i'm like if an omniscient narrator didn't know shit. you can call me cal / 30s / friendly neighborhood cruciverbalist. [ID: avi is a close-up of a woman looking unimpressed from the thomas anshutz painting "a rose" (1907). header is a slaps roof of car meme i have edited to read "moi, lisant le dico: *gifle toit de langue française* ce truc de dingue peut contenir tant de mots de ouf dedans" /end ID]
Now that Platform Decay has been out for a while, can we talk about the unfired Chekhov’s jewelled interface? When Leonide dies MB takes her two interfaces off her body, destroys one and pockets the other. But then when Janity, Leonide’s child, needs an interface later in the book, even though this would be a perfect opportunity for MB to give her Leonide’s interface, it doesn’t! Am I crazy? Why clarify that MB took it if it’s never mentioned again despite being potentially relevant and poignant (that Janity got something of her mother’s after she died)? Did I miss something? Is this interface broken? Not compatible for some reason? The elusive feed devices remain elusive…. Maybe forever…. Would love to hear anyone else’s thoughts on the matter.
[ID: Screenshots with text highlighted from "Platform Decay". 1: "I scanned Leonide's body and found two interfaces. […] The second one was small, shaped like jewelry, hidden in her hair. That one I kept." 2: "The juvenile […] said, 'They took my interface.' Farai […] said, 'I'll get you an interface as soon as we get to the transit station. […]" 3: "Naja dug in her bag and produced an external interface, a plain gray disk that hooked behind the ear." /end ID]
Imagine, for a moment, that your internet just stopped loading images one day. Your dash might look pretty different (and less usable), but at least you can still make posts — whether about your internet situation, or about completely unrelated topics.
Now, imagine that one or more of your posts blew up, to the tune of hundreds if not thousands of notes. Imagine people started adding images to your posts.
Imagine your post circulating almost entirely in the form with four or five images attached, and with everyone in the notes laughing about those images — except you, who started the post in the first place, who can't even see those images because you're trapped in Tumblr's loading gradient hellscape.
You're excluded from any further conversations on your own post, because someone added a mystery image with the caption "don't leave this in the tags," but you have no idea which set of tags it is, and can't tell if it's one of the good takes from the tags or one of the horrible takes from the tags. You're excluded from the Tumblr users playing with JPEGs like dolls. You can try to guess the contents of the images based on people's reactions, but it's hard. And no one adding images even seems to notice the irony.
This is, of course, a real problem plaguing Tumblr users with regularly slow internet. And it's also a huge, insidious problem plaguing blind and low vision people who rely on either screen readers, or image descriptions in combination with enlarged text on their device.
People with disabilities around comprehending images, people who have images (or gifs) disabled due to photosensitivity, and many others are also affected.
If you add an image to a post without either alt text, an in-post image description, or even both for maximal inclusivity, you don't know if OP — or the person whose tags you're peer reviewing, or whose reply you're screenshotting — will actually be able to see it. From their perspective, you might just be shoving a mystery rectangle in their face, expecting them to be able to guess — or responding to them without them being able to know.
Imagine being on the receiving end of that expectation constantly. Imagine how isolating that must feel.
We need, collectively, to stop making assumptions that everyone we interact with online will be able to access, physically see, and mentally process images. The assumption that disabled people are vanishingly rare and statistically shouldn't really need to be considered is an assumption of structural and/or implicit ableism.
Write image descriptions. Write image descriptions for every image you post, if you're able — but if you have limited energy, or you're still learning, you should at least start trying your absolute best to describe images you add to other people's posts. If you're starting a conversation, even an online conversation, you should make your best effort to be accessible.
So: Write IDs, especially if they're as simple as just text, like screenshotted tags (link to guide). Write IDs even if you think the best ID you can write is too short, or too incomplete (link to post explaining why even "bad" IDs help).
Write IDs in general (link to a huge compilation of guides). Challenge ableist assumptions and inaccessibility.
obvious question: who is it? the narration really brings attention to the narrator. it's non-normative to the point of being distracting. hard to avoid asking this.
okay, so if the narration is raising this question for the reader, it needs to be for a reason. both the answer to the question (the identity of the narrator) and the reason the question is being raised (rather than the identity just being told to us in a straightforward way early on in the story) should be serving the story in some way.
interlude to say with many other authors i might stop at this point and go, well, the author just liked this narrative style. she didn't think about it that hard. it's not that deep. but because i've read the raven tower i know this author knows how to do narration. i know she knows how to use style as a tool to serve themes, plot, pacing, &c. and because i know that, i spent the whole book waiting for the mystery of the narrator to pay off. and it did not explicitly obviously pay off for me at the end of the book, but I Want To Believe. so let's make it pay off.
let's talk first about the information we do have about the narrator that could be used to narrow down possible candidates. observations about this narrator:
uses the singular first person (i/me/my rather than we/us/our)
is not ooioiaan, but professes to a personal familiarity with ooioiaa. also is not radchaai but again is personally familiar
addresses the reader directly. the reader is supposed to be neither ooioiaan nor radchaai
has a high degree of knowledge about each of the characters and their actions over the course of the story. knows in detail about an event involving several of the characters that happened days before the radchaai arrived on the planet
is writing centuries after the events of the story (it is able to say "it would be centuries before any governor of Aaa actually dropped any association with the Radchaai, at least in name" (last chapter))
doesn't say anything about the source of their knowledge of the events of the plot. was the narrator there? did they talk to the people involved? we don't know
does at times profess to not knowing something or only being able to speculate. which is very interesting. it would be much easier to handwave and say "how the narrator knows what a character is feeling when they're alone in their apartment is something we're supposed to suspend disbelief over" if the narrator did not explicitly tell us they aren't omniscient. but since the narrator does tell us that, we have to find an answer that explains how the narrator both a) knows the things that they know and b) doesn't know the things that they don't know.
so the narrator must meet two criteria: they must fit the seven observations above, and there must be a compelling reason for the author to choose to tell the story from their perspective specifically. and then also there must be a compelling reason for the author to not tell us that they are the narrator.
i don't think the narrator can be someone completely outside the story, and i will try to explain why. let's say i speculate that the narrator is a scholar or journalist who was in ooioiaa on some kind of field assignment in the aftermath of the radchaai civil war, and they're writing for an audience of folks back home in the non-radch system they originated in. they got their information by conducting extensive interviews with charak, zaved, jonr, niranhin, iono, shtel, justice of albin, and several others. perhaps they even have access to some technology that allows them to experience other people's memories. and let's say keemat's writings (available posthumously along with, or perhaps included in, their manuscript) elucidate much, but not all, of keemat's experience of that period. and somehow this narrator then ended up in a suspension pod for 200 years, giving them knowledge about both the immediate aftermath and centuries later.
okay, such a narrator i think would account for all seven of my observations above. but if this were the narrator...what would be the point? what would the existence of such a narrator bring to the story? AND why would the identity of such a narrator be kept a secret and the reader be made to puzzle it out? is THAT doing anything for the story? i can't think of a way for the answers to these questions to be satisfying, if the narrator is some random external perspective that didn't have anything to do with the people and events with which the story is concerned.
like, you can either have a prologue like "here is my history dissertation. signed, Some Rando" OR you can be all coy about a narrator who we actually do know and should theoretically be able to put together the evidence to identify. but you cannot both be coy AND have the narrator be some rando. not if you are a writer with such a deep understanding of the power of narration as a story tool that you are capable of writing the raven tower. if such a writer is going to draw attention to the narration, it has to be for a reason. not just, "this style is fun to write and read", but a reason that is native to the story, that serves the story, that exemplifies the story. when such a writer throws some narration at me that is waving a flag saying look at me look at me, i'm looking at it, and i have faith that there is going to be a reason she made me look at it. i'm assuming it's going to pay off. and for it to pay off, by the end of the book i have to be able to go "ohhhhh, so that's why the identity of the narrator was such a mystery." and having it be some rando historian does not elicit that reaction.
so then we're looking at existing characters. the only two characters i can think of that would have access to the kind of knowledge the narrator seems to have are justice of albin and the radiant star. this author has previously written books from the perspective of a troop carrier AI and a god, so there's precedent for either. (not that she could not also write a book from the perspective of a brand-new type of entity. she has the range.)
i would need to reread ancillary justice to refresh my memory on what aspects of a non-ancillary's experience a justice has access to - it can read vital signs, but can it read thoughts? and is that only for its officers, or also for annexed populations? and what can ancillaries access when the ship is away? because if the access an ancillary has to the interior experience of humans differs significantly depending on whether it's in contact with its ship-self, then we should be able to trace a change in the quality of the narration (level of detail, or degree of certainty) at the point when the ship leaves the system. or we need some way for the justice to access that information retroactively after it returns. well, we kind of need that anyway, to explain how the narrator knows about jonr's meetings with zaved and niranhin that happened days before the radchaai showed up...
what about the radiant star? we don't know enough about it to say what the bounds of its knowledge are, or if it is capable of observation and of in some way recording its thoughts to share with humans. (maybe it used the intermediary of a savant? a savant who had a shitton of unusually coherent visions?) this would be such a big swing that i feel it would also need to be made explicit if this were the narrator. because how else would we come to understand the significance of having this specific entity be the narrator? we need to know more about both the radiant star itself and about why the hell it would be telling this story to this audience in order for it to be an effective storytelling choice. and there would also need to be some reason for the mystery surrounding the narrator's identity. like, if the story were more concerned with whether the radiant star really exists or is really divine, having the narrator turn out to be the possibly-nonexistent possibly-mundane entity in question would have some bearing on the story. but the story doesn't really care about that. really the only reason i'm even entertaining this is the book's title. which is not sufficient reason.
so i end up thinking the only possible candidate is justice of albin. and then we return to my original questions. if JoA is the narrator, 1) what purpose does it serve to have this particular story told by this particular entity? and 2) what purpose does it serve to hold the identity of the narrator back from the reader? because remember, these questions were raised by the author, by the author's choice to include these asides written in first person to a particular demographic of in-universe readers. if the author is raising these questions, answering them should add something to our understanding of the story she is trying to tell.
justice of albin is an interesting component of the story because the narrator rarely mentions it, yet we can assume it is often present. no part of the story covers anything that happens on the ship when it leaves aaa. the experience of JoA is not given any priority in the narrative. the story does not seem to be about JoA, and it is easy to forget about it altogether, because in a story that shares the interiority of probably dozens of characters, from main characters down to the shopkeeper who sells food to jonr, JoA's internal motivations and reactions are almost a complete black box until the very end - and not in such a way to lead the reader to think, "wow, JoA is sooo mysterious," but rather in such a way that it fades into the background. the experience of JoA might actually be, in retrospect, too deprioritized in comparison to everyone else. if any other character were present as often as JoA, would we know more about them than we do about it? is the narrator keeping back information, just about this one entity? perhaps because it is that entity and it values its own privacy? or because it is trying to be a neutral third party and not inject itself into the situation it wants to report on dispassionately?
OR, perhaps, because it wanted us not to think of JoA as a person, so that we would understand how terrifying that laugh at the end was for the other characters? so that we would have to abruptly adjust our own conception of it as soon as we were given external evidence of its interiority? so that we would then have to sit with our own complicity in not thinking of it as a person before, when we were given what may have seemed like the opposite of evidence of interiority (repeated references to its "flat, expressionless" affect) and only a handful of clues that it does indeed have motivations other than obeying orders (remorse for stealing jonr's collection; stealing the images of radiance and lying about it)? especially when the narrator, in all their little asides to the reader, was so charming, so full of insight and sympathy and irony?
this is to me the best evidence for the identity of the narrator. nothing else comes close to retroactively reframing anything in the way that that laugh does. that would explain why the identity of the narrator was held back - it was to create that moment of recontextualization.
i have two problems with this. 1) i don't know that having this aha moment about ships/ancillaries/AIs/justice of albin being people is really hugely relevant to the themes of this book? like, it's certainly not irrelevant. i think the idea of what a person is (and how oppression interacts with personhood) is relevant in all of leckie's writing. but i don't know that i would say it is the main thing happening here. and 2) i think if you have read the ancillary trilogy, you are already going around thinking of JoA as, like, an analogue to breq. and you surely already think of breq as a person. so it is actually not that shocking to get to this reveal, which defeats the entire purpose of it. and maybe that's why i got to the end of this book and still didn't know who the narrator was...because that wasn't really an aha moment for me. maybe it wasn't supposed to be? maybe it was supposed to be enough for me to see how unnerved the radchaai characters were by it and how incapable they were of wrapping their minds around it. but that wasn't quite enough for me to make the mystery pay off.
or maybe i was supposed to get something else out of JoA being the narrator, but it went over my head? curious if others have thoughts on this.
the last thing i'll mention is the chapter titles, which are presumably (?) chosen by the narrator. another thing that's not revealed until near the end is that each chapter is named after one of the images of radiance. this could i suppose be evidence in favor of the radiant star as narrator, but it seems better evidence for JoA, who, after all, is the one who currently possesses the original version of the images. given the chapters are labeled with the contents of one of its collections, could we also think of the story itself as a collection of JoA's?
THANK YOU for writing these thoughts, OP! This is such an interesting question and I'm so grateful to you for moving my thinking forward on it in so many ways. I agree that JoA is by far the most likely candidate, and I'd love to play with you in this space, if I may!
The narration is SO expressive, and it is so concerned with the nuances of people’s motivations for their actions. There’s lots of examples for this— the clarity around the water filtration problem being no one’s fault, the delicacy with which the savants are allowed to be both politically shrewd and devout, the way that Jonr is kind to his consoror because of true loyalty but also Radchaai reeducation programing and ALSO Consorority of the Translocation training. And yet, you’re right, JoA’s perspective is almost conspicuously absent, even though it clearly has a point of view that affects events. If JoA is the narrator, perhaps it is engaged in some self-deception here. It examines and places significance on all the motivations of others, but it does not categorize itself as an actor. We see Breq do this in places as well— she hides how she really feels, and, to some extent, how much power she really has, from herself. And this self-obfuscation, this refusal to interrogate its own conflicting motivations and limits, IS I think relevant to the central themes. So in my mind, it’s not so much that the reader is meant to assume that JoA doesn’t have an interiority until we see it free, it’s that we’re meant to wonder what would drive JoA to deny or obfuscate its own interiority even in its own retelling until it is freed.
deepl being based on more modern ai means that it works a lot better than translation programs before it, especially for casual conversation. it has a little more sensitivity to context, which means it can propose less straightforward and literal translations that better convey the intended meaning
it's very important to check your outputs. this was impressed even further today when I saw someone's serious message get an entire blushing kaomoji added on
Why is it that every time I google something like "Are olives poisonous to cats" the top results are always like "Fun fact: Cats are carnivores! This means that they eat meat. There is no reason to include olives in a cat's diet. You should feed your cat cat food, which is dry or wet food especially designed for cats. You can purchase this at a store." like is there a single person alive on the planet who's googled "Are blueberry muffins safe for cats" because they're planning on switching their cat to a muffin-only diet??? No, I'm asking because the little bastard somehow popped open the packet while I was putting away the groceries and dragged one under the couch before I could react and now I need to know if I should call the after-hours vet. "Cats should not eat spaghetti." NO SHIT, SHERLOCK!!!! "Try to keep human food away from cats." i live in a studio apartment with a completely silent and permanently hungry apex predator who has the intelligence of a toddler and the desperate Machiavellian cunning of a creature who spent his formative months on the streets. He can already open doors and he is this 👌 close to learning how to open the microwave. He is stronger than me and covered in knives. So im gonna do my best but for the moment i just need you to tell me whether this yoghurt is going to kill my son y/n
I've been using the pet poison hotline's poison list cause it has a search function. It also tells you whether something is mildly, moderately, or severely toxic which can be very handy! It doesn't contain like everything but it might be a good place to start, it also includes plants for fellow houseplant lovers <3
Explore Pet Poison Helpline®s vast knowledge on poisons by reviewing our pet poison list. Explore our top 10 poison and holiday poison lists
For plants specifically, there’s also a wildly detailed set of posts and listings about toxicity on the old, wonderful, Plants Are the Strangest People blog
in actual uncontrollable sobbing fits of laughter over my mom's "EW ORK CITY" tshirt like i don't think enough oxygen is reaching my brain rn i'm laughing so hard
[ID: image of a white tshirt that is supposed to say "New York City" but the first letter of each word is white, leading to "ew ork city". below is text saying "manhattan 5th avenue" /end ID]
Probably a sign your team is not in great shape when your local broadcast is showing graphics like this.
attached is a photo of the corner of a TV screen, showing the Chicago Bulls. A graphic reads:
Greek Mythology 101
Who is Sisyphus?
* King of Ephyra, devious tyrant
* Would kill visitors of Ephyra to show off his power, which angered the gods
* Punishment: roll a boulder up a hill, would roll back down each time
* Must repeat this action for all eternity
Oh man I’d forgotten that LHK said the way he played it, LXC was thrilled about Wei Wuxian being back. Despite his grudge against WWX. because Wangji’s happiness is more important to LXC than anything. devastating.
@madtomedgar I definitely agree you can also see frustration, anger and even dislike in his performance when he’s interacting with WWX. I like the idea that he’s so tolerant of WWX not because he really believes that he’s a misunderstood victim but just because Wangji has been depressed for 16 years and there’s been nothing LXC could do to help which has been devastating to him and having that magically undone is a miracle he’s not going to question too hard.
Thinking about the whole "there is no platonic explanation for this" thing and how it doesn't account for intense platonic situationships and anyways I think we should start saying "there is no casual explanation for this" bc really what we're talking about is the way the characters in question are Obsessed with each other
-become furiously angry over what seems to be small things
-hit a self destruct button over and over again
-lose all sense of reality
-becoming straight up unable to communicate
-view every situation as life or death
-experience delusions/become vulnerable to irrational worldviews
-perceive hostility where none exists
-become extremely nauseous and/or throw up
-stop engaging in sleeping/eating/basic hygiene
-stop processing sensory input
-process way too much sensory input all at once
-lash out at others/themselves
-and more!
being able to recognize when a human (ie. you or another person) is so stressed out they cannot think clearly is VERY important for conflict resolution and diffusing emotional crisis. highly recommend trying to train yourself at being able to recognize that state of panic- there is a point in which logic and rationality is useless and you have to address the underlying emotional issue first. knowing that saves everyone a lot of pain and struggle.
the Murderbot situation (killer robot attempts to integrate into a nonviolent communalist utopia, but somehow always ends up shooting a bunch of people) is on some level kind of symbolic of Martha Wells's writing (old sci-fi/fantasy from the long and venerated tradition of evil races and boss battles, now writing for the new sci-fi of cozy cottagecore settings and talk-it-out conflict resolution, yet always wraps up the finale with a big shootout)
issue with being mentally and physically ill and/or broke is that all you ever do is survive and that sounds like enough on the face of it but it is very normal to want and even need more than that. and it feels almost dismissive to pretend like there’s not a lot of grief associated with the experience. because there just is
Thanks to ultrasounds, the genders can be assigned before birth. The people are so excited to conform they throw “Gender reveal parties” to make sure their offspring exist in a strict binary since before they can even form thoughts.
“And s-omeday,” Mihashi hiccuped, “he’s gonna look. Like. His dad!”
Suyama and Sakaeguchi exchanged a desperate look. “And that’s…good?” Sakaeguchi hazarded.
“YES it’s good,” wailed Mihashi. “Have you SEEN. H-his dad?!”
“We’ve seen him,” Suyama said cautiously.
“S-so—broad,” Mihashi moaned into his arms. “So soft…”
Sakaeguchi patted him on the back, mouthing What do we do?? over his head at Suyama.
Suyama was wondering the same thing. He had been enjoying a very normal evening when Tajima blasted the old Nishiura group chat with an emergency request: Ren was getting drunk and being maudlin, by himself, in public. Could whoever was nearest go pick him up and get him home before he got recognized?
Abe lived closest, but his response time had become downright erratic since starting his first clinical rotation. Suyama and Sakaeguchi were on opposite sides of the city but about equidistant to the izakaya and figured it would be easier with two—one to be lookout, one to be human crutch—so they’d met up in the middle and walked there together. But now that they were here, they couldn’t get Mihashi to stop talking long enough to take him anywhere.
It wouldn’t be such a problem if he were talking about something else. But it had been half an hour of Mihashi sadly enumerating all of Abe Takaya’s finest qualities (many of which Suyama had not heretofore been aware he possessed, and to be honest still wasn’t completely sure that he did in fact possess), and whatever else was unclear, it was pretty clear that it was for gay reasons. And it was also pretty clear that Mihashi was not out to the entire world of pro baseball. If they could just get him to keep it to himself for two minutes while they got him in a cab…and then hope the cabbie didn’t follow sports…
If you’d asked Suyama back in high school, he would never have thought that someday they would have a problem with Mihashi talking too much.
He was aware he was no expert on crushes, or whatever, but really. How much more could there be to say?
“And now he’s. Lost. Forever,” Mihashi was saying in tones of deep tragedy. “H-he’s going to be too. Busy, and all the—with—the—the patients, w-who have in-interesting. Conditions, and so he. Will never. Look at m-me—ever—again,” he said, his voice cracking on the last word.
“Uh,” said Suyama. Was that how it worked? It didn’t seem right to Suyama, but what did he know.
“They’ll. Need him,” Mihashi cried. “He l-loves that.”
“Well,” said Sakaeguchi. Abe did love to be needed, that was true. But again, there was something off about the way Mihashi was looking at it.
“I’m not. Weird enough for him anymore!” Mihashi burst out. “He’ll think I’m—boring. How c-can I com-compare with patients? He—he can look at, at their bones. Their bones!”
“Oh…no,” said Suyama, in a tone he hoped passed for supportive. He barely managed to keep it from coming out as a question.
“Bones! In-inside of them! Do you. Know. What h-he said. When I asked i-if he wants—to look—at my bones?” Mihashi gave Suyama a look of such pure despair that he could swear he felt his heart wrench sideways, despite not understanding in the least what could be so devastating about a person looking, or not looking, at one’s bones.
“What did he say?” Sakaeguchi said breathlessly. Maybe the bone thing made sense to him.
“H-he said. ‘That would be. An.’” Mihashi buried his face in his hands. “’Ethics violationnnnnn!’”
“It would?” Sakaeguchi asked, enthralled.
“What if I. Want him to e-ethically violate me,” Mihashi said sadly.
“Oh, buddy,” Suyama said, patting his hair.
“And n-now I’ll. Never get the chance,” Mihashi whimpered, pushing his head into Suyama’s hand like a very needy cat. “H-he’ll be—People th-throwing themselves at him—P-parents of…of everyone wanting—son-in-law… A doctor…sexy genius who kn-knows all my favorite—m-mochi flavors—”
“Would that be a selling point for others, do you think?” Sakaeguchi interjected weakly, but Mihashi didn’t hear him.
“And someday he’ll. Look like his hot dad and—ugh, he would be s-such a—good father—!”
“Would he?” Suyama said, not managing to keep out the skepticism this time, but Mihashi wasn’t listening to him either.
“When he’s looking at-at you, you feel like you could do—anything,” he whispered, and his face crumpled. “As long as he’s—watching, y-you’re real…”
Suyama looked to see if Sakaeguchi was as alarmed by this as he was, but Sakaeguchi’s expression had gone thoughtful. “You know, Ren—” he started.
“What’s going on?” said a gruff voice as the door to their private room slid open. “Why isn’t he already home?”
“TAKA!!” Mihashi shouted, and spun himself around so fast he immediately toppled over.
Abe caught him, saying, “Easy, easy. I’m here.” He spared a glare for Suyama and Sakaeguchi. “I just got off a shift, but haven’t you been here for like an hour? What’s taking you so long?”
Suyama opened his mouth, but Mihashi preempted him. “Takaaaaa,” he said, petting Abe’s face to get his attention. “Don’t l-look at them. They’re not important.”
“Well, hang on,” Abe said, glancing back at them almost apologetically. “That’s not—”
“No, that’s fair,” Sakaeguchi said. Suyama nodded. It would be nice to be not important at this point. Maybe he could go home.
“Shh,” said Mihashi, putting his hand over Abe’s mouth. “Shush. You’re m-making—me dizzy.”
“I’m not doing anything,” Abe said from behind the hand. “Do you think there might be another reason you’re dizzy?” He looked pointedly at the empty beer bottles scattered over the low table.
“No,” said Mihashi emphatically. “It’s—you’re—I’ll tell you. Listen.” He took his hand away from Abe’s mouth to place it on his shoulder and leaned in. “You c-can’t be a doctor, Takaya. You—can’t take. Heartbeats.”
“What?” Abe said, confused. “A pulse? Yeah I can. They taught me to. In medical school. And it’s not really that difficult to begin with.”
“Y-you think you can,” said Mihashi, “but you don’t know. It’s the—wrong heartbeat. You-you’re in-interfering.”
“Ohhhh,” said Sakaeguchi quietly, grabbing Suyama’s arm. Ohhhh, what? Suyama was lost. So was Abe.
“It’s wrong,” Mihashi said again. “You—mess it up. When you come in. The r-room. Faster—just because—you’re there—"
Ah. Suyama could see where this was going. Not bad for a guy without a romantic bone in his body.
“You’re saying…the presence of the doctor throws off the results?” Abe frowned. He was proving to be slower on the uptake than Suyama, but then again, he hadn’t been privy to Mihashi’s litany of his virtues. “Well, going to the doctor’s can be stressful for people, so their readings might be elevated—”
“No. Takaya,” Mihashi interrupted. “Not the doctor. You. Because they—w-want you, b-because, it’s you, and you’re you, a-and—” He started gasping, his breath tearing out of him in sobs. “You’re gonna—f-find somebody, and—forget—about me—”
Oh, shit. Was it too late for Suyama to leave? Or should he stay to support Mihashi?
“Whoa, Ren, slow down,” Abe said, voice rising in alarm. “I don’t even know what—how could I forget about you, huh? Are you stupid?” He thumbed at the tear tracks on Mihashi’s face and said more calmly, “And I don’t know where this is coming from, but nobody wants me, Ren, that’s ridiculous—"
“Wr-wrong,” Mihashi interrupted again, almost shouting now. “Everybody. To—to talk to you and h-hold you and sleep—with you and have your—at-attention! Forever and ever!”
Abe stared at him, stunned. Suyama was losing sensation in the arm Sakaeguchi was clutching, but it was nothing to how excruciating this conversation had become. What was anybody supposed to say to that?
“Ren,” Abe breathed. “Hey, Ren.” His eyes were shiny. He was still cradling Mihashi’s face in his hands. “You’re—you’re my most important person.” He took a deep breath, and the tears spilled over. “I’m not—you could never lose me. You don’t have to worry about that.”
Mihashi reached out slowly to catch a tear as it dripped off Abe’s chin. Then he opened his hand and placed it flat against Abe’s chest. Over his heart.
Suyama would have liked to take that as his cue to leave, but that would require wrenching his arm out of Sakaeguchi’s death grip, and the last thing he wanted to do was draw any attention to himself. So he could only endure.
“I just—” Abe shuddered and closed his eyes. “I can’t play baseball anymore. So I thought…”
Mihashi blinked. He opened his mouth. “Are. You stupid?” he said.
Suyama had to agree. But again, he had been there for the litany. Mihashi should probably repeat it to Abe at some point. When Suyama was far away.
Abe choked out a laugh and opened his eyes. “I don’t know. Maybe?” He inhaled. “It’s just…Who am I to you, if I’m not your catcher?”
What a question. Could Suyama plug his ears without being rude?
Ren clenched his hand into Abe’s shirt. “You’re just mine,” he said fiercely. “If. If you want to be.”
No, that would definitely be rude.
Abe swallowed. “Even if…even if I’m stupid? Even if I don’t have time to work out anymore and I turn into my dad?”
Suyama and Sakaeguchi coughed in unison. Abe looked around at them in surprise. “Oh, you’re still here?” His eyebrows drew down. “Thanks for looking after Ren, but would you guys mind leaving? We’re having a private conversation.”
“Yes. Yep. Absolutely,” Suyama said immediately, and forgave Abe for everything.
