content: past implied noncon, rocky recovery, self-blame
"How do I know if I was a victim?"
The question rang out in the room, and Caretaker looked like they didn't even know what to say. They opened and closed their mouth, not even a breath leaving their throat. Then, quietly, they asked, "What do you mean?"
Whumpee went on. "I mean, it was my fault, right? So like, do I still qualify for help?"
"What do you mean your fault?"
Whumpee was beginning to feel uncomfortable. They didn't like to think about their part in their trauma, they were trying to externalise it as much as they could, but there was seemingly no way around it. "Well, I asked for it. At first. So like, it's my fault, not theirs. But I feel... violated now. And I mean, at some point I said no, and they kept going. I said no multiple times, actually. A lot. But I started it. I can't take back starting it. I don't want to put the blame on them... But if I call myself a victim, that'd make them a perpetrator. I don't want that. Can I be a victim without a perpetrator?"
Caretaker was speechless. "Whumpee, I... You do know it wasn't your fault, right?"
"It kinda was. No, it definitely was. Sorry, the question was dumb in the first place. I'm no victim."
Caretaker took their hand between their own, looking into their eyes all serious. "You are a victim. Your feelings of being violated are valid. You hear me? You went through something traumatic. It's okay if you don't want to blame the person who did this to you. You can still be a victim. Because you are."
Whumpee took their hand away. "Whatever. It's dumb. Do you wanna eat sushi tonight?"
The sudden change of topic was jarring, and Caretaker once again had to try and find their footing. "Yeah. Sushi sounds nice. But this conversation is open still; if you ever want to talk more, I'm here."
The Real beneath the surface Cost of Ignoring wisdom
I like to keep things simple, grounded, and honest, especially when it comes to wisdom — and failure systems learning more broadly. Artificial intelligence is not just a buzzword; it is a quiet infrastructure layer that is already rewiring how we make decisions, create, and even feel seen. The real story is not the headlines; it is the slow shift in everyday systems. Whatever your relationship with wisdom right now, there is room to look at it without judgment. Today I am not trying to cover everything. I am just offering one angle: how to learn without collapsing into blame or helplessness. Take what resonates, leave the rest, but give yourself a quiet moment to sit with it. Real change often starts in those small, unseen pauses where you finally tell yourself the truth.
You don't have to take responsibility for every little emotion or reaction that another person has. Though you can be empathetic toward them, their feelings and emotions, and toward what they are going through, you cannot be responsible for how they came to feel the way that they do about whatever it is that they are feeling it about.
If there is something that you caused, then yes, there is some level of responsibility that you have - but even then - it is okay to use discernment and wisdom as a person may be trying to get you to take responsibility for reactions that result from their unhealed past. Though it is okay to be aware of their triggers, you cannot take responsibility for their existence and for that person's refusal to self-examine and take accountability for how they show up.
Caught in a Net | Medical Restraints | Pinned to the Wall
word count: 1229 words
content warning: lady whumpee, hero whumpee, villain whumper, drugging mention, blood, (attempted) disassociation, stun gun mention, manipulative whumper, captivity, pinned to the wall/choking/suffocation, self-hate/self-blame, vulgarity
Villain’s hands were hot on Hero’s ice-cold skin, like flares sent up in a winter sky, and the contrast was so jarring on her skin that it tore her immediately from her half-dazed position on the floor, not quite asleep but definitely not awake. As her eyes fluttered open, the world half-blurred, she saw the faint outline of his body, swimming in her vision.
He’d probably drugged her again.
Not that it mattered.
Villain leaned closer, lifting her up into a sitting position, and Hero suppressed her shudder when the tang of blood washed over her like one of his morbid colognes—it was probably her blood, too, not that she knew it for certain.
Mingling with the blood, the smell of rain clung to him, too, much more comforting. Hero imagined that she was still in that field of wildflowers where he’d first found her, under a rainstorm, grass tickling her feet, the rain sprinkling kisses across her skin, the smell of dried blood—
No, no—wildflowers, just wildlfowers, and wet grass, and a dog barking somewhere—
His soft tsk brought her back too quickly, hands tightening on her shoulders. “Where did you go this time, hmm?”
“I-I’m not, I was—”
“Should I bring back the stun gun, Hero? Really let you live in the moment?”
She flinched at that weak hands scrabbling at Villain’s arms, eyes wide. “Please, no, no I won’t, please don’t, I know where I am, I promise—”
“Oh? Where are you?”
“I-In a cell,” she forced out. “With y-you. I’m cold.” I want to go home.
He hummed, tucking a strand of her hair behind her ear. His hand was warm, and she took small comfort in the fleeting warmth. Weeks ago, she would have wondered how it was even possible that she could take any solace in Villain’s presence. Now, she was grateful for his presence, even if fear was twisting her stomach into knots like a viper squeezing her inner organs slowly.
Silently, Villain stood, offering her his hand.
Shakily, she took it, and he pulled her up to her feet, steadying Hero with a gentle hand on her hip. When she’d settled her weight, Villain looked at her and said, “Your team is looking for you.”
The world tilted, and Hero felt her knees buckle.
Finally.
Oh, God, finally.
Villain stopped her from collapsing, a smirk painted on his lips. “Yes, I thought you’d react like that. It’s been what, three weeks since your disappearance?”
“Four,” she said numbly. Four weeks, two days, and eight hours. Almost a month. Thirty days.
It had felt like more.
It had felt like less.
“I suppose it has,” Villain said, leading her out of the cell, as if her captivity was nothing to him. As if she was a toy for him to play with, and her misery was easy to miscount. “Well, it’s not like your friends aren’t trying, I’ll give them that. They’ve put up posters and sent out search parties. It’s all over the news. Cute, really.”
Cute.
Cute—
It was cute?
Villain’s hand tightened on Hero’s hip, as if he’d felt the tension in her body, and she forced herself to forget, to let the haziness take her mind again. It was easier that way, when he talked about the world outside. The world Hero didn’t think she’d see anytime soon.
“Well, it’s all a waste, anyway. They’ll never find you, Hero.”
“And if they do?” Her voice came out too sharp, but she didn’t flinch when his gaze landed on her. “If they find me?” If they save me?
Hero’s stomach lurched as she went flying through the air, and the wall collided with her spine, her head crashing into old stone. Villain’s forearm pinned her to the wall by the throat, crushing Hero’s already bruised windpipe, and his snarling face leaned in closer to hers.
“Do you really believe that your little team is going to manage to find my secret lair, Hero? I have dozens of decoys placed around the city, and even if any one of your sidekicks manage to infiltrate this place, my henchmen will annihilate them before you can blink.”
“They’ll find me.”
The hand wrapped around her throatlifted Hero off of the ground, and she clawed at his arm as her oxygen was cut off, choked gasps coming out of her open mouth. She kicked her legs wildly, flailing, but it wasn’t until black spots tunneled over her vision that he dropped her to the floor.
She landed in a crumpled heap, tears pricking her eyes.
What the hell am I doing?
Why in the world had Hero goaded him on, when she knew his words were true? Even if her hope refused to die, it was about time someone crushed it. It had been a month, and they’d only started searching for her now.
Was she that forgettable? Had the team so quickly forgotten about their leader? Let her fade into the background because she was always off doing her own thing, anyway? Always taking the risk, sacrificing herself, throwing herself in front of the gun. Maybe the team had finally gotten tired of Hero’s recklessness.
When Villain raised his foot, ready to kick her, Hero flinched.
And she fucking hated herself for it.
She hated how she bled and screamed in the past few weeks and let Villain beat her and bruise her. Let him chain her up and given him the satisfaction of seeing her cry.
This is all your fault, she thought. If you hadn’t gone out alone, none of this would have happened.
Hero burned with that hate as Villain stood up, more tears spilling over her cheeks. As he nudged her with his boot, Hero curled on her side with her hands over her aching, burning throat. It hurts, she wanted to say. Please stop. Please. It hurts.
But there was another part of her that was screaming at him to continue. Kick me, she thought. kick me and bruise me and make me bleed, so that when I come back for revenge, I can make you return tenfold what you did to me.
He did kick her, and a crack resounded through the hall as pain exploded in her ribcage, traveling up her chest and across her body as Hero curled up into herself, a teary gasp escaping her.
Pressing her cheek to the cold surface of the tiled floor, Hero let her tears drip to the floor, staining the stone with droplets of silver that burrowed into the floor and left their mark far under the surface, glimmering like shards of glass.
As her tears continued to fall, Hero stretched out weak fingers and brushed one of those shards in the floor, her fingers sparking with infinitesimal sparks of silver magic. Magic, even though Villain had ripped hers away when he’d first captured her. Here it was, blooming out of her sorrow.
Hero curled her hand into a fist and raised herself up, glaring at Villain through her lashes. He could do whatever he wanted to her, whatever he thought would break her. But he would never manage to pierce through her soul, through the core of who she was.
No grave can hold my body down.
Not even this one.
With a lingering glance at the mark she’d left, Hero raised her chin.
Part (8) of Identity, the next arc of Doc's Misadventures! If you're new, start at the beginning with Touch Starved!
At a whopping 27,000 words, this accidentally became the biggest arc in the series. Oops. Anyway, I've certainly been a bit possessed about getting it done, so here yuh go!
Warnings: Honestly, aside from the standard guilt and regret, this chapter is mostly fluff
WC: 2,913
He held me until my breath eased back into a quiet, rhythmic ebb and flow free of even the occasional hitched gasp. At some point, he’d shifted just enough to lean his shoulder against the wall, hand lightly clasped around the back of my neck as his fingers trailed absently atop the skin peaking out between my blacks and hairline. Part of me knew I shouldn’t stay like this; that hiding against him only delayed confronting the guilt I’d see in Wolffe’s eyes, the trepidation and doubt in Cody’s, but it was so easy to pretend otherwise, to keep my face nestled against his throat and let all thought of what responsibility awaited us beyond those walls fade as seconds turned into minutes.
A crippling realization struck me in that moment. I was hiding. I was hiding from the risk of another mission and another near disaster. I was hiding from the damage that had already been caused and the inevitable destruction still awaiting me. I was hiding from the certainty that even worse might be befall those around me at any moment; doubtless of just how effortlessly that might break whatever fleeting reserves of strength somehow managed to keep me going through all that had already happened, and I knew that that very fear of them getting hurt was likely the only thing keeping me from yielding that I might be there to help them in any way I could.
But it wasn’t just the fear of impending nightmares that kept me curled in the arms of a man I remembered hiding from so many months prior, back when we were strangers and I shied from the intensity that burned in his eyes when faced with even a simple question; the deep quiet he’d fall into while considering every aspect of a problem before coming to a decision, and the unease that would fill me at the mere thought of finding myself the subject of that frightening focus. So much had happened since then, and I couldn’t bring myself to feel anything but grateful for his presence in that moment, for the calm he granted me even as reality seemed to shift with a wretched understanding.
I was hiding from Wolffe; from the way his voice had threatened to break when last we spoke, from the tension that stole the effortless visage of command from him whenever we’d found ourselves alone. I was hiding from the squad that I could no longer think of as mine, from the longing in their eyes for a time that was now gone and would never again grant us the incredible breadth of comfort once gleaned from the sense of family we had found in each other, now felt only with a nostalgia tarnished by the horrors filling these past few days.
I wanted to weep anew at the thought of those coming farewell’s weighted beneath guilt and regret and the want for a denial we knew to be useless. In that moment, I longed to let myself be weak; to beg Hunter to tell Wolffe to leave that I wouldn’t have to face him at all, and I hated myself for that weakness.
The gentle dance of his touch stilled; fingers half buried in my hair as he subtly turned his gaze toward me; waiting. I drew a slow, resigned breath, held it in a final plea for even a few seconds’ more of a delay, and finally let it out in a controlled sigh as I pulled away from him.
“Thank you.” I whispered, eyes raising to just glimpse his. His thumb swept once more along the length of my neck before finally letting his hand fall briefly to my arm and then to the floor near his waist.
“Don’t need to thank me, Doc.” He replied softly, attention carefully locked on me. My lips drew up in an empty smile as I turned to glance thoughtlessly around the room. When I began to draw movement back into my limbs, weight shifting to balance atop a knee in preparation of forcing myself to my feet, Hunter quickly reached back out to me, arm looping around my shoulders as though anticipating the way my muscles would instantly waver at that first hint of strain. I was no stranger to the way grief and fear and panic left one so hopelessly drained yet always found myself unprepared for how ruthlessly that exhaustion struck. Unphased, I leaned into his support; let myself rely on his strength in the absence of my own as he carefully pulled me up alongside him.
“If we stay in here much longer, they might get the wrong idea.” I muttered, peaking towards him to see the way his brow cocked in surprise, but he let out a quiet chuckle at the weary smirk I managed to shoot him.
“The last thing I need is Crosshair hearing those kinds of rumors from regs…” He grumbled back, and I was shocked at how easily the huff of laughter escaped me. “Are you okay to walk?” He asked, voice dropping into a whisper as though that might prevent it from robbing us of that brief, precious moment of lightness. I nodded, forcing my back straight despite the reluctance weighing down my shoulders. “Alright.” He murmured and I tried to ignore the chill left in the wake of his touch as he slowly stepped away from me.
Whatever conversation had filled the silence beyond the office walls ceased with a harsh finality the instant that door began to open. I could feel Hunter standing just behind me, attention still following my every movement as though I might tumble without warning. Cody was the first to approach me, helm tucked under his arm and expression still somehow void of the disappointment I kept expecting to find.
“Commander, I-” He dismissed whatever attempt at an apology I was still trying to piece together with a simple wave of his hand and subtle shake of his head.
“Just get to the barracks and try to get some rest.” The innate authority in his voice was softened by a compassion that I still found myself shocked to hear from someone in his position and could only respond with a small nod.
“I can come back tomorrow – answer any other questions you have.” I offered, but he again dismissed it.
“Between what you’ve already told me and what I discussed with Commander Wolffe, there’s no need for that. Just take some time; try not to lose yourself in what happened.” He barely whispered those final words, willing them into me with a quiet understanding that I couldn’t begin to pretend I didn’t need. He ducked his head in a small bow before stepping past me into his office, and I hesitated just a moment longer before turning toward Wolffe.
“Guess I overestimated myself.” I mumbled, voice straining past the stiffness in my jaw, and I wasn’t sure how to respond to the subtle feeling of Hunter’s hand coming to rest against the armor sweeping across my lower back, nor my inability to deny the depth of comfort it gave me.
“No one’s holding that against you.” He replied softly before his gaze shifted to the man behind me. “Take care of her.” There was none of that disdain he’d once regarded Hunter with; no sneer of disapproval, and Hunter mirrored that unspoken respect with a silent nod.
“Wolffe.” I called hesitantly just as he’d begun to walk away, nearly cringing at the remorse in my own voice; the threat of shame. “I don’t… Will you tell the others I’ll be okay? I just… I can’t…” How could I explain the way it would cripple me to see their guilt again? To hear their apologies despite knowing they’d done nothing to warrant such sorrow?
“Don’t worry about them.” He explained, voice quiet but no less commanding for it. “Just be safe, kid.” There… just lingering beneath that infallible composure… Even Wolffe couldn’t keep the traces of an apology from his farewell. Gaze falling lest I note even a glimmer of regret in those stern eyes, I fought to offer some trace of a smile before turning away. The sense of finality in that farewell left my breath trembling slightly, and even the way Hunter shifted nearer to me did little to ease the sense of loss twisting through my chest.
-
“Cody’s already granting us clearance for the mission details.” He didn’t look at me when he said it, gaze once more hidden behind that dark visor as we walked unhurried through the corridors of the Negotiator. “You don’t have to, but if you want to talk about it…” My head fell slightly at the gentle invitation, and I knew he could hear how my heartbeat quickened at the mere thought. When I gave no answer, he didn’t press, but I couldn’t dispel the tension that lingered in the silence between us.
“I don’t think Wrecker’s ever going to let you go off on another mission without us.” He added a moment later, somehow managing to sow a wisp of humor into his voice, and a small scoff escaped me.
“Even if it’s the 104th calling you again?” There was something beneath the teasing lilt in his voice, but I was too weary to try to name it.
“Given my track record, I don’t think he’ll hear any arguments from me…” I grumbled.
“I didn’t know I’d be working with them this time until after I’d boarded the transport.” His helm shifted toward me, and I could easily picture the way his brows had surely risen above eyes widened with surprise. “But, no.” I added quietly, pace unchanged as I tried not to think too deeply on the painful words slipping over my tongue. “I don’t think it would be a good idea for me to work with them again.” Hunter stopped walking. I didn’t, intent on not falling back into the remorse that was all too eager to overwhelm me again.
“I’m sorry.” He murmured, treading back to my side. I gave a weak shrug, collecting my thoughts a moment before responding.
“Too much has changed… Besides, they have a jedi watching their backs. Without me, you lot only have dumb luck and sheer stubbornness.” A quiet chuckle just sounded through his comm system, and I found myself joining him in with a snicker of my own as his hand reached up to lightly jostle my helmet. It was heartbreaking – that conscious understanding that I no longer belonged with the 104th, but I had harbored no doubts that it was the right choice; that the 99 had become my family in a way the others never could.
-
“Doc!” Wrecker’s shout boomed through the nearly empty barracks, and I barely had time to draw in breath for a reply I never got to speak before his arms locked around my waist to hoist me up in an embrace far softer than his normal hugs. Still, laughter sputtered from my lips at the welcomed display of affection I would always treasure from the man, hand automatically darting out to his shoulder to steady myself despite the knowledge that he’d never let me fall.
“It’s almost like you missed me or something.” I teased, earning a brilliant smile from him that was so utterly free of shame or hesitation as he gently set me back down.
“Those regs need to find their own nat-born next time! It’s not fair for them to just come and steal yuh away whenever they want.” He complained, hands lingering on my hips for just a moment longer to ensure I was steady before stepping back.
Two rows of double bunks stretched out before me in a room designed to hold at least a company of one hundred though the entirety of it had been reserved for our tiny squad. Crosshair stood leaning against one of the upper bunks a few rows away with his arms wrapped tightly across his chest, attention locked on me from the corner of his eye while Echo and Tech sat together atop a lower cot a mere handful of strides from the door, the telltale mess of cables strewn between them warning of some half-started project.
“I don’t think you’ll have to worry about that.” I reassured him in a gentle sigh. “Pretty sure this was a one-time thing.” I could see the concern lingering in his gaze despite his efforts to hide it beneath his usual glee, the subtle threat of anger it fueled, and had to look away.
“Hey stranger.” I said softly. His chest bucked slightly around a sharp breath, mouth just beginning to open before closing tightly in a final bout of hesitation, but then he let out a small huff, forcing some of that tightness from his shoulders.
The instant I glimpsed him, the arc quick pushed himself to his feet, eyes torn between meeting my gaze and darting away as his jaw tensed around whatever attempt at a greeting caught in his throat. Had he been there when I first landed? Had I simply been too lost in my own thoughts to notice? My heart sank at the thought, just managing to offer the ghost of a smile in the face of how stiffly he held himself.
“Hey.” He whispered, and I heard clearly the apology in it, but it was nothing like those plaguing every word uttered amongst the 104th. There was a warmth in his apology; a subtle self-deprecation softened with something near enough to humor that my smile bloomed with relief.
“I see you two have been making the most of this little vacation.” I started, looking pointedly at the assortment of mysteriously procured supplies. He glanced quickly over his shoulder as though he’d forgotten the project entirely before turning back to me.
“Echo suggested a few interesting modifications to his cybernetic legs.” Tech stated before his brother could try to explain. “This is merely the initial prototype. Rebuilding his legs entirely will take significantly longer than a few days, but this will allow us to test the efficiency of our new design.” I looked back to the arc with surprise and found him fighting a sheepish grin.
My head fell toward my chest, stomach churning with regret for having offered at all despite Tech’s automatic “thank you.” Swallowing back the anxiety threatening to coil through my gut, I finally let myself glance toward the tall sniper still watching me from just the corner of his eye, and the little thrill of glee that seeing him shot through me offered a precious sliver of relief. He barely reacted as I approached him, head just shifting to follow my movements until barely a foot lay between us, and I let out a heavy sigh full of mock guilt and remorse.
“Wow.” I chirped, pleased to hear they’d managed to be so productive despite how strained things had been over the past few weeks, “Let me know if you need any help synching it to the neural interface.” Echo’s face darkened for barely the breadth of a heartbeat, but it was enough to remind me that the effortless connection that once came so easily to us still lay far beyond my grasp.
“I may have jinxed myself.” I muttered, and a quiet chuckle escaped me at the way he cocked his brow, unimpressed by my admission. “Was I right? Did you mope the entire time I was gone?”
“Yes.” Hunter called from the front of the barracks, kindling my chuckle into a short burst of laughter as Cross shot his brother a lethal glare.
“Just got back and you’re already trying to cause trouble.” He growled under his breath, earning a coy smirk from me. Only then did he begin to abandon that impartial veneer, weight shifting as he pushed himself away from the bunks to reach for me, and I could feel my entire body lighten with the deep sigh that fled my lips at that first rush of warmth from his embrace.
“Are you okay?” He asked, words barely audible as they danced through my hair. The rote reassurance so nearly fell from my lips absent a moment’s thought before catching in my throat. I could feel him tense in those brief seconds of hesitation before I reluctantly shook my head.
“Not yet.” I answered, voice heavy with every unspoken reason forbidding me from trying to convince him otherwise. “But I’m really glad to be back.” He went still for a long moment, but then his arms tightened almost harshly around me, body curling over mine as though he might hide me from what darkness lingered behind the veil of empty smiles.
We both knew there would be no walking away from the damage wrought during my time apart from them, but I let myself relish that moment of stillness; the hum of quiet conversation between Hunter and Wrecker, the rhythmic clicks and hisses of tools augmenting metal and wire beneath Echo and Tech’s ministrations, the steady thrum of Crosshair’s heartbeat dancing against me as I rested my forehead to his neck, shamelessly letting myself vanish in that heady spice and tang of blasterfire. Every day spent fighting this war brought untold risks and dangers, but I held no reservations that this was exactly where I belonged, and no threat was great enough to see me leave them for even a moment more.
Continue Reading
Click here or message me if you'd like to be added to a taglist!
The Eighth Sense e5 & e6: portraying trauma with nuance
Episodes 5 and 6 of The Eighth Sense have really blown up a discourse bomb in tumblr’s BL scene. I had been putting off watching these episodes because I had gathered that episode 6 ended with something pretty distressing, and stuff like that sometimes hits me pretty hard, especially when it’s left as a cliffhanger. But I was already tempted to rip off the band-aid and watch it anyway, and then everyone has been debating aspects of these episodes. So I just had to see what all the discussion was about and figure out my own take on it.
In case it’s not obvious, the following will have spoilers for the series up to and including episode 6.
I have a lot to say about this, because it touches on subjects that have been a major focus for me in my personal life, in my previous work as a trainee therapist, and in my research and writing. But I want this to be a manageable read, so I’m going to put things in bullet form when I can to keep them brief and organized and I’m going to make some section headings to help with skimming or skipping around.
But before I launch into the rest, there’s one thing I should get out of the way: I don’t think any part of episodes 5 or 6 are a hallucination, a dream, or otherwise did not occur. I do think that there are aspects of the way the show portrays certain things that indicate dissociation and/or an acute trauma response. I’ll talk more about that below.
(Hey, @waitmyturtles, this is the epic TES post I’ve been writing off and on for two days! I hope it’s of interest.)
Here are the section headings I’ll use below, to give a sense of what I’m going to talk about:
Conceptualizing Jae Won: Or, what I think is happening with him
Jae Won’s therapist - comments and interpretations
Jae Won’s therapist - medication management
Human beings’ amazing capacity for self-blame
Interpreting show production choices psychologically
Are the creators of The Eighth Sense going to pull a “who shot JR?” move?
Conceptualizing Jae Won: Or, what I think is happening with him
We don’t know how his younger brother died, but we know that he died in front of Jae Won when they were together, and it’s clear that he blames himself. I would be shocked if he was actually at fault even a little bit. But it does appear to have happened “on his watch” in a sense that lends itself to blaming himself. This is a huge issue, one that I’ll discuss in more detail later on.
Even before his brother’s death, Jae Won was clearly under a ton of pressure from his parents. And his father appears to be emotionally and, almost certainly, physically abusive. This is also far more likely to have pre-dated his brother’s death than to have only developed afterward.
In addition to pressure and abuse, I think it’s pretty clear that Jae Won was a parentified child. This means that he was put in a position of having to take care of his parents’ emotional needs as a child. This kind of role reversal has profound effects throughout the parentified person’s life.
Jae Won’s self-blame about his brother’s death means he was always going to be predisposed to stay stuck in the chronic version of the acute trauma response instead of moving through the natural healing process. In other words, he was almost certain to develop PTSD.
This is less clearly shown in the show, but my impression is that Jae Won has a deep-seated depressive tendency that existed before the loss of his brother. This would make sense for someone who faced the family-of-origin difficulties that he did.
When he did develop PTSD, as I have no doubt he did, Jae Won’s existing challenges were going to make him even more likely to develop the depressive symptoms of PTSD than others. We’ve seen some of these in the show already:
feeling alienated from others, unable to form meaningful connections with them,
anhedonia (an inability to feel positive emotions), and
negative beliefs about himself, other people, and the world.
All of this is happening at once. He’s dealing with PTSD, but he also still has all the same habits and beliefs he had before due to the parentification and training in people-pleasing, so he’s supposed to bottle up all of this pain. And if it’s his fault (in his mind) that his brother died, how much more does he owe his parents than he ever did before? This is a distorted, unhealthy way of thinking about all of it, but these kinds of maladaptive thoughts and expectations happen all the time with trauma survivors.
Jae Won’s therapist really sums all of this up very well when she says, “All your worries, not doing what you want to do because you do not want to let your parents down, and trying hard to be a good person to everyone because you do not want to disappoint others. Don’t you think it might be all because of your younger brother? Your younger brother, who got into an accident while with you. Your younger brother, who you couldn’t protect. And you are struggling to live your life for him as well.”
Jae Won’s therapist - comments and interpretations
I went into this series feeling nervous about its portrayal of therapy. I was very excited that therapy was being portrayed at all, mind you! It’s horrifying how seldom we see therapy mentioned as an option, much less shown, either in BLs or kdramas, and I’ve hoped for this to change for a long time now. But therapy is shown in an inaccurate way so often in media. And often, we see therapists and other mental health professionals breaking ethical rules. So I was on my guard, big time.
There’s one thing I really take issue with about Jae Won’s therapist, and it’s somewhat of a small thing: her office is way, way too dark! I just don’t think that kind of low lighting, with a lot of the illumination coming from her aquarium and other tinted light sources, is professional or conducive to therapy work. Of course, it’s obvious that her office is lit in this way because it looks cool and sets a certain mood for the show. And that’s fine. It’s a very stylized show in a lot of ways. But it makes me a little tweaky to watch it.
Some of the things she does in the therapy space with Jae Won are a bit open to interpretation, and could be debated. But I view her in a fairly charitable light, and I found that a favorable interpretation wasn’t difficult to justify at all. I ended up viewing her (so far, at least) as a very skillful and effective therapist.
I loved it when she joked, in the first scene after the credits for episode 1, “For God’s sake! Just tell me what your worries are!” Jae Won isn’t great at sharing. He’s been trained from early childhood not to show his messy, vulnerable emotions around authority figures. Jae Won is not an easy client by any stretch, so she may have been showing a mild version of some real frustration with him when she began that comment with mock-hostility. But he seems really sensitive to criticism, real or perceived. Coming at him directly about this could be risky. Using humor is a good way to get around this sensitivity pretty effectively. It’s worth noting, though, that I wouldn’t endorse this kind of move by a therapist unless they knew a client very well and had built a solid rapport with them.
The comment I quoted above (”Don’t you think it might be all because of your younger brother?”) connects so many of Jae Won’s interpersonal difficulties to the loss of his brother in a skillful way. It was very astute and well-put. But there are some things I would quibble with about it.
First, I’m kind of surprised that she is only saying this explicitly this far into therapy with Jae Won. It seems rather late to make such an observation considering this constellation of issues has, without a doubt, been in place the entire time they’ve been working together. This could definitely have been done sooner.
At the same time, paradoxically, it’s delivered abruptly, as if she blurted it out too soon. Actually, the abruptness comes from the fact that there’s not sufficient lead-up to the comment in their discussion beforehand.
Though the show’s treatment of mental health is strong overall, I think this part of this scene suffered from flawed writing. If I had written this scene, I would have made a change that I think would have resolved both of these issues. Instead of introducing this insight as if the therapist has just voiced it for the first time, I would have presented it as something she and Jae Won have touched on together more than once during their work together. Anyone who’s been to therapy knows that the same ideas, which appear as shocking revelations at first, often have to be returned to many times and worked through before we can benefit from them. She could have said something like, “This is that issue we’ve talked about before, right? It seems like another case of your beliefs about your brother’s death causing trouble in other areas of your life.”
Even better, she could have been shown quoting some kind of metaphor or shorthand Jae Won came up with himself when they’d spoken about this previously. For example, I had a client once who used to talk about metaphorically carrying around a giant, heavy book where he wrote down all of his failures. He described it in a similar way to “the catalog of mistakes” (I’m not going to share his actual wording, of course). Whenever I would use his wording, saying “the catalog of mistakes” or even “the catalog,” all of our prior discussion of that issue came into both our minds immediately. It also served as a reminder of our rapport and the importance I placed on his perspective.
Jae Won’s therapist - medication management
There’s one other area of Jae Won’s interactions with his therapist that is a bit hard to interpret. The exchange he has with his therapist about the amount of medication she’ll prescribe to him certainly seems important, but it’s hard to tell what exactly it means.
One thing that complicates this is the fact that he is receiving therapy and medication management services from the same provider. In other words, she seems to be a psychiatrist who provides therapy services. In most parts of the United States, this is rare (though that wasn’t always the case). I haven’t been able to tell whether this is more commonplace in South Korea.
Because she’s a prescriber and a therapist, asking for three weeks’ worth of medication instead of two also means waiting longer before having another therapy session. Maybe Jae Won really is just busy and trying to cut down on demands on his time, but this doesn’t seem too likely. It’s also possible that he’s seeking a greater quantity of his medication for some purpose, such as abusing it or using it for self-harm or to end his life. But he also could just be trying to put off his next therapy session to a later date because of his difficulty talking about vulnerable topics, something he demonstrates at multiple points in his therapy session.
Similarly, when his therapist says she can extend his prescription to three weeks but not a month, because, as she puts it, “I need to do my job,” this could be in reference to the medication or her therapy work. Part of her job is keeping him from having access to too large an amount of medication at once, while another part is having therapy sessions with him (that are frequent enough to be useful). It’s hard to tell which of the two she was referring to, or whether it could be something else entirely. So I don’t think there’s one clearly correct interpretation here. But I do think we should be attentive to the possibility that he might be medication-seeking, possibly with the aim of using the medication for self-harm.
Human beings’ amazing capacity for self-blame
Even if you have experienced trauma or have been close to someone who has, unless you’ve spent time with a sizable sample of trauma survivors, it’s hard to understand just how readily people blame themselves for traumatic experiences. I had had personal experience with this as a survivor of intimate partner violence before I ever did any training in trauma therapy, but I was still totally floored when I observed firsthand just how often this happens and how unjustifiable every single instance of self-blame I encountered in clients turned out to be.
This is actually a big area for me as a researcher so I’m going to try not to go off on a massive tangent, but I think this is important. When we experience trauma, one of the most frequent responses people have is to blame themselves. I used to describe this to clients as a “deal with the devil.” Blaming ourselves allows us to feel like we have control over whether such things will happen to us (and/or those we care about) in the future. If we tell ourselves, “the trauma only happened to me because I did something bad, or something wrong,” then we can also tell ourselves, “but I’ll never do the bad or wrong thing again so from now on I’ll be safe.”
It’s very tempting to make this bargain, but it is an extremely bad deal. Self-blame is one of the biggest reasons some people get stuck in their acute trauma response instead of completing the healing process, resulting in PTSD. That feeling of control isn’t worth that. But human beings are so tempted to make this trade. When I was doing trauma therapy as a trainee, I saw example after example of folks who did seriously remarkable amounts of mental gymnastics in order to justify blaming themselves for their trauma.
I’m going to talk briefly now about a client I had many years ago, without giving any details that could be remotely identifying. This person had witnessed the death of a close friend when they were in combat together. I did prolonged exposure therapy with this person, meaning he had to tell me the story of his friend’s death again and again and again. When we do this type of work, it usually seems at first like the client is telling the exact same story again and again without any real change. But little changes crop up gradually and accumulate and after a while, you find the story has made big shifts. And occasionally, a big change happens.
This client started out telling his story in a way that looked for every possible reason his friend’s death could have been his fault. And wow, was he ever grasping at straws. It was almost as if he had said something as nonsensical as “I had oatmeal for breakfast that day and maybe that’s why my friend died.” Every miniscule decision he had made that day could, in his eyes, potentially have caused his friend’s death in some mysterious and imperceptible way. It would have been absurd had it not been so sad. But thankfully, as we continued the exposure work, his story gradually changed and these justifications for self-blame started to fall away a little at a time.
Then, one day, a crucial detail was added to the story that blew me away. After weeks of telling the story in the usual way, my client mentioned for the first time that just before his friend was hit, he had called out a warning to him, which the friend had ignored. He’d mentioned countless ways he might be to blame--none of them remotely justified--but had never told me about the one very clear way in which he had tried to prevent his friend’s death. When I pointed this out, my client was shocked that he had never mentioned that detail before. We spent a lot of time unpacking what all of this meant. It was the single biggest turning point in his therapy.
So, yeah. People have an amazing capacity for figuring out even the slimmest of pretexts for self-blame, and it’s abundantly clear that Jae Won is exercising that capacity big time. I’m pretty certain we’ll find out that he has been blaming himself a lot for what happened while having no real justification for doing so.
(Side note: I have tons more thoughts about trauma, self-blame, victim-blaming more generally, and other related psychological constructs--these are all longstanding research interests of mine--but I’m going to stop here because this thing is already ridiculously long. But if anyone reading this ever wants to discuss any of this further, please feel free to hit me up! I love talking about these things.)
Interpreting show production choices psychologically
Let’s review where we find Jae Won toward the beginning of the show. I’ve talked about how Jae Won had a lot of psychological difficulties before the story started. His family of origin situation was damaging even before he lost his brother, and then he had to contend with trauma and complicated grief. After that, he went through a breakup (possibly due to his partner cheating on him), completed his military service, and then had to make the transition back to civilian life, which isn’t easy under the best of circumstances.
And then he meets Ji Hyun, and his feelings for him unsettle the precarious set of strategies that he’s been using to get by. Ji Hyun makes Jae Won feel tempted to let his guard down and be himself. He places a degree of trust in Jae Won that challenges his cynicism and makes him feel tempted to trust Ji Hyun in return--to trust him to an extent that would normally be out of the question for him. Ji Hyun shakes things up, and while this is mostly a very positive thing--there are a lot of things in Jae Won’s life that urgently need to change--it’s also rather destabilizing in the short term.
Then the shit starts to hit the fan when Jae Won wakes up after staying out late drinking to hear his father pounding on his door. And the makers of the show start to play around with cinematography, editing, sound design, and other aspects of the show’s production to evoke Jae Won’s inner experience. After his dad pounds on his door, the way the show is shot and edited changes.
This disjointed editing and other distortions of typical filmmaking at this point in episode 5 have reminded some folks on here of a dissociative state, and I can see why. I would agree that it has a dissociative flavor. There are two prominent types of dissociation (which can happen simultaneously):
derealization, a feeling that the world around us isn’t real--it may feel empty, strange, or just plain wrong; and
depersonalization, in which we feel like we’re seeing ourselves from the outside, as if the person we’re observing isn’t us.
It’s tricky to talk about either of these in the context of tv/film because as viewers watching a fictional story unfold in a TV show, we are by definition:
perceiving that the world the characters inhabit doesn’t seem real, because it isn’t
looking at the characters from the outside, because they aren’t us (and they aren’t real)
But there are conventions of film and tv production that give us a sense of realism and of seeing things from characters’ points of view, and when Jae Won is dissociating we see those conventions get suspended or distorted. For example:
Conventional editing creates a flow of time that feels realistic (partly because we learn the “language” of film from a young age and interpret it that way). At important moments in The Eighth Sense, the editing breaks the rules of conventional editing, often messing with the viewers’ sense of time. Contexts change abruptly, as when Jae Won suddenly goes from being at home to being in his car. At other points, dialogue also goes out of sync.
Shot-reverse shot techniques help to approximate seeing things from the characters’ perspectives, situating us in the story so that we don’t feel like we’re observing from a distance. The most notable moment when this rule is broken happens when Jae Won is upset about his camera being damaged. We see him telling someone between sobs that the camera was a gift from his younger brother, but that person (assumably his dad) isn’t shown at all--not even a shoulder or the back of a head.
There’s also a lot of use of shallow depth of field (something the show uses in other ways as well), putting Jae Won in focus while his surroundings become a blur, making the world around him look hazy and unreal.
The sequence where Ji Hyun and Jae Won kiss in the ocean puts their dialogue way out of sync. On my first viewing, this just seemed like an interesting choice, one that gave the scene a sort of dreamlike quality. I’ve seen this strategy used before, as well, without any reference to mental illness, usually in art films. The first example that came to mind for me was from a Godard movie. It would be a valid option regardless of mental health-related content in a show. But after what immediately follows, I think that scene is portraying a trauma memory. Sometimes benign events that happened just before something traumatic become encoded with trauma memories rather than our usual type. (To put it briefly, trauma memories are encoded and stored in a different part of the brain from our everyday memories, and this is why they “behave” differently and have a different sensory quality from typical memories. Trauma recovery often involves some degree of re-encoding these memories in a more normal manner.)
Basically, the show sometimes puts the viewer into an approximation of a derealized and depersonalized state, particularly relative to what we’re used to as TV watchers. At other points, it shows characters’ experiences as if they were traumatic memories.
Are the creators of The Eighth Sense going to pull a “who shot JR?” move?
All this being said, I think that Jae Won’s dissociative moments, while very concerning and doubtless extremely distressing for him, do not point toward any sort of severe dissociative disorder like Dissociative Identity Disorder, nor do they make me concerned that his reality-testing (his ability to effectively distinguish what is and isn’t real) is impaired. I also don’t see any signs of cognitive impairment that would create a similar degree of confusion about reality. As a result, I don’t think the show’s use of signs of dissociation suggests that entire sections of the story will later be shown not to have happened.
Here’s the thing about dissociation. On paper, it sounds like an extreme symptom that approaches the kind of severe mental illness that includes symptoms like hallucinations and delusions. But the vast majority of the time, it’s very different from psychosis. And it’s also, in my opinion, more of a spectrum than we care to acknowledge most of the time. When we look at it that way, we can see that in a sense, Jae Won is at least a tiny bit dissociated a whole lot of the time. But frankly, so am I. It’s not uncommon for trauma survivors. It’s very different from something that would result in impaired reality-testing.
It’s possible that the show will end up revealing that Jae Won’s mental illness has resulted in him imagining entire segments of the show. These types of symptoms are often portrayed in media, for a couple of reasons: 1) people just find psychosis fascinating, and 2) these types of symptoms are very handy for creating plot twists and other interesting narrative devices. It’s not hard to think of examples of this. Fight Club, Black Swan, Shutter Island...the list goes on and on. But these portrayals are almost always inaccurate and exploitative. So far, the folks who make The Eighth Sense have shown a great deal of nuanced awareness of and sensitivity toward mental health matters, so I don’t think they would use this kind of cheap plot device. But they might. If so, I’ll find that pretty disappointing.
There is one thing the showrunners are doing that is somewhat sneaky in a way that could look analogous to that. Others have pointed out that Jae Won and his therapist are wearing the same clothes in every therapy scene, suggesting that we’re seeing the same therapy session interspersed with the other events of the series. In other words, the therapy session operates on a very different timeline from the rest of the story. We don’t know where to situate it relative to the rest of the plot. But I don’t see that as tied to the show’s portrayal of Jae Won’s mental health, nor does it seem exploitative or out of left field.
To sum up:
So far, The Eighth Sense has been remarkably accurate regarding psychological matters and has portrayed therapy and the use of psychotropic medication in a mostly positive and realistic light. I get the feeling the writers/directors/etc. have had some experience receiving mental health treatment. I really hope they maintain this level of quality throughout the remainder of the series.
I don’t think Jae Won’s PTSD (or his depression/anxiety) are sufficient for him to experience psychosis. I don’t expect entire segments of the show will be revealed to be an elaborate lie or hallucination, and if they are, I would consider that to be an example of poor writing and an unrealistic and potentially harmful representation of mental illness.
Whumpee's hands shook as they stared at the body in front of them. "What have I done?"
Caretaker pulled them into their lap, turning their head into their chest. "Shh, it's okay. You didn't have a choice."
That was the last thing they had to hear for the dam to break. Whumpee broke out in ugly sobs, clinging to Caretaker and leaving bloody handprints on their shirt. "I killed them! I killed Whumper! I killed the only person who ever cared about me!"
"Shh," they soothed. "They're not the only person in your life anymore. You have me, remember?"
"That's different! They— They taught me everything I know, they basically raised me, I— What have I done?"
"The only thing you could to keep your life. They were set on killing you."
"Then I deserved it!"
"Clearly, they couldn't beat the self-preservation instincts out of you."
"This is so bad! I'm bad! I need— I need to be punished, severely, I need to be killed in retaliation, I, I'm nothing without Whumper, I'm nothing without them—"
"Whumpee, it's okay. It's gonna be okay."
"Nothing's ever gonna be okay again!" Whumpee suddenly pushed themself away from Caretaker, standing up. It was like their tears had stopped in an instant — they wiped their eyes and walked over to the wall of torture instruments. They picked the heaviest looking whip, a cat o' nine tails with little iron pellets at the end, and walked back to Caretaker. They shoved the whip into their hands and pulled off their shirt. "I need to be punished," they said in a daze. Their eyes carefully avoided looking at the body as they turned around for Caretaker to hit them. "Now."
"Whumpee, I won't—"
"Now."
"No."
Whumpee clutched their shirt tighter. Blood was pooling around their bare feet, sticky and viscous. "You want me to go with you now that Whumper is gone," they said, not a question, but a statement. "Then you have to prove to me that you can keep me on the right track."
"This isn't the right track, this would be torture—"
"Prove it," they hissed. "Prove to me that you can correct me. Otherwise I'll stay with Whumper's body until I die of dehydration. That's the only thing I'm good for, anyway."
"Whumpee…"
"Prove it."
They heard the whip hit the floor. Caretaker stepped up to them and hugged them from behind, the front of them pressing against criss-cross scars on Whumpee's back of various healing stages. "I will never prove it like that. I want you to come with me, but I will never, ever hit you."
At that, Whumpee broke down again. The strength to hold up their body left their legs, and they collapsed into Caretaker's embrace. Caretaker slowly lowered them both back to the floor.
He pushed himself onto his toes to sneak past both Sora and Riyu before letting himself out of the sliding door and started to walk after letting himself back down onto the soles of his feet.
He didn't know where he was going, but he couldn't lay there, not when he was the only thing that kept Sora off of death's doorstep that afternoon.
"Arin! Arin, hold pressure on this while I find Kai!"
"On it!" His hands went right to the wound where the bright red slowly but surely seeped into his black gloves and his knees started to get scratched on the concrete.
"A-Arin?" Her voice was shaking as she grasped her hand around his upper arm.
"Lloyd's getting help, stay awake."
"I-it hurts!" The end of her sentence came out in a shout as he pressed down harder to try and keep her blood inside of her body.
"I know, I know it hurts, but you have to stay awake, Sora."
Arin panted as he awoke to darkness with his hand grasping onto his chest and tears in his eyes as he heard Riyu's snores filling the room.
"Sora?" Arin couldn't help but whisper as he laid on his back in the darkness, "Sora, are you awake?"
He heard a pained groan break through the sounds of sleep coming from the dragon which made his heart pang with regret, "now. You okay?"
"Y-yeah," Arin insisted as he sat up, hoping that she couldn't hear where tears had filled his throat moments before he had chosen to whisper, "yeah, just go back to sleep."
But, this was Sora, who knew him better than he knew himself and before he knew it, she was sitting up with her hand hovering over her injured side.
He was motionless as he watched the blade made out of black and yellow metal slice right through Sora's skin, blood splattering on the ground around her where the crimson shone brightly in the sun.
"Come on, tell me what's going on," she stopped to pull in a particularly shaky inhale that Arin was pretty sure was from the pain, "are you thinking about them again? Your parents?"
"Get away from her!" Arin shouted as he grabbed the first piece of metal he could, before twisting himself into Spinjitzu and flinging the object right at the guy who still had a sword buried deep in Sora's skin.
"No, I just…had a nightmare." Arin insisted, scratching at the back of his neck. 'It's not like I'm lying about that, but she doesn't need to be upset right now.'
"Okay," if she doubted him, she wasn't expressing it as she laid back down with her hand still clasped around her side, "just try and go back to sleep if you can."
"Will do." Arin nodded as he laid back down and stared at the long faded glow-in-the-dark stars that covered the ceiling.
He scrubbed at the red that he knew was covering his black gloves, trying not to throw up at the coppery smell of his friend's life that had been at risk under his palms, all while knowing that he was never going to get her pained shout out of his head.
Arin waited until he heard her breathing even out before he got out of his bed slowly, letting his feet hit the wooden floor with a quiet 'thud'.
He pushed himself onto his toes to sneak past both Sora and Riyu before letting himself out of the sliding door and started to walk after letting himself back down onto the soles of his feet.
He didn't know where he was going, but he couldn't lay there, not when he was the only thing that kept Sora off of death's doorstep that afternoon.
'Maybe I should get some training in,' he pondered briefly, but shook it off when he remembered the warning of his master, 'Lloyd said training while tired puts you at more harm.'
So, he made his way toward the kitchen instead to get a glass of water.
His mom had always made sure to get him a glass of water and even a chocolate chip cookie whenever he had a nightmare after she had held him close, wiped his eyes and double-checked for monsters under the bed.
It was nights like these, when the tree branches outside of the windows would smack against it in the wind that made the parent-sized hole in Arin's heart throb more than usual; nights where he couldn't help but wonder if they would still be proud of him, even though he hadn't stopped that guy from hurting Sora.
But as he filled his glass with water, he couldn't help but try and listen in on the hushed voices he could hear coming from…somewhere in the monastery. 'Who else is awake at…it has to be nearly three in the morning.'
He gulped down his water and set the glass in the left side of the sink next to the rest of the dishes that were still soaking off the burnt grease from cooking dinner before inching closer and closer toward the whispers, pushing himself onto his toes once again.
"First Master!" one of the voices shouted, but as he tip-toed toward the bedroom with light peeking out from under the door, he couldn't identify who was yelling.
"You are so stupid," a second voice that had to be Kai responded, "and this is gonna sting."
"That was just you cleaning it?!"
"This is really gnarly looking. Deep breath."
"I am not a kid any more," the voice was strained which made it harder to identify, "I don't need you to baby me-shit!" Arin heard a hand hit the wall hard after the curse.
"This isn't me babying you," Kai retorted with a bite of anger in his voice, "this is me making sure you don't kill yourself by bleeding out. You're lucky I didn't wake Zane up to deal with you."
"I could have dealt with it."
"Do you know how hard it is to clean a wound to the back? You would have gotten it infected, you little shit."
"If you're gonna keep being a dick, just-" The first voice stopped to hiss, but the walls continued to distort it, "go back to bed and get your beauty sleep."
"I can't, because someone," Kai's emphasis on the word "someone" followed by a quick exclamation of pain didn't leave much to Arin's imagination as to what was happening behind the thin door, "decided to lie to everyone when asked if anyone besides Sora was injured."
"I was gonna tell Zane."
"When your god genes kicked in and healed it up? Those aren't going to always save you, Lloyd."
'Wait, Lloyd?' Arin thought with confusion.
He remembered Lloyd clearly and thoroughly telling both him and Sora that if they got hurt, even if they didn't notice at first due to adrenaline, to let someone know so the wounds didn't get worse and yet…then again, he couldn't help but also remember the times where Lloyd reminisced on his time as a student.
Where he would directly disobey Master Wu's teaching and instruction, even if he would also explain why not listening to his master had ended badly for him and the other ninja like his life was one big cautionary tale.
And yet, here he was, listening in on Lloyd after doing the exact same thing that he told them not to do.
'Surely he had a good reason, even if it's just one that he thinks is good,' Arin tried to reassure himself, 'he tried to upkeep the whole monastery by himself after all, and he put all of Master Wu's responsibilities on himself outside of keeping things clean.'
"Gotcha!"
Arin couldn't stop himself from shouting as he was tackled to the ground and a flame was held too close to his face for comfort.
"Kai, get off of him!" Lloyd insisted as he pulled at the fire ninja's shoulder before reaching his hand out for Arin to take, "are you okay?"
But all he could focus on as he let him pull him to his feet was the fact that Lloyd's pajama shirt had been haphazardly pulled on and with it, he could clearly see the bandages that looped around his stomach.
"I should be asking you that."
"What?" Lloyd questioned but looked down when Kai cleared his throat and straightened out his shirt so it hung over the waistband of his pants, "that's…that's nothing. Don't worry about it."
"It's not "nothing", I just had to stitch you back together," Kai retorted before looking right at Arin, "but he's right, you don't need to worry about it. Humpty-Dumpty has been put back together again, thanks to yours truly."
"Kai, I need to have this conversation with Arin," when all Kai did was nod, Arin had to stifle his giggle when Lloyd had to emphasize, "alone."
"Fine, fine, but then you two get your asses in bed, it's almost sunrise."
"I am not running any sunrise exercises until Sora is healed."
"That is not the point I was trying to get across and you know it, you little insomniac," Lloyd's groan only resulted in Kai reaching over to ruffle up Lloyd's already impressive bed-head which made it impossible for Arin to keep himself from laughing, "you shouldn't even be training them while you're hurt-"
"Okay, goodnight!" Lloyd shouted which finally got Kai to raise his hands in surrender and walk to his room while he ran a hand over his face before finally redirecting his attention so his bright green eyes met Arin's dark brown ones, "I'm sure you have questions, or criticism so…get it out."
"Is that normal?" Arin found himself asking despite the many other "whys" and "hows" running through his head.
"Kai's obnoxious teasing? Yes."
"I meant you getting hurt, or…" he stopped to let his glance wander toward his and Sora's room before returning to his Master's eyes, "any of us getting hurt."
Lloyd sighed and looked down at the floor, which filled Arin with regret for the second time that night, before looking back up at him, "I want you to trust me, so I'm not gonna lie to you. I don't think there has been a single fight where we haven't come out of it injured."
"Really?"
"Usually it's just bruises or scrapes, sometimes a minor concussion or a couple of stitches," Lloyd elaborated, "but, what happened to Sora and I, that isn't exactly common, and we're going to be okay."
"How do you know that?" Arin asked as he fought himself from adding, 'because I cannot lose anyone else.'
"Because we always are," Lloyd shrugged before ushering Arin to his room, "we should get some sleep, even if it's just so Kai doesn't yell at both of us tomorrow."
"Okay," Arin nodded even though he wasn't sure Kai could actually be that angry with Lloyd, "goodnight, Lloyd."
And with that, he turned his back on his master and started to make his way back to his bedroom, only to realize that maybe the sound of tree branches hitting the windows wasn't as jarring as it was before.
