#supressed suffering

[wordsofwisdomandsoul]

[lbibliophile-sw]

Business as usual

Also on AO3 @whumptober - no.15: supressed suffering

In the wake of the War, Fox’s batchmates celebrate. There’s still work to be done, of course: supressing remaining pockets of resistance, aiding reconstruction efforts. But everything seems easy without clankers shooting at them.

Fox nods along and says nothing. It’s good that the war has ended, but he doesn’t really see the difference.

None of his problems are as easy to shut down as battledroids. There are still supercilious Senators, disgruntled citizens, dangerous criminals; endless flimsiwork and persistent staff shortages. The Guard’s greatest threats never were the Separatists.

So Fox will celebrate, but then he gets back to work.

[wordsofwisdomandsoul]

[newsofthenight]

Facebook got me shadowbanned

How do i grow if i can't grow. Lame. I ain't buyin their ads. Get zucked FB.....

[haunting-of]

Late night, late. Jesha crouched in the desert, something from in their stomach or throat or lungs was coming up. It didn’t taste like sick, or blood, or anything else they’d really encountered before. Sweat dripped down to their nose, falling in between shudders. 

Something moved in their blurry vision. They focused on it, a black shape on the ground. Scorpion, sort of moving in a circle around to behind them. Jesha thought of one, two, four, more different ways to kill it. Some of the ways took a while, some of them were instant.

Off the top of their head, there was drowning, taking its limbs one at a time, lots of small punctures, burning, roasting, stepping on, driving over, pulling apart, beating it against the ground, beheading. There were crueler ones, like taking its way of fighting, feeding, and leaving it to fend for itself. 

It was creeping up closer to their heel. They picked up their foot, still undecided about what to do with it. The scorpion crept over to the pile of wretch they’d just expelled from their mouth and seemed to be investigating.

Jesha had their foot still raised, and had an unfamiliar thought. They thought of them and the scorpion in a home together. They’d kept it and gave it food and taken good care of it and they loved it and named it. The scorpion seemed grateful for the food and terrarium, as much as a wild scorpion could seem grateful.

Would the scorpion miss the wild? Would it ever think of the danger, the hunt, the fight and struggle to eat nightly with fondness?

No, a scorpion wouldn’t look up at the stars and wonder if the way it lived was the way scorpions were supposed to live. 

Would it?

Would it remember how. If it could go back after everything, would it remember how to take care of itself. Would the scorpion just die if it had to go back to the way it was supposed to live. The scorpion never took it for granted.

The scorpion never missed it’s parents. The scorpion didn’t feel sorry for itself when it killed another scorpion. The scorpion would know not to fall in love with a hawk. The scorpion-

“AH FUCK OW!!” Jesha shouted into the night and hopped for a second, clutching their ankle that was still on the ground. They managed to stay upright for a second before falling over onto the ground in a puff of dust.

“Jesha!?” Danel wandered onto the scene, light from the van spilling onto his back. “Jesha, what happened, are you okay??”

“Yes, I’m fucking FINE Danel, get back to the van before I kill you, I’m just taking a piss, I told you-”

“Woah, ok,” Danel said, halfway to the person yelling at him from the ground. “Fuck, okay, I’ll go-”

Jesha was the loudest thing in the desert night by far. “I’m trying to have a piss by my fucking self, can you get off my back for five fucking minutes-”

“OKAY I’m going!!” Danel had his hands up in the universal ‘I’m backing off’ motion. “I’m going!” He went back the way he came, and the sound of a car door closed in the night.

Jesha winced from the pain of the sting, but it… It wasn’t as bad as they thought a scorpion sting would be. Was it just how much they’d changed? Ow, no, there it was.

Eventually, they picked themself out of the dust. Not the safest place to be at night, after all. It was time to get back on the road, keep reading the Lilimoire. Chazaqiel was less of a worry than Vincent now. Jesha started back towards the van.

Their first step, they tripped themself, stumbling painfully on their stung leg. Close call.

They’d almost stepped on the scorpion.

[eatdirt420]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

So what? It's some shitty Halloween party, what possibly could happen?

"I don't need you to help me, I can handle things myself." Makeshift Bandages | Suppressed Suffering | "I'm fine."

Relationships: Rhaenyra Targaryen/Laena Velaryon (Daughter of Corlys), Rhaenyra Targaryen & Elinda Massey, Rhaenyra Targaryen & Elinda Massey & Mysaria | Lady Misery (A Song of Ice and Fire), Laena Velaryon (Daugher of Corlys) & Laenor Velaryon Characters: Rhaenyra Targaryen, Laena Velaryon (Daughter of Corlys), Laenor Velaryon, Elinda Massey, Mysaria | Lady Misery (A Song of Ice and Fire)

✵✷✵

Parties aren't Rhaenyra's thing; it's just a bunch of university-age kids getting drunk off their asses and making asses of themselves. Still, it's freshman year, the first year away from her parents, and her roommates (Elinda and Mysaria) have decided that the only way they can celebrate Halloween is to become one of those fucking idiots. It's almost like they don't even care that midterms are coming up, but whatever— she's done plenty of studying; it can all wait till later, anyways.

Rhaenyra is scantily clad as Cleopatra, complete with a white cut out mini dress, gold chain headpiece, and gold gladiator sandals. The only thing she has that brings any semblance of warmth is a dainty red chiffon scarf wrapped around her upper arms like a shawl. This ensemble is, of course, an oversight on her part; it's brumal inside and out.

(The venue itself, complete with a bonfire outside, has been rented out courtesy of the Velaryon family, which is sure to earn Laena and Laenor some popularity points. Neither of these facts were known to Rhaenyra, who hadn't even planned on being there in the first place and l, likely wouldn't even care if she knew. All that information would come later from Mysaria's morning tea gossip session.)

Rhaenyra, for the most part, stays inside, but at one point she decides to take a peek outside towards the bonfire. She searches for the pink of Elinda's princess dress or the striking red of Mysaria's femme fatale ensemble, but finds neither. Braving in the cold for just a moment, she ventures outside to get a better look. Surely, they hadn't left her here, alone, and without a phone.

In sparce, separate groups around the bonfire are imbellic students that have decided that the fire is enough to chase away the cold. In one of these groups (further away from the door), stands the woman she knows as Laena from one of Rhaenyra's elective classes. She's wearing a long black leather jacket, almost like a duster, and what appears to be some form of tights, likely beneath a short dress hidden by the jacket. She's got on turquoise socks and black tennis shoes. Her hair is pulled back in a thick white ponytail, tied off with a turquoise and black ribbon.

Laena turns to her, dressed like a Euphoria cheerleader underneath her leather jacket. She gives her a once over, then turns to a black man dressed as a cowboy and whispers something in his ear. He turns back to her with a smile and shoves at her shoulder.

At this, Rhaenyra turns away and scans the crowd for either Elinda or Mysaria; she finds neither, but makes her way inside towards the bar to start on another beer anyway. Originally, she planned to wallow mysteriously with the bartender's ear, but the crowd there gives her heebie-jeebies. She's handed another Guinness and makes her way towards the bathrooms where the crowds are sparse (completely opposite to the dancefloor and double french doors to the outside world).

Rhaenyra finds herself immensely bored. She's got no phone and no social entertainment in her corner; the most she can do is get herself completely wasted so she will no longer be cold, or watch all her classmates dance together, smiling from ear to ear. She likes to do the first, but is very rudely interrupted; she can't seem to find it in her to be annoyed.

"Rhaenyra," Laena greets her, smelling of smoke.

"Laena," Rhaenyra acknowledges in return, "Gaelic 1A, yeah?"

"That'd be me," there's a slightly tense silence, save for the other moving party-goers, as she leans against the wall, "you don't strike me as a Celtic major."

"No, no— uhm," Rhaenyra clears her throat and leans back away from Laena's easy stance, "Politics, Philosophy and Economics— I just wanted to… learn… Gaelic…"

"Ah," Laena takes a swig from her cider, "you're a true academic, then."

"I take it you are majoring in… Celtic?"

"Celtic and Linguistics," Laena gazes at her lips for a moment too long before averting back to her eyes, "parents wanted me to go to University, and I figure it'll help when I join the Armed Forces."

"Oh," Rhaenyra adjusts her stance subtly (even subconsciously, not knowing that she's moving at all) and brings her beer to her lips, "you think yourself a soldier, I take it."

"I think o' myself a doer," she shrugs, watching her drink her beer with an underlying intensity, "figure I can do better work fighting then I can working an office job."

She smiles warmly in return, despite the not-quite-warm air, "how noble of you."

The two of them fall into one of those lapsed silences that occurs when you've known each other for long enough to graduate past passing small talk, but not long enough to know what comes next. Some people combat this by asking mundane, get-to-know-you questions: favorite color?, any hobbies?, recent holiday excursions?. While this is a tried and true tactic, it's not always the most effective. Sometimes one of the parties will give into impulsivity and suggest going somewhere else altogether: somewhere more quiet, more quaint, more… personal.

A door opens, sending in a ghastly draft; Rhaenyra shivers involuntarily against it, pushing herself subtly colder to Laena as a way of creating a human shield.

Laena deflects the silence, "aren't you freezing?"

"I'm fine. I've got," Rhaenyra lifts her scarf with a shrug.

"A scrap of fabric," Laena counters with a furrowed brow, "its brass monkeys outside; not much better in here."

"I'll blame my piss-poor planning and walk it off," she shrugs, twirling her now-empty bottle and ignoring the sudden rush of heat in her bloodstream.

"You'll get frostbite," Rhaenyra opens her mouth to argue, but she beats her to the punchline, "d'you want my jacket? I swear on my mother, I won't mind."

As some sort of aside, Laena takes the bottle out of Rhaenyra's hand and passes it to the man (when did he get here???) she was talking to earlier. They have some sort of exchange (that Rhaenyra can't quite hear) before he rolls his eyes and leaves the two of them alone again.

"Look, I don't need you to help me, I can handle things myself," Rhaenyra takes a step back, her skin raised in goosebumps (not from the cold).

"Of course you can," Laena laughs. The sound is cruel, but not mean, "but that's not what I asked, pretty girl."

Laena straightens up as a group brushes by them to get to the bathrooms, pulling Rhaenyra away from them and towards a more hidden alcove by the 'employees only' area. There, in the internal alleyway, she crowds her against the wall. That is, she uses her hands to make sure Rhaenyra doesn't hit the brick too hard before pulling slightly away, her right hand just above her head, palm against the bricks.

"Are you… trying to intimidate me?"

"Depends on whether or not it's working," Laena backs up a bit when she sees the flash of anxiety in Rhaenyra's eyes. She switches tactics, "look, no strings attached— I'm just looking for somewhere to hang my jacket, but if you're not cold…"

"I wouldn't really know what to do with," Rhaenyra raises her scarf again, this time much more pathetic than the last. It almost feels like an excuse; she longs for another beer.

"I can help with that, too, y'know," Laena half-whispers, making it clear it's only for her to hear, "if you'd like."

She looks at her— really looks at her: past all the glitter and entrancing smiles. Laena's offer is genuine, for she truly cares about whether or not she'll get frostbite. The sound is foreign on her tongue when she whispers back, "okay."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"Thank Tyraxes," Laena leans back a bit, giving Rhaenyra another brush of the cool night air, "I was beginning to wonder if all that studying stole your reason."

"It's not—"

Laena pulls the scarf out of Rhaenyra's grasp, pulling it into a condensed line in her hands. She takes her left hand and carefully puts it on her waist, using it to pull her closer and effectively grasp the end of the scarf. When she's got it threaded around the back, Rhaenyra half-wonders if she's gonna use the scarf to kiss her.

Rhaenyra banishes the thought as Laena flawlessly ties the scarf up.

With that out of the way, Laena slowly removes her jacket and pulls it onto Rhaenyra. Rhaenyra herself is dumbfounded, making no moves to help (which is, of course, Laena's intent). She is caught like a deer in headlights beneath her caring ways. Her stomach swoops dramatically, and she forces herself to refrain from leaning in to leave a kiss on her cheek.

Laena pulls away with a mischievous smile, her tongue poking between her teeth, "what were you saying?"

Rhaenyra swallows harshly, "nothing."

Laena fixes her leather jacket's collar, flattening it unnecessarily. If Rhaenyra didn't know any better, she'd say she was obnoxiously flirting with her; a buried part of her hopes she is.

"See you around, Rhae," Laena smirks, giving her one more once-over before vanishing amongst the crowd.

Rhaenyra takes a moment to breathe, but it does nothing to ease the rising tension in the center of her chest. She finds herself frazzled in the dark leather of Laena's coat. If she turns her nose into the collar, she will find the scent of fresh sea salt. Later in life it'll provide her with a sense of security, a sense of home, that she didn't know beforehand. For now, it makes her feel nervous. She bites her lip, turns her eyes to the ceiling, makes a small prayer to whatever Gods might be listening, and walks back out into the party.

Rhaenyra will return the jacket come Monday, for now she's just concerned about sticking to her plans of sipping Guinness 'til the sun comes up. Her next three beers are paid for, but the bartender keeps the benefactor unknown.

Rhaenyra doesn't remember most of the night, but she knows she wasn't cold; her throbbing hangover reminded her of whose fault that was.