#lettersdeeplyworn

“When you realize you can tell someone your truth, when you can show yourself to them, when you stand in front of them and their response is “you’re safe with me” – that’s intimacy.”

Eddie hates overnight shifts.  The bunks at the station are as comfortable as they can be for what they are, but that doesn’t change the fact that even after two years, Eddie can’t seem to convince his brain that the station is a familiar, safe place to sleep.  He’s grateful when they get calls that yank them out of bed before he can sink too far into dreams because he’s always tense, worried that he’ll slip under the dark haze that’s lingered ever since he left the army.  

But, he can’t always avoid it.

He snaps awake shivering, gunpowder in his nose and blood on his tongue—he must have bitten it in his sleep.  He’s drenched in sweat, his heart races.  The only saving grace is that when he looks around, he doesn’t seem to have woken up anyone else.

He rubs his hands over his face and tries to stop shaking.  Eventually, he just gets up and slips out of the room.  

The kitchen is dark, the station quiet.  Eddie grabs a bottle of water from the refrigerator and takes a long swig, swishing it around and spitting back into the sink to rinse the blood out of his mouth.  Then, he caps it again and presses it to the side of his neck, the chill soothing against his skin.  

“Diaz! I’m out of ammo!”

“ETA six minutes.”

“We don’t have six minutes.”

“Diaz—”

“Eddie?”

Eddie jumps, the bottle slipping from his fingers.  He flinches when it hits the ground, the noise too loud in the small space.  

“Woah, woah, woah, it’s okay.  Just me.”  Buck.  

Buck’s brow is furrowed, his hands up, palms open.  Eddie swallows hard, clenches and unclenches his hands to try and get them to stop trembling.  He breathes.

“Sorry,” he rasps out.

Buck shakes his head.  “I didn’t mean to startle you.  I—are you okay?”

Eddie bends down to pick up the water bottle.  His shoulders are tight, stomach twisted up in knots—Buck’s eyes may be soft and nonjudgmental, but Eddie’s anxiety spikes anyway.  He doesn’t talk about this.  Shoves it down, pushes it aside, tries not to think about it when it isn’t directly happening.  He doesn’t want to make a fuss, doesn’t want there to be something wrong with him.  Doesn’t want there to be something he can’t handle himself.  

But.  Buck’s never thought of him as a failure.  Buck’s never thought of him as weak.  

Eddie exhales and rolls his shoulders, uncaps the bottle and takes a long swig.

“I—um—yeah,” he answers finally.  “Sometimes, I—”

Buck’s gaze is steady.  Patient.  Eddie clears his throat and fights against the anxiety welling up in his chest.

“—I have nightmares,” he forces out.  Buck just nods.

“Because of the war?”

“Yeah.”  Eddie leans heavily against the counter, turning the water bottle over in his hands, avoiding Buck’s eyes.  “I, uh, my last mission in Afghanistan, our helicopter was shot down. My unit, we took heavy fire, barely made it out—I was shot three times.  Got a medical discharge a few weeks later.”

Buck hums quietly.  He takes a step forward.  “Your silver star?”

“Yeah.”

“Can I touch you?”  

Eddie looks up, startled.  That wasn’t what he expected.

He wets his lips.  “I—okay.”

Buck doesn’t hug him—his hands settle on Eddie’s shoulders, steady, grounding.  His thumbs dig into the tendons at the side of Eddie’s neck and sweep gently up and down, pressing the tension out.  Eddie sets the water bottle aside and tentatively rests his hands on Buck’s waist, leaning into him.

“What would you do if you were at home right now?”  Buck’s voice is still quiet, soothing, and Eddie’s breathing evens out, his pulse calms.  

“I’d go sit in Christopher’s room,” he replies.  “Watch him sleep for a bit.  That—that usually helps.”

“Well, I’m not Chris,” Buck acknowledges—Eddie can hear the smile in his voice— “—but we could go the rec room, sit on the couch, maybe watch something?”

“You don’t have to do that—” Eddie starts, feeling guilty at the idea of keeping Buck up with this.  

“Hey.”  Buck pulls back, his touch stilling.  “I want to.  You shouldn’t have to deal with this stuff alone.  Okay?”

God, I love you.  

The thought steals his breath all over again for an entirely different reason.  

Oh.  Well.  That’s—oh.

“Okay.”

“Babe I need a pairing to go with the number.” “I don’t know! Geraskier?” “Geraskier works.”

From the September prompt list, found here!

Indeed I do. Lemme point out though that we have tons of nice gifmakers in this fandom. No one is perfect and there is no such a thing as a perfect gif. Most gifmakers have a certain style they stick with and develop and improve. I try to gif various styles since I usually get inspired by others and then wanna see if I can do something similar to what they have done so nicely. So the following list is of people who have come across my dash various times and I would go “wooowwww, I wanna be able to do this”. Their styles are rather different from each other but I enjoy all of them and how these certain people work with these styles. What’s not in here are people who oversaturate, oversharpen, overdo gradient colorings, or have too much movement because each gif consists of 5 different gifs. I do love colorful gifs, I do love blending, I also love dark-ish gifs and I appreciate natural colorings so much. But I want it to be aesthetically pleasing. And these people I mention, they’re inspirations to me.

@lettersdeeplyworn If you ask which gifsets most likely appear on my dash and I get JEALOUS of how cleanly and perfectly and artistically the gifs are edited and I literally don’t even know how some of the things are done on Photoshop, very high chance the gifset is Gabi’s. Never talked to her, I believe. But I admire her from afar.

@gillespiecharlie Cece. Never talked to her either. I think I may have tagged her in a bunch of my ugly edits, which I’m very sorry for. Her gifs are clean, lit, and yet, she’s got a way with colors. I really adore this style. Because it’s so clean, I also suppose it has to do with the sharpening, I don’t know, but she still somehow manages to intentionally apply colors and... it still looks clean??? Like how even??? The more color goes into my gifsets, the less clean my gifs get. So, once again, I’m so freaking jealous of this style.

@stydixa Talking about clean gifs, Adeline is the queen of those. I admire her style because she can lit make EVERY scene look natural and clean. It doesn’t matter how badly the source material was oversaturated or undersaturated or too bright or too dark or anything. You give her a scene, she can gif it naturally. As if it was supposed to be exactly like that.

@charligillespie (@lucifersmorningstars) Another very talented person in this fandom is Engy. I think she hasn’t reblogged me once but no hard feelings, I just lowkey need attention. But she’s very talented. Her range of giffing is somewhere between the two people mentioned before. I don’t know, seeing her gifs on my dash always makes me smile because you can just tell that she knows what she’s doing.

@sunsetscurve Once again, this leads me to Haia who is yet another talented person who is able to gif scenes incredibly natural, clean and without the lack of contrasts. Very jealous of her giffing style as well. Every 540px gif she makes just slays.

@beccs and @danisclayton are cross-fandom blogs for me whom I have reblogged/queued for other fandoms as well. Clean and nice, every fandom’s heroes for making edits that look natural and perfect.

@kennyortegas is the most colorful gifmaker on this list. Lee enjoys colors, clearly, and also uses gradients sometimes but she never exaggerates. I really enjoy her gifs because the style she’s using is usually not my favorite, but she does her gifs in a way that I admire her style anyway, very much, actually. So <3

@carolineeforbes I don’t know her. She’s useless. Most useless person on earth. The reason why I don’t reblog her is because I’m a lazy btch and she has accepted that. As I said, I don’t know her. Haven’t known her for some years. She steals my giffing styles. No, she doesn’t. She improves them, actually, which is very bothersome and makes me very jealous and competitive. Anyway, like me, she doesn’t really have one certain giffing style. She’s my artsy soulmate, so we try to create unique and special colorings, while getting inspired by people as the ones above. Anny’s an artistically free spirit in giffing therefore and I love all of her things. Too bad she hasn’t made more gifs of JatP yet.

Thank you! <3

11.  3 books that you would recommend everyone to read

There are few books I’d recommend to everyone, but there are a few I love enough that I recommend to a lot of people:

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

Silencing the Past by Michel-Rolph Trouillot

The Inquisitor’s Tale by Adam Gidwitz

12.  3 apps you use the most

Tumblr

Instagram

Hangouts

22.  3 movies/books/tv shows that made you cry

Rilla of Ingleside

Bridge to Terabithia

Fleabag

(women are better at making me cry)

32.  3 months you enjoy the most

January (newness)

September (birthday!)

October (spooky)

37.  3 languages you would love to learn

French (I know some but would love to be more fluent)

Latin