#unedited draft

[steddie-lyfalling]

"Hey"

"Hi"

Those were the only words spoken before they were slowly leaning into each other's space. Passers by wading through the syrupy sweetness that surrounded them. Their moment, finally here for the taking, as their lips met with a softness that knew this would not be their last kiss.

"Jesus. Why does every romcom end like this!?" As the screen faded to black in the near empty cinema Eddie couldn't help his exasperation. He dropped his tone mimicking the two men he'd just seen on screen "Hey. Hi." And with that slammed his hands together making obscene squelching noises that Steve couldn't help but laugh at.

"Yeah, well, some people probably do have moments like that, you're just jealous!"

The lights in the theatre slowly rise as the credits come to an end, but all Steve can see is Eddie's wild hair as he turns in faux shock toward him. Hand on heart and pure drama in his deep brown eyes. "Jealous! Me! I take nothing but offence good sir!"

The clearing of a throat reminded the two they were not alone, as Robin's head bobbed into vision and drew their attention back.

"I mean, I'm a little jealous. Hawkins may have progressed to showing a singular gay kiss, on one screen, at ass o'clock in the morning on a random Thursday, but it's still backwards enough that we're the only three dinguses in attendance. I'd say I'm quite a way off of having a sensual make out with a girl in the middle of the street!"

"Bobs, you'd have to actually talk to Nace first." Steve knew he'd made a grave error bringing up Robin's colossal crush on Nancy Wheeler, but they were in good company, and said good company was sitting between them so Robin's uncoordinated attack mainly landed on Eddie.

"Hey. Hey. I didn't say anything about your poorly hidden moon eyes for Wheeler, this is not fair! I'm an innocent bystander! By-sitter?" He pondered still being gracelessly slapped on his chest and arm, but he'll be honest the seat was facing a majority of the blows. "Could you please slap Harrington upside the head when we're outside and you have a clean shot!?"

"Fine." Ceasefire somewhat agreed, all three began to rise from their seats.

Only as they stood did either of the boys notice quite how close they'd been in the safety of the dark, leaning into each other's space, pinkies almost interlaced and forearms fully passing each other's warmth back and forth over the armrest, knees touching, sneakers and heavy boots mere millimetres apart. One forceful cough and they would've basically been straddling one another. And given that Robin's oddly knowing look seemed aimed both their ways, this was getting stupid, one of them had to break, they needed to talk.

A simulations shudder racked its way through the two men as they realised they were, at most, days away from talking about their feelings with one another.

Horrifying.

[the12thnightproject]

WIP Wednesday

He turned and grabbed my chin, forcing me to look into those amber eyes. "I have been doing this kind of work long enough to know that some decisions need to be made in an instant. Orders need to be followed without question or people could die. Is that quite clear?”

“When we’re in our disguises, or when we are in an urgent situation, you may be in charge.” I managed to infuse that with an unspoken ‘I’m doing this because I want to and not because you say so’ tone to my voice. “When we are here, in private, at our leisure, I will do what I want. And I want my own room.”

“In public, you will dress as I say, act as my concubine, and follow my orders to the letter.” He watched over my shoulder as I wrote that down. “In this building, if we are not actively working, you may do as you wish.”

“And my own room? I will not in truth be your bedmate.” I shouldn’t have needed to spell that out, but better to do so now and avoid an awkward conversation later. If this place didn’t have a second bedroom, I supposed I would have to bunk in this not terribly private office.

“A bed technically is not required. You might be surprised at what can be accomplished against a wall, or … on a desk.” He ran his fingers along the smooth lacquer of the desk. The sound his nails made as they slithered across skittered down my spine.

Not interested in either kabedon or desk-a-don. “Well, what is life without a little unsolved mystery?”

“What would you say if I pointed out that our charade requires that we be able to act as if we’ve enjoyed certain intimacies.” He tugged my hair out of its ponytail, and tangled his hands in it, exerting enough pressure to force me to continue to look at him. “Lovers… have a specific look to them. They smile and flush when exchanging glances. Intimate touches when they believe no one is watching.”

“I can pretend. In any case, people saw you buy me. There shouldn’t be any surprise if I look like I hate you.” Something evil inside me made me add.  “I doubt you’re unfamiliar with the concept of ‘faking it.’” Before Mitsuhide could react to that … in fact, afraid that he would indeed react because I had probably gone too far there, I hurried to write, “no sex.”

He grabbled the brush, carefully dipped it in ink, and added, “unless she begs.”

“Are you crazy? That’s horrible!” I snatched the brush back and marked out his word with thick dark lines.

“You certain display a lot of confidence for one so young.” He tapped his finger on his lip, drawing attention to that sensual mouth. “I promise you, if would not be horrible. While it is true that I am renowned as a torturer, what people don’t understand is that one can torture with pleasure as easily as with pain. If I put my mind to it, I could have you on this desk, desperate for me. You would most certainly beg… and be rewarded. Eventually.”

He'd done nothing but speak. That’s all he had done. He hadn’t touched me at all. Yet I felt a jolt of … revulsion, yes, revulsion, it had to be that, all through me.

Ok Gaereth-with-better-teeth, dial it down a few hundred degrees.

“Well, thanks for that warning – but that wasn’t what I meant. Begging is demeaning. It’s …” Gross, but he wouldn’t understand that word. “If, in the, completely improbable case that I decide, I decide that I want to sleep with you, I will inform you of that fact.”

“Inform me.” There went the eyebrow.

“Well, how would you like it if I told you that I would only sleep with you if you begged me.” I could almost picture the look on his face if I said that. It would probably be similar to how he was looking at me right now. Snarkily amused.

“Point taken.” He took the brush and wrote, Intimacies in private will only occur upon mutual renegotiation. “Does that meet with your approval?”

I had a feeling he was just humoring me, but I had gotten what I wanted so I let that go. “It will do.”

In any case, the chances of my wanting to renegotiate that particular item basically lived in the category that also contained airborne pork and figure skating in hell, so it probably didn’t matter all that much anyway.

Once again my brain inserted a shade rattle of doom into my thoughts.

[h2duo]

Welcome to Wonderland by Anson Seabra except "wonderland" is Fairy Tail and the metaphors of wonderland being a dream is hyper realistic because . yeah.

so like i cried to this song the other day imagining myself appearing to my boyfriend, my friends, and my family and all of us knowing that my time is limited because i dont truly exist in their reality and that i am, in fact, a dream. its why theres so many dream-like genders in my xenobox and why i heavily identify with the concept of dreaming. im a maladaptive daydreamer and a lucid dreamer. i truly believe i am in the wrong reality because i have felt the most sense of belonging in a fucking dream with fictional characters than i ever have in the real world. and then i have to go outside and pretend like im normal. dude this shit fucking hurts.

like bro take me now. let me leave. not in a "i wanna kms" way but in a "i want to be alive just not in this reality."

did i mention i am diagnosed with depersonalization, derealization, and delusions. triple Ds baby (cries)

[nihalthemartian]

Draft Two

Because I have never met anyone that I wanted in my life that way before.

But you.

I could make an exception for you.

[woodthrushcalling]

I'm not a huge fan of the cold but these past couple days I've been venturing out into the snow and becoming a little snow baby again. It's been good; I feel full.

[woodthrushcalling]

I do so well until you find a crack in my face and what can I do but shrug my shoulders and say, “I think that was always there, but I can’t be sure” You say something else, but as usual, I don’t hear you. 

[empiricalrepresentation-blog]

“A jab at creating my own Catcher in the Rye, part fiction, part autobiography and almost entirely dedicated to you” - draft of synopsis 19/11/15″

Poetry is a whole bunch of bullshit. your words, the ones you think is smart and beautifully strung together, its just garbage. in fact, can you even say that any of it is yours, truly yours?  isnt it just regurgitated crap? things that were put into your empty head by other people who had empty heads. i thought about this right before writing all of this down a moment ago. and the phrase that came to my mind, the one that summed it all up was “regurgitate to alleviate”. Alleviating whatever you have inside of you. feelings bottled up, none of it making any or much sense. and then all of it brought together, tied up nicely by words and phrases and romantic gestures or whatever it is you’ve picked up throughout your life from whatever youve come across, whatever that tickles your fancy from people you like and admired.

and these things and people - you want to be them. you want to be like them and make things they make. I could say emulate and use words that sound big and great and beautiful and romantic and whatnot. but ive had enough doing it. frankly its just dishonest. i’ve come to realise that, after years of trying and failing. every single time i try to come up with something original and try to make it the best it can, how I feel it should be, my idea of what good and beautiful and original and honest is - it just falls flat on its face. I overthink it, I erase whole phrases and at the end of it it just comes up looking and sounding horrible. All the choice of words used and how the phrases are arranged and what its meant to convey just comes of as wrong. Its disingenuous - and it shows.

Maybe it has to do with how things are for me. I studied law and used legal language so everything I wrote had to be precise. I’m not saying that what I wrote in law school in the end was precise or accurate but it had an effect on the way I’ve written ever since. And even before I went to law school, all throughout my life, I’ve tried to write as romantically and poetically as I could. I wrote fairly good stories for English classes when I was in primary school, all of them with a twist in the end and almost all of it had elements of things and moods and people and places I picked up from watching television and comic books - you know, characters and stuff, which worked because I wasn’t marked as a plagiarist or anything since most of the stuff I liked was too obscure for any of the teachers to pick up.

what Im trying to say is that, ever since having to write formally and accurately and romantically and poetically, i’ve developed a habit of dismantling whatever I’ve written down, whatever I feel is an honest depiction of myself and what I want to say in the form of words and in the end it all comes off as garbage. Doctored disingenuous garbage. 

I’ve also had this thing where I feel inclined to present everything as grammatically correct. This wasn’t always the case. I really grew as a writer, a real original one or at least one where I felt like I was developing an original style and voice, after having read Vladimir Nobokov’s Lolita when I was 13. That book was and still is the most beautiful work of art i’ve ever read. I carried it everywhere with me. I used to randomly turn the pages and read a stanza or two. sometimes whole paragraphs and sometimes whole chapters and id feel fulfilled. like an angelic light had beamed through to me and i could feel my heart and insides just drop and my bones chill and then there is a jittery tingle that creeps up my spine and it feels all so euphoric (although at the time I had no idea what euphoric meant so I didn’t know how to describe the sensation to other people, not that it mattered since nobody cared maybe perhaps this other girl who I had a crush on - Sabrina was her name - but that was only because she was the only other girl and someone I knew who actually read tasteful books). All these sensation and heavenly light guided me in my writing. I wanted to write words as beautiful as Nobokov’s. Nothing else mattered.

(cont.)

[saminthebluebox]

So, for those who don't know, I'm a blogger for my university and have a weekly blog about whatever I want as long as it has to do with the university and students in some way. My post for this week is about pulling all nighters and the nine stages you can go through during this. The following is the unedited version, co-written by Gael, because for some reason I don't think I can get away with "LSD-fueled Frankenstein fever dream". Just a guess though.

We’ve all done it. Pulled an all-nighter because of too much homework, an essay due the next morning, studying for a big exam, or insomnia just keeping you from dream land. And if you haven’t experienced it yet, you will before you graduate. It’s almost a guarantee.

The all-nighter can go one of two ways though. It can be completely miserable or a surprisingly entertaining experience. Having pulled one (all most two) myself last week, I happened to observe the more entertaining side.  I also noted the nine stages that occur, or rather can occur, during an all-nighter. These stages are even more obvious when the all-nighter is pulled in a group rather than alone.

Stage 1: Determined to finish work

When you first decide to that you are going to pull an all-nighter, you go into it with the goal of getting all of your work done. You plant yourself in a lounge, the library, Kingsbury, your room, or some other random spot on campus. With your laptop out, textbook open, and ear buds in, you start working on trying to accomplish your goal. This is the point of the all-nighter where you are at your most calm and focused.

If you are in a group, whether you are all working on the same thing or different things, now is when you are all the most quiet. The jokes haven’t started and the sleep deprivation hasn’t begun to affect the whole group and their actions and decisions.

That being said, you are not exactly a machine running with German-like efficiency either. You are still prone to the occasional facebook check, “you-totes-got-to-see-this” youtube video and Wikipedia digressions on the riveting study of the honey bee mating behavior, which you will say you are looking at because of a class….sure.

This stage of an all-nighter can run about two hours or 10pm until midnight.

Stage 2: Nicolas Cage is God

This stage can differ from person to person or group to group. This is the stage where the computers have switched from blackboard or the library site to YouTube and Facebook completely. While this is not an entirely new phenomenon, the YouTube videos and Facebook pages in question are slowly beginning to move to the disturbing end of the spectrum of sanity and suggest that smearing “God Is A Lie” on the bathroom wall in feces is not far around the corner.

For us, this slow descent into madness began with a Facebook page whose primary source of content involved photoshopping Nicolas Cage’s face on various celebrities, movie posters and inanimate objects. In the end, we stumbled upon a video of Nicolas Cage’s face on the body of Miley Cyrus singing “Wrecking Ball” wallowing away in a corner of the internet, like an LSD-fueled Frankenstein fever dream.

What form this stage may take for you, we cannot say, but it will be something you will bring up for the rest of the night and look back up in shame and bewilderment the next day.

Stage 3: I Need To Get Work Done

Sometimes, sanity returns like a harsh, sobering slap in the face and you resolve to get your work done once again. Don’t worry, this is only temporary as Stage 4 is just around the corner. You’ll maybe write about fifty words, sometimes in the right order, before some inane distraction once again pulls you from your work. This is the distraction that will send you into the stage of prolonged hysteria which will sustain you throughout the night.

Stage 4: Mom’s Spaghetti

The shortest of all the stages, it is also the most potent one. Sleep deprivation hits you at once and floods the brain, turning that half-eaten pack of M&M’s in the corner of the room into the most hysterical thing you’ve ever seen.

The Youtube video which pushed us over the edge was the “Mom’s Spaghetti” remix of that Eminem classic, “Lose Yourself.” If you have not seen this video, make it your life’s priority. Any description of it cannot do it justice. While we may give it more credit than it’s due, just remember that we were exposed to it at 3 a.m. What followed was a spiral of increasingly absurd videos and songs. Highlights include Flight of the Conchords’ “Foux Du Fafa” and videos of American and British people failing to answer questions on basic trivia and current events such as “Where is South Korea?” and “Who was the first president of the United States?”.

From this point onwards, any ambition of getting work done is cast aside, at least for a few hours, and simply serves as a weak rationale for continuing to stay up.

Stage 5: I’m A Musical Genius

If you are near a piano, run. Run fast and don’t look back. You will become convinced that you are a Beethoven and divine Providence placed this piano in your path so you may dazzle the world with your electric fingers. The sad reality is that you will simply make nearby people believe that a particularly loud whale is being beaten to death by bagpipes. Any nearby object that is not bolted down to the surface it is resting on will be thrown across the room and the most common response to any sentence is “Your face.”

The debate over whether or not to go to bed becomes a divisive issue as well, but the constant sound of the piano in the corner is impeding your though process. Slowly but surely, however, as that 8a.m. goes from being “ tomorrow”  to “ in a couple hours”, going to sleep starts to become less and less worth it. This thought process is verbalized as “I need to go to bed” to “Should I go to bed?” to “I’m not going to bed, am I?” to…

Stage 6:  The point of no return (4:30am)

…”When does HoCo open?”

Stage 7: Adventure Time

Having been in the same room for about seven or eight hours, you are beginning to go a bit stir-crazy and the adrenaline of Stage 5 is beginning to wear out and sleep becomes very tempting. This, combined with the fact that you have become increasingly impulsive, propels you and your group outdoors, like a group of zombies but with even less direction.

In our case, the decision to brave the great outdoors was immediately regretted as the cold turned us into human diamond-cutters and some of us became temporarily female. Our attempts to bring some variety to the night was cut short and we headed back to the dorm for the penultimate stage of the all-nighter.

Stage 8: I’m All Jacked Up On Red Bull

This is the final stage before you come crashing down and sleep-deprivation hysteria is at its most intense. You have the energy to do everything and anything, but like that burnout relative who’s always in between jobs and is “about to hit it big” with his brilliant business idea, none of it will amount to anything. Combined with this is a frustration at having failed to get any significant amount of work done despite attempting to do so for nine hours. It’s a veritable cocktail of emotions; puberty condensed in sixty minutes.

Stage 9: I REALLY REALLY REALLY NEED TO GET THIS DONE

What the fuck have you been doing for nine hours?! You have class in literally two hours and the fruits of your labor have amounted to having determined that the word “poop” is slightly funnier when written in Comic Sans than in Times New Roman. That paper proposal you were supposed to write for that Civil War class has descended into a detailed discussion of Abraham Lincoln’s beard, your French essay is about the political differences between a man and his dog and concludes with “Omelette du Fromage”, your photojournalism power point presentation had deteriorated to selfies of you during Homecoming and you’re not even sure what your English homework has become. Oh wait, that was us.

In any case, the sun is rising, you have finally realized the severity of the situation and you are finally beginning to get your work done, albeit with an acute drop in quality since, after all, you stayed up all night, you fucking idiot.

Epilogue

As you slowly climb the HoCo stairs, the sun peaking up over New Quad and you having miraculously finished your assignments (sort of), you realize that despite it all, you had a lot of fun. You have been reduced to a giggling mess belting out “Set Fire To Rain” along with the Dining Hall PA system, scarfing down the heartiest breakfast you have ever had, you get ready to face the day ahead and realize you really, really don’t want to do that. You’re going to feel the consequences of the all-nighter for the rest of the day, it totally wasn’t worth it and you’re never going to pull one again. For a week. At least.  Probably.