this is not his job. his job is being my neurologist.

his job is not "call patients after hours while I'm on vacation because I'm afraid if I don't give them this guidance their insurance company might murder them and so even though this isn't my job it feels like a fucking hostage situation"

anyway. he confirmed that the shit my insurance has been pulling for a month and a half is explicitly Trying To Kill The Patient behavior. told us to get everything in writing. sending us a whole packet of every single relevant form and piece of paperwork so we have it all on hand. told us to contact the patient advocate and if that doesn't work, we're going to have to go outside the company entirely and get the state insurance ombudsman involved.

but like. you can see by their behavior they've identified my case as one that would be too expensive for them to want to cover, and they also are perfectly aware that I cannot get treatment for this anywhere else.

*cries along with Stephen*

Since I did a long ass something for a pretty similar ask have a ficlet for this one. This is… wild and also written on too little sleep, a little bit of wine and way to many emotions. (Also, this thing got longer than planned and is not nearly long enough. Sorry. Maybe I’ll put it up on AO3 later. We’ll see.) For the purposes of this story Tony got rescued at the beginning of Endgame and the return of the dusted happened a long time (months of even years) later and he had more than enough time to recover his strength. Because a ¾ dead Tony rescuing a ½ dead Stephen just doesn’t work… 🤣

Title from Saturn by Sleeping at Last.

Light Carries On (endlessly)

It hurt.

Stephen Strange was only a collection of pain, memories and bitter regret. The pain was everywhere - in his body, in his mind, in his very soul. The question why he had been brought back haunted him constantly; all he’d seen when he’d choosen this timeline had been a victory and a living, breathing and halfway healthy Tony Stark. He hadn’t seen himself and that had been okay. He’d done his part and with his usefulness over death would have been the final release from the agony of living in a broken body and with an overtaxed mind.

When the haunted house catches fire:

a moment of indecision.

The house was, after all, built on bones,

and blood, and bad intentions.

Everyone who enters the house feels

that overwhelming dread, the evil

that perhaps only fire can purge.

It’s tempting to just let it burn.

And then I remember:

These birds are native to Australia, yes, but they're not technically native to the cities. Or, well, kinda?

So, Australian ibises typically lived in inland wetland areas. Australia, however, is a dry-ass continent, and the swamps aren't always wet, so whenever there's a dry spell and the swamps dry up and the food dwindles, the ibis colonies will migrate to the coast for food. I suppose when their presence caused enough competition with existing coastal birds they'd fly back inland and hopefully the wetlands would be wet again.

Enter the Europeans - the ibis didn't have much contact with the white man for a hundred years or so, wetlands were too annoying to actively clear, so the white man mostly stayed out and the ibis generally doesn't leave while there's food. Or maybe they did, and the white man towns were too tiny to register for them and they just did their usual thing.

Come the 1970s, severe drought conditions once again led to ibises to flee the wetlands (and the wetlands were probably extra hurt and extra unable to recover due to water diversion for agriculture).

They went for the coasts, and there, due to the absolutely boom in Australian urban sprawl, they found....

Huh. That's new. But was there food?

The answer was yes there was, and not only that, it was almost like the food set out specifically for them!

I am of course talking about bins.

Bins have a couple of nifty features if you're an ibis. One, they contain food scraps, especially protein scraps. Two, the openings tend to be fairly far off the ground, so rats and other flightless creatures can't get to the food (the cockroaches can, which is a plus for the ibis because they eat bugs!)

Two, the bottoms are low, and ibises are wading birds so they have long legs and long beaks. Seagulls, crows and pigeons all have to wait for the bin to be fairly full - ibises can get in there at half full!

And three, natural environment for the ibis is diving into a fetid stagnant swamp with nasty bacteria to eat wriggling things. Their beaks and heads are specially adapted for that - they're bald, and the skin is specially adapted for diving into gross places. Their beaks are sharp and dextrous, so they can open packaging or simply pierce it to get at the tasty, tasty leftover fried chicken or whatever. And if the chicken's already got maggots? Fantastic, they love eating bugs.

So they don't wanna go back. Why the hell would they go back? And with every new drought, even more ibis leave the drying wetlands, find the cities, and decide to stay.

I mean, there's probably a selection effect - the birds that are scared of humans eventually return to their home wetlands, but the ones that aren't decide they're just gonna start nesting in the urban parks. Wetlands are also getting drier and drier (water use issues) so the wetland populations are crashing while the urban populations are exploding.

I think, the bin chicken has to be a symbol of luck. It is so insane to me that the human-designed environment ended up being an ibis paradise, where we've systematically murdered all their enemies and established abundant self-replenishing food sources that they and only them can access.

Not a stupid question, and many of our bins have lids (see first picture), but they're designed to work with our robot arm bin trucks (minimises worker's contact with waste) and they swing open easily as a result. But normally a non-issue, since many birds aren't quite strong enough to lift the plastic lid.

But Australia is home to some of the smartest birds that exist, soooo

Source:

PROJECT 2025 MUST BE STOPPED 🛑