he doesn’t get better. the more he travels, the weaker he grows, and the more he understands that he isn’t going to be some sort of miracle case. he’s one of the many that will never get better, that will simply pass in their sleep when they’re at the cusp of their youth.
his service pokemon follows him to the end of his life. he evolves from a ralts to a kirlia, then a gardevoir because he’s never liked physical attacks anyway. he becomes tall enough to wheel him around in a wheelchair when his legs grow too weak to carry him. even his gardevoir grows quiet. he’s not as talkative and sassy, although he grows increasingly guarded and protective and doesn’t let anyone just waltz up to min jae to speak to him.
they have a lot of silent conversations about the most mundane and smallest of things, but it’s these little things that min jae feels alive for, so his gardevoir humours him.
call me late to the party but i just heard of ricci's passing.
and it shook me. the last death i've had to deal with was my grandmother's and that was ten years ago. i can't say i've been around for the past several months, or the past year, really, and a part of me just felt like it got ripped out.
i spent last night digging through my box of mementos to find the christmas card he sent me two years ago and i read it, read it twice, thrice, and seeing in his handwriting "i'm really glad we met" just hurt so much because this was ricci in his brightest days, when i didn't go into the cbox worrying about his panic attacks and feeling stressed that i wasn't actually calming him down
as a buddhist i do believe (to some extent) in the idea of reincarnation. and i hope wherever his soul goes, it'll be one where he'll struggle with less. because karma-wise he's done pretty damn great. he listened, unfailingly, with the patience and understanding that you don't very often from the people around you and just listened, offered words of reassurance, and that was all i ever really needed.
today in school i sat there throughout class listless and unable to do anything of consequence because i was so shattered and a part of me just felt like it had broken. i've known ricci for five years, and it's been a joy to know someone like that. and he'll always be something special to me. that $40 shipping i spent on sending his birthday parcel over will hopefully be testament to that.
with regards to anrui - it hurts a fuck ton for me to go back now because i had been struggling with muse problems, but this kind of was like the nail to the coffin. i can never go back without seeing thinking that hey, all these plots we were supposed to have and everything... it won't come to fruition any more. anrui won't be the same without one of my best staff members, who did their duty diligently and stuck to the site even through its several deaths and revivals, who dared to call me out on shit because i'm a terrible person.
wherever you may be, ricci, nums, i hope you're happier. because you deserve all that happiness in the world.
i'm going to keep away from anrui for as long as this takes for me to heal. that and school has just been eating away at me, and the last thing i need now is to let that funk drag me under now that university is starting. bearlyepic, bandicoot-curtlesnoot and everyone else because i don't have your tumblrs, i'll always be on my main sirree if you ever need to find me.
Natalie struggled a lot with coming to terms with who she was. Turning 13 and shifting also brought on the age of puberty and dear god she hated it. The monthly hell and the way her body started curving just really irked her. That year's summer felt hotter and more horrible than any other that she cut her hair short, like bob cut tiny ponytail short. She slouched more so that her chest didn't jut out, wore sports bras as much as possible to flatten her chest down, anything to feel less weird.
I think at many points of her schooling years she really questioned why she hated skirts so much or why she detested everything about growing up a girl. At several points she probably thought she'd concluded that she just really wanted to be a guy. She'd start trying to wear the guy's uniform (got into a whole ton of trouble for that) and also gave herself a really bad choppy pixie cut of sorts. People started calling her Nathan or variations of it, and she kept teetering. She felt a lot more comfortable in these clothes, with the breeze on her neck, but felt awkward being addressed as a guy.
She finally sort of pulled herself together in her last year and decided that she couldn't really escape the fact that she was a girl. But being a girl didn't mean that she couldn't do the things traditionally unlike girls. She ran and climbed and did everything she wanted because gender or sex didn't matter in her pursuit. Being scouted as an officer reaffirmed that for her and it helped boost her confidence in general.
Her confidence started showing signs of wavering when the training missions got tougher and the trainer was basically a very traditional man raised on old society values that was misogynistic and adhered to the gender roles and most of his beating downs were always insulting to be a girl, "don't be a girl", all Shang like "did they send me daughters when i asked for sons" and shit and it really knocked her down a lot. A lot of her pessimism stems from being told she can't do something. She normally bounced back and let it roll off her shoulders, but she couldn't this time. (She was eternally grateful for her attached officer Oswald that just listened to her cry about it and may or may not have gotten himself benched for a while for disrespecting seniority.)
Motherhood was another rollercoaster for her. Natalie screwed her body up royally from her youth and conceiving was a problem already. Learning to accept that her tummy was just going to inflate up was a hurdle for her, but it helped her settle into womanhood. She got a bit more curves at her hips now and she'll come to learn how to love her stretch marks, but she's pretty certain on who she is now.
Being chief actually holds a lot of value for her. Her first council meeting involved her getting looked down upon for being a woman that cut their hair like a man. She shut them down and walked out after she addressed everything that needed to be said. Pretty happy that she did, actually.
Christian is really hard to write sometimes because he doesn't have labels that I can tack onto him for certain. One moment he's this, another moment he's acting another way. As odd as it may seem, I actually consider this one of the most human things about people. People are multi faceted. We aren't squares or diamonds. To be honest, he's sort of a circle. One moment he's polite, but he's also grumpy and blunt. He is effeminate, but tries his best to defy and denies it even though he's accepted it at the same time. He is socially charming, but socially awkward as well.
I guess the only way I can put it is that he is a different person at different times. We all have those days that we don't want to hang out with people. We have those days where we want to get out and have fun. So it feels like everytime I write him, I just go with whatever comes to mind and what suits the situation. Makes him feel like a Sue, but at the same time, we're not all right, but we're also not all wrong?
Oh god, don't make him laugh. Christian rejects the thought of his birth father and his family. As far as he's concerned, two human women raised him, along with a bunch of other children from the same orphanage (headcanon - there is only one orphanage in the entire city, so orphaned kids probably know one another from back then.) So he doesn't have anything nice to say about the family that didn't exist for the most part of his life, even if they're related by blood.
It's a lot of self denial on his end. He likes to pretend they're strangers or that they don't exist for the most part of it. Resentment probably has a part to play in that. It would have been nice to know he had brothers to back him up or something while he was struggling. At the same time, the empathetic part of him can't really empathise, but Christian understands. They were in the dark about all of it, they were in the dark about him. He just thinks that it's a shame they couldn't have been closer.
He keeps his distance from them. They already have enough family drama, Christian doesn't want to add to it nor be a part of it (though he's at a point where he doesn't have much choice) By actively avoiding them, he thinks he's out of all of this (which is again, ridiculous oh Christian) He's rather content with the Lyons. Thinks it suits him better as well.
Being an officer means a lot to Nat. She was scouted out for it, spent five years just training and further honing her skills in it, even met the love of her life in it. It's a lot more than a job for her. It's essentially become a part of her, even in her absence.
It causes her a lot of undue stress, and sometimes she feels like it pulls her away from the time she should be spending with family. She doesn't think that it's fair for her husband to be the primary face around the house, thinks that the lack of a mother figure is bad for the child. She's happy that she got to see him through his formative years.
Given the officers' general disdain towards paperwork, she's actually pretty fond of it. She has the ability to sit through lectures and briefings and meetings and doesn't mind the monotony, in comparison to some of the younger faces. During her pregnancy she stuck to doing administrative work, so she's become good at paperwork, efficient, even.
But she loves it because of what's out there. Justice rings through her heart. And with a child, she has grown a wish to protect. Fellox is a haven for her, and she's pretty sure Jack's going to grow up into a shifter as well. The world outside doesn't take too kindly to people like them, so as much as she can, she'll try and maintain the order in this world of her's.
muse
james barnes' third symphony - movement iii (for natalie) which is one of the most beautiful pieces i've got to hear in my life. the story behind this entire symphony is amazing and tragic beyond words.
natalie is also the name of a very dear friend of mine. they're not very similar, but it's a name of familiarity that brings me a lot of peace.
clara's family, or at least, her line, follows a very pure line of metagross shifters. not any psychic/steel, but specifically the metagross line. the jirachi shift was just kind of like a time bomb waiting to go off.
it's actually customary of every child to go through something like a rite of passage. because beldum are one eyed, i actually imagine that at one point in their life, they lose sight in one of their eyes. they could regain sight in that eye (and it would take some time to learn how to use it and try and strengthen muscles that have weakened) when they underwent evolution. clara didn't lose sight in one eye, which was their great distress.
to preserve the line of metagross shifters, it's been generations and generations of inbreeding in the family. they've gotten a lot of flak for it, but somewhere along the road, shit like that probably went down. (i imagine this was the case in scarrow history)
a lot of marriages were arranged by the elders. there's a very strong sense of filial piety that the fontaines are raised in. your parents are the first and foremost you listen to. you don't question their decisions. which was probably why clara didn't go against her father's rejection towards chemo. on a medical level, she knows this is probably the best way to save him, but on a familial level, she cannot overrule his own judgement. if he asked her to kill him, she would.
but after seeing how that turned out, she's gotten a lot more defiant when it comes to her mother. her mother's probably tried suicide at several points in time when she realises her husband is gone in her moments of clarity. she tells clara to let her do it, or to kill her, but she refuses because she's not ready to be left alone. she'll only let her go to natural causes, so she says.
her mother is nearly 70. she was born relatively later than most. i'd like to think that her parents are fairly distant cousins along the family tree. veeeeery sore topic. don't ever talk about it.
her mother is also suffering from depression and she's got selective memory loss. she calls clara jacques because she resembles her dad, and she only sees her husband, not her daughter. she doesn't seem to look it on a normal basis, but she looks like she's constantly detached and looking into the distance even when talking to people in front of her.
the rest of the family believes that clara's human. recessive genes handed down from the family (and inbreeding) could have resulted in a lot of undesirable traits being amplified down along the bloodline so they just think of her as the black sheep in the family that was the cumulation of all the bad blood they had. human or legendary she's still kind of perceived the same, really.
I don't really know what to believe anymore, to be honest. I'm just not... interested to care. Is the hatchet buried? Never. I'm a grudging asshole who will remember this forever.
Was it necessary for my leaving thread to be deleted three hours from posting it? You decide. It's over. Tried so hard and got so far.
She holds on so desperately to them she starts giving her life a la Healing Wish to them to see them alive and well if only for one more week. The Jirachi in her gets increasingly frustrated because her host is hurting herself for no reason. Her patients will never be thankful to her, and they will leave the world sooner or later. She's trying to play god, she's sacrificing who she is for people who will never remember her face. Yet, it is trapped, forced to act by her wishes as much as it doesn't want to.
And then one day she'll finally give the last of her life, breathe her last breath, never understanding what she means to other people. The Jirachi in her will be freed from the torment she has forced upon it, to find another vessel. She will be buried beside her parents, and only be happy in death.
