#hm. anyways

[hotcoalzzzzzz]

wires

[autisticlancemcclain]

Pidge stares hard at her twisted fingers. Her eyes have long since begun to burn, and she holds her face carefully parallel to the floor, knees presses to the sides of her head, watching as her vision gets blurrier and heavier, until eventually the tear drops from her eyes and splatters on her glasses.

“How did you handle it?” she asks hoarsely, not even looking up. “The homesickness.”

For a while Lance doesn’t say anything. His breathing is steady and near-silent, quick little inhales and long, shallow exhales. Practiced breathing, when he’s choking back tears. He does it several times a day. Sometimes Pidge can’t stand to look at him. She doesn’t understand where he puts it all, the sadness that is constantly bubbling out of him. Doesn’t understand where he finds the strength to let his voice get choked up in the middle of a sentence and keep going like there’s nothing wrong. She feels hot shame heat up her own body, in the clear absence of his; a secondhand embarrassment at emotion that shouldn’t be advertised so easily, so trustingly, so constantly.

Eventually he sighs. When Pidge looks up there are tears in his brown eyes, as there so often are, but she fights the urge to look away and tucks herself under his open arm, instead.

It’s warm, in his hold. Bony too. But he holds her without fear of squeezing too tightly, winds his long arm around her back and shoulders and presses her face into his neck. He smells, as he always does, of flowers, although Pidge could not identify what kinds, and she imagines that she’s sat under the rows and rows of shelves in her mother’s greenhouse, watching her work. Her hands shake so she winds them around the creases of Lance’s jacket and grips tightly.

“I don’t,” he says after thinking about it. “I carry it with me. I always have.”

Pidge thinks she knew that, in her bones. She thinks she understood that about Lance from the very second she first saw him, two years ago at the Garrison auditorium in September; this boy who slouched and grinned and shot finger guns and laughed like a hyena and cried four times a day. The boy whose eyes were deep and dark and filled with an abyssal pain that hurts to look at. Off-putting.

“That sounds lonely.”

Lance hums. He shifts, resting his chin on the top of her head. She feels the slow drip of his tears, down his nose and plopping onto her scalp, and parcels at how his heartbeat doesn’t change, the ease in his voice. The shaky steel of it.

“It is. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t. Lonely. It’s just something I carry.”

Her breath shudders out of her, big and large and shaking her shoulders. She hears what he doesn’t say: I have gotten used to it. She thinks to herself: I will never get used to this weight.

She says: “I don’t understand.”

Ever so slowly, he begins to rock them back and forth, barest sway of their bodies. His lips press her hairline. Her face crumples and her breathing quickens as she forces down the tears, shoves back the mirroring feeling, the mixing of Lance and Matt happening in her head.

“When I was four my oldest brother moved away. He was getting married. I never got over that, I don’t think. He lived down the street longer than he lived down the hall but I never really stopped missing him.”

He pauses for a moment, and Pidge knows it’s deliberate in the way his whole body stops moving, pondering, before starting again.

“Sometimes I miss him on purpose.”

Pidge pulls away, enough to look him in the face, to watch his sad eyes and slight smile and the familiarity in the uncanny expression, the Lance of it.

“Why?” she asks desperately, hands twisting further in his sleeves. “Why would you ever — on purpose?”

“Because I love him on purpose.” The tears drip down Lance’s face as a steady waterfall and he doesn’t even flinch at them, doesn’t even blink. Lets his eyes fill and spill over again and again like cupped hands under a leaking faucet. “When I miss my mom I love her. When I miss my sister I love her. When I miss my brother I love him. When I miss Keith I love him. When I miss you, I love you.” He gently pulls his sleeves away from her clutched fingers, wrapping his hands around them instead and squeezing. “The grief hurts like a never healing wound. But I’m terrified of not having that. I don’t want to wake up one day without the reminder of how deeply I’ve loved and how deeply it will always be a part of me, that love. I don’t know how I’d ever function without it.”

“You don’t function with it,” Pidge argues. “It — haunts you. I see it in your face.”

Lance shrugs. “I function with it. I function because of it. Every day that I miss them I live because I will miss them until I see them again. It’s an — anticipation, almost. I miss you and I can’t wait to see you again mean the same thing.”

A strange noise bursts out from Pidge’s throat, gut-punching. I miss you and I can’t wait to see you again mean the same thing.

She misses her brother in her bones. Her father in her blood. Her mother in her heart.

Waiting to see them again pulses at every level in her body. That’s — manageable.

“Oh,” she says, and she means oh, in the way you blink your eyes open in the mornings. Oh, I see now. Oh, that hurts. Oh, it’s bright.

Lance squeezes her hands again. “There are worse things than loving so much it hurts you,” he says softly.

“Oh,” Pidge says again. “Oh.”

[valyrfia]

you say the only thing tethering me to this sport is a ship and i vehemently agree with you while trying to shove the python pipeline i built for fun to compare past race telemetry under the table

[turkishdizis]

[yantao-enthusiast]

desperate for mihaly's backstory now. i KNEW something was weird with how they looked a bit apprehensive when the rest of the just dancers appeared at the end of rather be. and the reason for that is they used to IDOLIZE night swan??? take my money. take it right now i need to know the STORY (violently shaking the bars of my jail cell)

[megumaye]

i found the voice over yall

[evermorebytaylorswift]

thinking about “i’m highly suspicious that everyone who sees you wants you” in lover, “i don’t like that anyone would die to feel your touch, everybody wants you, but i don’t like a gold rush,” and all the infidelity remarks on ttpd

[jpegdoll]

seeing less and less people talk about palestine. hm. what's that about.