Bite Sized Bits of Fic

DC, Barbara Gordon, a day in the life

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Alexa & Katie, Alexa Mendoza, longterm chemo side effects

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Any, any, Paralympics AU

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Marvel, Jane Foster, living. dying. living again.

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cornerofmadness.livejournal.com

Star Trek The NExt Generation Geordi LaForge, navigating without his visor

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Any (please no SPN), any, it hurrrrrrrrrts

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Star Trek (any tv), any Starfleet person and any Doctor, the doc doesn't believe that their patient is in a distressing amount of pain because they aren't behaving like acute pain patients until the scans indicate how the pain neurons are firing off

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Miranda (BBC), Miranda/Gary + Stevie, Miranda is having a High Pain/Brain Fog day and Gary and Stevie cheer her up and support her*

*Miranda Hart has fibromyalgia and her newsletter emails are the only things that make me feel seen

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Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, Aziraphale has full-blown panic attacks when Gabriel comes around, sometimes he's alone and sometimes Crowley shows up to help

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Any (please no SPN), finally getting proof/a diagnosis and the celebration of "it's NOT fake and I really am in this amount of pain" pairs with the UTTER SALTINESS that it took that long for anyone to take it seriously enough to bother with scans

2007. It was Two Thousand and Effing Seven. The Celtic Tiger was still A Thing. Two bulging discs in the thoracic spine. Sine 2007. But, oh you're exaggerrating/being dramatic/it's psychosomatic. I am saltier than the Atlantic Ocean.

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Doctors are a real pain in the ass. As someone else who has had to jump through medical hoops to get a diagnosis, I just want to say that I'm sorry you had to go through that. No one deserves that. Best wishes to you health-wise going forward, and I truly hope that you find a provider who listens and genuinely cares about you.

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THank you. Now that it's provable my gp is actually willing to pay attention when I talk about how my life is impacted where before she only gave a damn when I was acute, so it's a (small) step in the right direction. Thankfully my physios always believed me. But I am so salty that it took my pain interfering with my career/ability to participate in Capitalism properly that spurred her to get me a scan.

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Any, any, migraines

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Silas came home to a dark apartment. A couple months ago that wouldn’t have been weird. It would have even been normal since back then he lived alone and usually kept other people as far the fuck away from his shitty apartment sanctuary as possible, but he didn’t live alone anymore, and Cecilio should have been home. He flicked on the light to the entryway and kicked off his shoes.

Cecilio’s stupidly expensive tennis shoes are in their usual spot, looking a bit worse for the wear than they had when they first were set on Silas’s cracked linoleum floor. Might have something to do with actually getting a chance to wear them outdoors for more than ten minutes at a time. At any rate, if Cecilio’s shoes were here, he was here; it wasn’t like he had any other shoes and he was too prissy to go outside barefoot.

“Hey, I’m home?”

Nothing. But when Silas turned on the light to the living space, there was a pained whimper from the direction of the couch.

“Cecilio?”

“Mnnn,” Cecilio groaned back.

Silas leaned over the back of the couch to find Cecilio with a pillow stuffed over his head in a white-knuckled grip. “Hey, you trying to suffocate yourself or something? Did I wake you up?” It wasn’t like him to nap, but it wasn’t like Silas was going to judge if he did. If Silas had the option, he’d nap all the time.

Cecilio said something into the pillow.

“Yeah, can’t hear you for shit.” Silas tugged at the pillow and got a hand flapped in his general direction in retaliation.

“Please shut up,” Cecilio said, pillow lifted a bit from his face, voice barely louder than a whisper, “and turn off the lights.”

For a second Silas couldn’t help feeling annoyed because he got off work and instead of a greeting, he got a ‘shut up,’ but then Cecilio peeked out enough for him to see how his face was pale and his face was pinched with pain and Silas’s brain switched tracks from, ‘wow, fuck you too’ to ‘oh shit, there’s a problem.’ “Uh, you okay?”

“Lights,” Cecilio said with a hint of desperation.

So Silas turned off the main light and stumbled his way across the apartment—wow he needed to clean, where did all this shit even come from—to turn on the light above the stove so that he could see something because his night vision was okay, but his apartment was currently a death trap of library books, used clothing, and whatever crap Cecilio had used and never put away because he was a spoiled rich brat who never had to clean a day in his life and was still getting used to the idea that he had to put things away. (Okay, Silas wasn’t much better, but he chose to be messy consciously. Cecilio wasn’t even doing it on purpose.) Cecilio was damn lucky Silas liked his dumb ass.

“Better?” Silas asked, quieter.

He got another wordless sound that could have been agreement or just general ‘wow I’m in a fucking lot of pain’ in some kind of primal language.

Silas didn’t know what to do with this. Even less so because he was hardly the nurturing type. Also this was his apartment, and it felt weird to not have the run of it. He wasn’t an ass though so he’d just… let Cecilio be for the moment and hope he was coherent later.

He went and got leftovers from the fridge, from the Korean place that always gave a shit-ton of food at a cheap price that Silas loved because it meant at least three meals out of one order. Plus there was the sides. He dished out black bean noodles and kimchi, fully intending to go sit at the kitchen table and eat, except Cecilio made a choking sound, sat straight up and lunged for the bathroom so fast Silas could have sworn there was an after image. Seconds later there was retching. The plate of food was immediately much less appetizing.

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“Stomach bug?” Silas asked, coming to stand in the bathroom doorway awkwardly. What did you do when someone was sick? He had a vague memory of one of his foster parents rubbing his back as he threw up as a kid, but that was a long time ago, and he didn’t want to catch whatever Cecilio had if it was a stomach bug. These days Silas powered through if he was sick, and if he couldn’t, he glued himself to his bed or the toilet and barely moved to do anything but drink water and sleep until the symptoms were ignorable again.

Cecilio rested his head against the cold porcelain edge of the toilet, face scrunched with absolute misery. He’d stopped heaving though, so that was good. He looked like a light breeze would make him start again though, so Silas rocked on his feet indecisively, grasping mentally for something to help. Washcloth. Maybe a glass of water?

He got both, pressed them into Cecilio’s hands. Cecilio looked weird with his glasses off, though maybe it was in part how pale he was instead of the usual bronzy-Italian skin tone he had going. It was like all the life was sucked from him leaving him looking ashy and frail. Frailer than the skinny teenaged limbs and his usual coke-bottle glasses already did. “Talk to me,” Silas said.

“Headache,” Cecilio grit out.

The hell kind of headache made a guy throw up? Cecilio breathed slowly through his mouth before swishing water around and spitting it in the toilet. “…This happen often?”

“…Sometimes.”

It was the first time Silas had seen it, though maybe it’d happened before and he had been at work or something. It’d only been a few months after all. How well did he really know this kid? “Can I do anything to help?” Please let there be a solution of a couple pain meds and a bit of quiet.

Cecilio grimaced. “Quiet, no light, no strong smells.”

“And?”

“And nothing, Si, I wait until it stops feeling like someone’s trying to drill into my brain with a dull icepick while setting it on fire.”
Well that sounded like a lot of unpleasant shit. “No meds?”

“I mean, I can take some pain killers, but they’re not gonna do much at this point.” More quietly he added, “I had meds at home, but I didn’t think to take them. I haven’t had a migraine in over a year. Lots of other shitty headaches, yeah, not brain-melty, vision warping, private mini-hell.”

“Well shit,” Silas said, not really sure what to say to that. If there was anything that could be said to that. He’d noticed the headaches. The little ones. The way Cecilio would press his hands against his eyes after a long day or rub between them. Eye strain because of the whole slowly-going-blind thing. None of those ever made him throw up.

“At least I’m not seeing weird colors and shit right now,” Cecilio muttered. “Small favors.”

“…how long’s this usually last?”

“Fuck, if I’m lucky no more than a day.”

Double shit. “Y’need me here?”

“Ugh. No. I might just live on the bathroom floor.”

Despite the shitty situation, Silas almost smiled at that. “You can take the bed,” he offered. The bed had the window blocked out with a blanket tacked over it, so less light, and it was sequestered off from the rest of the room even if it didn’t have a door or anything. It was the most privacy Silas could offer and a hell of a lot better than the lumpy couch to sleep on.

“…You sure?”

The fact that Cecilio wasn’t even putting up a token protest was answer enough for how bad he felt. “Go for it. I can live sleeping on the couch for a few days.” He scratched the back of his head a bit.
“Uh. I guess I’ll go eat outside.”

He got a weak thumbs up in return and that was good enough. Silas ate his noodles and kimchi outside his front door while his neighbor two doors down smoked by the railing. When the guy gave him a weird look, Silas just shot him a middle finger and kept eating. Wasn’t anyone’s business if he wanted to eat sitting on cold concrete instead of in his damn apartment. Mentally he added ‘shitty mega-headaches’ to his list of cons to having Cecilio as a roommate. There were still more positives than drawbacks, though, even with feeding two mouths instead of one and barely ever having time to himself anymore.

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It might’ve been an impulse to give a runaway a place to sleep, but he’d let him stay longer than a night because he kind of liked having someone to greet him when he got back. He liked that Cecilio tried to do random chores even if he was both bad and sporadic about it. He liked the excuse to go to the library and read magazines he’d never justify buying while Cecilio looked for books. He liked having this fifteen-year-old kid—Cecilio hated being called a kid but he was still a kid even if he was almost sixteen, yeah three years made a lot of difference in age, Cecilio, shut up—look up to him and showing him things that Silas never took the time to appreciate on his own.
He liked that he didn’t have to be tough here. He could be vulnerable because hell, Cecilio was always vulnerable and kind of naïve and that made it easier to be a bit more like the kid he used to be instead of the guy most people saw these days.
Cecilio trusted way too easily and somehow instead of wanting to prove him wrong, Silas had only ever wanted to prove that instinct right.

He stayed outside long after his neighbor went back indoors and the sky was as dark as it ever got, the air making goosebumps rise on his arms. Only when he couldn’t stop the nagging tug of exhaustion did he slip back inside and clean his plate as quiet as possible.

Cecilio was asleep when he glanced at the bed, curled around a lump of one of Silas’s blankets like he needed something to hug and with half a corner of it flung over his face. Still too pale though. He almost wanted to touch, like touching him would confirm whether he was okay or not. But that was kind of dumb because it wouldn’t tell him shit and would only wake Cecilio up.

Silas made himself comfortable on the couch instead, going to sleep because anything else would probably wake Cecilio too.

When he woke up an unknown chunk of time later, one of the first things he saw was Cecilio wrapped in one of the blankets from his bed, sitting at the kitchen table. His glasses were back on and he was staring at nothing with the sort of way people do when they weren’t really seeing anything at all. Light made its feeble way in through the cracks of the window shades, and given that Cecilio wasn’t acting like a vampire at the moment, the worst of the headache must have been over.

Good. For multiple reasons.

Silas lurched upright, his neck and one random spot on his back aching from the couch. How did Cecilio stand sleeping on it every night? Ow. “Ugh,” he grumbled rubbing at his neck. Cecilio glanced his way but didn’t move from his blanket huddle. “Hey.”

“Morning,” Cecilio said, hitching the blanket to his chin.

“Y’good?”

“No more brain stabbing,” Cecilio said.

That wasn’t a ‘yes, Silas, I’m feeling great now, how about you?’ but you know what, Silas would take it. “Mngh.” Silas rubbed sleep out of his eyes. “Breakfast?”

A shrug.

“Shitty cereal or shittier quick oats?”

Another shrug. Did they have milk for cereal or had he forgotten to pick that up? Instant oatmeal packets it was. Silas stumbled through his morning routine with Cecilio’s silent stare following him, a little weirded out because usually Cecilio will talk his ear off about whatever he was reading or what weird thing he saw when he went out that was culture shock for a sheltered kid like him, but nothing. Just more blanket huddling and a quiet word of thanks when Silas slid over a watery bowl of oats.

“You sure you’re okay?” Silas asked as Cecilio pushed his half-eaten oatmeal around in his bowl.

“I feel like a used dish rag,” Cecilio admitted.

“Ah.” Probably no going out like usual today then. “Read anything good before your head tried to murder you?”

Another shrug. It was like trying to drag words out of him today. “I think I might have to stop reading so much. I think all the little headaches stressed me enough to have that big one.”

Well that sucked. “Reading les doesn’t mean not at all.” That didn’t cheer him up though. “It’s that bad?”

“I think my prescription changed again,” Cecilio said with a sigh. “Before you say anything about just going and getting better glasses, the ones I’m wearing already cost more than twice your monthly rent. It’s not happening.”

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He already was using magnifiers and shit so… Damn. There had to be some solution. …Weren’t there books that you listen to? On cassettes and CDs and stuff. Silas didn’t own any players for those kinds of things, never saw a need for it, but he could get one. “Gimme a few days and I’ll find a solution.”

“To my eyes?” Cecilio asked straightening from his huddle a bit to give Silas a skeptical, dead-pan expression.

Oh, so now he wasn’t acting like a zombie. Typical. “No, to the whole reading thing.” He could probably get his hands on a boombox pretty cheap, and even through mostly legal channels. The library could provide the audiobooks and there we go, problem solved.

Cecilio still looked skeptical. Brat. It’d be a surprise then.

“Anyway, while your brain was practicing knife throwing on itself, you wouldn’t believe the shit that went down at the shop—” If Cecilio couldn’t carry a conversation much today, Silas would just pick up the slack until he was more himself again.

And if two days later he returned with a lightly used boombox and a few random audiobooks that looked like the sort of thing Cecilio brought home before, and if Cecilio’s grin lit up his whole face in a way that made Silas’s day if not week or more… Well, getting that smile aimed at him was another pro of having Cecilio as a roommate. (Not that he’d tell Cecilio that anytime soon, heck no.) Silas was plenty happy to keep up their playing house for however long it’d last.

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Thank you so much for this awesome fic!!! I enjoyed it! Big hugs!!! You are amazing and such a great writer! Hugs!

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Hugs! Glad you liked it!!

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creepy_shetan

This is really good! :D Have you written other things with these two, or is this a one-shot? Your characterizations and details are especially A+. Your description of migraines is pretty damn spot-on as well. (I'm lucky I can count on one hand how many times I've had a true migraine, and that it started after my teenage years. Also lucky my eyesight is bad but has kinda stabilized.)

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Haha, I've written probably a good half a dozen things over the last 8 years with different versions of these characters (mostly Cecilio/(AKA Caecus) to be honest; he's an AU version of my character from my senior writing project from college ^_^;;)
If you're interested in other versions of things with him in it there's a few I've posted in various places under various names (consistency? me? never) with various versions of character names (^_^;;;) though they're all tonally pretty different and trend more toward angst than not...
this one (https://www.shousetsubangbang.com/mirror/still-love-after/) is from the perspective of a character Cecilio/Caecus meets later in life than the scene shown here and deals with grief/finding second loves. Also NSFW...
this one (https://lisa-telramor.livejournal.com/52866.html) was my first take on a modern AU for a friend and has Cecilio and Silas/Sol (I keep changing his modern AU name =_=;;) as well as Cecilio and Suhayl(the guy he meets later in life)
this one (https://archiveofourown.org/works/26093410) is based of my original novel of the characters but if it were ABO universe (I wanted to explore ABO + asexuality)

It seems they're all characters I keep circling back to ^_^;;; I never finished their original story but I still like them a lot.
(I don't get migraines but I do get awful sinus headaches and sometimes you just have to sit somewhere quiet and dark and take a painkiller until your eyes stop feeling like a dull spoon is trying to gauge them out =_=)

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Haha, I've written probably a good half a dozen things over the last 8 years with different versions of these characters (mostly Cecilio/(AKA Caecus) to be honest; he's an AU version of my character from my senior writing project from college ^_^;;)
If you're interested in other versions of things with him in it there's a few I've posted in various places under various names (consistency? me? never) with various versions of character names (^_^;;;) though they're all tonally pretty different and trend more toward angst than not...

There's a fic titled "Still Love After" posted to Shousetsu Bang Bang under the name Aohime involving a character Cecilio meets later in life, the fic deals with grief, moving on, and second loves (also NSFW being Shousetsu Bang Bang). One on my lisa_telramor lj written for a friend that was the first attempt at a modern AU for these characters which has Cecilio, Sol/Silas (whose name I have yet to settle on in a modern AU 100%), and Suhayl (the guy he meets later in life). And on my Lisa_Telramor AO3 title "A Place Called Home", there's an ABO AU for the original novel exploring how Cecilio/Caecus would handle that sort of universe since he's Asexual...

It seems they're all characters I keep circling back to ^_^;;; I never finished their original story but I still like them a lot.
(I don't get migraines but I do get awful sinus headaches and sometimes you just have to sit somewhere quiet and dark and take a painkiller until your eyes stop feeling like a dull spoon is trying to gauge them out =_=)

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creepy_shetan

Wow, you've done quite a variety with your OCs! My longest-running OCs are also from my school years, and I've also never finished their main stories, so no worries, I sadly get it. 6^^;; They don't get consistent attention, and then I feel bad when I don't do anything for a birthday, haha... 6>_>;; I'm also familiar with sinus headaches, ugh...

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Heh, yeah, these ones I've played with on and off for 8 years or so, tho my oldest ones are from high school and despite it being at least a decade and a half they still prod at me every now and then to assert their existence ^_^ OCs are great that way, right?

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This is wonderful! You are amazing!!

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"Quiet, no light, no strong smells."

Been there, know first hand how all 3 of those make it worse.

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