shadowglitter | ic contact

peter corners me a lot and whispers the things he'd do for you. it's awkward and uncomfortable, being around him. clouded by lust for you as he is. he says he wants to feel your beard in his butt.

i can see that. we had a lot of edgy warriors in my homeland and i think he could be the edgiest. how do you think crobat would wear pants? i need to design him an outfit.

jokes on you i know peter is straight then again he is the only straight i know... perhaps it was a lie all along... mutual agreement on him wearing it on the bottom part of his body with holes for his second pair of wings. me and matt have discussed this at length. i asked maxie as well but he threw a cushion at me.

Fuck! Why does he always tell people that? God damn it. I'm never gonna get a beard in his butt at this rate. I'm gonna ask Poe to like, grow a beard and

[ whoops he remembers the poe sitch and he's sad again. ]

and like put it in Peter's butt. wing holes sounds good. maxie's the worst? i'm gonna bring home some of this space paste and smear it in his stupid herbal tea or whatever nerd bullshit he drinks. probably herbal tea. boiled over a volcano. tell him i think he's a big nerd and that i named a spell after him and it was called Everlasting Celibacy.

[yeah he'll just skate over that.]

can you even grow a beard? i'm struggling to see you as anything other than clean shaven i told him he said "shut up you buffoon" exactly as expected

i mean i can, but why would i? archie i'm not going near peter's butt, that's so weird. stop saying so much weird shit all the time. for ONCE that sounds about right. i love camerupt. can you tell camerupt i love him? can you tell me i love literally everyone in your house right now, actually? except blue, if he's there. fuck that dude.

I WASN'T ASKING IN RELATION TO PUTTING YOUR BEARD IN PETER'S ASS!! i mean in general! you should grow a soul patch it might suit you? okay here's what happened in order i told maxie and he just rolled his eyes i told matt and he yelled a lot i told camerupt and it said "rupt" and licked me i told muk and it hugged me and got gunk on me i gotta shower now i told carvanha and sharpedo and they both made a weird shark noise i told the crobats and they're asleep so they did nothing i told the mightyenas and they went bananas oh right yeah blue's not talking to me i punched him in the face

everything suits me, but. i'll grow one out and see how it goes? i'll need your opinion, though, you're the face-hair man. that's all REALLY CUTE and made me really happy but-- why did you punch blue?

i'll help you do it when you get back if you want it was bad you know how sometimes you're doing pretty well and then other times you're lounging in the garbage? i was in the garbage so i couldn't control my emotions and hit him when he upset me i was wrong to do that that's the kind of abusive shit rockets did

Edited 2017-11-27 23:40 (UTC)

archie... i'm not gonna beat you up over it or anything. you're a good enough dude to know you've fucked up. i'm sorry that it happened, though. for you and for him. do you want to talk about it? no judgment? i know i'm going through shit right now but i hate being the one who needs help all the time, so. talk to me about it.

i don't think there's really anything to say. thanks though. i'm jsut gonna give him space then say sorry for being stupid. you okay for me to reveal some of my mysterious backstory? it's not gonna be good stuff. not traumatic? just i did bad stuff, briefly. before the whale thing. i dont't want to fuck with you if you're not up to it.

nah, that's okay too. odin dark is always available to talk about bad stuff.

alright. so i'll have to give some backstory here. back home there's a bunch of regions which are basically the same as countries here. i come from hoenn which is a tropical one. so does maxie and matt. blue and red come from kanto. niko is from johto. they're pretty close to each other. a little like the europe here. there's a lot of timeline fuckery going on for us. not related to this, but between us there's like 3 different timelines. it's crazy. anyway, so when i did my whale god awaken thing, red was actually about eleven or so, even if he's twenty here. what i did is a decade in the past for him.

[he should ask red if it's public what became of team aqua or magma in his time but... he's too scared to know.]

in kanto there was this mafia type group called team rocket. they're pretty og... the team leader - giovanni - was pretty much the biggest name in the underworld on that side of the world, but especially in kanto and johto. anyway, when i did my thing red was eleven in kanto and taking down giovanni's crime ring. no, that wasn't a typo. a kid took him down. i guess when it came down to it giovanni was actually a gigantic bitch. he's niko's dad, too, so if you wanna know why niko is such a shit that's why. okay. rewind about seventeen years before that. i was about fifteen. i'd pretty much finished my own little journey after i left home at ten like people do (i know that sounds crazy here, i can explain that some other time) and had all the gym badges from hoenn (another thing, basically each major city has a gym with strong trainers in you challenge and if you beat them all you get a badge so you can challenge the league who are the best in the region) only i didn't really know what to do with my life. usually people continue travelling to other regions to challenge their gyms or go back to their home to start a normal life; i didn't challenge the league because i wasn't particularly interested in getting into massively competitive battling like that and i didn't go home because the town i come from, pacifidlog, has a big sailing culture but i was being a stupid edgy kid and thought i was above that. i went to kanto because it's near by hoenn and wanted to see if i could figure my life out there. maybe if i'd gone to johto instead it would've been different. hell, i could've gone to my grandparents in alola but i didn't. i still don't know why... i made a huge choice with very little thought behind it. though honestly i wanted to catch a lapras. it's like this giant sea turtle that can understand human speech better than other pokémon and is used for surfing in the sea. i was gonna go to johto to get a mantine, which is a manta ray pokémon. i always specialised in water types... maybe i wanted to bring some exotic ones home to show off to my parents. i wasn't a BAD kid, my mum raised me right, but team rocket kind of draw you in through a bunch of insidious ways. they'll let you do a quick job for them - catch a pokémon for them and they'll pay you and supposedly take the caught pokémon away to their labs for research to help the professors in the region. this was all lies, they went to the black market, but i was a stupid kid. i didn't know it and i believed them. by the time i'd been in kanto a couple months i was pretty much working for them full time to cover my rent and thought - fuck it - they seem reasonable enough. why not make it official? so i got enlisted as one of their grunts. they were smart. all the superiors were in on the joke and they knew what they were doing, while all the new guys thought maybe they'd finally got a stable job, even if the description is a little vague. you'd get paired up with people who were experienced so when you went along with them, it was like a mini mob mentality. i stole a LOT of stuff with them to aid whatever their goals were, because if the people i was with who were more experienced said what we had to do was right, even if it didn't seems like it. who am i to question? i didn't want to be homeless, so i stole people's pokémon, i did enforcing, i threatened people into paying their loans... pretty much just all of the stuff you can imagine that wasn't outright physical violence. i'm ashamed to say i enjoyed it, to some degree. you got rewarded well when you didn't fuck up. muk and crobat are actually originally team rocket pokémon i was given because all the grunts need to have the same team. made it easier to care for them, i guess. zubats and grimers were also somewhat rare, too, so they were meant to be intimidating. i had to put my own team in the PC - some of them are still there, they're a little too old to battle now - but i kept crobat and muk on hand because they were babies when i got them. i'm always grateful they hadn't been handed down, because i've no doubt they would've been abused. i left team rocket because i finally saw what they were actually doing. i didn't do anything about it, i just decided one day that the pokémon abuse they were starting to leak into was too much. i know it's fucked up that i was okay intimidating and threatening people but the animals were when i drew the line, but i'd met someone who i could actually relate to within the organisation,[maxie, but archie won't out him too.]and they agreed with me that it was too much. sometimes the people i threatened into owing money were genuinely bad people, anyway. the pokémon i had to steal or whatever never were. during the memory shit, blue saw a memory of mine when i was in team rocket. i don't know if it was a bad one, because fuck knows i've done enough shit in my life that 90% of it is regret, but i'd imagine he would hate me for it regardless. i wasn't part of the team that red stopped anymore, but... i went home to hoenn and ended up making team aqua. i did the same shit there, only i was the one ordering my grunts intimidate people and steal their pokémon. i never ordered harm against people or their team, but i was no better than giovanni, really, even if i try to tell myself i was. right up until i almost ended the world thinking i could save it instead. anyway i kind of want giovanni to be ported in so i can beat his stupid old man ass. he wouldn't know me. i never saw him when i was part of the team, but i still hate him for what he built and what he's done to niko. it's hypocritical because i chose to be part of it but... i guess my only positive aspect is that i'm capable of feeling remorse about it. giovanni ran off without giving a shit about anyone part of his team. jeez. that was a lot.

archie, please don't tell me after this that i'm putting you on a pedestal. just listen. we had these animals back home. pegasi? horses with wings. they were very quiet, very shy things. white as snow, wings like great, great doves. they were all very afraid of humans, but they had a gift. they could sense the nature of a person's heart - and if they thought you were good, or kind, or loving, they would trust you. even before you spoke to them, they knew if you were the kind of person who could derive joy from suffering or the kind of person who, like you, treated animals, things weaker than them, with respect. they opened up to those they saw as "good". not necessarily gentle, or self-sacrificing, or anything like that - just, "good". anyway, one of my best friends? she had one. they were inseparable. it used to belong to her mother, sumia. when sumia died, in my original homeland, her pegasus found its way back to her daughter, my best friend. cynthia. the two of them mourned sumia together. i saw cynthia fly that pegasus into many battles, against any number of foes. a great number of enemies, human and monster alike, fell to her lance. she was powerful and brave, and - as all of us children were - merciless. she killed many people. i killed many more than her. but she was kind and warm and bonded so strongly with the pegasus that knew what kind of heart she had, and fought by her side until the very last day i knew her. there was a year or two i didn't see her. in that time, i killed many people, not on the battlefield of war or for survival or out of self defense, but because it was how i could make money in my world doing something that i wrongly considered to be noble. i would not be surprised if she and her pegasus killed for coin as i did. my point is, good people can do bad things, even if - at the time - they know, on some level, that those things are wrong. maybe you were a self-aware hypocrite, who valued the inclusivity team rocket offered you over the morality it played against. maybe there was a selfish, ugly part of you which valued the sense of community you found in an organization like that over the health and safety of strangers, both in your grunt days and when you organized team aqua. there is no part of me who cannot see you as a person who has done selfish, terrible things. because, there is no part of me who is not willing to believe that when you tried to end the world, you were a monster. you were more of a monster than i think even you realize, as you have never been an innocent bystander to someone else's apocalypse the way that i have been. i don't have the words to say what a fucked up, selfish, cowardly thing it is that you tried to do. i cannot possibly make it clear to you how disgusting it is, what you tried to do to so many people, even if i don't fully understand what it is you tried to do, or why, exactly, you tried to do it. let me make this very clear, though. i have lived through hell. i have seen what the end of the world does to people. families - my own, those of the people i love, or those of the hundreds of thousands of civilians in my care, as their prince - were torn apart. there is a barren, empty timeline in my homeland filled with graves. i lived for years in a timeline that wasn't my own, knowing the one i came from was full of blood, the undead, and bodies littering the streets. i have seen a selfish, egotistical piece of shit think that his vision for the future is worth more than anyone else's, and i watched that man ruin countless lives for the sake of what he thinks is "best". there is no part of me that doubts you have been, in the past, as bad as him. as bad as those who watched my country drown in anguish and relished in the power that it gave them. but i still think if you met a pegasus, it would love you. you are kind. you are admirable. you have seen, on some level, the heartache that you've caused, and the heartache that you could have caused. you know, on some level, that you need to change, and you are trying to find retribution for your past in whatever way you can. you are strong and brave in a way that so few people are. you are open and honest about the remorse you feel, and you've never - in the months that i've known you - dwelled, silently, caring more about feeding your own suffering than doing what you can to make someone's life better in whatever way you can. maybe you did that before you met me. i know you have been here for a very long time. but if you have focused on your own misery without caring about other people, that just means you are still growing, as i have never seen that side of you. the king i am fighting for in my country back home is burning civilians out of spite. the man who ruined my homeland destroyed a woman's mind so she would bear his child in silence. there is a pretty stark difference between you and the other world-enders i know. i'm pretty sure none of them would have set aside their feelings to get me a cool rainbow sword or cheer me up about getting dumped on tv. you are a stupid man who has fucked up a lot. but so am i. so are most of us. so whatever. sorry for implying you don't deserve love yesterday.

Edited 2017-11-28 04:21 (UTC)

[it actually takes him a while to reply. he's reading it over and over, about 50 different emotions and reactions flying through his head.

he wants to defend himself, as he always does when he's actually called out. he doesn't, though, because he knows that's not appropriate. odin is right, on all counts. it's pretty incredible actually. archie ends up getting up and pacing around his house while he tries to formulate a reply.

eventually:]

thanks, odin i know that sounds sarcastic but it's not no-one would talk to me like that before. being aware of my fuck up is a blessing and a curse because when they see i'm upset they want to say something to make me feel better. this is why i tell anyone who tries to befriend me what i did. maybe i should just tell everyone. make it my fucking voicemail or something. which isn't to say that's not what this is but everyone always tells me what i did is in the past. only you, magnus, matt and maxie get that it's not something that can be waved off i've heard people say "what you did back home doesn't matter here" but it does because what everyone lived through back home for better or worse made them the person they are here if i had been ported in with the relic in my hand then i have no doubt i would've ended up hurting people HERE out of spite maybe people just don't care because it's not their world magnus helped me realise how much i fucked with may when she stopped me. my only regret there is that i didn't get a chance to talk to him and come to that conclusion until after may was ported out. you know what he's like. magnus always knows what to say. (small magnus. not bear magnus.) honestly a lot of the time i feel like what i'm doing is in vain, because i'll probably end up repeating the cycle again like i did after being in team rocket then starting team aqua but i think maybe you guys are why i haven't god don't laugh at me about this phrasing but "embraced the darkness within" because that's what it is? it's a horrible part of a person that enjoys hurting other people. its what i did when i was enabled to in team rocket and when people were too scared to stop me going off the deep end in team aqua. i hope i never end up like that again. i used to revel in seeing people fear me but now i hate it. so i guess thanks for not treating me like an idiot? or with the gravity what i did deserves feelings are hard. it's fine.

[he doesn't.

]

when you care about a person, it hurts to see them suffer. archie... if you're trying to make amends for the things you've done, i think you've got the mental capacity to try and accept that sometimes people are gonna suck, even when they've got good intentions. it is not easy to comprehend the complete and total annihilation of humanity. it's not that people don't "care", it's just - okay, it's like war. if i told you a horrible story about a person i killed and how it haunted me, you would probably say something like, "i'm sorry you had to go through that", and quietly hope that one day the scars in me will ease. because what else are you supposed to say? you've never been in a war, but you know what i'm like now, and you know that i'm not running around stabbing people in the chest in the same way you're not running around trying to piss off a whale. all you know is that it sucks and you love me and you want my future to be brighter. that's what your friends want for you, too. it must be hard for civilians with no grasp of death to see the man you were. it must be hard for your friends who have never witnessed the end of things imagine all you've done. not when you're in front of them recovering, so much better and so much stronger than the archie you've been in the past. that doesn't make their love for you less valid. just, a little more naive, than the love i have for you. if you think you're going to repeat the cycle again, then you will. if you genuinely want to move forward in your life, you need to do more than just prime yourself for whatever punishment might come your way, one day. you need to put the work into actually becoming a man who would find the idea of pain in other people completely reprehensible. you need to rewrite yourself. but like i said - you're still growing, i think. yeah, you might be aware that there's a dark part of you that could flare up again, especially without people like me and magnus and your friends from home around to reign it in. that just means you're not done growing up yet. because one day, alongside your conviction and with the distance you've put between your present and your past, you're not going to need anyone but yourself to do the right thing. but if it helps i promise i'll come kill you if you fuck up again. ok?

[it's still hard for him to grasp this. that people truly care about him. it's a selfish belief to fall back on, but... he can't help it. his kneejerk reaction is that he's stupid scum, no one does or should care about him and he deserves to die alone. pretty standard self-hate, really.]

i don't

[his typing bubble stays up. goes. stays up. stays up for 20 minutes.]

know how to convince myself it's not inevitable. that i'll do that again.

[another pause.]

please don't do that

[ Odin watches that bubble, staring at it like a lifeline. It's - awful, what he's doing, but Archie is distracting him from his own problems, and waiting so long for him to talk again is starting to make Odin focus on his own heartache. He feels selfish when the silence creeps in enough, starts making him panic enough, to make him want to disconnect and go. But he stays, and he sighs long and hard when Archie finally says what's on his mind. Fuck, that's rough. ]

Yeah... I know. I'm sorry. If I knew how to stop insidious mental bullshit from fucking over personal growth, I would be a lot less painful to be around.

[ The things he's done, the ways he's felt about himself - he's not going to go into them, not here, but there's an empathetic sadness in his chest that aches for Archie. He thinks about getting the spotlight off of himself, embarrassed, suddenly, by writing that, but when he types out a quick "hey, my friend back home who tried to end the world had a couple of kids and that worked out okay (except for when one of the kids went evil and tried to kill everyone), so maybe you could knock matt up and become a stay at home dad", he erases it, deciding deflecting this with humor is not the way to handle things. whoops. ]

I wouldn't ever hurt you. But like I said - You are a work in progress. There is so much more ahead of you than the way you're feeling now. Can you tell me you haven't changed - on any level - between when you first arrived here and now? You've made a lifetime of bad decisions. That hollowness is not going to go away in the eight or nine months you've been in America. But there has to be some part of you that realizes you're changing for the better, in some small way.

only physically. i don't do self destructive shit as much as i used to.

[there's that bubble for ages again.]

i still i still think if i hadn't used the relic wrong that it would've worked

[even over text, the apparent shame he feels for even thinking this is clear.]

[ there's no bubble, on Odin's side. just a long, stony silence that stretches for a few minutes as he works out what he wants to say. ]

That's still change. I think you're more than that, but protecting yourself is very difficult and something to be proud of.

[ but - fuck. he breathes out. he has to handle this right. ]

That is a lot to carry with you. You came closer to your goal than I thought you did. If you get ported back home with the memories you've made here - And if you're ported to a point in time before you "used the relic wrong" - Would you use it right, this time, do you think?

no if i had those memories i wouldn't do it at all i'd give it to shelly when she told me to stop i know there's no way to undo what was done i just in that moment when i used the relic to wake kyogre up i hated so many people so much there's a lot i don't remember about that day, but the only two feelings i really remember from it are regret and hate and i don't know which one was stronger i honestly don't even know how i'm still coherently sane

Not doing much to dispel this notion I have of you that you're good and you're trying.

[ he runs his hand over his face, though. as more and more of this conversation goes on, the more Archie reminds Odin of - somebody specific, somebody big. he wants to tell Archie about him, but he thinks if he does, it'll only hurt.

because that somebody is destined to repeat his cycle of destruction until he dies, mourning himself and his pain, ruined in a way no living being should ever be. ]

Regret is not an emotion held by evil, Archie. Hate can be justifiable. What would it take for you to hurt people in America? Can you foresee yourself trying to end the world here, as you did back home? In any circumstance?

sorry.

[that's... just how it is, he thinks. if odin decides after this that archie isn't who he thought he was and he isn't interested in knowing him anymore, then... he'd have to live with it.]

no

[...he doesn't have the heart to tell odin he doesn't like this world for the same reason he fell into villainy in his own, and that that in itself is a slippery slope.]

at the very least i know maxie is from the timeline where i tried to stop him and he was the one that went batshit instead of the other way around even if i don't trust myself, i trust my friends to tell me i'm being a shithead. especially maxie, because he knows what to look out for more than anyone.

No, I mean - so much of you is good. I know you can't see it, but-- you are. To me. I wish I could make you understand that, but I know what it's like, being unable to judge yourself when there's so much wrong at your back. It's kind of funny that you've never condemned me for the things I've done.

[ though - he understands why archie might hold back on being harsh with him, if that ever happens. with how quick odin is to internalize things and dwell on them, people treat him like glass, sometimes. he hates it. ]

It's just, A lot of your answers don't sound like what I would expect to hear, from someone destined to fall back into the old habits you've fallen back into once before. If you were to ever value the pain of others higher, again, than you do right now - you would lose a lot. I don't think you want to lose what you have. And I don't think any of us are going anywhere any time soon.

Edited 2017-11-28 23:21 (UTC)

[hey odin have you tried not being so shit at existing? that might help!!

though the true reason why archie is never harsh with anyone unless they earn his ire is because he feels he has no place to judge.]

i won't i can't just thinking about it makes me sick

[ cold? ]

That fear and that sickness is going to stop you from treading over old mistakes. I don't think you're going to turn back into the monster you think you might become. Not while you feel like that.

[ HE SAYS, WHILE ON A MISSION BACK HOME TO KILL SOMEONE WHOSE FEAR AND SICKNESS ABOUT BECOMING EVIL TURNED HIM INTO AN EVIL WORLD-DESTROYING ULTRA-NIGHTMARE ]

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