Razzek - Let Me Teach You How To Navigate Your Way To Defeat!

It's 2am, pitch dark, nobody around, I know what would be perfect to listen to! 8D But for real, the audio mixing on SHODAN even 25-ish years later is still just about the creepiest thing I've ever heard. Makes my hair stand on end every time.

Kloktober Day 9: Inspired by Dethalbum IV

Summary: Pickles helps Nathan write a song.

Rating: M

Tags/Warnings: Swearing, blood, discussions about periods, trans male character, and booze

Read on Ao3 ,or read below!

Nathan took a bite of his freshly microwaved cinnamon poptart, letting the hot and constant chew bring his reading glasses down to the tip of his nose before flicking the glazeless corner edge onto the page of his journal. The large crumb bounced against the empty page before being wiped away by a dragging hand. Then, the end of a chewed up pencil tapped the bottom corner as Nathan searched for inspiration. How much time had passed since he started? Five, ten minutes? Oh god, fifteen? Normally, lyrics didn't take this long to construct, not when he already possessed a general idea of what he wanted to compose.

He ate away the minutes staring, doodling and finishing off the rest of his first poptart, and after no progress, groaned and sank into his seat. He shut his eyes and listened to the sink dripping water on some dirty dishes.

“Heeeyy, Nathan.” Pickles’ voice rang through the darkness, followed by the light rub of his sneakers hitting the kitchen floor. “How’s it going, dood?”

Nathan opened his eyes and found Pickles rummaging through one of the fridges. “Hey, Pickles,” he greeted with a low, tired voice. “Just trying to get something on paper.”

Pickles stumbled away from the fridge, a cold beer in his hand. As he cracked it open, he glanced to the table where Nathan sat, and at the near-blank page that only hosted a single word for the would-be song’s title.

He took a sip of the foamy drink before remarking. “Ya stuck?”

“Yeah.” Nathan rested his chin on top of his knuckles. He jabbed at the title with his pencil. “I got the title of a real good song here, but I’m having trouble making it happen.”

Pickles neared the table. He raised one of his pierced eyebrows and, once he had gulped down half of his beer, asked, “What’s the idea?”

“Bloodbath,” Nathan answered, then ceased stabbing at the sheet with his pencil to stare intensely at the scribbled title. “Like, a literal bathtub filled with blood! The image is fucking amazing, but what’s the story? Was there a murder? Did someone gut the guy in the tub? A pissed off chick, maybe?”

Frustrated, he brought a chipped, black nail in between his teeth. He could see the suffering he wanted to induce in his listeners, the red dribbles of sticky fluids pouring out into the warm water, but no matter where Nathan searched, couldn’t connect the pieces together.

“Bloody tub, huh?” He heard Pickles comment next to him. He took another large gulp of his beer, then pulled a chair out to take a seat besides Nathan. “Sound like my Saturday after the old snatch decided to hemorrhage out all its lining in a single night.”

Nathan dropped his finger from his mouth. “Uhhh, what?”

“Ya’ know,” Pickles suggested, making a slight face and wiggling his brows knowingly at Nathan. Once it became clear that didn't work, he made yet another face and, with a roll of his eyes, clarified, “Periods an’ shit.”

“Oh. Ooohhh.” Nathan slowly dragged his head up and down in barely acknowledged agreement. He saw Pickles still staring at him, and then admitted, “I didn’t think you still got… y’know…”

With a snicker, Pickles said, “Anything’s possible, as long as you still got the goods.”

“And you do?” Nathan inquired, then raised a finger over to Pickle’s stomach. “Have the goods?”

Pickles shrugged. “I think about getting the rest of the work done, but each time I start to wonder, what if it fucks with my drive?”

“Yeah, that would suck.”

Pickles downed the rest of his can before tossing it over his shoulder. Nathan watched it fly and hit one of the nearby countertops, and when returned to his notebook, he saw the title mocking him and inwardly groaned.

When he looked away, he saw Pickles back in the fridge, picking up the rest of the six pack he had typed with earlier.

“So, you filled a bathtub with your own blood?” he asked aloud, which, thankfully, gauged Pickles' interest.

“Well, sorta. Obviously I didn't bleed out. But it got real nasty,” Pickles answered. His smiles stretched from ear to ear as Nathan narrowed in on him. “Mind you, I ain’t spilling just blood here. There’s bits and pieces coming out of me.”

Nathan’s eyes widened. “Meat?”

“Well, err, the inner lining of the uterus,” Pickles corrected. He thought about it for a minute, rubbing his head all the meanwhile. “So, uuuuh, yeah? Kinda?”

“And this happens to you every month?” Nathan’s lower lip curled inward as he tried to imagine the scene, along with having to endure such a cycle for all of his existence.

“Well, not every month,” Pickles replied oh-so casually. “More like, once in a blue moon. Unusually after a heavy bender. Too much booze fucks with the hormones.”

“Oh, that’s not too bad,” Nathan remarked, notably relieved by the notion, until he remembered just how much and often he and Pickles drank till they blacked out. Confusion hurriedly blanketed his mind as he struggled to gauge how much was required to fit under the term “heavy bender.”

Pickles nodded in return, then cracked open another can of boose. “Yeah, but when it rains it pours.”

“What do you mean?”

Pickles held in a chuckle. “I swear, when I’m on the rag, I bleed out all at once.” He brought up a hand as though to stop Nathan from suggesting. “Again, not enough to fill a tub, but it’s enough to ruin some nice bed sheets. Oh, and the cramps.”

“Cramps?”

Nathan got cramps, usually when he consumed too much diary. When he tried to bridge the conversation with his example, though, Pickles held in a snort and hooks his head.

“Imagine what Mags did to you, but smack dab in the middle of yer’ naughty bits,” he explained, and earned an immediate cringe from Nathan. With a haughty smirk, he continued, “You got a muscle design to keep shut, and now it’s gotta force itself open so it can expel a bunch of rotten flesh and blood. Doesn’t matter what you tell the damn doctors either, they give you the same shitty painkillers and say take two every six to eight hours.” Pickles raised a can to the very thought, then loudly slurped at the fizz gathering at the top. Once he had thoroughly finished the can, he placed down upon the table with a rough clank. He wiped his upper lip with the back of his hand and said, “I take about five per sitting.”

“That sounds…” Nathan fell into a silence as he tried, but failed, to imagine himself in such a situation, “Well, Intense.”

Reaching for his third can, Pickles responded, “Oh, it is. And it used to be worse.”

“...what?”

Nathan couldn't fathom how something that was supposedly natural would be any worse than what Pickles had currently described.

Luckily for him, Pickles seemed to have no issue openly sharing the dirty details. “Dood, before I started HRT, I was irregular as hell,” he began, “I’d have two in a month, go three months without anything happening, then suddenly end up spending days at the hospital thinking I was about to die.” Nathan swallowed a dry lump as Pickles stared out into a distant memory, his freckles becoming more visibly abundant as his expression started to pale from the past trauma. He brought a hand on his chest. “My fucking nips hurt,” he started, “and I’d get pissed real easily. And the cramps! The pain was so bad I’d dry heave or spit up the plasticky, hospital water the nurses handed me. Like, you’ve seen me mad before? I can be pissy, but the anger I experienced while waiting for the IV drugs to induce my painless coma was insufferable. I wanted to rip those smart-ass doctors a new one, but couldnt cause if I moved too much I’d fucking vomit.” Pickles stuck out a dry tongue and feigned a heave as he reenacted the experience. “And you know my bitch of a mother wanted nothing to do with the ol’ B.C. So it was like that until I had money for a regular prescription. Soaking cold hospital sheets with my fucking blood clots while being so sick and hateful that just thinkin’ about looking into the mirror made me wanna jump out the window.”

Looking up, Pickles tossed his third can. Maybe it was because he was thinking of his mother, but Nathan noticed the force in Pickles’ throw. The can crashed into the ground, and Nathan stared at the deformed tab leading into the crooked hole, and he couldn't break away as it leaked out the remains of dark, fizzy beer.

He eventually caught Pickles watching him. “Oh” was all Nathan could stammer, then returned to a state of absolute silence from the horror his friend had casually constructed.

“Yeah, but that was a long time ago,” Pickles replied after some time, giving them both ample time to recover, though Nathan still remained uncomfortably silent. He picked himself off from his chair, took the rest of his half-consumed six pack by the plastic rim, and flashed a pleased grin. “Thanks fer listening, Nathan.”

“Uhhh, no problem.” Nathan replied, his eyes looking far into the distance. He shuffled uncomfortably in his seat. “And, uhh, sorry about all of that.”

He continued to stare out long after Pickles left the kitchen and retreated back into his domains. Nathan counted the days since Saturday, and then shirked in his seat. By the time his stomach had settled, Nathan’s remaining poptart had returned to its stony, tasteless state, though by now eating was out of the question. Instead, he brought a finger over to his sinking glasses, and pushed them up his sweaty bridge, back to his wary stare. Nathan glanced at the title of Dethklok’s next song scribbled on his notebook and, with a slight look of disgust, began to write.

Visual aid for people who ask my gender

Ok so at this point I've had two people roll up to me in manual wheelchairs, well, one of them was somebody pushing somebody who was nonverbal at the time, but it still counts. They asked me why I had zip ties around my tires.

It's winter where I'm living and we have really bad snow. And the snow plow people are really bad at their jobs probably because there aren't snow plow people who clean sidewalks. As a solution I got to thinking about how I could increase the traction on my wheels. And the most redneck thing I could think of was taking a bunch of zip ties and tying them around my wheels. They last surprisingly long, and work surprisingly well. It's basically the same premise as chains for your tires during the winter.

I chose to space them out pretty evenly so there's about one for every spoke. You could probably do more or less depending on how many you want and how much traction you get but I wouldn't go more than three per spoke. I realize that it's a bit later in the winter, and I probably should have made a post about this sooner, but I came up with it about a week ago. So please share this, even if you're not disabled, because there are tons of people I know who are stuck in their houses because they can't get around in the snow. A pack of zip ties costs about $5, which compared to $200 knobby snow tires is a big save, and if you want to invest you could get colored zip ties.

Here’s my spoopy Halloween picture, the food stamps that the lady promised me Thursday morning still haven’t been loaded onto my card and my former employer isn’t answering any of my emails for the paperwork I need. Fingers crossed for tomorrow I guess.

Alas, I physically can't read the manga unless someone out there has made a aan audio naroated version, but thank you for the rec. :)

Welp. Time to watch the original Trigun so I can find out what the hell I just watched. o_o