Jack x Robby but they both basically see each other as different ‘rescue’ dogs that need to be cared for.
Jack thinks Robby is like the previously neglected hound dog his parents picked up from the shelter when he was ten. The dog obviously hadn’t had much human socialization and was overly timid the first few years they had it. He was aloof and a little odd, but no matter how asocial the dog seemed he still slept at the foot of Jack’s bed every night.
Robby thinks Jack is like the street dog he picked up and carried home when he was a teenager. He had been hit by a car and didn’t like any loud noises or overt human touch, but would be fine sitting on top of your feet or staring at you while you sat at the table. He howled some nights with out any real cause other than just seeming to want to make noise.
Notes: Little one shot that I wrote on my break. This is all angst but knowing the Merlin fandom I don’t think you sick fucks will complain.
Ship: Merlin/Arthur
Word Count: 620
Characters: Merlin, Arthur, Sir Leon (let him rest)
“Just.. teaching Arthur some poetry.”
It was an offhand excuse, the only thing that Merlin could muster as he looked to Sir Leon with an unfairly angelic innocence while Arthur could only gape at the confused knight in front of them.
It would have been a perfectly fine explanation, albeit peculiar considering just who was standing next to Merlin. But what he hadn’t accounted for was how it sounded a little different to the two men that stared back at the sheepish manservant.
And that was because unbeknownst to someone who had grown up far from the outskirts of Camelot, such a phrase had a certain meaning. In the same way that many of Merlin’s muttered commentary or the occasional country twang to his words went misunderstood by the knights, the manservant had unintentionally implied something very specific.
Something that had the tips of Arthur’s ears burning a hot red as he attempted to remain poised and calm in the face of a slightly intrigued Sir Leon.
Because of course it had to be Sir Leon.
The very knight who tended to catch them in the more compromising positions despite how entirely innocent Arthur insisted to himself that they were, a small knowing smile playing on the knight’s face whenever he would find himself slowly backing out of a room or spinning around on the spot in the depths of the woods to push back the onslaught of Gwaine or Lancelot as they made their way towards them.
So the second Merlin mentioned poetry of all things, something triumphant twinkled in Sir Leon’s eyes that drowned out the embarrassment of supposedly catching the King in another one of his moments with Merlin, a satisfaction that had Arthur’s stomach turning because he was wrong.
This wasn’t a quiet moment of poetry, there was nothing charged in the air around them, painfully lacking the quiet soft humming that could soothe the gritted ache in his bones. It was nothing more than a King and his manservant.
It was Arthur staring into Merlin’s eyes, desperate to decipher past the earnesty that shone from them to see if there was something more. If it was a trick of the light that had him seeing flickers of a darkness in the man’s blue eyes, a devotion so raw that it rivalled possessive.
There was nothing there, he told himself. Despite the pitiful screams that protested, that echoed and mocked him in response.
No lingering touches or purposeful moments where he was so undeniably close to Merlin that he could imprint the etched lines in the man’s face into his memory, or feel the rise and fall of his chest until his own was in sync.
Those moments were there, but only by chance. Fleeting moments that the universe would allow him in a deliciously twisted torture that had Arthur longing in a way that it felt like the air in his lungs would cease if he went a day without Merlin, that the lack of his smile felt as though the sun just hadn’t bothered to rise one morning, that when the mischief in his eyes dimmed nature itself wilted as though the rain hadn’t come.
Because while Arthur might have been the sun, Merlin was every planet, moon, and star that orbited around him. He brought life to an existence Arthur hadn’t realised was meaningless with such ease that it was sickening.
He was Arthur’s everything.
But he wasn’t Arthur’s, not really. He couldn’t be.
And it was that resounding thought that rang in his head as he stood there motionless while Merlin simply choked out a distracting laugh, Sir Leon raising a skeptical eyebrow as he slowly turned away to take his leave.
A Mad, mixed, and metaphorical means of movement (or Transport)
So doing class work, light stuff ... I’ve been told I’m putting too much focus on the neat extra stuff, ignoring the more important ground work. Putting the Cart before the Horse. Not seeing the Forest for the Trees. And a way my professor put it (because he enjoys Food Metaphors), “Worrying about the Sprinkles and Frosting before the cake”. While I’m pretty sure many have been guilty of enjoying Frosting sans cake, his point still remained. I was reminded again of the Trees and Forest bit...and the point still stands. At the end of class I lamented to my friends Mr N of the 80s, and Churchill (both experiencing somewhat similar setbacks) “I am take a step forward to take two steps back. Sitting in a Cart laden with Frosting and Sprinkles, drawn by a Team of Trees, in a Forest of Horses and Cake”. They both gave me odd looks and asked what the hell I just said. I found their reaction quite amusing overall. Very funny. On top of that, the image of me Driving a Cart pulled by a Team (so like four or eight?) of Trees (not known for their mobility) and stuff is also hilarious. So there’s that. I wonder what sort of Trees. Probably the sort to be found in Washington and Oregon. Evergreens and what not...birches? I don’t know much about Trees. Make of this what you will. Al, the Chronographing Cottager.
Warning ahead, depressing stuff (warning to myself, mostly, bc shit bout to get real)
Here’s the thing-
The thing they don’t tell you about the recovery process of mental illness is that getting it under control is just step one. If it was truly white-knuckled, all-consumingly mad, then that is just step one. Step two, the fucking long step two, is learning to deal with the space it leaves in your life. Somedays you won’t know what to do with yourself. It might even seem worse than before at first. You spend so much time dealing with it that now you have less of it to deal with- you feel empty. An emptiness you don’t know what to fill with. Learning to live all over again, sort of. I still don’t know how to let people in. And thing is, at least I had a legitimate reason for it before. So, that’s how it is: Getting rid of the monster is the first step. Navigating the empty space under your bed that it leaves in its wake?
Another thing: promoting mental health discourse is all very good when you confine the normative acceptability to things like “couldnt look the guy who delivered my pizza in the eye lol” and “depressed af cpuldnt get out of bed lol” but when you start talking about scars and suicidal thoughts it gets too much. And your therapy has trained you into thinking of it as a thing you can train. But before you did, it was rabid and horrific and destructive. And just- Don’t forget that there are degrees to this madness, now that you have come out the other side. Some people are still there, battling that feral creature, not the one that now snaps at you from time to time with sandpapered teeth.
