Time is a finicky mistress. Across countless timelines, Five and Lila try to find each other—sometimes they succeed, most times they don’t... Follow them as they navigate through the complex stages of realisation that the universe has a bigger plan for both of them.
Each of us have written a stage. Some are one shots, some are multi-chapters. All standalone fics, all finding Five and Lila in the worlds when they manage to find each other.
What is your favorite fanfiction you have written?
(Also can my emoji be the sloth? 🦥)
of course! welcome little sloth
my favourite always tends to be whatever I'm writing at the time so I guess right now it's Impact, and the few I'm writing that are currently unpublished!
But if that's not an option then I thing it has to be Five Stages, which will always have a special place in my heart because I wrote it when I was grieving myself.
I do also really love all of the Hotchners Future AUs too, though. I hope to write a lot more of those.
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I talk more about making this comic here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/24849906
TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON
This cartoon has six panels.
PANEL 1
There is nothing in this panel but title lettering. The title lettering is done in large, friendly white lettering, but the letters are casting some gritty-looking shadows.
THE FIVE STAGES OF FINDING OUT YOUR FAVE IS TRASH
PANEL 2
This panel shows a woman with black hair yelling angrily at something she's read on her tablet. She's holding the tablet in one hand and pointing angrily to something on screen with the other hand.
CAPTION: ANGER
BLACK HAIRED WOMAN: Unfounded rumors! Jealous attention seekers!
PANEL 3
A man sits in front of his laptop. His hair is messy and his eyes are wide, and he looks desperate as he taps taps taps at the keyboard.
CAPTION: BARGAINING
MAN (typing): What he did was bad. But not Weinstein or Polanski bad, right? Right?
PANEL 4
A person lies in bad, with the bedsheet pulled up high enough so that all of their face is covered. They are, however, holding one hand up, forefinger extended, in a "making a point" gesture. Next to the bed, a somewhat bored-looking friend sits in a chair, her face resting on one of her hands.
CAPTION: DEPRESSION
PERSON (in a shaky word balloon): I never want to see a movie again. Or read a book. Or look at a picture. Or...
FRIEND: Er... Wanna try hiking?
PANEL 5
A cocktail party in an art gallery. We can see people milling about and chatting to each other in the background. In the foreground, a person wearing a bowtie is speaking somewhat self-importantly to a couple of other party goers.
CAPTION: DENIAL
PERSON: I never liked his work.
PANEL 6
Two women are in this panel. One, with curly hair, is looking inside a large book of art. Behind her, the black-haired woman from panel one, still holding her tablet, leans towards the curly-haired woman.
CURLY HAIRED WOMAN: Wow, these paintings are amazing!
BLACK HAIRED WOMAN: They are! Too bad the painter's a creep.
Can we just appreciate the levels of Tsundere that Euyrale will go through as we’re setting up her build?
Anger: Pfft. I’m not “useful.” I should never be useful! I’m a trophy Goddess, men fight wars over me because they’re unsure of their manhood, not “strategy!”
Denial: I’m not even supposed to be a Servant! This stupid bow has nothing to do with my “legend.” It probably came from Cupid or something. It doesn’t work this way. None of this works this way.
Bargaining: Okay, maybe my strange status could SURPRISE a male saber, right? But you guys do all the heavy lifting; and hitting and magic zapping.
Depression:...you’re spending multiple Grails on me. The things you stupid mages always freak out about. The things Chaldea is expecting to save all of time and space. I’m going to screw this up! Oh Zeus, what if this just means I’m being confused with Cupid and his legend mixes more with mine? I’m going to turn into a fat stupid male super-deformed baby naked with a weiner angel. I’m going to be married to Psyche. I don’t even like Psyche!
Acceptance: ...:sighs: I guess if it will help the Other Me, Asterios and my Loser Sister. ....and I suppose you too, Master. Fine. I’m a valued useful member of the team. I’ve sold out. You’d better appreciate this! I will MAKE YOU appreciate this!
Usually I explain a little of the reasoning behind why I’ve created a spread. I don’t think this one needs it.
Most times I have an idea of where to start with my spreads, but for this, I felt so lost I wasn’t sure. I turned to the five stages of grief for inspiration.
Denial. Where you might think things like “What? No. Surely this isn’t right. This can’t be real.” The associated question: How can I ground myself in reality?
Anger: “How dare you, universe? How dare you, someone not at funeral? How dare…” The associated question: When it is present, how do I work through the anger?
Bargaining: “If only...what if...if I had been able to…” The associated question: Sadly this cannot be changed, but what should I do in the present to help me cope?
Depression: “They are gone. Why should I keep going?” The associated question: When it is present, how do I handle the depression?
Acceptance: “I am not alright or okay, but I have accepted this new reality.” The associated question: When I am ready, what can I do to accept what has happened?
Cycle: A reminder that this cycle is not linear, you can go back to previous stages, and the length of each stage or feeling is not set in stone. The associated question: Additional support and/or advice?
In many ways I hope no one ever needs this spread. But if by chance you do, I hope it can help.
My spreads are free to use so long as I retain credit for creating the spread and you are not making money from the reading. Do not repost or remove caption.
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Despite what we want to believe, there is no linear path through loss.
Grief Doesn’t Have Five Stages
By Suchandrika Chakrabarti
Despite what we want to believe, there is no linear path through loss.
If you haven’t experienced the death of someone close — someone so important to your life that the loss left you hollowed — then you haven’t yet found out what your imagination is capable of.
Grief is like an impenetrable force field around the person left behind, the person who used to be like you (pro-tip: they’re not really like you anymore; acknowledge that).
Inside it, the mourning person is both incredibly lonely and never alone. “You run through me unceasingly, like blood, like my own thoughts,” the writer John Niven says in this Father’s Day letter to his late dad. A beautifully expressed, completely private moment between the two, but only really happening inside one person's mind.
“A lot of grief feels like madness and is crazy-making,” says Julia Samuel, psychotherapist and author of Grief Works. Death is an enormous concept to grapple with, and, yes, it can feel like you're losing your mind. Mourning is inscrutable for those who have yet to experience it; no wonder we try to impose a linear order onto it. Both the grieving and the witnesses to grief feel the need to map a way out.
You’ve heard of them, the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. You’ve seen that Simpsons clip. They sound faster than the 12 Steps, less prescriptive than the 10 Commandments, but much less fun than the Rule of Threes. Unfortunately, I can tell you this is not at all how grief works.
Both of my parents died before my 20th birthday. The shock and the disbelief lasted for a long time. In those strange early days I’d wake up from vivid multi-colored scenes of simple domestic moments — dreams of lost normality — forgetting that I’d been locked out of that world. The knowledge would then slide in, taking those few precious seconds of believing that I was still a daughter, and making them absurd, a source of renewed pain.
Back then, my head invaded by grief, I couldn’t find the words to explain the shifting size of it: unbearably huge one day, forcing endless crying and dwelling on the past; small and tucked away the next day, freeing me to just live for a little while.
The popular five stages framework presents bereavement as a simple linear process, but grief is closer to a huge, unending paradox.
Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross devised the five stages in the 1970s after speaking to terminally ill patients as a way of helping them deal with their own impending deaths. The Kübler-Ross model was quickly snapped up as a framework for all responses to death. Kübler-Ross noted this with concern, and said the steps were “not stops on some linear timeline in grief.” Still, the model’s enduring popularity for precisely that purpose tells that we desperately want a guide to living with death.
So, if even Kübler-Ross herself suggests grief is not experienced in stages, then what?
“They never come back to tell you what it's like," my dad once said to me about the people he’d lost; an image that I’ve held on to for more than 15 years. He was right. There is a lot of imaginative work woven through the labor of mourning.
The Kübler-Ross model’s enduring popularity tells us that we desperately want a guide to living with death.
“Grief goes in circles. I think we are slowly coming to realize as a society, that it is okay to grieve your whole life,” said actress Beth Rylance. Her mother died four days after Beth’s first birthday.
As an ambassador for child bereavement charity Grief Encounter, Rylance said, “I feel the loss of her more the older I get.” As she has gone past life milestones and matured emotionally, Rylance has both experienced her mother’s loss and come to understand how time has shaped her responses to the absence. Rylance’s grief has grown up with her. Cruelly, comfortingly, it’s been there in place of her mother. “If there is something I’ve learnt from growing up without my mum, it’s that there isn’t really an end to it,” she said. “You don’t suddenly one day feel better that you don’t have a mum.”
The grieving process is complex, isolating and ongoing — requiring emotional energy to find meaning in the vast unfairness. This goes on under the skin, invisible to the outside world. It’s what you do just to continue living at the same basic level as everyone else. Certainly this involves feelings of denial, anger, and depression. Sometimes all at once, or not at all, and then again.
Sounds like a lot of effort? It is, and that’s only part of it. Among some of the unwanted gifts of a new loss is overproduction of fight-or-flight hormones cortisol and adrenaline, leading to a racing pulse and state of hypervigilance. Grief is not confined to the emotions; it is a physical reaction going on in the heart, veins, and arteries of the bereaved. If this continues, anxiety, exhaustion, and a fear of building relationships can follow.
One significant death means that anyone can die, anytime; the world is no longer safe. This feeling is particularly true of people who lost a parent in their teenage years. Comedian Cariad Lloyd, whose father died when she was a teenager, compares it to having the floor pulled out from under you, which is exactly right.
“I joined the club when I was 15,” Lloyd said, alluding to the common feeling shared by people who’ve been through a devastating loss: that we’re in it together because we understand something overwhelmingly large and unspoken, knowledge that can only be gained through loss. We have a need to talk to each other. That’s why she started her award-winning podcast, Griefcast, in 2016.
“When we were growing up,” she said, “everything was stable. And then, suddenly, nothing was. As a teenager, it feels like: oh, well now I don’t believe in anything. I’d worry that everything would be taken away from me all the time, because it had been. We had evidence of that.”
There’s no choice except to engage with loss, to acknowledge and grow around the outline of the missing loved one. “If you ignore grief and push it down,” Julia Samuel said, “you can live and you can even function, but you will live a very narrow emotional life because you are using so much energy to cope.”
When dealt with head-on, “mourning can be one of the most enriching, vivid things you ever do, if you lean into it fully. There’s a feeling of joy that eventually arises,” wrote Heather Havrilesky, in her Ask Polly column for now-defunct site The Awl.
So if the five stages of grief are inadequate for guiding us through loss and explaining how that journey might go, is there any structure that works?
I’ve found a lot of truth in Julia Samuel’s Pillars of Strength, which are built from her 25 years’ experience of counseling the bereaved. They categorize the effects of loss, showing the bereaved person that, as confusing and alienating as mourning is, there is help available.
The eight pillars are: relationship with the person who’s died; relationship with oneself; ways to express grief; time; mind and body; limits; structure; focusing. You don’t progress through them in a linear fashion. Each pillar is a resource you can return to. They provide reasons for why your feelings are changing over time, and suggest ways to get through the harder moments. The pillars also frame a series of windows onto that experience, for those who remain outside the club.
They make clear the basis of grief’s’ paradox: “The relationship with the person who has died, although radically altered, continues; loving them in absence, rather than presence.” It is an experience that covers the real and the imaginary, the living and the dead.
Mourning is so much more than an act of endurance. Really, grieving is the task of taking the love that was once shared between two people, and transforming it to fit inside one broken but still-beating heart. That’s why it takes time; that’s why it hurts.
