NO MORE SHAME / NO MORE FEAR / NO MORE DREAD

organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.

[vitalphenomena]

HIATUS MAY 11 — JULY 29.

NOBODY EXISTS ON PURPOSE. Nobody belongs anywhere. We're all going to die. Come watch TV?

VITALPHENOMENA. by lye, 26, they/them. EST. 2011.

— rules&roster. roster wheel. prompts. open posts. credits. —

TRIGGERS APPLY. 21+ only.

For OOC info, content warnings, and rules, see below.

lye, 26, they/them. EST. @/vitalphen on discord.

CONTENT WARNINGS

I do not tag triggers in threads, only in visual media. If your triggers are not indicated on your blog, I will probably end up asking. If you follow this blog, I assume you are comfortable with potentially being exposed to, but not necessarily writing, the following:

a scientific institute that tortures and experiments on human beings, primarily children. child abuse will be addressed but hopefully with a careful hand. posts pertaining to this are tagged #TIMELINE: COEUS.

incest *i write alicent hightower from hotd. if aware of the book or tv series source material, you are aware of the implications of this. incest will not be romanticized, glamorized, or sexualized. in particular, i note that alicent's conduct re: helaena and aemond is unacceptable.

child abuse (separate from what is listed above), including mentions of childhood sexual assault — which, while relevant to backstories, will never be explicitly written or depicted.

domestic abuse and family violence - explicit abuse will not always be tagged, but it will be under a read more.

cult behavior

religious trauma (more broadly than cult behavior)

spree/serial murder

organized crime

arson/fire/pyromania

drug use/drug trafficking/addictive disorders

self harm/self mutilation

torture

age gap relationships

sex work in the form of stripping.

RULES

Mutuals only. Godmodding should only be of the plotted variety (so not even godmodding). I don’t even know what the other basics are. Just be cool. Don’t be all, like, uncool.

I love shipping - chemistry-based, experimental, pre-established, anything goes. Explicit smut gets tagged as #usfw and is not always under a read more. Respect sexualities and gender identities. Burns is asexual. Romantic/sexual/inappropriate content with minors will not be tolerated. Various characters are polyamorous or in open relationships. 

Length-wise, I prefer one-liners or short multi-para prose threads. I generally match length. I’m always down to plot — shoot me a message or some memes whenever. I post starter calls frequently as well. Always feel free to send memes!

[kylo-wrecked]

He tries not to let his heart swell at the flash, this glimmer of recognition, but it's too late.  

It's painful to swallow, and to have to swallow it.

The questions are painful, and he must answer them; he must find answers closest to the truth. Now that he knows it. Now that it—that He—stands before him. 

"My first master."  

He, who owned the blue saber Kylo brought with him from a Corvax Fen He would hardly recognize. He, who traded flesh for armor. He who died at the hands of a hero; His own son. He who must have looked back and found death was the only way forward.  

Ben’s parents had kept that from him, too. 

"He died while saving a small band of separatists,” Kylo said, grasping for the nearest truth, a truth that fit his circumstances. “He exhausted himself completely for those people. Nothing remained of him. He was gone."

Into the red dust of Crait, into the Ahch-To's ocean air. 

“But so many are dying.” Kylo looks at his hands. They alone were more innocent than the child attached to them. “And so many more will die.” 

So much death. It will be endless. It will outlive Anakin, and it may outlive Kylo Ren, and whoever—whatever—came after.

[vitalphenomena]

NEVER MEET YOUR HEROES, RIGHT?

Or your idols.

Or your gods.

Kylo's master died. Initially, Anakin wraps his head around the statement without resistance due to the inevitable, reliable nature of death. (This has been true for Anakin before the war, before abandoning Tatooine for Coruscant. And it will, of course, be true until the end of him, true until beyond Kylo's time.)

However. First master?

Anakin knows he's young, objectively. (Does Kylo think so, too? Had he ever imagined Vader before Vader, the way he was almost vibrant, the way he smirks and beams when he's proud? Has Anakin lived substantially in the expanse of Kylo Ren's expectant memory?)

Anakin also knows to carry himself with authority and experience, which compel him to see Kylo as young—in need of guidance. Anakin does not know, infuriatingly, what kind of life Kylo could possibly have lived before now—appearing, as he has, seemingly out of thin air, unaffected by the Order, undocumented by history.

Anakin grimaces, more thoughtful than truly irritated. He glances, shifty, at Kylo's hands. Around them, this world spins. Their ears echo with the sound of energies colliding, blasts being fired - this will never end.

"Who is your master now?"

Ever-closer to demanding: where did you come from?

[vitalphenomena]

@trainedmutt said: i saw a kid at the park the other day eating a cigarette butt.

DAVY SMILES FONDLY. The exhale through his nostrils constitutes a laugh.

He loves how open and sharing Gabe is—though it is often about things that ultimately matter very little. Davy has hopes that one day, Gabe will open up in more meaningful ways, too. In the meantime, Davy can enjoy hearing about the day Gabe had before collapsing onto Davy's bed.

Davy's temple bumps into Gabe's shoulder as they lean into one another.

"Are you sure?" he wonders, half-sincere. "It could have been a piece of candy. Did you ask them how it tasted?"

[despiterage]

You didn’t kill him, she says. It’s not a question. It’s… maybe just an observation, a colorless statement; just words rolling off her tongue to fill the roaring silence left in the absence of the barbarism of men. But– It feels like an accusation. Just a little; like an object in shadow at the end of a long hall with a similar silhouette. It makes his heart thud harder, louder, faster, and the sweat of his physical exertion begins to mix with that of his anxiety.

Should he kill him?

What is the difference between the man at his feet and the man he’d killed all those years ago? Daniel is worse in most aspects, frankly, because of course he is. And even without access to his mutation, his obscene wealth gives him a sinister amount of power. So much fucking power. Not to mention the connections he has to the seedy underbelly of society.

There is the circus, of course, but Marcus is hardly concerned with them. He gets the impression that Daniel is a meal ticket to them and nothing more; that none of them like the man for anything more than the money that they will be able to find elsewhere, eventually. How much more than that is his to his little henchmen? To his drives and security guards and whoever the fuck else he has on payroll running his shady operations? Is that all he is to them, too? Could they–would they–move on to work for some other rich asshole if there was no one left to cut them a check?

Should he kill him?

Marcus clenches and unclenches his fists, letting the ache in his blooded hand ground him for Spirit’s questioning.

“I set us free,” Marcus tells her, an earnestness in his voice that’s both ancient and boyish in its affect. “I– He can’t do that anymore. To you. To either of us. Or anyone. He can’t use his powers. I took them.”

Finally, he wants to say, peppered onto the end of his multiple staccato statements like an audible exclamation mark. But he struggles with the momentum of it, because what she asks next nearly floors him.

What is us?

“Us.” He says it and he pauses for a long moment, like all she’d needed was for his emphatic repetition of the word to draw her feelings up to recognize what they mean to each other. But– “Spirit. What do you mean ‘what is us?’”

Casting his eyes away from her, his gaze falls back down to Daniel. Their tormentor. Their warden. Does she really not see the ‘Us’ in the pair of them? Does she think herself above Marcus too, like Daniel had? (No, does, not had; he’s not dead. Yet.) 

Anger flickers, flares. He shakes his head as if he can physically shake the emotion away. And maybe it works, a little, but the embers remain even if the flame has sputtered out. There’s still heat there.

“You brought me into all of this,” he reminds her in a moment of weakness he surely won’t regret later. “You wanted me. You had all of this–” He gestures around them at the empty opulence, at the deathly still man on the high shine floor. Marble is porous, he remembers, thinking of the blood leaking onto it. He’s not sure if it is marble, but that’s the most expensive masonry material he can think of. “--and it wasn’t enough because it wasn’t love. And I love you, Spirit.” 

Where she’d taken a couple steps, he takes a couple more, trying not to slip with his wetted shoes.

He lifts the hand he’d held Daniel still with. The least bloody of the two: just splattered and spilled on, not painted one solid color.

“I put up with it all because it meant being close to you. But I’m not doing that anymore. I’m not going to watch him hurt the woman I love anymore.” He drops his hand back down before it ever makes contact with her, because again, he looks at Daniel with a sneer. “I’ll kill him. If that’s what you want.”

Marcus cannot face her when he says this. He doesn’t want her to see the rage buried behind his permission-seeking; doesn’t want her to see that the permission-seeking may just be a formality at this point.

They are not the only ones who would live better lives with one less asshole in the world.

[vitalphenomena]

SHE SAID YOU DIDN'T KILL HIM BECAUSE SHE HAD TO. Maybe Marcus wouldn't know; Spirit objectively, oppressively does. She hears Daniel in her head as loud as real and any ghost in her radio brain, but his presence is different. His presence moves her like nobody else's.

What Spirit doesn't know: did Marcus want this? Is he disappointed? Is he relieved? Whatever Marcus has had to do in self-defense once or twice in his life has never bothered Spirit. In fact, she admires him for surviving—for knowing the value of his own life and where it resides in the grand scheme of things. Through it all, she has never considered him a killer, though she's sure he's critical enough of himself to wear this label like a brand.

They haven't talked about it. Maybe they should have. Maybe there are a lot of things that Spirit should have done differently. Like—

You brought me into this.

He looks disturbingly lucid when he explains what he's done. He believes, knows with conviction, that he has set them free.

(Daniel's powers don't begin and end with the devastating side of his mutation. There's the pleasure, of course, that controls Spirit perhaps even more compellingly. There's the money—the security and stability that have evaded her for the last two decades. And she can't ever forget the danger present to her family, no matter how much she wants to ignore this into non-existence.)

"Stop it."

She's suddenly so guilty that she needs to cry—so she does. Marcus' hand is hers to take (at least for a few seconds), and she only stares.

"This isn't—this isn't my fault."

You brought me into this. She asked for this—for Daniel at the very beginning, for Marcus later on.

"I don't want you to kill him—" She won't watch how his face shifts when she reveals this.

"I don't—I don't want this. He dies, and he's—he's not gone. This doesn't disappear. This is the fucking—real world. And in my head, he's, he'll be in my head, forever, and it'll never—it'll never stop until I make it stop."

Until she smashes her brains to bits against a sturdy surface, sturdy as marble, like she tried to do when she was a little girl.

"I didn't—know." She did. It was always going to get this bad. This self-awareness, though unrevealed to Marcus, agitates her further; she wrenches herself out of Marcus' orbit entirely and crosses closer to the kitchen.

More loudly: "What about Rhett? What about the fucking cops? How is anyone supposed to get away with murdering someone like him? Where would we go, Marcus? What the fuck do you think this is? You sound crazy!"

[pittbangs]

@vitalphenomena as samira said: ø for a LATE NIGHT text.

[ TEXT: MOHAN, S.]: [ image.png ] [ TEXT: MOHAN, S.]: do you see what kind of bullshit passes for dating profiles past 35? [ TEXT: MOHAN, S.]: if i see one more large mouth bass i may jump into a pond myself.

[vitalphenomena]

SAMIRA FORGOT TO PUT HER PHONE ON DO NOT DISTURB.

She assumes something's wrong—always in crisis mode, to an extent—and smiles fondly at the reality of the situation.

[ sms: Cassie PTMC ] Is that what the fish is called? [ sms: Cassie PTMC ] Or just what these guys look like?

Hee-hee.

[vitalphenomena]

@joyousdefunct | annis said: "you saved my life."

HE DID. He's not going to be humble about it—though he is amazed she's giving him such a blatant opportunity to be smug.

Maybe the near-death experience has cured something intolerable and defective within her—something that has, until now, refused to acknowledge that he is a wickedly cool guy.

"Пожалуйста. You're welcome." He has one hand wrapped around her forearm, the other on her shoulder. His hold is practical—almost clinical. If she loses her footing or her resolve, they'll have another mess to clean up. He isn't in the mood. He rarely sticks around long enough to be accountable for anything.

Smiling too coldly to be flirtatious: "You may thank me properly later."

Whatever that means.

[bruisedpenny]

magic words that never get old. she doesn't know whether they're specially imbued or just especially human right now, but they set her heart pounding in an echo that sounds all the way through her body.

pash almost wishes they didn't get in the bath. not because of her little accident, but because she wants to stick herself to him and needs the friction of her own grime. they'll get clean only to get dirtier and dirtier again. pash will need to be hosed down by morning. these are the kinds of designs she has in mind when she's pulling gojo's earlobe between her teeth. she doesn't soothe it with her tongue - not right away, at least.

"you ask for what you want like that and you're gonna go real far, kid. i like decisive. i like a thinker."

thighs spread so gojo can find a better anchor between them. the width of the tub is generous. pash lets herself slip a little, pressing him against the seam of her under the water. her dark eyed dialate even more, looking at him nestle into the dark bloom of her pubic hair. a small while she spends on this, just for her own self indulgence, working herself up against him.

"i been thinkin about you for days. waitin to get my hands on you. touch you. make you make those sweet little - god, y'hear that? hear how sexy you sound when i touch you?"

blood turns her lips lush. she twitches, body crags at her, she gropes his ass, everything a resounding hunger in that big fancy fuckin bathroom with its artfully dimmed lights. she wants him so bad but yeah, yeah, we'll get to it. gojo got first dibs, technically, and she is more than happy to oblige.

"how you feel about standin up, go fetch me them nice things we bought? can ya manage?" like he isn't, well, the strongest.

[vitalphenomena]

BEING THAT CURSED SPEECH ISN'T ONE OF GOJO'S NUMEROUS TALENTS, THIS IS ALL AS HUMAN AS IT GETS.

He wants to be chowed down on, he thinks, shuddering and whimpering like he's sooo sensitive, 'cause he is, 'cause it's fun to be.

"Hmmm!" Gojo says, and it's kind of shrill, sure, but what he's trying to do, here, is make a contemplative noise, to affirm Pasha's conviction that she's got a real thinker melting in her hands, in her lap.

And then—yeah. Yeah. "Yeahhh."

Sexy, maybe, is how he sounds when he's fairly certain he is being tortured and wouldn't do a damn thing to change it. He can't hear himself and he can't see straight, which is fine—he's never properly seeing things the way we do. Pasha knows what that's like, kind of, despite not having inherited the Six Eyes herself.

Fuck, she's exceptionally beautiful. He doesn't want to know what his cock would feel like buried in her, to the hilt—he doesn't want to see the face she'd make. He wants this—the denial. The line drawn. Satoru Gojo is capable of any and all things, and he's been honored by powers higher than his present self or even Pasha. But he can never have this; he loves that.

Drooling, Gojo relies on one arm to hold him upright while he wipes hastily at the spittle at the corner of his mouth. He hears her like she's underwater, or maybe he is—where their bodies touch, where she looks cosmic. The coarseness of her, what with how rigid he is, what with how perfect this water is—he'd rut into her pubic hair for hours. That's where he'd like to be. Forever.

"Huh?"

Yeah. yeah, he can manage, due to what he is, as we know. He kisses her all doting and sloppy before he slips and slides out of the tub, to the cabinet under the sink.

Amongst his products and serums and the pipes in perfect condition: unassuming box. Lube. Harness. So on, so on.

He's in a trance when he returns to her, kneeling by the tub because the tiles don't bruise or chill him, what with his being untouchable. Leaning over the edge, he reaches for her tits again, greedy guy, and kisses her again.

"I don't get anything done these days," he sighs, dejected, lips against her ear too gently, "Because I'm sitting around thinking about you. And now you're here! That's great. That's so—great."

[id1eyouth]

For a moment, he just stares. The ease of it all, the way Phil sidesteps every point and turns it into a game, needles at something deep and old inside him. There are days he can almost convince himself that they are a team. Then he opens his mouth.

"No," he says flatly. His jaw shifts. Irritation pulses behind his eyes, familiar as a heartbeat.

"You are missing the part where I'm trying to get rid of you." A beat passes. "Preferably several miles away." His gaze narrows. "And preferably without me… But I'll visit, of course."

[vitalphenomena]

HARRISON ASKED FOR THIS. He didn't bargain for this, not exactly, but isn't this what he's always been working towards? Doesn't Phil's power now serve to comfort him?

"I'm your son."

Doesn't that means something? Duty, obligation—these are things that allegedly matter.

"Stop lying."

[apjvff]

new religion: have a good time

[bruisedpenny]

gojo’s smile is just as shiny slippery nice as the rest of him. presumably. pash likes to see the kink of a smirk knocked out, the corners of his mouth softened up for person-to-person conversation and not just excitable quips.

honest to god, for a sec? she’d prematurely written him off as an excitable quip kind of guy. for one, easy way to integrate into a second language. for two, easy to block the harsh light with. she would know. tally that up, if you’re keeping score.

anyway. it’s nice to be asked a question.

her blood and brain recalibrating itself or whatever it does when she gets shook around like this, it turns her to the tender side of thinking. the answer is many-branched; i missed them sabretts, too much cold to get lost in, their milk comes in a bag, i fucked up some handiwork real bad, all this to say go knicks… fuck all that.

“the land, all that quiet, i could feel it tellin me i had overstayed my welcome. i had to go do somethin with myself again."

pash showed up in dawson city flayed, parts of her that she was so proud of chipped off in a mad and heated tear away from the east coast of america. her time in the yukon territory was wasted on her, she's remiss to remember; it was beautiful, and she was too ridden through with holes to enjoy it. the things that nourished her, bad as they were, didn't exist there and so, no healing. just festering. odd work kept her in booze and class As to cut the daylight. too much daylight. she started to seek out basements, but none of them felt safe or dangerous enough. she started to retrace her steps through the provinces, through BC onto alberta, sasketchewan through manitoba and then ontario. she tried to pick up the pieces of herself she had lost along the way and took a couple of jobs. she gained a trunkful of ill-gotten, maliciously-charged gains that needed a home in the process.

"i had no real intent of cutting the gas anywhere in particular. but then, i made a friend in montreal,” and at this she smiles, any coyness dusting off her face. and the bartender sets down another chartreuse and sprite in front of her (she does not want it), “and he got into some trouble not long after i met him. so i, i got him back to full charge, just about… that kind of welded us together. he needed a safe place to go. and there are good people here, better than me, who could help him."

that's a half truth. pash had planned to cut and run with an apology burger left in the squat they occupied in st henri. she locked the door behind her to find giddy sitting, expectant, in the passenger seat of the capri. these are things she doesn't explicitly tell gojo, yet, because she doesn't take easy to trusting people with her memories.

"so i came back for that." she rub-rubs the condensation on her glass. let's brutally undercut this for her lovely listener's benefit, shall we? "plus, ehh, it's new york! center of the fuckin universe."

[vitalphenomena]

SHE HAD TO GO DO SOMETHING WITH HERSELF AGAIN.

This resonates with Gojo in that he often reckons with the same basic necessity, but it also means he respects the hell out of her. People like them—The Strongest—often shirk their duties 'cause they're lazy or ultimately cowardly or, if you can believe it, hellbent on exterminating the very same human race they're meant to protect for no justifiable reason whatsoever.

It's one thing to be enlightened by the sobering recognition of what you owe a planet that's never given you anything soft, anything comforting. It's another thing to own up to it, to do what you ought to without a gun to your head.

Gojo does not interject, as he's not egregiously rude, truly, but his eyebrows wriggle to say A friend—oh yeah? As she's come close to acknowledging, he'll quip about anything and flirt with a rock. It's not his business what kind of friends Pasha's got in Canada or anywhere else—but, man, he'll laugh his ass off when he realizes how wrong he is to even tease about Ontario's own Giddy Rosenstock like this.

"People better than you, huh? Yeah, right. I'm not interested in meeting them. But, hey—aren't they supposed to be polite? Canadians—they're supposed to be polite. You've found the only Canadian criminal at large? Very cool!" Because the only trouble worth getting into and worth being defended by the likes of Pasha Novak is the kind that makes law enforcement scratch their heads and stomp their boots—the kind that has snobby elites fearing for their precariously-maintained power over society.

Gojo takes another hearty swig of his beer, which he really does not need to be doing.

"Have you been to Times Square? I love Times Square."

[bruisedpenny]

@vitalphenomena harris said, “ungrateful little yuppie larvae.”

“that’s what you get for gettin born on the bridge end of the bridge and tunnel, i suppose.”

around the broke teeth and whimpering on the ground in front of them - she is employing a city blind not her circus mentality, harris harris can beat the fuck out of whoever he wants - she pipes up, not unfriendly, “say. what’s your workload lookin like these days?”

[vitalphenomena]

EXASPERATED, AGGRESSIVE: "I don't know what you're talkin' about."

Harris flicks hair out of his line of sight. Pash's question has him achier than the task at hand, which he continues by ramming the sturdy toe of his boots into his victim's abdomen.

"What, you want my fuckin' schedule? I'm supposed to work a double tomorrow, and I open the day after that. I'm busy."

[bruisedpenny]

@vitalphenomena burns said, “it’s a river of slime!”

enthused, “ohya fer sure!”

“the fish’re fine but whatever they got goin on in there makes em wicked slow. can’t deke outta the way of nothin, so usin a pole feels, like, unusually cruel. just teasin, no need to be mean to em. you can basically just pick em up in yer hands.”

[vitalphenomena]

"You took me to shit river to touch fish with my bare fuckin' hands?"

"I'll kill you."

[joyousdefunct]

“so this isn’t a shooting lesson at all.”

she breaks the action, removes the spent shell, then turns it once between her fingers before tucking it into her pocket. it's ritualistic. appealing, in times of such uncertainty and change.

“it’s some kind of personality assessment?” 

she shifts her footing, searching for firmer ground. a grouse emerges from the brush a few yards away. instinctively, she raises the barrel, but her grip falters, the weight of it suddenly unsteady in her hands.

[vitalphenomena]

DOLOKHOV SMILES THE PLACID SMILE OF A MAN WHO HAS NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT BECAUSE HE IS ALWAYS RIGHT.

There's an undeniable smugness to it that borders on impolite.

"I have no clue what you are talking about. I couldn't think to test a good woman like you." Because he is a good man. Looks like one, maybe, at the very least.

He goes quiet. She might be able to do something if he—righteous, snide, the act of firing a gun too ingrained in his bones for him to be any good at teaching someone else how to feel the way he does—stops intervening.

He grimaces in disappointment.

"What are you afraid of?"

[archvillainofromance]

Lee Pace as Brother Day FOUNDATION Season One

[vitalphenomena]

what they don't want you to know about stella romano is that she has an addiction. and that addiction is to treating her men like her little girlfriends

[vitalphenomena]

[vitalphenomena]

fight between gojo and phil. who are you putting your money on