My local shelter does a thing where you can offer to host a cat while she raises her kittens. You pay for the food and a chill space for cats to hang out. The shelter pays for the vet, spaying/neutering, inoculations and finds homes for the cats.

I had been living with my brother. His girlfriend moved in. They wanted to do this ethical kitten leasing thing and I did not hate that but I wasn't really a part of it. And I didn't really want to get attached to them. Even some cats were kept, I wouldn't be doing the keeping.

This was in 2014 and around the height of the warmest summer we've had here in living memory. The cat comes around and she is pregnant as all hell. She is the most pitful creature. She waddles through our apartment disdainful of how her body has her move now and of her new, unpromising accommodations.

Probably she used to have a home at some point because she is not skittish at all and she is a very large, strong adult. I dont think she can ever have been malnourished and she probably hasn't lost many fights either way.

She is standard cat graceful. Which ... I think always gives strays the air of royalty in exile or nobility fallen on hard times. Like "Yes, yes, we were driven from our ancestral holdings but let's not be gauche about it" or "Ah, What is this? Some sort of provincial treat? How delightful!"

Also she is a stunning grey like the marrow of an expensive Italian pencil, the kind someone might sharpen with a pen knife.

And she is reduced to flopping around in the shade or sprawling on the back of our livingroom couch by the screen window. It is the highest she can still climb.

She was super cute you guys. We named her Marx.

I figured I could wet at towel so it was just a little damp and cool and pet her with it. Something to make her more comfortable in the heat. Maybe she bonds with me over this a little.

She sleeps in my bed some nights. Maybe a week into her stay with us I get home from a party in the wee hours. I am drifting to sleep with her next to me on the pillow and I have a semi-lucid dolly zoom moment. She is in labour.

Her nest is in my brother's room. I wake them up. We move her. I ramble drunkenly everything I have googled about cats giving birth. You have to count the placentas. Feel her belly. Make sure everyone gets out. Rub her belly to restart labour. They already know but I don't have any chill and I am drunk. I promptly pass out.

The birth is difficult. They have to restart labour after the first two kittens are out. There are four all in all. The last is stillborn and the second to last just barely makes it.

We name them after Jupiter's moons and in order of arrival they are Metis, Io, and Carpo. We ought to have named the last Amalthea. But it is not like cats care about names.
There is a shoebox for her/him. The vet who comes to check in and weigh the kittens in the morning brings the box with her when she leaves.

The kittens grow up. Metis is the same color as his mother. He runs up and down the long corridor between the hallway and the kitchen, up and down as soon as he can run. He runs first. He climbs around in our cheap drapes. He climbs first. I watch as his body changes from use. He grows strong, he is the same color as his mother, and he will be big and strong like her.

Io is the only girl. She has fur like an explosion. She looks like one of the coal spirits in spirited away. Here she was in my window.



Carpo is pitch black. He is curious and skinny and affectionate. He would crinkle his tail up like a question mark and just almost vibrate with with intense puzzlement or desire. We thought it might be palsy but he had motor skills to keep up with Metis.

Her he is on my face.


They all grew up. Marx and Io were taken in together. Some family gave them new names they'd listen to as little as any cat ever does.

We had switched rooms after the kittens were born. Their nest had been in the bottom drawer of a closet and it was in my room after the switch.
When Io and Marx had gone, Metis and Carpo came into my room. They scratched at the closet. They wanted to see if their sister and mother were in the old nest.

It was heartbreaking. Those dlittle idiots.

Soon Metis and Carpo found a home too, and then all the cats were gone.

They were born, grew up and changed so quickly. It took almost no time. It was only a few months from start to finish.

So I was clinically depressed for a whole and it turns out even if they didn't mean for Bucky to seem clinically depressed, all the awful things about him make me go "IT ME.
Like... I feel SEEN by the portrayal? And transitively by these S-Rank burns.

Bucky hasn't washed, much less cut his hair in 60 years which also, was probably the last time he left the house before noon or answered a text. In my time: SAME.
In each wounded fiber of my heart I feel it must be true that HYDRA had to implant a trigger word to get him out of bed for punch-training and then they probably just hosed him off after because what can even be the point of showers when there is no point to life?
Which I am ready to stretch to my own xp of when my doctors finally got my meds right. All I did was work out resentfully 5 days a week. Bucky's sweaty glower? EXTREMELY ON POINT.

I was in my early 20s when it got to me. I went in as a kinda androgynous alt-twink and came out some random dude who could grow a beard. I was not really there for the change. I came back and it was just something that had happened.
People link pics of Sebastian Stan from the first movie and earlier when talk about how busted he looks in civil war and I uh... wanna fight them.

I know it isn't real! But like if someone compared two pics of me, one from before and one from now 6 years later, and they went"what happan u were so pretty"... like aging happened you ASS there's nothing wrong with my face now.
WHEN THEY SAY IT TO HIM IT IS LIKE THEY ARE SAYING IT TO ME AND THEY ARE NOT I AM MAKING THIS WEIRD.
Identifying with Bucky is probably 95% that he is a broody dirtbag with unwashed hair and also that I would've liked it if Chris Evans fought all his friends and Robert Downey Jr to protect and keep me, no matter how awful I was or felt.
Seeing the movie was completely inadvertently a little bit healing and so was this.

I am not a raccoon. There are no raccoons posting on the toast dot net our fingers are too small for mavis bacon to have taught us typing they would have to post in groups of several raccoons at once to even make this single post ahahaha

it is one of those myths that show up everywhere. I think it is called "transformation chase".

FYI many of these just go under what gay men refer to as (active/passive) "Tam Lin"-ing. The old hanky code color was "ever-changing".

This makes me so mad I want to blow up the sun. I am just so angry.

Guys guys! Let her finish.

I have every steven universe feeling in my body. I don't even want to talk about what happens just, OH MAN THOSE FEELINGS RIGHT?

feelings? never heard of em.

i know you already know this but maybe someone read your name, thought of the show and thought of it fondly:
they are rebooting it and the showrunner was like "we r not going to be coy about her sexuality" on twitter. sooo