Middle of the night
I smell coffee
I get all the way down to the kitchen, smiling
Before I remember you’re dead.
-A Softer World

“It’s overused and clichéd because it’s true; it feels like it happened yesterday. I mean it feels like the world froze and time just forgot how to work, and I forgot how to work and how to function and I froze. Like the last two years were some kind of horrible, very horrible out of body experience, or something I heard happened to someone else – one of those horror stories they tell young girls to make them afraid to go walking at night. The last thing I remember with any clarity is two years ago. It’s not just clear but there’s this kind of … there’s a harsh sharpness to it, like cold air in the lungs. I remember waking up and how shocked I was to find that everyone was still moving about, that the world hadn’t just stopped – it felt wrong, scary wrong, like it was three days after the apocalypse and no one had noticed. And they said it would hurt less with time but it doesn’t – you go to sleep and you wake up and you wake up and you wake up and you wait for it to stop hurting but all that happens is that instead of being raw it’s like something that’s been picked open over and over again and there’s this ugly scar forming around it but it keeps stinging just as much as before – it feels like it felt when they first told me what happened and I learnt what they mean when they say ‘her knees buckled’.
“Grief is something you can’t hope to understand until you feel it. Someone once said it’s like missing a step on the stairs but that feels so badly – so crassly inadequate; I have to tell you: you feel yourself die. Physically it feels like a blow to the chest, and everything shuts down; your legs stop working and you start leaking and you go blind and your brain is screaming the entire time, just screaming, but you start laughing – or maybe that was just me? I cried for days and I never knew I had that much saltwater in me, it kept coming and coming – I swear to god my eyes still sting like hell whenever I start crying. Then there are times when crying just isn’t enough, and there’s this awful raw sound that wants to come out of you because you just have to scream, you have to scream just like you would if someone were cutting your chest open – you’re leaning against a desk or a wall or some fucking thing with your arms shaking and all you can feel is how badly you need to scream and how much your eyes are stinging and that you’ll never remember anything in your life as sharply as this moment.”

Life is essentially a chess game.
You have to plan and calculate and
I am so lonely.
-A Softer World 

Hero built that lab around herself. Tucked up in one corner of the Home, it was her place. A sanctuary. There were thirteen locks on the door, locks she made herself from scrap metal and fitted together to work in perfect harmony. She found cogs and iron had a rhythm that true life lacked. Things could be calculated with engineering, she could bash things into place with hammers and curl up over the detail until everything fitted together in logical order. Things made sense. Metal was immovable and reliable and could be counted upon to behave a certain decided way.
In real life, outside the door, lay uncertainty. The danger of having ones hopes crushed very suddenly, and the numerous possibilities for abandonment, hurt, confusion, misunderstanding, and emotional complication. Hero knew by now that leaving oneself open to attack, to allow anyone to gain any kind of ground on her, was foolish and unacceptable.
She made clockwork robots to keep herself company.

sirdavevantas submitted:

The fight is drawing to a close, both of us standing beaten and ragged in the middle of a field, unable to battle much longer.  I drop my weapon and you drop yours, our eyes meeting dangerously across the distance.

We both charge, and tumble to the ground in a tangle of punches and kicks, reduced to pulling hair and biting.  I tug the hair covering your ear aside, and sensually whisper…

“This is my division…”

You hiss in pain, sinking your teeth into my arm, and cry back “REICHENFEELS!”

But you are no match for me, and you are pinned, panting and weak to the ground, as I lean inches from your face, and breathe out one final phrase…

“Fuck you, I won a Bafta…”

I choke at the words and spasm briefly, but without warning thrust my knee into your stomach, shrieking in a voice of destruction, “LOKI’D!”

Not prepared for the cross-fandom jab, you buckle, and in the moment of weakness I flip you over and execute a perfectly timed body roll to somer-sault over your head and land back on my feet.

You are in the mud. (There is mud.) You hiss at me in displeasure as I stand over you, swearing graphically about ex-marines, and I smile. But you are ready to sink to lower stakes.

“Anderson …” you gasp with seething fury that seethes, and I take a step back.

“No!”

“ANDERSON LOVES DINOSAURS!”

I stumble with the pain of it, fire straight to the chest, the memory of one thousand poorly executed jokes burning the heart right out of me. I am falling to my knees. The world is blacking out slowly, and you are walking towards me with a twisted smile worthy of a Stephanie Meyer novel. But as we both know, not today matey, only the good die young.

I launch myself up as far as I can and grab your collar, pulling you down with me with the sheer force of being fucking stubborn, and bring your face right before mine, our noses almost touching in paroxysms of hatred. We glare into each others eyes, and in yours I see the end of it all - the unravelling of fandom all the way back to the beginning, Tumblr immemorial crumbling to pieces in ages of resentment and breaking off, meme by meme, right back to the start - and I know the three little words to send us both to oblivion.

My hands shake, but my gaze remains steady. I shall die in a poorly imagined non-descript field, covered in mud, but I am taking you down with me.

“John …” I whisper, my voice nearly a caress. There is a moment of confusion in your eyes, before realisation, and you struggle, but there is no escape.

“John loves jam.”

The explosion rips us apart. And in that moment, I swear we were elitist bloggers.

I have found a way
To watch a video in your head
High definition with instant replay.
It’s called having regrets.
-A Softer World 

By candlelight he rereads Anne’s letters. They smell like violets and are just as frail. The candlelight turns them golden, warms them up in a melancholy semblance of life, and sometimes Martin can almost imagine her there at his shoulder, smiling serenely with her dark auburn hair tumbling down over her night dress in familiar waves. He can imagine her like that, illuminated by candlelight, and paint over the memory of her face white and thin and wasting away on hospital pillows.
Her nightdress is still draped over the back of an empty chair in the corner of the room, as if its owner will reclaim it any day now. They wouldn’t let her wear it in the hospital. Contamination, they said, we have to be careful.
“I miss you, Martin Thewlis,” she says in her letters. “I’ll see you again soon though, be sure of it. I’m only a Train ride away.”
She talks about the countdown – the big one, counting down the years until she could move away to join him, and the little ones, counting down the weeks until he could come to visit her. He wasted years writing her letters when he could have been holding her hand.
She’s far away again. Only this time there’s no train in the world he can get on to see her.

Second best isn’t so bad.
-A Softer World 

“You know you’re the best friend I could have asked for, Lettie.”
Lettie looks down and picks up a piece of broken pottery in the most nonchalant way possible, leaning against the worn benchtop and suddenly very aware of what all her limbs are doing.
“Oh yeah?” she says casually, not meeting his eyes, which she’s sure are horribly sincere. Inside she’s frustrated. How many hours does she spend in this cramped and sweaty greenhouse, listening to endless plant talk that goes straight over her head, how many times has she dropped hints that could leave craters on the face of a moon, how many times has she brought him food, flattered him, smiled at him, helped him prune his bloody roses? And for nothing. Barely a glance her way, absent-minded smiles, and being his “friend”?
A year later she kicks herself for it. She kicks herself for not looking, not meeting his eye, not saying something light and witty. Not because she’s embarrassed she didn’t make a move, but because she’s embarrassed she was so petty as to reject an offer of sincere friendship simply because it wasn’t enough for her, even though it was all Toby had to give. Smiles, all day access to his precious greenhouse, hours spent explaining again and again aspects of plant life he had told her about days ago in an effort to include her, to teach her, because he so innocently thought she was interested. She was interested. Unfortunately just not in plants.

I wonder if the ugly ducking
Felt stupid
When he realised that being pretty
Didn’t magically solve all his problems.
-A Softer World 

“It’s a stupid dress.”
“Mhmm. And?”
“And it was a stupid dance.”
“And Toby?”
“Oh Toby. Well, he’s … he left early.”
“Oh, Lettie …”
“Don’t look at me like that, Martin, I can take care of meself! It don’t matter, alright? It don’t matter at all, I don’t care! I don’t care! He’s an idiot, and I’m an idiot, he’ll love plants for the rest of his life, and there ain’t room for nothing else, alright?”
“Lettie …”
Silence.
“Oh, get off me, I’m not a fairfen-girlie.”

There are people who believe that a photograph captures your soul.
For them this is a terrible thing.
For me it’s one last chance.
-A Softer World 

Iris carries the camera with her everywhere she goes. She doesn’t do much around the Home. She just exists, appearing here and there, insubstantial as a crushed butterfly wing. Her hair hangs lank and long, shadows take permanent residence under her eyes and inside her mind. The camera seems too heavy and clunky for her long fingers, but she holds onto it like a lifeline.
She can see the world through it. She takes photographs of everyone, and she is the most skilful kind of photographer – the kind that nobody notices. She captures everything she can, laughter and smiles and years of love held within a fleeting glance. She takes them back to her dark room, and develops them, sinking them in water with careful practiced movements. And then she hangs them. Her fingertips brush against the faces in the photographs, making contact in the only way she knows how.