Signed.
Please consider signing this! It will allow non-binary individuals like myself to put a gender-neutral ‘X’ on official documents like passports instead of having to pick between ‘M’ an ‘F’. Even if this doesn’t affect you please think about how much of a difference it will make to people like me. The UK government currently doesn’t legally recognise non-binary genders at all and this would be a huge step forward.
Love it!!! They're such a cute family
Butterflies-verse fambly - bless.
if the marauders were brilliant enough to discuss their fullmoon trips in front of snape, then there’s no way they’d be able to conceal themselves from mcgonagall. unless of course some things would just be too much for her to handle.
Check out my book trailer! Only t-minus 6 days and counting until Rise of the Darkwitch is released.
Have you pre-ordered your copy yet?
Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?k=kindle+books+ziv+gray
Amazon US:https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01MPVMJG1/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1477254369&sr=1-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&keywords=ziv+gray
Amazon CA:https://www.amazon.ca/gp/aw/d/B01MPVMJG1/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1477254500&sr=8-1&pi=SY200_QL40&keywords=ziv+gray
Amazon AUS:https://www.amazon.com.au/gp/aw/d/B01MPVMJG1/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1477254416&sr=8-1&pi=SY200_QL40&keywords=ziv+gray
Amazon NZ:https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01MPVMJG1/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1477254466&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=ziv+gray
It’s the boy’s first Father’s Day without their Father around.
John point blank refuses to come down from Five. He locks his jaw, grits his teeth and forces himself to stay, stationary and floating, his muscles tense and trembling without his consent, at his station. He’s going to be ready in case a rescue call comes in, in case he’s needed. It’s what their Father would have wanted John, tired and trembling, tells himself. International Rescue is Jeff’s organization and today of all days John is not going to let him down.
Later though, his resolve slowly crumbles. It cracks away, peeling like flaky paint, and it leaves John feeling very small; a tiny dot adrift in the nothingness of space, and he starts to wonder if he should have perhaps named a star for his Father by now, like he had for his Mother, when she…
John ends up curled on his own in his room in the gravity ring, pushed against his headboard and blocking out both EOS’ and his brother’s calls. He’s got his space-print duvet over his head and his hands pressed to his ears and he’s shaking in the silence when all he needs is his Dad’s hand on his shoulder and the sharp spice of whisky and cinnamon and cigarette smoke breathed into his hair.
John doesn’t look at the protocols, running permanent searches for Jefferson Tracy, at all. He can’t bring himself to look at empty results today.
Scott passively straight up ignores the significance of the date. Everything is quiet and tense and Scott doesn’t mention anything at all. He tries his best to go on like it’s just another day, but beneath his awkward, forced routine, he just knows. It’s just there and raw and an empty space at their table.
He calls John six times and gets irrationally angry when his brother doesn’t pick up. As the day wears on, Scott gets increasingly and increasingly more edgy and irritated and he finally snaps at Virgil and Gordon, who are easy targets because they were just there, shouting that the whole day is stupid and that they shouldn’t be grieving him, because Jefferson Tracy is not dead. He can’t be dead. Scott’s brothers understand though, and Virgil just silently loops his fingers around Scott’s wrist, guiding him to the sofa and pushing his head down between his knees, talking their eldest through breaths.
Virgil has still got the gift that he’d been planning to give his Father. Two’s Pilot has been prepared for months; he’d made it long before Jeff had even disappeared. It’s a watch. One Virgil made himself from scratch; all fine, elegant lines and some really beautiful engineering. He spent ages on it, and now it’s just sat wrapped up under his bed because Virgil has no one to give it to anymore. He takes it out and stares at it, trailing his fingers over silver, stylish wrapping paper and ribbon. Eventually, Virgil makes himself put the gift away, trying his best to be positive and to think that maybe he can just give it to Jeff next year.
Once they’ve found him.
Gordon is in the pool almost as soon as he wakes. He’s doing rapid, angry, frustrated lengths; refusing to come out for anything because that’s just how he deals with grief. He pushes it away and looses himself in the repetitive, constant motion of the waves and the water and his own body gliding professionally through it. But today each tumble turn just twists the knot ever tighter in his stomach. Today swimming does not help at all.
Gordon drags himself out of the pool, leaving a damp, splotchy trail of water all over the flagstones as he shakes his head like a dog before burying it in a towel. He dresses and lumbers up to the kitchen, slumping at the breakfast bar. His hair is still dripping wetly into the back of his shirt collar… which, in yet another attempt to distract himself, gives Gordon a great idea for a prank…
Little Alan doesn’t even realize what day it is. Until that is, his preordained mainland-led lesson plan gives him the arts and crafts guide on how to make a Father’s Day card. Glumly, Alan sneaks into Virgil’s craft supply and he numbly makes the card anyway; because his home school lessons had told him too. He stares at the card, the inside left blank, and ends up setting it on Jeff’s desk, next to the bunch of flowers that Grandma Tracy has put there and Alan just sits under it, like he’s a child again, and watches the way the light catches the red, sparkly glitter glue he’s splodged onto a crude picture he’d drawn of Thunderbird Three. Art has never really been his forte.
The evening wears on and Alan finds himself tense and bored and not even his computer games can take his mind off things, and so he gets up and, following the lesson guide again, he makes another card.
This one he gives to Scott. His big brother has fallen asleep on the sofa, worn out by his earlier ranting, and Alan snakes the thing, more glitter glue and plastic hearts and space ship stickers than actual card, under Scott’s fingers, where they rest limply on the couch cushion.
Inside he’s written a explanation that while Scott is not at all his Father, he’s been the next best thing while Jeff is gone, and that Alan wanted to show he understands everything that their big brother is doing for them, and that is so, so grateful and that he loves him very much.
A sleepy, half awake Scott finds Alan half an hour later and throws his arms around his baby brother and cries into his shoulder.
In the evening, with no grave to visit, the four Earthbound Tracy boys end up cuddled together on the sofa, a movie playing away in the background, and their bodies heaped together as one big Tracy puppy pile. They hear nothing at all from John in space.
The Trials of Apollo with a chainsaw.
My hair is now back to a reasonable length. It's based on Emelia Fox's hair in Series 17 of Silent Witness.
When I was 13 years old and curious about sex and love, I asked my mom if she had had sex before marrying my father (of whom she is still married to, and has been since before I was born). She said that that wasn’t really a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ question. I said ‘sure it is, you’ve either had sex before him, or you haven’t’. She brought me onto the couch and sat me down and told me about the boy she liked when she was young and how one night she snuck into his house while his parents were gone and they were kissing and he said they should have sex and she said that she wanted to save sex for marriage and he laughed and basically took all her clothes off and he raped her and as my mom was telling the story she cried and this was the second time I had ever seen my mom cry. She was 12 when it happened.
In grade 8 I got a call from my friend in the middle of the night and she was drunk in the park crying and told me that she went out that night with some other friends and they drank a little and her guy “friend” starting flirting and yes she laughed at first but then he tried to pull her shirt over her head and she pulled away and he ripped her shirt and it was her favourite shirt and then he pushed her to her knees and HIS BEST FRIEND HELD HER JAW OPEN WHILE HE FACE FUCKED HER. And so I went to the park and picked her up and took her home and slept in her bed with her except we didn’t sleep because she just cried and her mouth bled and this was four years ago but I still have to be the one to bring her items to the till it the cashier is a man, and she still has anxiety attacks and she’ll get a rash all over her body and I just want to kill those boys but instead they are still walking around. And I’m in the bathroom with her, dabbing at her skin with a warm cloth until it returns to its regular colour.
And in grade 9 one of my closest friends was kinda seeing this boy and so they hung out one night and then she said that she really had to be getting back home and he said that she wasn’t going anywhere until she gave him what he wanted and he parked the car and took off her clothes and she said no and he ignored her and so she laid in the backseat totally limp and just cried and it wasn’t even sex, he just masterbated by using her body instead of his hand and she came to school the next day with vodka in her water bottle and she drank all day and I had to fight her to get the alcohol away from her and she just cried and threw up and I skipped class while I held her hair back and that same boy texted me a month later, asking if I ever wanted to hangout sometime.
And in that same year my very best friend who has never even kissed a boy, confessed to me that when she was 9 years old, her 12 year old cousin made her give him a hand job and he told her that was what cousins do and he gave her a chocolate bar afterwards and she told me that he probably doesn’t even remember it but that it’s something that she’ll never have the luxury of forgetting.
And in grade 10 I knew a girl who invited her best friend over to watch Disney movies and then he started to put his hands down her pants and she said no but she is 130lbs and he is 220lbs and he called her a tease while she tried to fight him but he used one hand to hold her down, and the other to put inside of her and i was the one to push her inside of a classroom and stand in front of her while calling the police when he showed up at our school looking for her and she was so damn scared.
And a few months later I skipped class and was in the car with a guy who i had had unprotected sex with in the past while under the influence of cocaine but this time I was sober and I insisted we use a condom but he told me he couldn’t feel anything while the condom was on so he ripped it off and I said I refused to have unprotected sex again and so he just grabbed me and forced himself into my mouth and I was crying and he pulled me onto him and I just came saying “stop” over and over like a broken record but he must’ve heard something different because he went until he came and I just sat naked in the backseat while he drove me back to the school and said “we should do this again sometime”. And I had five showers that night and I scratched at my skin so hard to try and rip his fingerprints off of me, I still have the scars.
And I found out soon afterwards that that same guy had raped a classmate of mine, 5 months earlier and she told me about how he brought her McDonald’s first, and how he said they could take things slow and she told me about how he didn’t listen to her either. And he goes to our school and so after she told me about her incident and I told her about mine, we decided to report it to the police and the trial is currently still going on and he told people about it, except in his version we are just “asking for attention” and all his friends talk about how bad they feel for him. As if HE is the one that still wakes up screaming. As if HE felt like his skin no longer was beautiful, no longer belonged to him. And I held her in my arms as she bawled after giving the police her statement. And she did the same for me.
And I met a woman a year ago in a paint store and she had a service dog and I asked what the dog was for and it turns out that she had been so brutally raped and abused in her life, that the dog is literally trained to keep men away from her.
And I’m so FUCKING SICK AND TIRED OF THIS WORLD WE ARE LIVING IN. How many rape victims eyes have I already looked into? How many more will I? And how many more friends will I hold while they shake? Because I don’t know how many more I can take. And who the fuck still has the nerve to make rape jokes? And… Something just has to change. Please, someone just start being that change.
-16 year old girl
I'm a writer, a little strange, and a serial series watcher. That's about all there is to me. Find me on https://archiveofourown.org/users/ToxikCherrys16/pseuds/ToxikCherrys16 and https://m.fanfiction.net/u/4642750/ToxikCherrys16
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