Did a collaboration with my brother for #hucklerobbyforhealthcare — he drew a comic based on this drabble —to celebrate the goal not only being reached but exceeded by so much for the following charities: outcarehealth and outrightintl
With an intial goal of $300, everyone came together and raised $11,210 for the healthcare needs of the LGBTQ+ community! Of course, even though the campaign is over, donations are always appreciated. Thank you and I hope you have a great day/night. — It's been a while since I've written anything solo, but I had a lot of fun with this one and tried my best lol
The first day was the longest, by far. Spent familiarizing himself with the space he had been entrusted with. Terrified of unintentionally invading the other's privacy yet too curious to keep from leaving a single corner unexplored. In a way, the house was strangely normal. Nothing that particularly screamed Robby to him. Although Dennis couldn't begin to explain what that even means. Only that as he took in the lived-in yet oddly-impersonal space, he somehow felt further from Michael Robinavitch than ever.
As time passed, Dennis settled into a routine. Balancing time between the home and his home. Aware that Trinity would have a field day if she heard him refer to their shared space as such.
Even if Robby intended for this to be a step into independence, that didn't have to include isolation. Evident by the pinging from his pocket, Dennis pulling out his phone to glance at the home screen. Notifications pop up in a parade of quips and concerns from Trinity herself, as well as a reminder that the most recent text between him and Amy was a week ago. A slew of pictures from a get together she had attended with her family. Followed by Dennis commenting about how much fun it looked like, as well as another apology for being unable to attend.
Thankfully, his absence didn't seem to damper her mood. She even took the opportunity to invite a few relatives to stay on the farm for a few days.
Perhaps longer, if things go well.
With a slow exhale, he shoves down the complicated feelings about his place there slipping away. Each strategically dodged plan and friendly encouragement for her to connect with the people close to her aiding in it. Blood isn't always the strongest of bonds… but it can be. Something he hopes is true for Amy and Theo. Meanwhile, he travels down a contrasting route, opening the messages between him and his co-worker turned roommate.
Humming a tune as he scans concerns disguised as complaints, he replies that Robby hasn't shown up yet but he's certain the other will soon. He's probably just running late. Traffic can be unpredictable. As can be motorcycles and Robby, but Dennis leaves that unsaid. Once the lies are sent alongside an insistence he can manage a few more hours without burning the place down, he sets the phone on the table. Not wanting to deal with any potential pinging. He appreciates the concern, but he's not in the mood to take it.
Lightly bouncing in place, a hand hits the side of his leg in a rapid tap to match his thoughts. After a few breaths, he huffs out a sharp exhale and decides to quiet his mind one of the best ways he knows how… Manual labor.
Frankly, there's not much in need of cleaning. His determination to be a proper house guest now biting him in the rear. He could walk out this very second and no one would think he had been there at all. But that doesn't stop him from treating the house like a patient on the brink of disaster. Focusing on floorboards to light bulbs, he dons rubber gloves, connects his phone to the speakers, turns the volume up enough to drown out even the thoughts he wants to have, and gets to work. Scrubbing, sweeping, sorting— and then searching for whatever may have slipped through the cracks.
Refusing to stop until the house feels new or Robby walks up that driveway.
Whatever comes first.
Neck starts to ache from how often it cranes to look out the front window in the hope of noticing Robby's approach. Thanks to a troublesome twinge that makes him grimace, Dennis decides to enforce a new rule. He cannot purposely check. But if he happens to catch a glimpse when walking past, technically it isn't his fault. Although, once that guideline is established, he does notice a lot more work in that area of the house.
Furiously scrubbing at a counter he can already see his reflection in, it suddenly occurs to Dennis that he hasn't looked at the window for the span of several songs… and he couldn't say what's happened aside from polishing and drowning everything else out if his life depended on it. Chest clenching while his stomach sinks, he nearly trips in his haste to reach his phone. Feet covering the span of the living room in only a few steps. Hands shake as they pick it up and turn off the music, an unsettling silence in the air as his heartbeat makes up for the lack of external noise. No longer at risk of missing a knock at the door.
No longer distracted.
Exhaling slowly, deeply enough to feel his shoulders slump from the release, Dennis once again starts to lose the battle against his fears. Fingers curling, fists rest against smooth wood grain. Dennis giving it a knock. Then two. Lightly biting his bottom lip, he shoves himself away and walks further down the hall. Where silence can follow him but the sight of an empty driveway can not. Noticing a closet door ajar, he moves to push it shut— only to pause, eyes drifting upward to settle on the motorcycle helmet sitting abandoned on a shelf.
Untouched for months. Three, if Dennis had to guess.
He can hear his heartbeat in his ears. A steady, echoing, pounding. Rising like his blood pressure, mouth slightly parted as each breath shakes his chest. Wide gaze fixated on the sight. Unfaltering to the point of cruelty, helmet unchanged where it sits no matter how long Dennis stares. Tongue drags across his dry lips, throat billowing with a thick swallow, before he reaches into the closet. Lower than the shelf, hand grasping around green fabric before he fully realizes what he's done.
It's a familiar reaction. One Dennis could pull examples of since he was barely knee-high. Pure, unfounded impulse that has yet to fade even with the passage of time. When all else fails, latching onto an idea so crazy he knows it shouldn't work. Understands it doesn't have anything to do with an eventual outcome, favorable or not. Yet he pulls out the jacket nonetheless, because until everything is undeniably over, he has one more thing to try. One more desperate deal to make with someone who has far better things to concern Himself with.
"… This is insane."
Spoken as he stares at himself in the mirror, but arms slipping on a green jacket. Exhaling slow and deep, he gives it a sharp tug to let it settle on his frame. Oversized where it hangs, Dennis can only imagine what Robby would say if he saw this. Aside from the initial question as to why he decided to wear the others jacket to begin with. Face grows hot as his mind supplies a slew of jokes he suspects aren't nearly as sharp as the ones Robby would come up with.
Clearing his throat with a strained sound, he voices his deal. "Alright. I, uh… I know it's been a bit since we've spoken like- this… But it's important. Really important. So… I hope you're listening." Gaze raises to the ceiling out of habit. "If he comes back right now, I won't take this off. I'll answer the door exactly like this, and he'll see that I put on his clothes, and say whatever it is he's going to say… and I'll have to try and explain it." Something Dennis doubts is possible without coming across as an overreaction, should his worries be proven wrong. "But I don't care."
"I just… want him to come back."
"… Okay?"
He lets the question hang in the air, as though expecting the silence to part and give him an answer. A thought that makes him sputter incredulously. A hand rests against his forehead, fingers sliding up to run through his hair as he stares at himself. Other finds a spot on his hip, Dennis left looking at what has to be—
A knock at the front door.
"Oh shhhhit!" Hissed as he hurries out of the room and towards the noise, Dennis nearly trips on his own feet and bangs his knee against a corner. Hobbling for a few steps with a fresh curse and a near-certainty it was all in his head, he shakes off the pain ( and the fear ) before fumbling for the doorknob. Wrenching it open with more force than necessary, he's left standing there. Breathless, bewildered, and with the sun beaming right in his eyes as it makes its trek down the sky. Dennis briefly recalls how it was shining proudly at the top of it when he first came to Robby's house.
"You're back…" He breathes, mouth slightly agape, jacket sliding down one shoulder, and only one thing he can think of to do.
There was far more to the conversation, but Dragon dropped this banger of an observation on Discord and I wanted to share it here because they're RIGHT
Yknow after my third watch of iron lung im even more confused than ever that anyone could think that this film needed time cut from it. Like I was trying to take notes while watching and I had to write BLIND because I couldn't tear my eyes away from the screen. It was so hard to even find a time where I could write something because there was far too much happening to not pay attention to. Just because the spoken words in the movie weren't that common doesn't mean the film didn't spend its run screaming at the audience. The visual language is incredible. I couldn't tear my eyes from the screen because things were happening in every second. If anything, trying to write while watching made me feel more frantic than ever. The pacing is so rock solid I couldn't even find a moment for a bathroom break until after the movie was over. Every second is used to it's entire capacity and I need this movie on something I can pause IMMEDIATELY because there is so much going into every single second i need to inspect and replay every bit of it over and over.
A detail about simon that I love that I haven't really seen anyone talk about is how everyone around him seems to insist that he's stupid. And how desperately he needs to disprove that. Since he was a child, he's been berated and called stupid for having hope, for having regret, for wanting to live, for simply being labelled a convict. Even when his intelligence isn't actually being questioned, he feels the need to defend himself. "I've seen a skeleton before, how stupid do you think I am." "That's not condensation I know what condensation is." "I know what letters are. I can read."
In a world determined to make him feel less than for who he is and what he wants and what he's been defined as, Simon refuses it. And not for no reason. He isn't stupid. Not that he'd deserve being belittled regardless of his "actual" intelligence, but. He's smart. He maps out unmapped parts of the blood ocean using only the very limited resources he has. He finds quick solutions for moving the ship automatically, for keeping the camera running(even if it doesn't work great), and bandaging his wounds. So it does grind my gears a little when I've seen people call him stupid for drinking the rubbing alcohol. I know it's just for jokes, but it's such a poignant character moment!! He very much understands the consequences of drinking it. He takes several moments to consider it before deciding fuck it. This is one of the many moments that make him feel so human!! He's concussed, alone, lost at the bottom of an ocean of blood with god knows what outside, and he's given this one chance at relief. The obsession with horror protagonists always making the most logical decision at every turn creates characters who are boring!! Humans make dumb decisions for any number of reasons!! It doesn't make us stupid! Just human!
What if you just wanted to live. What if you just wanted to live and have hope and be a real person but everyone around you insists you're stupid for it. What if all you wanted was to live but everyone told you it was naive to want! What if everyone wanted you to give up before you even try.
saw iron lung this last thursday and have some thoughts. do not read past this line if u dont want spoilers.
the thing that fucks me up the most about iron lung is that like. the central tragedy of simon as a character is that he is surrounded by people who lie to him about what he's being tasked to do, about the purpose of what he's doing, about the tools he's been given. and when he does something that hurts others, either because he was instructed to do it or because he's scared/desperate/trying to survive, everyone around him ascribes to him a level of intentional malice that really isn't there.
like we don't learn exactly what he did to filament station, but from my understanding of events presented, it sounds like the people of eden gave him a bomb, lied to him about it being a bomb, and then had him plant it in filament station under the assumption that he was doing something that would help humanity/the people of eden, since clearly eden and the COI were in significant conflict. and then, when filament station was blasted and all the people on it died, the COI assigned sole blame to simon on the technicality that he was the one who actually placed the bomb ON filament station. like this is an educated guess to me, but just from that sort of semi-dream-sequence where simon seems to be talking to someone who beseeches him that he needs to do something in a big space station-y metal hallway who then gets consumed by the flames of an explosion, him blowing up filament station seems like the most likely explanation. and everyone in COI blames him and calls him a butcher and sees him as this intentionally horrible person who blew up filament station because... they thought he wanted to? because he was "evil"? no, because it was simply easier to villainize him as a member of the outgroup. but he didn't know that was what he'd been sent there to do. the people of eden lied to him about what he had and what he was doing, and he took all the blame for it. but i dont believe for a second he would have agreed to it if he'd known what they sent him there to do.
and then simon gets welded into the iron lung. and when he gets pulled up the first time he gets so freaked out about being put under again that he flashes the camera at the people of COI out of desperation because being sent down there again wasn't part of the deal. and eva and all the people there start yelling at him about how much of an evil fucking monster he was for irradiating them to dangerous levels.
but... they never told him that camera was an x-ray. the moment he fully understands the consequences of what he just did, he's visibly horrified and desperately apologetic, and eva is unforgiving even in the face of his attempts to apologize ("tell it to my tumors"). he even says if he'd known what the x-ray camera was, he never would have done that. and he was getting more damaged by the x-ray camera than any of them were due to repeated exposure.
the incident with the camera is a parallel and microcosm of filament station. he is lied to by those with power over them, unintentionally hurts others using the tools he's given out of ignorance and a desperate attempt to survive, and then gets blamed and called a monster. but he didn't want to hurt anyone. he never did. he wanted to survive. he wanted to have hope. he was taken advantage of and used and then forced to bear the blame of actions he never would have taken had he truly known what he was doing. and the weight of it was unbearable.
to me, the greatest tragedy of simon's character isn't just that he was never going to survive going into the blood ocean. it was that his actions, especially the ones that landed him in that sub in the first place, were never done out of intentional, knowing malice--and yet, everyone assumes that of him anyway. they called him a monster, a butcher. but he says--repeatedly, even--that if he'd just known what it was he was really doing, he never would have done it. he'd always been used as a tool of violence by others and then blamed for the damage he'd caused and discarded once he was no longer useful. only fools get cut and blame the knife rather than the hand that wields it.
but what if the knife wasn't a knife. what if it was just a piece of broken glass that started as something that wasn't meant to cause harm and had been shattered and repurposed into a tool of violence thanks to its convenient shape and proximity. what if the broken glass didn't want to cut others. what if it used to be something beautiful. what if it was tired of drawing blood over and over, yet nothing could clean the stain of blood off it.
after all, what is the fate of broken glass in the end? to be thrown away so it cannot hurt anyone with its sharp edges.
ive been thinking a lot about iron lung movie still and today i had. a horrifying thought. more iron lung spoilers below.
like. the movie went to a lot of effort to show the viewer drops of liquid coming off every surface of the sub. including when the liquid in question is just clear instead of being red and bloody. and i was very curious about the point of these environmental storytelling shots because i wanted to understand what was being hinted at. eva says it's "just condensation" but if it was "just condensation", then why would the movie go out of its way to focus on all of these tiny little drips of water running off multiple surfaces in the sub? if it's just water, it's no big deal right?
but today i realized...
that clear liquid that was dripping off everything in the beginning... it seemed a bit too thick to be just regular water condensation.
then i thought:
what if it wasn't water condensation.
what if it was fucking plasma.
what if the blood was leaking into the sub from the beginning but at first only the plasma could get in, so everyone thought it was just normal old water.
stormborns
origamiaround
titsay
ellievsbear
snowghoul
dededos
prguitarman
