I feel so insane about ai. I've had face-to-face conversations with people who use it for therapy, who use it to calculate the safety of pill interactions, who use it for all their emails and grant applications and legal documents and academic papers and finance sheets and for every single question they have about the world, and if you tell them about the ecological costs they just laugh and say "I guess I've used a lot of water." and I've been in multiple gatherings of 10+ people where I'm THE ONLY PERSON who doesn't use chatgpt. it's turning me into a ranting raving pariah, because how don't you people see??? why don't you understand??????? this bullshit didn't exist five years ago, you absolutely do not need it, and it is destroying everything
this is one of the most disturbing scenes in nightcrawler, the way lou looks normal as normal as he can lmao at first, but then he slowly approaching, "blooming" and taking over nina and viewer and by the end he literally looks like he's possessed...and his eyes?? he unsettled me a lot but in this i was really scared of him
ִ ࣪𖤐 sum. your best friend who you totally aren’t in love with goes missing. when he shows up on halloween—changed, yet still himself, you dont complain. donnie darko x reader, angst, pining, if i write a part 2 it will have smut, sorry guys this was supposed to come out on HALLOWEEN (˃̣̣̥ᯅ˂̣̣̥) playlist / masterlist
After Donnie disappeared, you had to bite the days off in rows, corn kernels, one by one, exploding in the cross-section of each one of your bloody teeth. You couldn’t think he was really gone.
Your best friend.
The boy you admired behind cigarette smoke and fixing his bike chain after it finally snapped from the rust, when you told him not to leave it in the rain…
No, he couldn’t have just vanished. Not your Donnie.
You smothered the memories of the search parties and the sounds of his mother’s grief shrieking so loud it shook against your windows. You plugged your ears when Mrs. Farmer tried to tell you to stop hiding behind fear.
You floated through October like a visitor, the days getting stuck in the back of your throat. The moleskine in your back pocket had theories of what really happened to Donnie scribbled on every page.
You knew there was a part of you that simply really, really didn’t want him to be dead.
A bigger part had a feeling it was more complicated than that.
⋆✴︎˚｡⋆
“I think you know why I’ve arranged for us to chat today.”
You had been in in Mrs. Pomeroy’s class, thinking about where Donnie could have gone, when the door opened. Jim Cunningham called your name, led you into his shiny new office.
Cold rain breathed fog against the windows.
“No,” You snapped the elastic band against the cover of your moleskine. “I don’t.”
“Can I have a look at that?” He weaved his fingers together, leaning forward on his mahogany desk. You shrunk back into your chair.
“It’s personal.”
“Do you write about Donald? About his disappearance, earlier this month?”
You wanted to ask where he got his therapy license or his phony cult, but someone was choking you from the inside.
Rain shrieked and beat against the windowpanes.
“Nobody calls him that.”
“Listen. You’re destroying your life with these… instruments of fear. I believe you are in denial because you’re afraid to face the reality of your ego reflection, as well as what happened to Donald. You need to…”
The ceiling seemed to shrink. Maybe it was your own skull trying to implode. You just needed this man to shut up.
You pulled on the elastic of your moleskine so hard it snapped. He kept talking—chattering like a squirrel to no one listening.
You stared hard at the window, watching tears pour down the glass when—
Donnie.
The mist tried to swallow him, but it wasn’t quick enough.
He stood on the other side of the window, palm pressed into it. Still as a statue. Not even trembling from the icy rain. Looking at you. Into you.
Your heart stopped beating.
You didn’t remember standing up, knocking over the ugly leather chair you sat in. You didn’t remember scrambling to the window, screaming and reaching for the ghost boy.
Apparently Cunningham had to drag you all the way to the front office before you quit. You didn’t remember.
Thorn-covered vines must have crept across the floor while you weren’t looking, crackling like a bonfire and swallowing you whole.
After a stern talking-to about acceptance and grief and shutting-up, the principal sent you home.
“Happy Halloween. Take it easy, alright?”
You shrugged. You didn’t even have a costume picked out.
⋆✴︎˚｡⋆
Your bed was much better than school and all of the sneaky witches and imps that haunted it. Soft, safe, sleepy.
The cold soaked through your window and swirled like magic around your head. You didn’t remember opening your moleskine or starting to flip through it.
Runaway. Time travel. Alien abduction. Dream. Kidnapped.
The most fantastical reasons for Donnie’s disappearance didn't seem so outlandish anymore. It felt like your head had floated out the window, down the road and up, up, up into Neverland.
Maybe that’s where Donnie was. You wrote that down, too.
Your fingers moved on their own, brushing one of the old sketches you’d made of him while he wasn’t looking. Smudged graphite, the curve of his jawline, the messy hair that refused to stay down unless it was your hands brushing it back.
You thought about all the things you would give to see him, one more time. What you would do just to breathe him in.
You stared at his graphite eyes until you remembered you actually had plans.
Joanie James, a girl in your science class, had invited you to a Halloween party earlier that day.
Right before you got into your car, she pounced.
“Hey, you. Um… here. We’d like it if you came.” She said. She dropped an orange envelope into your driver’s seat.
“We?” You asked, shoving your backpack into the backseat.
It was clear you weren’t expecting company; your car was a mess.
“You know, Sean and Ronald. Donnie’s friends.”
“I haven’t talked to them since…” Before everything. Even then, you didn’t hang around them much.
Donnie had always acted differently with them. He turned into a plastic kind of tough and didn’t like when you saw right through it.
“…Well, just think about it, kay? I’m gonna be late for calculus.”
And then she was gone.
You figured it was out of pity; the last minute invite to get one more attendee. But now that your best friend had vanished and you effectively isolated your way out of a social life, a party invite was more than you deserved.
Maybe it was a grand gesture from the universe, or the big man in the sky, telling you to get drunk and eat candy until your teeth rot. Maybe you missed Donnie so much it was driving you crazy.
Maybe it really was just a pity invite.
Either way, the sun was going to set soon. You had to get ready.
⋆✴︎˚｡⋆
You couldn't look in the mirror the whole time; your reflection looked like someone else wearing your skin. You threw on Donnie’s old flannel—the one he left in your car last spring after it rained—and called it good enough. It still smelled like him.
The roads bled light through the mist as you walked. Every house you passed glowed faintly orange, full of plastic ghosts and paper bats.
For a second, you almost turned back.
But then the wind shifted. Cold and metallic, petrichor. Like rain before it hits. Like him.
The party was at Sean’s house, all cheap strobe lights and shrouded in the fog machine’s coughed-up smoke. Teenagers moved like shadows in the flashing dark, faces smudged by Halloween makeup and spilled beer.
You lasted maybe half an hour. Long enough to drink something sweet and stinging. Long enough to see Sean in the kitchen, his arm around Joanie’s waist. His grin kicked up in a way that twisted something inside you. It wasn’t anything in particular—it was all just too much. You shouldn’t have come.
You went outside before you could cry in front of anyone.
You didn’t know why you were crying. Sometimes everything just shrink-wrapped around your head until you burst.
The night opened up around you like a wound. The sky had had started to cry again.
Rain soaked through your shirt and Donnie’s flannel in seconds. You sat down on the curb, hands shaking, hair plastered to your forehead.
Everything you’d been trying not to feel hit you all at once—Donnie’s disappearance, the pity, the loneliness.
You sobbed like the sky was coming down with you. Maybe it was. The night was the color of the bruise—the way you imagined it could look if the world was ending.
Maybe it was.
The streetlight above you flickered once, twice, and popped into burnt sugar.
The party noise had thinned into dull bass and laughter, a different planet from the one you were on.
Something shifted in the far end of the street—just a flicker, a darker shadow inside the dark.
Then he was there.
Donnie.
He walked barefoot through the rain, but the water didn’t seem to touch him. It slid off his hair like silver.
No steam slipped out into the dark, no breath fogged the air.
When he reached you, you felt it first—cold.
Not the icyblack chill of the night, but the cold of something that shouldn’t have been moving at all.
You had to have been dreaming.
You waited for him to disappear, but he only grew closer.
He crouched down, wordless, and draped his jacket over your trembling shoulders. You could smell the faint, metallic sweetness beneath the wet denim. It wasn’t rust.
“You’ll catch a cold,” he murmured.
His voice carried that hollow hum you’d only ever heard through a microphone.
You looked up at him. His eyes caught the light from a passing car—glowed, just for a second, the color of spilled wine.
“You’re freezing,” you breathed. Your head was swimming.
“No,” he answered. “Not… anymore.”
He tried to smile that crooked grin, but there was nothing human behind it, so he quit.
He almost looked nervous—he had the same boyish anxiety you used to catch shimmering behind his eyes. A muscle jumped in his jaw.
His lips were pale, the corners darkened with something the rain couldn’t wash away.
He reached for you, hesitated.
“You… you shouldn’t be out here. Not like this.”
“Neither should you,” you whispered fervently. “You—you’re supposed to be—”
“Dead?” The word curled out of him like smoke. “Almost.”
He smiled then, slow and thin, and lightning cracked open the sky behind him. The flash caught in his teeth—too sharp, too white. For a heartbeat you saw what the rain was trying to hide.
Long, clean points where his canines should’ve ended. Shiny white bone. Impossibly sharp.
Then the light died, and he was just Donnie again.
Only he wasn’t.
“I… um—I missed you,” he said.
Whatever had changed about him, he still had that awkward teenage boy-ness.
When he reached out slowly, touching your throat to push a strand of wet hair aside, your pulse jumped under his thumb.
His eyes flashed like he could feel it. He jerked his hand away like it stung something awful.
“Come on,” he whispered, his voice thick. “Let’s get you out of the rain.”
He offered his hand, cold and slow and steady. When you took it, the chill traveled up your arm, through your spine, nestled between your vertebrae, and stayed there.
It never quite left.
⋆✴︎˚｡⋆
He led you down the empty street, water running in silver rivers around your shoes.
An old bus shelter waited at the end of the block, its glass walls fogged and streaked. He guided you inside, hands gentle at your elbows, and you realised the cold had left you the moment he’d touched you.
His palm was still chilled, but the air around him felt warmer, like the night itself bent closer.
He sat opposite you on the narrow bench. The streetlight caught the planes of his face—the same, and not the same. The eyes too bright, the skin too pale, the color of marble under water.
“They all think I’m dead,” he said. “You too?”
“I didn’t want to.”
“Good.”
His mouth curved, but the smile never reached his eyes. He looked down at your wrist, where the rain had washed your skin clean and left the veins blue. You saw his throat move, one small swallow. He seemed to tense and un-tense.
“You don’t feel it?” he asked quietly.
“Feel what?”
“Everything humming. Moving. Breathing.”
You didn’t answer. You couldn’t; the air felt charged, thin. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, until you could feel his breath on your cheek—cool, dry, and a little sweet, like dust and iron.
He leaned closer before catching himself.
“I tried to stay away,” he gasped. “I can’t—I… It’s different now. I’m different.”
Lightning flickered again, and for a heartbeat the world turned white.
In that flash you saw the truth written in his face—the fangs, small and perfect; the eyes reflecting no light but their own.
You should have been afraid. You weren’t.
“What happened to you?” you whispered.
“I don’t know what to call it,” he said. “Something between living and not. I didn’t mean for you to see me.”
“But you came back.”
“Because you kept calling.”
He reached out, knuckles brushing your jaw. The touch left a trail of cold that burned a little, pleasant and wrong all at once.
You tilted toward it before you could stop yourself.
He caught your hesitation in the corner of his mouth. He smiled despite himself—his grin kicked up in that perfect way.
“You still don’t believe in monsters?” he asked.
“Maybe I do now.”
The rain thinned to a whisper. You could hear the small, steady sound of his breath finally returning, like he’d been holding it for months.
His forehead touched yours, cold. For a moment there was only your pulse beating for the two of you, the faint brush of lips that never quite met.
Then the light from a passing car broke across the glass, and he drew back, eyes closed, as though it hurt.
It was like he couldnt quite find the balance between human and not.
He choked out a whisper of something you couldn’t catch, something that sounded like your name.
When he opened his eyes again, they were soft again. Human. Donnie.
“You should—you need to go home.” he choked. “Before… before I forget why I shouldn’t stay.”
The night held its breath around you. Donnie’s hand slowly found yours, squeezed. His fingers curled up around your wrist, slowly bringing it up to his mouth.
“Donnie…” you breathed, watching his lips move over your wristbone.
He didn’t kiss. Didn't bite. Just held it there, his eyes fluttering shut. He inhaled slow, deep. Breathing you in.
“I don’t want to go,” you said again. “I won’t.”
“You’ll end up like me.”
He said it like a confession, or a curse. You didn’t know which.
He said it like his throat burned with hatred, only for himself.
The rain outside had thinned to mist, and in that small hush, his breath trembled against your skin—cool and wrong and familiar all at once.
You reached for him anyway, fingertips brushing the collar of his jacket, tracing the pulse he no longer had.
He flinched like your touch burned him. “You shouldn’t. Shouldn’t love me.”
“I already do.”
Something broke behind his eyes then—something small and permanent. He caught your face between his hands, cold palms framing you like glass.
His mouth found yours in the dark, slow at first, then desperate, as if the world were ending again and he was trying to memorize it this time.
He kissed you like he was drowning. His hands trace down to just below your ears, feeling the heat in the soft gratitude of your neck. Then to your back, cradling you, crushing you against his chest.
“Oh, God…”
For a moment, it was almost enough.
For a moment, you could almost believe he was really alive.
Then he tore himself back again, like the air itself had become dangerous. Rain pooled in his hair and on his lashes, but he didn’t seem to notice. Need glittered in his eyes, pained and useless.
His eyes glowed faintly in the dark—too bright, too hungry, too far gone.
“You have to forget me,” he whispered. “You have to wake up.”
You didn’t understand until his thumb brushed your throat again—barely controlled, reverent—and the world around you slowed, sound dimming until you could hear only your heartbeat, wild and terrified and alive.
He leaned close, mouth just at your ear. “If I stay, I’ll take it from you. All of it.”
“Then take it,” you breathed.
He smiled at that; small, tragic, almost human. Like he wanted to.
Then he stood, the movement too quick, too fluid, the way shadows move when no one’s looking.
By the time you blinked, he was already halfway down the street, rain curving around him instead of falling on him. He didn’t look back.
You called after him anyway, but your voice was swallowed by the storm.
Just before the dark took him completely, he turned—just once—and for the briefest moment, the streetlights bent toward him, shimmering and white, like the universe itself couldn’t decide whether or not to let him go.
Then he was gone.
You stood there until the rain stopped, his jacket slipping from your shoulders, heavy with petrichor and memory.
Somewhere, in the space between thunder and silence, you thought you heard him again—
“Maybe somewhere, I don’t lose you.”
When you finally opened your moleskine the next morning, your handwriting ended halfway through a sentence. And below it, a single line, scrawled in ink too dark to be yours:
We were never meant to survive this universe together.
⋆✴︎˚｡⋆
The morning came pale and thin, like the world hadn’t quite decided to exist again. You woke to sunlight crawling across the floorboards, your hair still damp, the jacket folded neatly over the foot of your bed.
It didn’t smell like rain anymore. It smelled like dust and metal, like the old summer roads you used to bike down together.
You ran your thumb over the ink on that last page until it smudged, but no matter how long you stared, you couldn’t remember writing it. You couldn’t remember walking home, either.
Outside, the leaves scratched and whispered low against the pavement, their edges curling like burnt paper.
You told yourself you imagined it.
You told yourself he was gone.
But when you opened the window, the cold drifted in again—soft, deliberate—and for just a moment, you swore you heard him breathe.
“Come back..” you breathed—begged.
“One more night. Please.”
Somewhere, a bike chain clinked, slow and rhythmic, then fell silent.
jake gyllenhaal in nightcrawler really shows off how unsettling he can be portraying asocial traits but holy SHIT is it unsettling. the way his tongue almost never appears when he speaks, his mouth is just grey-white teeth and a black void. the way his eyes seem to have completely black irises during some shots while still having a shine to them. he’s so disturbing and he toes the line of secondhand embarrassment and stays on the right side through sheer confidence
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