing down the coffee pots you’re not using now that business has slowed to a crawl.

“Are you still coming Friday?” you call out to him, over the hum and hiss of the espresso machine running through the automated cleaning program, the milk foaming wands steaming in pitchers of sanitizer water, all of it loud enough that you’d never be able to hear him over it, something you realize too late, “Sorry, hold on, I should have asked before I—“

“Do you want me to?” His voice is clear and close and you startle reflexively; he’s at the counter, at the register, staring. Always staring. You thought in the beginning you’d get used to it. It’s not uncommon; those with power stare, and those without cast their eyes down and away. It’s the nature of customer service jobs in New York City. You meet a lot of powerful assholes in suits who make more money than you probably will ever handle in the entirety of your life, and they look at you and talk at you rather than to you, like you’re nothing, a rodent or an insect or something even less than that. You’ve never once flinched away from any of their stares, and never so much as felt like you wanted to, either.

James Buchanan Barnes doesn’t look at you like that at all. He doesn’t look at you like you’re lesser. He looks at you like he can see you— like he can see right through you, like you’re transparent, like everything going on in your head is out in the open, visible, vulnerable, or maybe like he just wants it to be. Like he’s looking for a door hidden somewhere in the minutiae of your expression, some way to force himself inside and pull all of your thoughts and secrets out like unraveling a spool of thread.

He doesn’t look at you like you’re not human. He looks at you like he knows, precisely, intimately, exactly how human you are, and that’s—

Kind of worse. Or maybe it isn’t. It’s definitely weird.

You realize with a start that he’d asked you a question, and you’d been silent for way too long. You tear your eyes away from him and focus on pulling all the cup lids out of the tray at the edge of the counter, sweeping the donut crumbs and sugar crystals and coffee grinds out and onto the floor.

“I mean—,” your tongue feels thick and clumsy in your mouth and it trips over the words, the syllables, stumbling and uncertain. “Not if you have plans, I— you don’t have to.”

“I never have plans,” he scoffs, scathingly self-deprecating, and then there’s the steady rhythm of his fingers drumming against the counter and you feel it on your neck, the hairs raising there, that he’s staring at you still, “I just—since I came today, I thought maybe you wouldn’t— I don’t want to bother you.”

You freeze, stack of iced coffee lids in one hand, half-lowered back into the now-spotless tray.

You force yourself to look back up at him.

“You’re not bothering me,” you say, stressing each word, like it’s important. It is important. “You’re— I like you. We’re friends.”

That thing, from before, the almost-maybe-flinch; it happens again, and you feel your own expression do something reflexive in response, your lips part and your brow furrow in the seconds before you can school your features back to composure. Whatever he does, the control he has over his affect; you’re not very good at that.

“Besides,” you say, into the silence, eyes cast back down and focused on filling the lid tray, “I found something you’ve never tried before, this time. And since I paid for it already, you are, in fact, contractually obligated to be here.”

He laughs, the same kind of laugh, the only kind of laugh you ever get from him; the cut-short one, like he doesn’t mean to, like he’d tried to stop it.

Like he couldn’t.

Barnes leaves at about 10:45, and you bring the trash out right before he goes, just in case. You wouldn’t have seen it if it weren’t for the fact that you were still kind of nervous and had your phone in hand, shining the washed-out beam of light back-and-forth across the little fenced-in area by the dumpster, trying to keep the garbage bag at arms’ length to avoid getting some disgusting coffee sludge mixture on your shoes where it’s leaking out of the corners.

The light catches on it. It glitters, captures your attention, red against the sun-bleached gray concrete. Pomegranate seeds. Shards of garnet.

Drops of blood.

#bucky barnes #bucky barnes x reader #i'm uploading all of the things to tumblr. finally.#fic; drops of blood

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bee-birb · 3 months

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compiled my thoughts whilst watching sonic prime s3, shes a doozy

WATCHING IT

he ate shit again :3

AHHHH THEY HELD HANDS (for half a second to propel forward) BUT STILL

shadow COUGHING??? he can get HURT??? nah he just fell

HE ATE SHIT AGAIN I LOVE THIS SONIC

🎶there goes hawaii, there-ere goes hawaii🎵 🎵there goes hawaii, the island is gone🎶

THE FIGHT CHOREOGRAPHY IS GORGEOUS

THE LITTLE DETAILS AHHHH LIKE TEHIR EYES MOVING AND EARS AND SHADOWS CHEST FUR MOVES WHEN HE BREATHES AHHHH SO GOOD

BIRDIE GO BRRRR

times sonic has eaten shit this season: 4

nine: “i hate chili dogs!” sonic: dramatic and wounded gasp

I need to get this off my chest why does sonic slap his ass as a taunt ive seen it in prime and ive seen in in x, this is a recurring theme and i am wtfing at it, why does sonic have a thing for smackin his ass as a taunt? idk but its fuckin hilarious, your ass is not that juicy it is not tempting, save the ass slapping for the bedroom you blue gumball son of a bitch, Sonic you have flat ass syndrome stop

DYING ONE OF THE BIGS JUST GOT SPINDASHED AND LOST HIS MEMORY AND STARTED TALKING BRITISH THIS WAS NEVER RESOLVED WHAT THE FUCK, DAMNIT NOW I HAVE TO HATE PIRATE BIG CUZ HES FUCKIN BRITISH

GIANT BIG HAHAHAHAHA GIANT BIG ROBOT SOBS HES JUST A GUY HE DOESNT DESERVE TO BE MADE A ROBOT DOUBLE WHO SHITS FROGGIE NUKES

where the FUCK is sonics boyfriend you cant hide in the crater the entire climax battle dumbass getchyo gay striped glutes out here and save you bf

bro got hit with a bomb and SURVIVED

SCREAMS AT THE GAY IDIOTS IN THE CREVICE DOING GAY SHIT LIKE SMASHING EACH OTHER GAYYYY

LMAO SHADOW ACTUALLY SMILED, granted, he was talking about “smashing hordes of sonics” (probably about destroying them but it was offcamera so we’ll never know) IT WAS SO CUTE

i also need 4 rocks, 80 ft of vine, and a time machine

times sonic has eaten shit this season: 6

the gang is not impressed by sonics bf

there goes hawaii, there-there goes hawaii, there goes hawaii, the island is gone pt 2

gonna draw this stupidhead 🫶

THE LIL NODS I AM SCREAMING

me when 6 identical copies of me attack my boyfriend (its kinda hot)

"AAAAAHHAAAHHAAAA! aaaahhhaaaahhh! splat."

YUHHH STEP ON YOUR BOYFRIEND AGAIN thats like what the 4th time???

renegade knux makes the best faces ngl like his expressions are top tier

shadow has not been onscreen in 10 minutes give me more of the edgy swifty, THE KING HAS RETURNED

SHADOW NODDING WHEN SONIC SACRIFICES HIMSELF HE KNOWS AHHHHH THE FUCKING NODS I AM SCREAMING THEY ARE COMMUNICATING WITHOUT WORDS LOSING MY MARBLES GOING KOOKY SCREAMING

OMGOMGOMG WHEN SONIC IS SAYING HOW HES GONNA SACRIFICE HIMSELF AND HE SAYS "If I do this" AND SHADOWS FISTS TIGHTEN HE CARES IM NOT CRAZY BUT IM SURE NOT NORMAL

CRYING he still has a smile as hes going to fucking DIE AHHHHH SCREAMING

ahhh the gateways are the shape of the shards

HE FUCKING SMILES AS HES ABOUT TO GET THE LIFE SUCKED OUT OF HIM HIS LITERAL GLUE HOLDING HIS ATOMS TOGETHER WILL BE SLURPED LIKE SPAGHETTI THROUGH A STRAW AND THIS INSUFFERABLE SELF SACRIFICING IDIOT IS SMILING IM GOING TO COMMIT SEVERAL WAR CRIMES

HIS FISTS TIGHTEN AGAIN WHEN THE MACHINE TURNS ON IM LOSING MY GRIP ON REALITY

AHHHHHHHHH THE FUCKING DROOP THE REACH SCREAMS IN AGONY THE HOPE IN HIS EYES AND HOW HE REACHES UP TO HELP- HE DROPS IT HIS EARS DROOP HES SAD AND LOSES LIGHT AND HIS EYES OH HIS EYES SPEAK MULTITUDES

old man soccer

HE STAYS BEHIND WHILE THE RESISTANCE FIGHTS THE CC SO HE CAN MAKE SURE SONIC DOESNT EAT SHIT WHILE HES BREAKING APART AT THE SEAMS

gay ass hand on hip side lean, fucking queer

OMGGGGG RUSTY KEPT THE GRIM ROSE HAMMER CACKLES SHE WILL BECOME AN EVEN BETTER WEAPON OF MASS DESTRUCTION

HIS FISTSSSSS THEY CLENCH WHEN SONIC IS LIKE DYING ON THE SHIPPPP

hA the sisters rose are FAILING now his bf gets to save his blue gumball ass

HE LOOKS SO SAD WHEN SONIC FAINTS GEDGIYFVJITWSGHIFE

BRO IS FUCKING TRANSPARENT SIR WHO GAVE YOU THE PERMISSION TO BE SO LOW OPACITY YOUR ATOMS ARE SLINGING AWAY FROM YOUR CONSCIOUSNESS FASTER THAN IF YOU WERE RADON YOU SELF DESTRUCTIVE IMBECILE

THE FUCKING NODS I CANTTTTTT

SONIC SMILES HES SO HAPPY TO SEE SHADS ON THE PRISM

lol rock gone get rekt eggbreath

HE DOES LITTKE EAR WIGGLES AHHH SO CUTE

you have 13 seconds before the island fucking explodes you hot topic wannabe and you blue gumball son of a bitch. you have done nothing but destroy my life, i hope you both die.

SCREAMS IT IS BEAUTIFUL EXCELLENT ENDING 10/10 WHERE THE FUCK DID SHADOW GO WITH THE THING IDC ITS BEAUTIFUL CRYING WHERES MY FANFIC

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wouldyoustilllovemeifiwasawyrm · 6 months

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Cleaning Up

Linktober 2023 Day 26: Overgrown This room, this castle, all of Hyrule, was her responsibility. She would dig through her own trash and find any treasures that remained. As for everything else, she would have it removed.

He’d been in this place dozens of times in this life. He blushed to imagine how often he had been here, standing on this floor, in his previous one. He wanted to imagine this room as it once was. Scraps of fabric hung from a broken bedframe, caved in by roofstones that fell through the canopy, crushing the mattress and scattering the feathers inside. He’d found little of value in this room before, other than a respite from the guidance sights of enemy Guardians. The books had long since deteriorated, only a handful of pages salvageable among the rot and decay. Animals had snuck in during the short peace following the last battle with the Calamity. Rats left chewings of fabric and paper all over the floor.

Link ran his hand across the old duvet, dulled in color and damp from morning dew. The embroidery and silken fabrics must have cost a fortune, not to mention the thick stuffing inside, which stuck to his skin through the rips in the cover. He wondered if he had felt it when it was clean, when the blues and reds were vibrant, when it was whole and dry and not so gray. He had some difficulty reconciling it—the decay with the beauty. Zelda’s bedroom must have once been beautiful.

His princess knelt on the floor, sifting through scraps of paper that had fallen. A lantern sat beside her, the flickering light making her task a little easier. Some legible writing remained on the sheets, though not much. She sorted them into piles. Those in the worst state, the most chewed, stained, or ink-bled, piled the highest.

When Zelda suggested that she return to her childhood home, Purah cautioned her against it. The damage was severe. Likely, little of what remained in her room would be salvageable. She would have to face the things that she loved falling into decay, and that might trouble her greatly. ”Send someone else to dig through all that, Your Highness.” Purah urged. ”Robbie and I could do it. I know where you kept your research notes.”

But Zelda wouldn’t have it. This room, this castle, all of Hyrule, was her responsibility. She would dig through her own trash and find any treasures that remained. As for everything else, she would have it removed.

Vines and moss crept up the sides of her tower, nature growing over what Hyrule had once claimed as her own. A drizzle of rain crept in through the gaping hole in the roof, sprinkling Link’s hood. Zelda, for now, remained on the dry side of the room. She muttered something under her breath, setting another scrap into the garbage pile.

Link didn’t know what he was here for, if he was being honest. He knew nothing about Sheikah tech. He would be no help in determining what was worthwhile to keep and what could be tossed away. If nothing else, he could set to work on clearing the space, sorting through furniture, and compiling that which could be carried out and burned. He picked up an armchair, the once-pink fabric stained with mold. Zelda might get sick from being too close to it.

“That belonged to my grandmother.” Zelda stated, not looking up from her sorting.

Link set the chair back down. “I was going to toss it. There’s mold in the cushion.”

“Hm.” Zelda hummed. She glanced up at the chair, then dropped her gaze to the papers. “Toss it then.”

As instructed, Link chucked it onto the remains of the bed. It sank the soaked mattress even further into the floor. Link winced when he heard a slat crack.

Next was the vanity. The mirror had seen better days, spotted with oxidation and partially warped across the glass. A few glass bottles rested on the surface, in various shapes and sizes. Glass bottles of many colors, shaped to resemble birds, flowers, or abstract twists of a glassblower’s prowess, were filled with some sort of liquid. Link picked up a bottle out of curiosity and unstopped it. A wave of sour scent assaulted his nose. He coughed, stopping the bottle back before his stomach inverted itself at the stench.

“Those perfumes are over a hundred years old, Link.” Zelda chided. “I don’t know what you expected.”

Link coughed again, fighting back a wretch. “Not sour milk! I thought maybe they would have, I don’t know, stopped smelling at all.”

Zelda shrugged, setting a scrap of paper into the keep pile. “Some probably have. I don’t remember what that one was made with. My father gave it to me when I turned fifteen.”

The king commissioned this? Link turned the bottle over in his hands. Based on the swirling, braided design of the green glass, he thought it might have once been a floral. Certainly not now. Those flowers had long since rotted. “It’s a pretty bottle.”

Zelda heaved a sigh (easy enough on the non-stinky side of the room). “I suppose.”

It reminded him a bit of the way some women braided dried herbs together. He’d tried that once. Clavia told him that tied herb bundles made soup better. He must not have done a very good job of tying them as the leaves quickly scattered in his soup. He pulled out as many wet, limp leaves as he could, and even still, they ended up in his final bowl. “It’s in pretty good condition. We could dump it and reuse the bottle.”

Zelda glanced up, her emerald eyes resting on the glass in his hand for a moment. Some emotion he couldn’t identify flashed across her face. She went back to sorting. “If you’d like. I’m sure it will make someone else happy.”

With her permission, Link gathered up all the bottles. He’d give them to Purah later. She could repurpose them into something nice again, if she wanted. Or she could make a stink bomb horrid enough to level a village. All good options. He set the perfume bottles in a trunk that they’d emptied out earlier that day. The handles of this one hadn’t rotted off yet, so it would be good for transporting anything valuable.

He tugged at the first of the drawers on the vanity. It refused to budge. He tugged again. “It’s jammed.”

“It’s locked, Link.” Zelda corrected.

Sure enough, the drawer had a keyhole toward one side. He frowned. “Do you have a key?”

Zelda thought for a moment, looking around the room. “Check that end table.”

What Link was sure was once a lovely cherry wood end table beside Zelda’s bed now leaned against the wall, the drawer hanging lopsided and off its track. He wrenched that drawer free, pulling it out. Inside were folded pieces of paper, most in good condition, and a few silk handkerchiefs. Link brought the drawer over to Zelda, showing her the contents.

Zelda ceased her sorting for a moment, her eyes widening when she saw the folded papers within. She picked up the first, handling it gently, as if it might crumble away in her hands. As she unfolded it to read the contents, her face paled, her expression set like stone.

“Princess?” Link asked. He peeked over her shoulder at the paper but found the penmanship too close to read. “What is it?”

Zelda took a shaky breath, folding the paper back up. She set it in the keep pile. “A note. These are all notes, from various people. This one,” She tapped a finger on the small scrap. “Was written by my lady’s maid, Henrietta. It’s nothing of any importance, really. She wrote to inform me that her mother was ill and she had to go home for a week to tend to her.” Zelda shook her head. “It’s of no importance. I should probably toss it.”

“Wait.” Link sat down beside her, stopping her hand from moving the note to the trash pile. “Tell me about her.”

Zelda blinked, surprised. “About a servant?”

“About your friend.” He said. “I remember that you were friends with your maid.”

The rain drizzled on. Zelda fiddled with the note in her hands, tracing the folds with her fingertips. “She…she was very nice. She would sing a little song every morning as she helped me dress. I don’t remember all the words anymore. It’s been so long…” She trailed off. Link remained silent, sitting with her in the quiet. “Something about bluebirds, I believe. Bluebirds chirping sweetly in the trees.” She took a slow breath. “She poured my tea, too. She always set a lump of sugar in the cup and poured the tea over it. No one else did it that way. She said it dissolved faster. And she would brush my hair and braid it into a crown.” She pointed to the vanity. “There used to be a little stool that matched that. I haven’t seen it yet. I sat on that and took my tea while she brushed my hair.”

Link followed her gaze, imagining the scene. He could see it so clearly. She liked her tea first thing in the morning. He could see her setting a cup on a delicate saucer, a smiling maid combing through Zelda’s golden hair, them laughing together at a song about bluebirds. He could see it. It was beautiful.

Zelda let out a small, bitter laugh beside him. “You probably think I’m spoiled rotten, having someone else do everything for me.”

“No.” Link said quickly, directing his attention back to her. “You’re a princess. That’s just how you grew up.”

“Hm.” Zelda hummed, her lips pressed into a thin line. She let the note fall into her lap, digging into the drawer for the next. “Let’s see, this one…” She unfolded the next note. “Ah. This one is from the high priestess. It’s a letter summoning me to the temple to try some new style of prayer that she’d found in the annals.” She flipped the note over, showing Link a very unflattering drawing of a woman in a long dress with ears and fangs like a bokoblin. “This is what I thought of her after she made me pray on that hard stone floor for hours. Awful woman.”

The lines of the drawing were faded, the ink bleeding out just a little, making the priestess appear almost bloody. “How old were you?”

“The first time?” Zelda asked. She chewed her lower lip, thinking. “Eight, I think.”

”Eight?!” Link gasped. “You were eight years old, and this crabby lady made you pray for hours?!”

Zelda shrugged. This note, too, fell into her lap. “Lot of good it did, too. Hand me another.”

“Wait,” Link pushed her hand away. “Why did you keep that one?”

“Hm?” Zelda blushed, a hint of a smile on her lips. “Oh. Because Henrietta found it later, among a bunch of other stuff. She said, ‘When you do unlock your powers, you’re going to look back on this drawing and laugh. You’ll laugh at how they doubted you.’” Her smile wavered, the corners of her mouth twitching downward again. “I…I’m waiting to laugh.”

Link didn’t stop her from taking the next note. As she unfolded it, her previous downcast vanished, replaced with a laugh and a blush that reached the tips of her ears. “Oh, this one is from you!”

“What?” Link asked, taking the offered note. “From me?”

Sure enough, his own handwriting, though slightly neater, stared back at him. His writing strung together a poem, so clumsy, so raunchy, that he immediately folded it again and handed it back, his face burning. “You can trash that one.”

“Oh no, I’m keeping this one!” Zelda giggled. She stood up, unfolded the note, and, to his mortification, began to read aloud. “Princess of my waking dreams, your smile in my night does gleam.” She darted to the other side of the room as Link got up, trying to grab the paper back. “As we lay alone in bed, I wish that we may one day wed!” She squeaked as Link got closer, twirling away from him as she read on. “As pillows lay my head to rest, I dream of your soft and supple- eek!” Zelda yelped as Link grabbed her around the waist, finally catching up and pinning her against the wall between the broken bed frame and the bookshelf. She let him take the note, not trying to fight again. “You know, I recall something similar happening the first time I read that poem, too.”

Heat burned all the way up Link’s ears and down to his neck. And though he tried to keep his composure, Zelda’s body pinned against his made forming any coherent thoughts extremely difficult. He tried to glare at her, to feign annoyance and disdain, but found his resolve crumbling with every moment that Zelda stared up at him with those lovely emerald eyes. “Don’t you dare show it to anyone else.”

“I would never.” Zelda teased. She pecked a kiss to his nose, grinning broadly. “That my thighs are soft as Rito down will remain our secret.”

Just when he thought his mortification would never end, Zelda slipped under his arm, returning to the abandoned drawer. She riffled through the remainder of the notes. “All of these I’ll keep. They were all written by those who are long dead.” She nodded to Link. “Excepting you, of course.” She picked up one of the handkerchiefs and unwrapped it, revealing a brass key.

Click.

The drawer on the vanity slid open. Zelda’s hand hovered over the knob, her smile disappearing once again.

“What’s in there?” Link asked, joining her side. Inside the drawer laid a necklace, carefully set on red silk. The golden chain, thin as a spider’s silk, looped through a triangle pendant. Three golden triangles joined together formed a larger structure, each with a gem set in the center. At the top point of this triangle laid a small ruby, barely bigger than the nail on Zelda’s pinky, cut into a diamond. To the left, three sapphires. And to the right, an emerald, round as a pea. Link stared at the necklace, finer than anything he’d ever seen in this lifetime, and so well-preserved that he wondered whether the decay of malice had ever reached the walls of that box. “It’s beautiful.”

Zelda swallowed hard, her voice barely a whisper. “It was my mother’s.” She took a shaky breath, steeling herself as she reached into the drawer and took hold of the chain. As she lifted it up, the gleam of the gold and gems seemed to glow in the firelight. “Not that I remember her ever wearing it. Father said it was hers.”

The pendant spun as she held it aloft. It spun toward Zelda, then away, and back again, catching the glint of the lantern’s glow as it turned. To say that the stones and the pendant were beautiful would be the understatement of a lifetime. It almost looked…magical. Like it called to his spirit.

Zelda set it back in the silk, wrapping it up and tucking it into her pocket. “Whether she wore it or not, it’s too fine a piece to leave here in all this decay.” She picked up small keep pile, tapping the papers until they were straight and laying them into the trunk they’d designated for transport earlier. “We’d better get these back to Purah before sundown. I don’t want to know what sort of creatures have made their home here.” She shuddered, giving her room one final look-over before she picked up her end of the trunk. “They can have it.”

#linktober 2023 #zelink #loz link #tears of the kingdom #loz zelda #loz fanfic #loz fic

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vinbee631 · 8 months

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I remember almost the exact moment I became a part of the sanders sides fandom. I was in middle school, and a friend I used to watch vine compilations with brought up Thomas's YouTube channel and a web series of his she really liked. And I thought "okay, why not?" and watched the first few episodes.

So. Here we are now.

I've been in a lot of fandoms since middle school, some more casual, some short term but very invested obsessions. But sanders sides was always kind of in the back of my mind. Before I even considered being autistic or doing enough research to self diagnose, it became my special interest. The show and the people involved have had such a big impact on my life.

I'm not leaving the fandom. But I respect the people that are. I respect the people that choose to casually watch until the series over. I respect the people that can't even leave Thomas unblocked anymore. I respect the people like me, who just can't bring themselves to leave.

I always kind of knew the end was going to be devastating for me, and the discourse has been a similar kind of devastating. I've watched so many content creators in this fandom come and go. I've personally seen people ruin their lives for popularity within the fandom. I've seen fanfic writers blow me away more than any published author could. There has been so much joy, so much connection, and because I was afraid of social media for a very long time, i only got to be a direct part of some of it.

The last thing we all need is another opinion about this- whole thing right now, and I don't think there's a single original though I could add that someone hasn't covered. A lot of mistakes have been made, a lot of hurt has been caused, and jesus, a lot has changed. But I know where I stand now, and I don't know that I stand to support Thomas. I don't know that everything was made perfectly, that he was as honest as he could have been, or if he's always had good at the center of his mind. I do know that he's just a person, and a very stressed one at that. When the series was at his peak, the minimal production team behind the series was put on a pedestal. That was a lot of pressure, and something that was so big and held so much weight that they all ended up with health issues by the end of it.

But there were things that they didn't do. There hasn't been a lot of honesty lately, to the point where the "suspense" just feels like we're being dragged along. I know I'm frustrated, really really frustrated, and I'm allowed to be. Thomas is also more than allowed to take the time he needs to make the thing because it's his project and his time, and it is a lot of work.

There isn't one perfect solution. The fandom will never be what it was. Thomas will never be who he was at the peak, but for differing reasons, neither will any of us. I am happy staying attached to my special interest, but I'm also exploring some other fandoms as well. I'm also in the beginnings of my first year of college, and that's a lot of pressure all on its own.

I don't know if anyone cares or if anyone will take the time to read this, but that's okay. I'll keep writing for me because I love it, and I'm gonna finish watching the series as it comes out, and im gonna love it.

So. Yeah. Have a good day <3

#sanders sides #rant #sanders sides ramble #rambles #long post #thomas sanders #discourse #i guess #idk what this is im feeling a lot of things today

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that-vibe-i-cant-explain · 5 months

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NorkusNovember 2023 | Day 5 "Time Travel"

A quick note on this AU: I decided to drop Markus and North into the universe of one of my original stories, codenamed "Project Bootstrap" because it is about time traveling androids and found family and I thought it was a natural fit.

Wordcount: 624

Years passed in blurs, centuries in blinks, the last thoughts and memories of the long-dead recorded and compiled in an Archive no one would ever see.

It was a fact that humanity would die out as Markus had seen it with his own eyes, the last dregs of civilization sprawled along the shore of the rust-red nanite sea. It was also a fact that this fate could not be changed; time was absolute and uncompromising. Markus and the other androids had been called saviors but their job was not to save humanity. It was to save its memory. And to pass it along to whatever came next.

So Markus traveled the Beams back through time and he collected his data. What he preserved were snapshots of humanity, hopes and dreams and fears, all the things that passed away. This went on and on, his life an eternal, meaningless spiral. A mission with no reward. A journey without an end.

Occasionally, Markus would get a ping that indicated another android was nearby. He might go months, even years (relatively speaking) without seeing another so it was always cause to set aside his current task and seek them out.

More and more often lately, that android was North. Sometimes they met at a café, sometimes at the edge of a worn-out battlefield, sometimes on a bridge that overlooked the flooded streets of a coastal town. And after so much time among humans, pretending to be one of them, it felt so good to relax and let the façade slip and enjoy the company. North would share the sights she’d collected and he would give her his stories. They didn’t need words to communicate and could sit for hours, just letting time melt away around them. And in these blissful moments, he felt more real and more alive than he ever had in fulfilling the purpose he was programmed for.

It was always over too soon and then it was back to building the Archive, that mausoleum to mankind. He’d seen it in the distant future, vine-shrouded and haloed by a dying sun, unused and forgotten. The memory of humanity would fade away once the last androids broke down. It became increasingly difficult to fulfill his purpose when really, he had none. All the people around him, they were already dead. They were just memories and he wanted to shout at them suddenly, to change things, to make them alive again, but he couldn’t because he was just a memory too.

He couldn’t save them, no matter how he tried. But that was not his purpose. His purpose was to preserve the moment. To catch a raindrop as it fell, to stop lightning as it forked to the ground. But moments were not meant to be preserved in a bottle and kept on the shelf. They were meant to be held close, cherished, and then let go. The Archive could not attribute meaning to that which already possessed it.

So these quiet times when his and North’s paths crossed across the great chasms of time, he held her hands and their foreheads touched, and they shared their moments. He thought this felt like a truer purpose than serving the Archive. His handlers sent him after ghosts to disturb when he should have let them go in peace.

He could not change the fate of this world and clinging on so desperately to the humans’ mission only prolonged its suffering.

It was a fact that time travel meant you never needed to hurry. The ghosts would always be there. So for now, Markus and North could pretend they were each other’s purpose. Together, they could distill time down to a moment and that would have to be enough.

#norkusnovember2023 #norkusnovember #norkus #detroit become human #dbh #bootstrap au #markus rk200 #north wr400

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lotusflowersimagines · 10 months

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Hey, I saw you do sibling scenarios/sibling content, so..

Could I possibly ask for Emma Magorobi or Xander Matthews sibling headcanons?

Sure anon! I think i'll just do Emma since shes quite a dynamic character to work with, but you can re-request for Xander if you'd like.

So sorry for lack of content to all others who have sent requests, after getting sick recently i've been suffering creative burnout and have been just generally unmotivated. However I have started all of the requests in some way or another and will get to all of them eventually! Thank you for your support and patience!

NOTES: Non-Despair AU, Character/Reader siblings, G/N reader, brief mentions of Emma's past (its nothing serious though), VOID has a 'found family' relationship in a way

~ Emma Magorobi w/ a sibling! (HC's)

You and Emma most definitely have a close relationship, no matter the dynamic you two share or in general just how different you are from eachother

At the end of the day, she's just happy to have a sibling and she'd never have it any other way, whether you were with her in the darkest times of her earlier life or through the new family shes come to know and love; you mean so much to her!

I can see her looking after you a lot, like if you forgot something at home on your way to school, she'll make sure to have a replacement for that thing or takes it and gives it to you if she notices you not having taken it yourself

Sometimes you jokingly call HER 'mom' or 'grandma em' because of the way she acts/dresses; she pretends to hate it but actually thinks its a little funny

Speaking of jokes you can't convince me Emma isn't a memer, she sends you dumb things she found on pinterest or old vine compilations and references them constantly, even if only to get a reaction out of you

She means no harm of course, but teasing you is just too funny! She can't help it!

Naturally it doesn't stop at just teasing, you get the short end of the stick with her jokes just like Hajime. You've been sitting through her nonsense for your whole life by now, it's as if shes some sort of joke encyclopedia because she has at least TWO for everything

If you do happen to have a similar sense of humor though, you guys would be having all-out pun wars for who can out-joke the other

Void is subjected to almost all of you and Emma's wars whenever you're invited to visit, which is not often because they insist that ONE Emma was enough

But oh, otherwise Void is actually quite fond of you! (even if you may have your differences with any members)

Nikei would be pestering you nonstop for your likes, dislikes, etc.. He never goes for the 'pervy' joke question though, he thinks it'd be weird because you're Emma's sibling.

Iroha is always dragging you around to show off her art in the hopes that you'll like it, maybe you can help her paint too?

You've probably already met Hajime before because of him being closer to Emma, but somehow he's even MORE motherly than her so you quickly shift your 'ok mom' jokes to him aswell. He doesn't know what to say to that and it confuses him more than anything

A lot of things depend on you liking Mikado, if it's AI!Mikado you're probably iffy on him; no-one can be THAT charming and creepy at the same time, he's probably like a serial killer or something, if you ever told him that though he'd tell on you to Emma, who would ignore him and leave him defeated ("Boo-hoo.. Y/N really thinks so lowley of me! I'm in tears!")

If it's IRL!Mikado though, you and him probably wouldn't talk much in the first place. He's not very good with new people and probably made a nervous error that made him too emberassed to talk to you for a while. He'll warm up eventually but you probably know him as the guy whos typing away on his computer all the time Overall, you and Emma have a pretty eventful life and are always finding new things to do. She really is glad to have family like you, afterall, it's all she's ever wanted

#sdra2 x reader #emma magorobi #sdra2 #emma magorobi x reader

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hime-memes · 1 year

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* Danny Gonzales Sentence Starters *

God, I’ve been watching Danny’s content since the vine era and he’s super fun & goofy in his youtube videos, so I’ve compiled a list of dialogue starters from a couple different videos he’s uploaded.

As always: These have been modified for cohesive and sensical use. Feel free to change anything within these that you see fit to make it work for your muse & the receiver’s muse !

Recommended For: Any muses/plots/timelines.

Trigger Warnings For: Swearing & slight innuendo.

“ I keep seeing this dude on tiktok who’s pretending to be a vampire, using special effects ... and, like, everyone believes him ! “ “ ... or you know, everyone would be thirsting over him because he’s a boy, and ... he’s not ... wearing a shirt. Or, he is -- he’s just wearing it wrong. “ “ ‘ He could actually be a vampire & no one would know ! ‘, uh, no, he couldn’t. He could not ... because vampires aren’t real ! “ “ Imagine if vampires really were real and this is how we found out ? From sorta like a thirst trappy tiktok of a guy just casually being like: ‘ Oh, I heard we were showing off our teeth ... Here’s mine ! ‘. “ “ What if they had to put this picture in every history book form now on ? " “ So, this is when we found out vampires existed, they’ve been around for thousands of years and we didn’t find out until this guy made a tiktok video without his shirt on ... because he wanted to show off his teeth. “ “ Still to this day it is the only evidence that we have of vampires, but I mean, you can’t dispute this ! “ “ Look, I don’t believe this yet, alright ? I’m not that stupid ... but, I swear to god, if you do this one more time -- I will believe you, I’m serious ! Post one more edited tiktok of you showing your fangs & I will spend the rest of my life believing vampires are real. “ “ ... and it’s not because you’re cute either; I don’t wanna kiss. I’m gonna spend the rest of my life trying to track you down and impale you with a wooden stake ! “ “ I like that he’s not just a vampire, he’s a cocky vampire ! “ “ Watching everyone I love die time and time again because I’m an immortal ageless being ... drifting through time becoming further convinced that nothing matters and life doesn’t mean anything because I sold my soul to the devil 200 years ago ??? Uh, it’s ya boy ! “ “ I like to think about this one and what it would look like without the effect. “ “ He jumps over his house ... so, don’t skip leg day ! “ “ I know a lot of people commenting on these tiktoks saying they think they’re real are either joking, or are literally one year old. ” “ I don’t think his intention was to deceive people into thinking vampires were real ... “ “ Welcome back to another episode of how to be a bad boy ! “ “ Don’t worry if you’re not a boy, because this applies to anybody ! You don’t have to be a boy to be a bad boy ! “ “ Bad Boys ... who doesn’t love a bad boy, am I right ? I mean, they’re strong, masculine, angry, violent ... what’s not to love ?! “ “ His IG stories are full of the worst, most painful to watch cringe tiktoks from super obscure accounts. “ “ I’ve noticed this uptick in bad boys. “ “ That’s a great question: Why do good girls like bad guys ? “ “ I mean, look at this dude: He’s clear bad as all heck ! “ “ One moment, you think he’s a doctor and the next moment he’s just a normal dude ? In normal clothes ? What the fuck happened to him ?! “ “ This is a bad boy right here guys, this doctor doesn’t play by the rules. “ “ I would not want this doctor to be my doctor cause he is a bad boy ! You can tell because his hair isn’t as neat as it was when he was just a doctor ... and he’s wearing a ring with a skull on it ! “ “ It’s possibly the skull of one of his patients who died because he was too busy making tiktoks to operate on them. “ “ What’s the opposite of swooning ? I just did the opposite of whatever swooning is ... “ “ Okay, so it looks like there’s this nerd and we’re roleplaying as his girlfriend, who left him or something to be with somebody else ? “ “ What could you possible have to show me that could change my mind now, you little dweeb ... that I used to date for some reason ... ? “ “ Now he’s some kind of ... kind of ... well, I don’t know what he is, but he looks different now ! “ “ Alright, it’s time to make her jealous ... “ “ Well ... look at me now. I’m a vampire ... so ... I bet you’re jealous of that ! “ “ Oh, you think I want you back now ? Well, I got news for you, bitch: I’m immortal & I can turn into a bat ! “ “ What is he at the beginning ?! An old man or a very stressed teen ?! “ “ Is this a tiktok or is this the plot of an early 2000s rom-com ? ” “ One day his silly old ass tripped into the fountain of youth ... “ “ I’ve fallen for you, ( and I can’t get up ). Coming this summer ! “ “ Did you just dress like an idiot all the time on purpose ? “ “ You think I’m a wrinkly old man ? Guess what bitch - I’m a greaser form the 1950s ! “ “ Are you just intentionally looking like shit to get her to break up with you ? “ “ ... Because nothing wins back girls like saying something badass really quietly into a microphone because you’re scared someone will you ! “ “ The bad boys on tiktok have values ! ... and one of those values is protecting women. “ “ He looks like he’s got absolutely no joint mobility ! “ “ Everyone knows that the badder the boy you are, the more your walk looks like a fuckin’ whomp, from Mario 64 ! “ “ It’s funny how this whole video was about respecting women, but then his girlfriend gets in the way and he’s like: ‘ Fuck off, babe ! I gotta go fight this asshole ! I have to protect your honor, babe. So, how ‘bout you get the fuck out of my way, you dumb bitch ’. “ “ This would be kind of menacing, if this dude wasn’t wearing the cutest tiny little cast on his pinky finger ! “ “ Dude are you really in any condition to be protecting women ? “ “ What the fuck ? This dude just barked ?! “ “ If you push a girl, you can catch these hands by all means. “ “ You couldn’t think of any less gruesome way to take care of this ? “ “ What are you ? A horror villain form the 80s ?! “ “ I don’t know what it is about grown men lip-syncing and then punching the air because they’re so mad ... “ “ The phrase ‘ asswhoopin’ in the parking lot ‘, I don’t know it just sounds like you’re not beating someone up, you’re just ... spanking them. “ “ You’re just, like, at the club - minding your own business and you accidentally bump into the girl standing next to you, and her boyfriend puts his hand on your shoulder and you turn around, and it’s fuckin’ Justin from Wizards of Waverly Place ... wearing what can only be described as the upper body version of a loin cloth ... ? “ “ He’s got that ‘ whispering because I’m recording a tiktok in my room and don’t want my parents to know ‘ vibe. “ “ Then he strangles you ? Is ... is that how you make a deal with the devil ? “ “ Is this, like, a sexual thing, or -- ? ... No one knows, it’s just what I do ! “ “ ... What I don’t understand is this creepy laugh followed immediately by that very weird moan. “ “ In what way is this supposed to be appealing to me as the viewer ? ” “ I just feel like if I were a girl ... If that’s what this is guy is into: I mean, girls or guys ... demons or imps ? I don’t know what he’s into ! “ “ I feel like if we got into any small argument, he’d Darth Vader my ass ! Strangle me and then lift me up in the air by my throat ... just because I didn’t want to go to Chili’s™ ... “

#rp meme #roleplay meme #sentence starters #rp sentence starters

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not-poignant · 2 years

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So, I have a chronic pain condition, Trigeminal Neuralgia. It's been so...lovingly dubbed as the suicide disease since (and the statics on this havent been updated super recently) 50% of those diagnosed commit suicide after 5 years. Because the pain is supposedly the worst pain known to man. It's a whole thing. The awful thing is that despite the pain, the person is considerably healthy and the condition itself doesnt threaten health or life expectancy. It just...hurts.

Anyway. When Gwyn loses his light? And he feels what it's like to not HURT for once? I feel that in my soul. Because I didnt always hurt. This condition wasnt from birth. And I REMEMBER what it was like. And I'm so happy for him. Like, tears (even though crying is like a 7 on the pain scale for me) welling up in my eyes happy for him. So thank you for that. It just meant a lot to me to read that.

Also, on a side note, I remember seeing these super funny vines about your characters but I cant find them now. Is there a spot for them somewhere I am unaware of?

I hope your own suffering eases for you and gives you a good reprieve soon. <3 you mean worlds to us.

TN is a horrible pain condition. I have a friend who has it and his is thankfully well managed with neuropathics, but he still gets flares and episodes that make him occasionally unable to work or function, which are especially effected by the weather. I know the suicide stats are based on super outdated research based on a chiropractor's dodgy statements with zero actual research, (I wouldn't trust chiropractors, frankly, but that's a whole other thing.)

My friend who has it is a scientist, and has shared a lot of links to me over the years on TN! (We both have chronic pain conditions, and have talked a lot about surgery, neuropathics, management options etc. over the years).

Many of those in outreach and support groups prefer moving away from the term 'suicide disease' because it's often choosing shock value over hope and support (the amount is anecdotally reported in dedicated support groups to be way less than 25% because of management options these days, though it differs between T1 and T2 type), especially because survival rates are extremely high and increasing all the time for many folks. What people were doing in 1773 with the disorder vs 2022 is pretty different!

But at any rate, I've had shingles of the trigeminal nerve and that alone was plenty, TN can be so intense and so few people know it exists, and often when articles do talk about it, they do it in this kind of exploitative way instead of pushing the actual methods of support and scientific learning etc. It's a horrible condition and there definitely needs to be more awareness of it and the growing science and options of treatment around it. I'm sorry for how much suffering it gives you, it's so unfair.

Anyway. When Gwyn loses his light? And he feels what it's like to not HURT for once? I feel that in my soul.

*nods* I definitely think this one hits different for people who have chronic pain conditions (something I also have). Gwyn's relief and his unwillingness to want to get his light back, and Augus' anger about that, I feel like anyone with a chronic pain condition (or anyone who has been through long-term pain of any kind even if it eventually goes away) knows exactly what that relief might be like and why Gwyn feels the way he does, if they've ever had a pain-free day. I do think of Gwyn's light as being like a chronic pain condition, one where he's only experienced a pain-free day in The Ice Plague.

Also, on a side note, I remember seeing these super funny vines about your characters but I cant find them now. Is there a spot for them somewhere I am unaware of?

They weren't official vines so much as vine edits / vine compilations, and they're in the Fae Tales Crack tag, there's a few of them and I'm not going to link them all specifically, but if you go back through you'll find them. :) They're all by @freyadragonlord and are awesome.

The tag is fun to go through anyway if you want to laugh about stuff. It's one of my favourites. :D

In the meantime I'm so sorry for the pain that you live with, and now relentless TN is. I don't think folks who haven't experienced unrelenting chronic fatigue or chronic pain can ever understand, but even with a chronic pain disorder of my own and having had shingles of the trigeminal nerve, I know I can't come close to imagining what it's like. I can only hope that there will be more and more developments in treatment and support, which thankfully looks to be the case, but those things can't come soon enough and in the meantime I hope you're taking care!

#asks and answers #suicide mention #chronic illness #fae tales #TN is horrible #it's been interesting talking to my friend about how weather can impact us both #he's particularly impacted by high / sharp / cold winds #(which makes sense for the part of the world he's in)#and less so by heat #and i'm more affected by humidity pre-storm and rain #and do better in drier weather #bodies are weird #but it sucks when the nerves start fucking up

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logically-asexual · 2 years

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because i'm procrastinating, the timeline of how Jon Cozart's After Ever After radically changed the course of my life.

I am terrible with years and keeping memories in a coherent timeline, but I'll try and might make up some fake dates accidentally.

around 2012-2013 i was in middle school and my classmates and i had a facebook group, like it was done back then. and a friend made a post sharing this silly Disney Parody. i watched it and thought it was soo cool and clever and also spent more time than i'd like to admit trying to figure out whether it was four identical guys or only one. (it was too impressive for my young mind, i still am impressed by it now)

then i proceeded to tell my friend when i saw her that i loved the video and we learned the lyrics and would sing them constantly, with one doing the accompanying rhythms and one singing the song (including, very importantly, the "p a i n t subscribe!" at the end).

then a few years later, around 2016 i created a tumblr account (that i barely used) because of facebooks page "people of tumblr", i only reblogged grunge or emo posts because i wanted to have that aesthetic.

i don't know if it was in that same year or until 2017 but i went on youtube and remembered this after ever after parody and then went to watch a bunch of other videos in the same channel. i thought jon was hilarious and edgy and hot so i became a fan.

while watching his content, i watched three videos he did with Thomas Sanders, but i can't for the life of me remember in which order. i think it was in this order:

Vine vs Youtube song

RIP Vine Agony parody

I've been shipped with Jon Cozart (on thomas' channel)

and at this point in my life i had somehow unlearned a lot of ugly predjudices i had (i don't remember how. i just gradually became a little better person) so when i watched that last one i was like "oh that's so cool that these (straight) men are comfortable in their masculinity enough to make a video like this!"

and i also liked watching it because i thought jon was So Cool and i was a teenage "girl" with no friends so i of course was playing along figuring out how compatible i was with him. and i also thought "oh this Thomas guy is very cool, too, i seem to have more in common with him actually"

i also remember watching the vine videos and thinking "oh this is the Storytime! guy!* he can sing??" and though i feel very little attraction, any time i see a man can sing i do feel it so much.

*i didn't have vine, i only watched compilations that popped up on facebook, mostly those Storytime ones.

so in the beginning of 2017 i caved and watched videos by thomas. and it was when i found Sanders Sides and i feel in love. my crush also moved from jon to thomas* lol. he was nice and sweet and relatable and attractive and his voice was so comforting. and i was aware of his presence on tumblr because he used to be very popular here before the exclusionists ruined everything. after watching Sanders Sides i followed some sanders sides blogs, of course.

*i didn't think much about his sexuality until i became a bit more of a fan and saw people arguing in the comments of his videos about it. everyone thought he was bisexual because of his vines and he insisted that it was only acting so i didn't speculate, but i did think he was attracted to women, specially after the valentine's video with valerie (listen.. it probably didn't fool actually perceptive people im just dense as hell). i found out he wasn't (like everyone else did) with that pride video in june 2017, and in a video after that when he corrected joan about not being bi. after that my crush died (for that + other silly reasons lol)

which then lead to the actual changes. the queer presence in the fandom took over my dash, i learned so much, i had no idea how little i knew about everything. for one, i dont remember exactly who put the definition of asexual in my dash but im sure i wouldn't have been so open to identifying with it if i hadnt become so used to seeing all blogs talking about it and reading fanfics with people giving the sides so many different identities. and being asexual is a big part of how i see myself now. its important, i filter a lot of my experiences throught this knowledge, and it's good!

then i also found out thanks to thomas' videos what being non binary was. because i heard it first from joan, who for some reason i thought was a trans woman who was using neutral pronouns while they felt comfortable enough to transicion completely. i now know that's not how it works. but that was the first step. i really learned so much about gender and also how i see the world has changed thanks to this new perspective i had never considered. i don't know what hot takes i would have now if it weren't for this. i knew back in 2016 i did have so very bad ones.

now more dominoes..

while i was patiently waiting for jon to post more videos and sneaking a peek into thomas’ channel, before getting well into sanders sides i watched

an awkward duet

this cover of waving through a window

this cover of birds

dear happy

human

city of stars

all with dodie, all absolute gems, lovely, gorgeous, spectacular, and i loved them but i didn't really care about dodie in particular (for some incredibly stupid reason) but i did get immersed in this fandom for specifically Jon, Thomas and Dodie, mostly comprised of bisexual people who shipped the three of them or couldn't decide who to ship with whom lol. but generally as a trio of friends they seemed like a really cool group and i loved the energy. they gave me this vibe of cool older cousins to look up to.

and from here two big changes:

first that cover of waving through a window made me cry so much. i knew that they were into musicals and i do like musicals but i was never into theather so i never knew what they were all talking about. i had heard thomas name dear evan hansen and also i had seen it around on tumblr. but that cover of waving through a window moved something so fundamental in me idk. it was An Experience. I watched it once sitting on my living room by my piano and cried so so much.

so i went and watched dear evan hansen as soon as i found a link to a bootleg. and it was incredible. the story was something i had never seen before, the emotions i felt were also so special. i felt so heard by several of the characters in a way that i just never had. it also changed my view of myself and of some personal struggles in my life. and to this day i think i have been able to cope with these problems a little better thanks to this musical. it's also the first theater musical i watched before i went on to watch a few others and realize that i adore the genre. after it i watched heathers which also had affected a lot the way i cope with my emotions, although maybe that's not such a big impact but big enough.

the second change was eventually giving in to the youtube recommendations and discovering dodie as an artist.

and god. her music. losing my mind. i couldn't believe what i had been missing. same as with dear evan hansen, it was so fresh and different from anything i knew before, and felt so much closer to me than any other music. the themes of her lyrics were stuff i couldn't find anywhere else (not that i’ve ever been good at finding music), that i didn't even know i was looking for. it always was so comforting, even when they were sad and made me cry. i bought her vinyl album last year because i love her so much.

also through dodie i have found many more artists that make up most of my current taste, like orla gartland and tessa violet and mxmtoon.

and well lastly, of course, Sanders Sides.

the first sanders sides i watched was the Q&A (it was the most recent one then). i realized when they brough up "last week's video" that it was a series so i watched the previous episode Losing my Motivation, which i loved. then i went back to the Q&A with more context and then i watched everything in the right order.

several things here. first Logan and Virgil as characters helped me figure a lot of stuff out about myself and my identity. they also helped me build it. i really didn't have much personality and only had a few traits that stood out somewhat as a kid. but during high school with these characters i was able to like, spot some things about myself that made me different from others, that i liked, so i could build upon them to create a more solid sense of self. stuff that already was there but i was unaware of or was just avoiding. now i feel like i have it more clear and it has helped me be more confident about who i am and interact better with people and make friends.

janus + my psychologist also have formed another part of who i am today which is a little shamelessly selfish but in a healthy way. im okay with it. i need to practice more kindness but i'm not an awful person and i am not hurting myself as much as i used to.

ALSO that. tumblr and dear evan hansen helped me realize that when you have serious issues with anxiety you look for professional help so i did when i was having an awful time in my last year of high school.

also i never drew much as a kid because i thought i sucked at it. and i did. i wasn't very creative and the assignments in art class never made sense to me. but sanders sides was so important to me that one day i thought.. damn... i have to draw this specific image i have in my head of these guys or else!

which provided three things: a nice peaceful way to cope during that bad year of high school in 2017-2018, nice online friends who i could talk to when i had nobody else, and also the idea that i do like drawing and that maybe i could get better at it with practice.

and i'm not much better now than i was before (many other artists i’ve seen have had much more radical transformations) but i have developed some sense for aesthetics and stuff that i didn't have and i also realized that i would like to know more graphic design.

which led me to think that a major thing i want to do as a professional is write and illustrate science articles. another huge part of what i am becoming, with great consequences for my future, thanks to me forcing myself to draw these silly characters in silly situations because i knew nobody else would.

...

so yeah. everyone say thank you jon...

that's all i can think of but it's probably enough. i don't know if anyone will read through all this but i felt like wasting a little time and sharing this.

goodnight.

#thomas sanders #jon cozart #dodie #paint

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