Drmeowingfangirl - DrMeowingFangirl

Hold me closer

Author: @sabine-leo

Wordcount: 1529

Hurt/Comfort/Fluff

Tom x Reader

Summary: In a world where distancing is required, a safe hug from a friend can go a long way to keep one sane.

Note: I felt as if I should send out a virtual hug to everyone in need. Hope you are safe and well! This may turn into an ongoing friends to lovers story. Who knows what my twisted mind will come up with.

A blended hue of orange, red and violet tinted the darkening sky while leaves in similar shades danced to a silent melody before your window. It was -after all- still your favourite time of year. Inside your cosy home a fire was crackling and the scent of fresh brewed tea lingered in the air. You were about to put another log onto the fire when you heard an elusively familiar knock on your front door. Frowning, you looked to the door and walked over covering your face with a mask that lay ready on a shelf in the hallway. When you opened the door, a tall shadow blocked the view onto the side road. A dark ballcap and mask hid a face you hadn´t seen in person for a while now. Even though his face was mostly hidden, the smile that lit up his features shone through his hauntingly blue eyes but was somehow reluctant.

“Tom…” You smiled under your mask and opened the door fully.

“Oh my, it is so good to see you…” He started and you felt that he had to restrain himself from reaching out to pull you into one of his famous hugs.

He looked into your eyes and tilted his head a bit.

“…I needed to see a friendly and familiar face.”

Laughing softly, you answered. “You´d see more of that face when you would have video called me.”

“Not the same.” Was his quiet answer. Tom teetered on his feet for a moment before directly looking at you again. “Do you…” He started and stopped himself again. A sigh escaped him before he could start again. “Do you think I could come in?” Before you were able to answer he continued. “I haven´t had any close human contact in the last 3 weeks. You know I am fully vaccinated and I tested myself before walking over here.”

“Come in Tom, I just made tea and started a fire.”

His eyes shone a little brighter. He waited for you to clear the doorway before walking in himself and closing the door behind himself. “Tea sounds brilliant.” He began to take of his jacket, shoes and ballcap. Tom ruffled his longer curls and looked at you. His movement was a little bit off if you´d be honest to yourself. His voice quieter than usual. “You do look even better in person than on my bloody phone screen.” His mask went into his jacket before using the disinfectant you had positioned on the shelf next to the coatrack.

Laughing quietly, you walked further into your living room, flopping down on your sofa. “Probably because there is more to me than just a face. Maybe you forgot over time.” Tom grinned and got himself a cup out of your kitchen cabinet before joining you in your living room. Since you had been friends for over 8 years now, he knew his way around in your home, as you did in his.

Tom sat down on your comfy wingchair opposite of you and just looked at you for a moment. Silence had never been uncomfortable between the both of you. You did enjoy lengthy and good conversations but comfortable silence was a gift in itself. The possibility of just being together, enjoying each other’s company without words…it was invaluable.

But today it seemed that Tom was not comfortable with just silence. “This damn pandemic…” He started and ruffled his hair. “…do you think it´ll be over one day? I mean, almost two years in and we are still keeping distance from one another.”

You poured tea into both of your cups and took in a deep breath. “I really don´t know but I sure hope so.” Looking up into Toms eyes with a comforting smile made him sigh.

“Without wanting to sound shallow…and I know I am very privileged…but I do miss…” He stopped himself.

“What?” You asked.

Tom snorted and sounded exasperated at the same time.

“Doesn´t matter how I phrase it. It will be the most dispensable problem of all.” Toms’ words made you look at him with a pang of worry in your gut. “It is not dispensable when it hurts you and makes you feel bad.” Tom rubbed his legs before he blurted out “I miss human contact. Hugs. God knows I am a big hugger. I hate keeping distance. I hate not being able to reach out or always having to think about my movement and restrain my natural behaviour. And I hate only seeing my friends, YOU, over a damn screen.”

Your heart broke for your friend, who clearly showed signs of physical and mental malaise now.

“Tom…” you started before he interrupted you.

“You know what, forget it. I should go. I should´ve just called and pulled myself together.” He was about to stand up.

“Sit back down and drink your tea!” You said a bit on the stern side.

Tom looked at you and flopped back down.

“Firstly!” You started. “It is not shallow and it also isn´t dispensable. You are a physical human being. You have a good selected circle of close friends with whom you can be yourself and that got ripped away in what felt like a split second.”

Tom closed his eyes at your words and sighed but nodded.

“Secondly…” You proceeded when you saw that he was indeed listening and thinking about your words. “…there isn´t only physical health.” You paused for a moment. “Don´t be ashamed to talk about what you need to get through all of this unscathed. Yes, you are privileged and you do give back a lot through various aid organisations and just by being who you are…but it all starts with you being healthy…body and soul. So, tell me…what do you need?”

Tom gulped and needed to take in a deep breath. When he stood from his seat a second later you froze. Would he leave like he wanted to minutes ago?

His gaze met yours and he slowly held out his hand while his eyes pleaded you to close the distance. He had come that far. Had told you what ached him. But he needed you to willingly take the step towards him.

Slowly you stood and placed your hand in his. The shudder that went through him, the anticipation of physical human contact echoed through you too. Living on your own, without close family nearby could take a toll out of you in a worldwide pandemic. And there was no shame in admitting it.

Tom pulled you close. His strong arms came around you and held you against him while his head came to rest on top of yours. He actually trembled for a moment before he very slowly relaxed into the hug. Softly stroking his still rigid back with one hand and listening to his fast-beating heart with your ear against his solid chest made a tear escape your eyes. How much effort had it cost him to come to your door and ask for help? How often had he tried and talked himself out of it?

“Hold me closer…” The whispered ask nearly broke you into pieces. You wrapped yourself fully into his hug and pressed in.

You actually lost track of time. How long you just stood there and held each other was beyond you. But Toms heart had calmed down, his body not tense anymore. When you leaned backwards and tilted your head upwards you saw him smile down on you with wet streaks down his cheeks.

“Thank you…” he croaked and closed his eyes when you softly brushed another tear away that fell out of his blue eyes.

“Not for that! Never for such a thing as this! I needed this too.” You admitted and hugged him once more.

“You are an angel (Y/N)…” Tom started and kissed the top of your head in a heartfelt thank you.

Slowly you unwrapped yourself out of his arms and smiled. “How about I make us some new tea and you get the fire going again. We are having a slumber party tonight.”

Tom couldn´t stop himself from grinning even though his eyes still glistered. “Are we now?!”

You nodded and went into the kitchen. “Yes indeed! Since we just opened up our own hug-a-friend bubble we might as well stay in it a while longer. Tend to the fire and choose your poison: Movie, music, conversation.”

Tom smiled and felt a heavy load falling from his chest. “Yes, my lady!” He went outside to grab some more logs from your stack of dry wood. For the first time in a long while, he felt like himself again.

When you came back with a new pot of tea you saw Tom sitting on your sofa. The fire was well stoked and music was playing. His eyes followed your movement when you poured the tea. He smiled when you sat down next to him and spoke. “Music it is…”

“For now…” He smirked and lifted his arm. His voice was like dark chocolate when he added “Come closer, darling.” When you just grinned at him for a second, he grinned back lopsided and pulled you in.

~TBC~

General Tom Tags: (tags are open if you want to get added)

@lots-of-loki @traceyaudette @ellaenchanted91 @catsladen @dr-kayleigh-dh @mrsstyles033 @usedtobegoodfriend96 @hiddles-thomas @noplacelikehome77 @ladyblablabla @myoxiisbroken @lumoswinchesterkazy2y5 @viviandarkbloom06 @snoopy3000 @archy3001 @itscalledfandomsweetielookitup @faeriedelalune-blog @lil-mewlingquim07 @alexakeyloveloki @nonsensicalobsessions @gingerwritess @kingtwhiddleston @mylokabrennauniverse @wolfsmom1

@amazinggraces-world @tanishahka @coniumalces @emomemelordess @devilbat @cest-le-temps-de-lamour @adefectivedetective @karnita-mexicana @marvelc00kie35 @stressedoutsteph @maggiefollows @bi-spider-noir @klbates22

@my-fuckin-problem @deathofmissjackson @vesper-lou @bluefrenchfries604​ @maybell88 @moonstar86 @lokilvrr @thisismysecrethappyplace​ @wiczer @otakumultimuse-hiddlewhore

DOCTOR STRANGE 2 Dr. Sam Raimi (2022)

*takes you on a museum date and proceeds to explain the most disgusting and bizarre facts to you with unveiled excitement*

i, too, would like to be loved by a stephen strange in every universe.

okay but imagine someone handing you a copy of a romance book fully annotated with their thoughts/feelings/reactions, and when you get to the scene with the love confession, you find a handwritten letter tucked within the pages & you see that it's their love confession to you. fuck.

Stray (A Lokitty Tale) Masterlist

A/N: Hi all. This began as a prompt suggestion by @mischief2sarawr and has since grown three heads and answers to no one. It's now a multipart, very fluffy, story about Lokitty. I have no idea where I'm going with this except definitely to the comfort district of fluff town...maybe driving through a little traffic jam of angst on the way there.

Synopsis: It's 1971 and you're a single shop girl living in the tumultuous, often damp, city of Seattle, feeling lost and alone. Meanwhile, Loki (under the guise of D.B. Cooper) is on the run from Thor the moment he jumped out of that plane. After crash landing in a dumpster and disguising himself as a stray cat to lay low, he becomes your beloved room mate and an unusual friendship begins to grow.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Part 8

@mischief2sarawr @ladyofthestayingpower @acidcasualties @unlucky-number-13 @goblingirlsarah @gigglingtiggerv2 @lokihiddleston @lokischambermaid @lokisgoodgirl @marcotheflychair @smolvenger @alexakeyloveloki @littlespaceyelf @loopsisloops @joyful-enchantress @eleniblue @loz-3 @the-haven-of-fiction @sweetsigyn @muddyorbs @icytrickster17 @holdmytesseract @thenerdyoldersister @thedistractedagglomeration @sailorholly @peachyjinx @coldnique @sarahscribbles @peaches1958 @infinitystoner @mischiefmaker615 @coldnique @jennyggggrrr @tripleyeeet @itsybitchylittlewitchy @mochie85 @huntress-artemiss @arunabrak @fruityfucker @averagetmblrusser @primrosesposts

Person A: Here are our vampire costumes and ten bags of blood you asked for.

Person B: Thank you, darling! But how did you manage to come across so much of fake blood at the last minute?

Person A: F-Fake blood?!

Dissociation + Moonknight

disclaimer: this is a long post, I triggered myself slightly when talking about this and ended up going off on a tangent. There is discussions of ab*se, not in detail apart from one brief mention of a we*pon at the end, and also a brief mention of s*lf h*rm but other than that it is a discussion about people wanting to be just like Moonknight.

———————————————————————————

So, I’ve noticed some people on here and some others in marvel groups I’m in on Facebook recently commenting about wishing they had DID or another person in their mind to help them cope with the terrible things currently happening in their life.

I am not here to scold you, or aggressively condescend and talk down to you as someone who has trauma related disorders. I’m not here to make you feel ashamed for what can be seen as ‘normal’ thoughts when you see a show like this. However, please do be careful of what you say online in regards to mental illness, specifically trauma and dissociation. Those of us with these issues and disorders will see your posts, it is a very painful and invalidating for us to see what we perceive as people trying to romanticise and glorify our disorders. These disorders were born out of terrible, awful, scary things that have traumatised people for life, and should not be seen as anything but an unfortunate result of lifelong childhood trauma and not as a fun, “quirky” thing. It seems fun and stress free because you don’t actually have the said disorders and trauma so it is easy to play pretend when you can’t attach emotions and personal experience to it; when you actually do have these conditions it is not at all fun. It’s tiring both mentally and physically.

I do however understand the need and want to think this way at times because life is ultimately stressful for every single person on this planet; just existing is hard, but it is even harder for others who were forced to go through things as a kid that no child should ever have to go through. Life is even hard when you are a product of the brain dissociating from reality in order to protect itself.

Everyone at some point in their life has unknowingly activated their “auto-pilot” or “zoned out” brain function. For example; if you’ve ever been having a conversation with someone and completely spaced out part of what they’ve said to you, that is you subconsciously detaching from the current moment.

It’s a perfectly normal regular coping mechanism of the brain to be able to detach oneself from reality of the current situation in order to cling to something reassuring and avoid anxieties. Dissociation in general is normal, but when it starts to take over your entire life then it needs to be looked into by a professional.

In the case of DID, the traumatic event or events cause the self to fragment into a number of different selves, or alters. Some alters may be holding on to traumatic memories, while others are blocked from accessing these memories.

Dissociating often becomes the centre coping mechanism for traumatic experiences, anxiety, PTSD, or even depression. It can present unconsciously and will make you feel out of control of your own mind and body.

Dissociative Identity Disorder is not the only dissociative disorder, you can have DPDR - depersonalisation/derealisation disorder, and DDNOS (dissociative disorder not otherwise specified), amongst many others. The act of dissociation is also a symptom of many other mental illnesses, and sometimes in certain cases may not even be it’s own unique condition but rather a side effect of something else, for example BPD (borderline personality disorder).

It may seem really nice to be able to just “zone out” of stressful situations, but it really isn’t. You lose memories, you can’t trust your own mind, everything you remember is cloudy and foggy. I have very little recollection of my childhood, and what I do remember is mostly all negative. Mine started when I was roughly 11/12 years old. I came home one day crying from school when I experienced my first episode out of the blue with no warning ( I can not remember what triggered it, I can’t even remember how I got home, all I remember is the terrifying memory of laying on the floor at home) screaming that nothing was real and neither was I, I could see outside of my own body, I also couldn’t physically feel anything no matter how much I hurt myself, so in my mind this confirmed to me that my reality was not real and neither was I.

I spent the majority of my teen years fixating on this. Nobody ever explained to me what dissociation was or why it occurs. So, as an autistic person who struggled to identify what they were feeling and why to others, I couldn’t even explain it to myself, so I become obsessed with it. Because I was left untreated for so long, I kept telling myself none of this was real and neither was I, and because the dissociative episodes kept happening, in my mind it was solidifying it even further.

I genuinely believe, if someone had took the time to recognise what this was and talked to me, I wouldn’t have been as terrified, I would have learned to cope with it a lot younger and not fixated on something I couldn’t define so much, because a lot of the other trauma I have is from the episodes themselves, because they were utterly terrifying especially for an autistic child that doesn’t know how to say what’s going on.

I was told by my mother that it was normal to feel this way, that she use to be like that as a kid. Now as an adult I realise my mother was wrong, because my mother as I later learned during my own adulthood also had very severe childhood trauma, and what she was experiencing at my age, was not normal either and she should have gotten help at the time too.

For some reason, I would often have the worst catatonic episodes during school break. I would be unable to function for 2 and a half months and then entirety of summer. I wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t sleep, wouldn’t get up, I’d lay on the floor in the living room with a blanket and pillow and try to distract myself. It got to a point where I was so physically weak that I was underweight and I could not leave the home without weeks of planning and reassurance and an escort who had to let me hold on to them because I was so physically weak.

I am still not sure why at the time my worst dissociative moments occurred at summer time/break, I’m yet to discuss this weird set of foggy memories with my trauma therapist in a few weeks. Idk if something happened to me during summer one time that I don’t remember, or maybe it was just because the first episode roughly occurred around that time and was very traumatic so maybe that’s why that seasonal time was always a trigger for me thereafter. But it still doesn’t explain what triggered me the first time, because I still don’t remember.

I never got treatment for it, never got an explanation as to what it was and why, never had someone investigate and say “hold on, why is this 11 year old cutting themselves and dissociating surely somethings going on at home”, I got sent to neurology because I had a history of epilepsy as a child (also traumatic to go to sleep in your bed and then wake up connected to a monitor in hospital because you nearly died, which gave me enough trauma to give me a fear of sleeping to this day) so they believed it was a type of seizure or migraine, but they most certainly were not.

I started to understand at 18 by doing my own research as to what it was. But by this time, I dropped out of college twice because I couldn’t cope with dissociative episodes happening during class and feeling myself beginning to lose control of my body when I was trying to take notes. It’s only now at 25, after years of constantly being referred to CBT by lazy GP’s that I decided to speak to one of the CBT assessors on the phone. I mentioned to her that CBT doesn’t work for me, I’ve been doing it and counselling on and off since I was 13 years old and it would have worked by now. I plucked up the courage to say that it doesn’t get to the route of my problems, I admitted to her over the phone that I think I have unresolved childhood trauma from physical and mental abuse I suffered daily up until the age of 19 and that I need to speak to someone about that because that’s where all of my other problems are coming from.

And now, because I said that, I finally, after 2 years of waiting, have a trauma therapist who is doing EMDR with me.

I’ve only had 2 sessions with her and they’ve been introductions, dissociative tests, trauma tests, and some background into the neuroscience of it all, and even that has helped so much because I’m able to talk more about things even if we haven’t got to the actual trauma part in detail yet.

Having to cope with how terrifying it is to dissociate for some people, living with traumatic memories, avoiding triggers, still living with said abusers etc is not fucking worth being able to “zone out” when shits difficult. It’s not fun. At all. TV makes it seem fun and quirky because it’s TV land and you don’t have anything from your own life to identify with to understand, but my god I can not stress enough how “not fun” it is.

It is absolutely terrifying not recognising family members, “waking up” in a place you don’t even recall getting to, “waking up” mid sentence and not understand why words you’re not even saying are flowing out of your mouth, seeing yourself out of your body, not being able to feel anything physically, intense paranoia, night terrors, everything looking and feeling small and faraway, feeling like your floating and not actually tethered down, being beaten everyday, having someone run at you with a knife and press you against a wall. This is all shit I experience or have experienced - it’s different for everyone - but it is universally agreed that it is not fun.

Even when I think nothing has triggered me, my brain fucking dissociates anyway. I hate it. I hate it so goddamn fucking much. I’m always tired mentally and physically. I can’t do anything. I’m afraid and paranoid all the time, I avoid going outside in fear of it happening in public. I don’t want to let go or lose control around other people. I don’t like not having control.

Just please please be careful how you choose to cope with your current situation, maladaptive daydreaming can also be quite dangerous. Please try to think of others with these dissociative disorders before you say shit like this.

Do not even get me started on people on this site who literally pretend to have dissociative disorders.

It’s so goddamn hard and I’m so fucking tired.

I kindly urge you to pick up your phone, @consult-sherlockholmes.

It’s of the utmost importance.

the midnights era red carpet looks