permets-tu, darling?

the five stages of grief were never meant to be a checklist your character moves through in chronological order across three chapters. Let me save you from writing a grieving character who is simply having scheduled emotions:

⊹ Grief is not primarily crying. i know that sounds wrong but hear me out. a lot of grief looks like doing laundry. cooking something the person liked and then not being able to eat it. watching a show they recommended and never told anyone you finished it. grief goes very quiet and very domestic for long stretches and then ambushes you at completely unreasonable moments like a petrol station or a Friday at 4pm for no reason at all.

⊹ people who are grieving often seem fine. not because they're suppressing or being brave or in denial, but because humans are genuinely capable of functioning and being devastated at the same time. your grieving character can make jokes. can go to work. can have a good day. can feel guilty about the good day. can feel guilty about not feeling guilty. grief has a very active internal bureaucracy that has nothing to do with what's visible on the outside.

⊹ Grief also changes shape over time in ways that aren't necessarily about getting better. the first year is often adrenaline, there are things to do, people around, ritual and structure. year two is frequently harder because the adrenaline is gone and the world has moved on and expects you to have moved on with it. your character being more visibly undone eighteen months later than at the funeral is not a pacing problem. it's accurate.

Anyway, I'm just imagining Ilya with this meticulous presentation, codesigned with his mother-in-law the executive manager of his charity Yuna Hollander.

And once Shane IS at team events (between the outing and officially joining the Cens), Ilya lets them know WHY this is a big thing for him...

So the first Cens event Shane attends, he bears witness to an all-out ARGUMENT between like five of his future teammates over whether the cake has any airborne allergens that means it needs putting in the specially designated 'SHANE DO NOT GO HERE' area, or if it's just a problem if Shane ingests it...

Crucially, this argument started BEFORE he and Ilya arrived. Just the Cens standing there having this argument as Shane and Ilya walk into the room, overtaken by every emotion all at once that their team are being THIS accommodating before even OFFICIALLY meeting Shane.

i see this and raise you that ilya didn't actually tell them it was for shane specifically. they know that allergies are apparently Very Important to ilya so yeah, sure, buddy. maybe this is important to him in his family or something. whatever. doesn't matter. sure the peanut butter cookies can remain in a sealed container away from everything else. why not.

which means that shane arrives to this event to find five grown men arguing about whether this cake is A Bad Cake and needs to go to jail or not, and shane fully thinks he's having a stroke for a second. he knows all of those words but NOT in that order. and he's like ?? um?? and the guys fucking GRAB HIM and are like, "you are married to roz. you would know. he would want this cake to go in jail, right? it has hazelnuts in it." and shane is just "i don't even know what you're asking me." and gets the explanation that team events have sections for food and the main one is no common allergens and then there's "hey, if you're allergic, stay tf away" in another area, and it's just a team bit to call it jail now. so if someone forgets and is like, "this has lemon in it," they can get a verdict on jail or not jail.

and shane is?? oddly touched??? yeah, send the cake to jail for sure. :)

Pen came into my DMs to call me out for it :P

...

this fresh-faced 18 year old kid who was already bracing himself to have to explain his food allergies, yes they're serious, yes he's sure, no he can't have even a little, no it's fine he can bring his own food, only to find out he gets to not have to explain ANY of that AND he gets to have MULTIPLE safe options at every team event now

And what’s interesting also is at the Olympics maybe Shane believes it, for a second? He goes to check on Rozanov. Maybe people think they’re friends, it’s not weird, people expect Shane to know things, maybe they can be friends, or at least friendly seeming, in public. We see how that turned out.

so they eat, have handsy time on the couch, smooch smooch, first names, and oh. OH. gotta. gotta go. oh god. bad bad. death is coming. bad. bad bad.

and shane doesn't even realize at first what's happening because he thinks it's just the first names getting to him (and it is. partially.), but he's like. halfway back upstairs when what's ACTUALLY happening hits him.

but he's never spent longer than a few hours with ilya before. he doesn't actually know how sharing a space with him is going to feel. and yeah, he's excited about it, but he also knows himself. with EVERYONE he eventually feels the need to get a break and be alone and reset and what if ilya thinks it's weird or what if he gets insulted and wants to leave or what if-

but then...he doesn't feel the need to escape.

Therefore I posit: having a missing person declared dead in the Shire requires the consent of their next of kin. Whoever Bilbo’s next of kin was at the time of the Hobbit (possibly Otho? I’m not sure) had him declared dead at the first opportunity but Frodo refused to ever do it.

Frodo had anxious hobbit bureaucrats knocking on his door every couple of years like ‘Mr Baggins… blease… it’s been 10 years… he was eleventy-one… can we fill out his death certificate yet’ and Frodo was like ‘absolutely not’.

After all, last time they declared Bilbo Baggins dead— which involved filling out all the paperwork necessary to declare somebody dead without a body— he had the rudeness to show up again, forcing them to do a lot more paperwork, and this time with an indignant Bilbo having a go at them while they did it.

As a result, the magistrates have decided that they’re not going to declare Bilbo Baggins dead a second time unless they have a body, a coroners reprt explaining the cause of death, and a three day wake to make sure that he doesn’t get up and walk away again.

It became a fireside-story for young hobbits; and eventually Mad Baggins, who used to vanish with a bang and a flash and reappear with bags of jewels and gold, became a favourite character of legend and lived on long after all the true events were forgotten.