hi hi!! can I request the lipstick and a split lip prompt with jason? maybe like a date night gone wrong and he shows up late and bruised but reader is mostly just happy he’s okay <33
lipstick and a split lip + hanif abdurraqib, “fall out boy forever” in they can't kill us until they kill us
He felt the world pulsing at the side of his head.
Even now with an ice pack pressed against his blackened eye and bloodied lip, the ache of a slow heal burned him as he sat on your couch. The night was too early to come home to you broken and bleeding as he did. Especially on a night like this, a night young and ripe with the plans to spend time together haunting some diner that hugs an overlooked yet well-loved corner of Gotham before letting the night pull you towards wayward wanderings or some movie theater replaying silver stories the both of you had yet to witness.
But instead, he sat on your couch letting the blackened eye bruise violently under the cooling ice and his reddened lip burn open while he saw from his half-vision that you were getting ready for what won’t come. And he hates having to bear this bad news to you, that at the very sight of him the night you looked forward to all week would be stripped from your hopeful imagination as if suddenly reduced to sand slipping from your fingers with no forewarning.
His head hung over the edge of the couch’s spine, unable to risk the chance of seeing your shadows move gracefully along the floor, spilling swiftly into the living room where he lay in self-inflicted banishment. You must not have heard him come in—and he thanked god for those little miracles—as your night rolled on with expectation and excitement tuning the weight of your steps. While he sat poorly nursing these small wounds, graciously decorated by some punk that got lucky once, you continued to get ready for what you assume will be a lovely evening spent in the life of the world.
The soft music rolled from your barely opened room, the door slightly ajar to the acoustics of a night vastly different from his. This is how you’ve always gotten ready for what you looked forward to: your music playing quietly along your room’s walls as you padded around searching for the best outfit, the best accessories, with the world melting away at your side as if its presence did not matter because it did not matter—you had better things to attend to, better business to make of what glimmers you can adorn for the night.
Jason stayed on the couch holding the burning freeze of the ice pack to his bruised face, eyes closed to the ritual of your symphonic sound. From where he sat, a near distance away from your arm’s reach, it felt as if the warm reddish-pink hues and the melodic jazz of what he assumed to be the used Nina Simone CD you purchased earlier that week forged some barrier, some intangible distance that he dared not cross. The disk spurred on, the delicate fabrics of your closet feathered under your thoughtful gaze (for he can see clearly in his mind’s eye how your brows furrowed in contemplation), and an unspeakable wave crashed over him. It was this overwhelming uproar of desire to hide away in the smallness of his swollen, splitting lip, to disappear into the pooling blood embellishing his skin, to draw the curtains and retreat under the covers—to call if a life and be done with the sorry mess of it all. You a blushing warmth and he a bloodied cold. In some wired entropic experiment played out in this apartment’s stage, it was only logical that he vanished into some corner of this space, into some balconied edge of your life.
The pull towards a smallness grew and settled deep within him, beckoning him like some siren song antithetical to the calming reach your presence from another room provided. Yet, for all the horrors and violences he has faced, for some reason the streak of disappointment that would paint over the glimmer in your eyes, that would sullen your perfect smile and weigh heavy on your orchestral voice—it was all a sight too much for Jason to bear. It would be easier that way, he thought, easier to flee and vacate your home and life, to rid himself of his bloodied apparition that haunts you whether you indulge in that gruesome truth or not. He ruined your night after all—and isn’t that a crime deserving a hefty punishment?
He felt himself sinking into the depth of your couch as his body pillared in refusing the crashing of his mind’s wanderings. Leaving, of course, would make this all easier: climbing out the window he entered routinely from and pushing his body north toward some forsaken safe house scattered around the city, offering him a sham place to rest his tomb of guilt, even if it was for one night. In leaving, sneaking through the front door possibly, he would be spared from your ache and your sullen expression that would overtake your form, and he would avoid shouldering the sole responsibility for this onset of grief at another failed night out together.
Yes, leaving would make this all easier, but what of his life has been easy up to this point? Even getting into a hapless altercation with some jerk that wanted to boulder the risk of hurting him on a night he had already promised to you strayed from his easy task of laying low and out of trouble. Not even loving you has been easy solely because of his own lingerings, his own mind’s temptations naming him villain as you slept peacefully in his arms. Every glance and touch and smile you offered him in those quiet moments of your life shared with him made his heart ache for what kindness had your eyes marked him as, for what damning truth had your soul mischaracterized him for. Your love—gentle as a well-missed summer breeze caressing his being on the turn of autumn’s leaves; beautiful kisses remembered on warm skin—crept so easily into his heart before it was his own faulty wiring that wrenched him small, cornered, and undeserving. Was there, after all, a place for a love this gentle for vanished men? It was a bloody thing, this guilt, and while it was mostly confined to the bruises now blooming along his eyes, lips, and jaw, the guilt had marked him into threaded smallness, some lump craving a disappearance as if it would ease any heartache of yours to come.
He moved from his upright position to lay down on your all-too-small couch, letting his head pillow along the armrest as the rest of his body shrank into the curves and grooves of the worn material. He tried to stay as silent as he could hoping that his stillness would maintain the shining illusion that your night had not been altered. Of course, an enemy to all that which is easy, Jason’s shuffling to find some semblance of comfort in his growing kingdom of small things carelessly knocked over one of your knitted throw pillows, its plush landing onto the floor somehow carried over the jazz harmonies into your room alerting you to his presence.
“Jason?” you called out to him from your room, your voice melodic in its own beautiful, rhythmic cadence—music for his tainted ears. “Is that you?”
“Yeah,” he offered back without hesitation, his voice attempting to masquerade the bruises forming on the terrain of his throat. How he wished to vanish now, to retreat into the crevices of the world and disappear from this disappointment that will mark you. He kept his eyes closed and concealed, unable to witness the pending ruination ticking into reality.
You moved towards him, your footsteps coming closer and closer before the door of your room creaked into its open embrace to the rest of your small apartment.
“Jason? Are you okay?” you questioned as you approached his shrinking form on the couch, one arm tossed over his eyes to hold the barely noticeable ice-pack in place (intentional on his part, hoping that he could conceal the truth as long as possible) while the other rested limp on his torso. You kneeled beside his place on the couch as your hand brushed against his bicep, gently urging him to look at you as if the gesture of your hand resting along his skin alone could melt his defenses and wither the moat he’s hidden himself behind—and, as it has now, it often did. Jason moved his arm from his face, grabbing the ice pack in his slow and labored movement, revealing fully what crimes and mistakes and faults have done upon his features.
You looked at him with a mix of shock and worry with how your posture straightened slightly and your breath hitched briefly, but his mind could only read this as the disappointment he expected the moment he entered the threshold of your apartment. Your brows furrowed as your hands came to hesitate into a caress of his face; your eyes widened, your mouth slightly open to the bruised creature he returned to you as. He couldn’t bring himself to fully look into your eyes, but he knew from how your fluidity and buzzed excitement of the night waned that he had singlehandedly undone you. The waves of his mind and smallness calmed and he knew it akin to the end of time.
“I’m sorry,” Jason remorsefully said, shame clinging to the only string of words that his mind could conjure, that his voice could bear the weight of on his tongue. You looked down at him from your place on the floor, the contact of your divine eyes meeting his was almost too much; the beauty that enveloped you, like some diamond cave glimmering brightly in the depths of some forsaken cave, distracted his mind, stunning him and his heart into a dumbfounded silence. He softly bit his lips, forgetting the injury sustained at its site. The slight taste of blood landed on his tongue, and he confused its rusted salt with love.
He shuffled, freeing himself from your hands’ gentle caress in attempt to sit up as if the position would remedy the guilt weighing heavy on his chest: “I just- I didn’t think. I didn’t expe-”
“Jason,” you said in such kindness that felt unbelonging to him, cutting his stuttered mess of words cleanly in two. Your hands came to rest on his thighs, and his hand—habitually, instinctually, as if destined in its path the way nightly constellations map the season’s sky—came to yours. You continued, grounding and calming, like waterfalls in springtime marshes: “Shut up.”
He needed your firmness, especially in moments like this where his mind taunted him, stretched him into a desire for disappearance. He felt your eyes upon him, the soft blinking of your lashes a lighthouse calling upon his return.
You reached to hold his face once more, “Look at me.”
Following your words like a command meant for some wounded dog devoted solely to your kindness, he did. You appeared to him as divinity, like light withstanding the darkened shadows of Gotham; the beauty you possessed, especially in how you had readied yourself for an evening of unbridled laughter and smiles, a barrier of joy in a city that worked to jostle its stability, was unearthly in its angelic chorus ushering you to him.
Under your gaze, worry draping the corners of your perfected face, he found himself at some crossroad of big and small, of love and guilt. Your hand carefully caressed his bruising wounds, the warmth of your skin against his, uncomfortable at first, melted into the cool in some minute and ancient practice of healing neither of you were aware. He shuddered at your hesitant touch before leaning fully into the love your palm carried.
“Your face is cold.”
“The ice,” his words slurred.
Your fingers traced a path along his bruising blackened eye, almost excavating the ruins of his skin after being pillaged and stormed. You studied him with worry never ceasing against your features, unyielding along your form in contrast to the adornments and style you spent the evening preparing. He ruined not only the night, but you—plaguing your manicured beauty with his ailments and trappings of blood, dirt, and grime.
At the warmth of your gentleness against his cooled skin, it was as if all he can bring you was pain: bloodied knuckles that you would stay awake into the early morning patching up, unsavory gashes to his torso that you would cautiously hold in sleep, split lips that now threaten you with ruin. If loving you was not easy for him, as he rationed in his perverse labyrinthine thinking, loving him had to be a newfound layer of hell—one which his presence here, your hand upon his cheek, had doomed you to.
The call to vanish rose within him again, louder than before as if the shadows inhabiting the darkened corners of your barely illuminated lamp-lit apartment yearned for his disappearance just as much as his cells screamed. But your steady hand stayed firm along his skin beckoning him into visibility, into submission. Your thumb now hesitated along the rust-blood stained contours of his split lip.
“I’m sorry,” Jason started again.
“Don’t.”
“I know you were really looking forward to tonight.”
“Jason.” You said firmly, softness grasping each syllable of his name. You spoke his name like it was a reaffirmation of life and present-ness: a call to look into your eyes, your voice some kind of siren song that doomed him from ever hiding. Your hand rose to move rebellious strands of hair from his face, you as well rising with this gesture to let your hand fully meet the forest of his hair as you moved fluidly to sit beside him on the shrinking couch.
“Who cares,” you continued. “We can order takeout and watch a movie here. I just wanted to spend time with you. That’s all I ever want. I don’t care how.”
Your fingers lightly brushed through his loose locks and Jason felt himself undone. He met your eyes once more, unable to find anything of hatred or disappointment in their diamond-shine, anything that would prove the voice in his head correct. No, instead all that was verily there was a softness you always looked at him with, a profound gentleness that witnessed and made him whole, and not stretched or split at the seams. His head moved, almost out of its own volition, to rest on your shoulder, your hand remaining in the garden of his hair to play at the soft curls, to compose harmonies through the gentle pull of his scalp.
Jason had always expected love to be something violent, something bloody and rusted, but all you have ever given him was music: melodic gemstones of kindness and tender touches that feel anything but damning. Your touch was salvation, Nina’s cry—playing still from the other room now forgotten—for a saved world.
it’s pretty sad in a way that the final episode of st wasn’t even that bad in the scheme of things. like not hugely demonstrably worse than the rest of the season. the final episode of sherlock was so radioactively bad that it looped all the way around to hilarious and is an amazing and awe inspiring thing to watch for how bizarrely misguided it is. the final episode of supernatural is so bad that it’s difficult to keep your eyes on the screen and it feel like a series of clips from other versions of the show made in worse universes smashed together into a fever dream of awful. personally what i think stranger things was missing was a secret forgotten best friend hallucinated as a dog or perhaps a rusty nail and a shit wig.
One of life's great ironies is that almost everyone who makes the active decision to not have kids would probably be way better at raising a child than all the people who just kind of have children because it's what they think everyone is supposed to do
Like genuinely if you're like "I don't want kids because of the financial strain/the commitment/the irritation I would feel/the possibility of traumatizing them/whatever reason" you instantly demonstrate to me that you 1) understand the realities of parenthood and 2) believe that children should be treated with at least a base level of respect and compassion. Meanwhile everyone who's like "I want kids because I don't want to be alone" "I can't wait to dress up my babies" "I won't raise my children to be soft" may as well be talking about Neopets for all the fucks they seem to give about kids
i do think the concept of a dean winchester job application is fucking funny tho. every line of his resume is a lie and he is not qualified to work anywhere. his ass could not be a mechanic im sorry he would quit the second he had to work on a prius. a bartender? he would be in physical altercations with drunk people every night. please. my unemployable king. my doomed anger freak. i actually think he would be great in an office job if he had any idea how to use excel. my baby.
My family in Gaza has lived all these meanings. For two years we have been displaced again and again, carrying only blankets, hope, and each other. We no longer have a stable shelter, but we are trying to stay alive. you can support my family’s ❤️
Vetted by gazaevetters #644
Update: After 4.430 notes on this post
Even though this post reached thousands, we received very little. My children need any support right now — even one dollar can help.Please… if you can donate, then donate. And if you can’t, share this post so it reaches someone who can. ❤️
"Racialised" is much better than PoC but I've been leaning a lot on the concept of racial markedness. Because that allows us to make statements like "the name Jamal is racially marked in USA". Rather than saying something like "Jamal is a PoC name", a nonsense statement, saying it's racially marked in USA allows us to contrast with societies like Albania or the Arab countries where the name Jamal is ordinary, thus unmarked.
It's a concept I've kind of imported from linguistic analysis; saying a speech pattern is more or less marked does not really allow us to avoid the subject of who's doing the marking. A statement like "womens' speech is more marked in Lakota" necessitates that we understand that it's the Lakota who are marking womens' speech. A foreigner can't tell the difference and probably doesn't understand why it would thus be weird to see a man using speech patterns associated with women, in the same way an Albanian wouldn't understand why USA people would think Jamal is a Black name.
You! You get it. In my view, if someone is saying "racialised" or "racially marked" without acknowledgement of context, they are doing it in a way that is gramatically incorrect.
TEEN HORSE GIRL MOVIE WHERE THE HORSE DIES AN HOUR IN AND THE SECOND HALF IS THE GIRL LEARNING OCCULT SCIENCE TO REANIMATE IT SO SHE CAN WIN THE BIG DERBY
gotham is exactly the right amounts of wet and socioeconomically unstable to have spawned an INSANE grunge scene you just know their local shit is like the sonic equivalent of getting hit over the head with a car battery
bruce wayne has his finger on the pulse of gotham's underground music scene he's like "listen to this" and he puts on a cassette he bought for $10 from a guy under a bridge and its like 90 minutes of some guy crooning in a flooded warehouse with a guitar amp they found in the river and there's active gunfire in the background of half the songs
gotham grunge band "arkham fire" debut album "DYING ALL THE TIME" becomes the world's first snuff record because their guitarist is killed by the joker in the middle of the fifth track and it is unequivocally considered their best song
If your friend is struggling, the signs might not be obvious. A cry for help can take many different forms. Try checking in on them if you hear them express any of the following sentiments:
snowghoul
andulkaphoto
baratheonpilled
jacobvanloon
germansingergirl
