LB autobio: Rage Against the Regime
Oct. 14th, 2025 06:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeRage Against the Regime
Series: LB autobio
Summary: Biff rages out over politics, beats the shit out of a headspace wall, and then goes on a fetch quest to blow off steam.
Word Count: 1800
Notes: Winner of the fan poll this month! If you want to support writing like this (and have your votes count double!), check out our LiberaPay or Patreon! The book referenced is Burnout: the Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, by Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski. Content warnings for consensual sex and the American political everything.
The moment Biff comes, his thoughtleak starts feeling off.
“I can keep going,” he insists. “I wanna keep going.”
Rogan and Mac exchange uneasy looks. “If you’re sure…”
“Yeah, I’m sure, c’mon.”
But it’s not working, something’s wrong, and when it becomes clear things won’t go the way Biff wants them to, that Rogan won’t be able to come again, Biff goes, “shit!” and stomps off, snatching his briefs from the floor.
“Angel…” Rogan reaches for him.
“Don’t fuckin’ touch me, man! Just don’t fucking touch me!” Without the sex to distract him, the rage is eating his guts, and if Rogan tries do that fucking shrink-talk bullshit and hug him…
“I’m gonna go get some orange juice and cookies,” Mac says, their go-to for endorphin drop. “You want a punching bag or something, B?”
Mac used to box. Him and Biff sometimes takes turns with the bag when one of them is mad, Mac’s even taught him a few things, so Biff keeps from biting his head off. “Yeah, gimme—gimme something solid,” something that pushes back, that doesn’t swing away, something that resists.
Rogan conjures up a padded wall roughly the size of a big bookcase, and Biff hurls himself against it, pounds on it, kicks it, until the first adrenaline rush is through.
“You good?” Mac asks, holding out the juice.
Biff shotguns it, resists the urge to hurl the glass at the wall to break it. He doesn’t trash rooms anymore; that’s his rule to himself, because then either he’ll have to clean up the mess himself, or way worse, Rogan will do it for him. That shit is what Biff’s old man used to do, and he isn’t like his old man.
Rogan, who to his credit sat very quietly while Biff pounded on the wall and didn’t try to fix it or make it about feelings, ventures, “You wanna talk about it?”
“I hate this fuckin’ president!” Biff shouts.
Mac and Rogan blink at him.
“Oh,” Rogan says with an air of sudden understanding, “it’s a present thing…” All his sex freak-outs are about past things.
Biff rants about politics for a bit, but it doesn’t help, he already knows it won’t help. Talking about shit has never once helped him when he’s like this, it just wastes air. What he needs is to do something, push back, fight back, and how does anybody fight something this big? (He doesn’t touch the cookies Mac offers. Fuck the cookies.) He’s so fucking pissed that these jack-offs are fucking with his sex life. They don’t think about him at all, in bed or out of it!
“Here,” Mac says. “How about we go running, then you and me, we can go a few rounds with the bag, get some of this energy out, huh?”
“Okay.” It won’t solve the problem, but he can’t go around biting heads off all day.
Mori bangs on the door. “Hey, you decent? Is this Rogan’s fault? Do I need to kill him?” She has a standing promise to murder whichever one of them is a dick to the other.
Biff rolls his eyes. “Yeah, I’m decent, come in.”
She gives him a hug and shoulder-punches, but he still simmers as they dress for the run and eat breakfast. The anger’s still in him, seething and coiling in his guts. He hates when he gets like this; nothing makes it go away. Running at least gives all that rage somewhere to go, channels it through the old familiar pounding of feet on pavement, breath in lungs, Mori and Rogan on either side of him. They lob thoughts back and forth, since he can’t keep the pace and talk at the same time.
“I need to do something about it,” he thought-snarls at them, “but the fuck do I do? Only shit I ever been good at is busting heads and sucking dick, and then we’d get arrested!” And even this pissed, Biff doesn’t want to get all of LB (or even just his own self) arrested.
“And to be fair,” Mori adds, “our noodle-armed body is probably way worse at ass-kicking than yours is.” Which is true.
“Also, you’re way better at more than that,” Rogan adds, because he can’t resist trying to shrink-talk his way through anything. “Cooking, cleaning, adulting…”
Biff rolls his eyes. Sure, real helpful, all that… he’ll mop the White House’s floor, that’ll teach ‘em…
They jog past a yellow elephant and a yard sale. A friend calls to them from a park bench; they wave but don’t stop. They’ll loop back after the run.
They continue lobbing thoughts back and forth. Biff could give a shit about billionaire computer nerds who have to pay people to play their own video games for them, but the Grok Spicy thing (a new fresh annoyance) chaps his ass. He used to shovel out that kinda McDonald's porn for a living, he hated it (he hated everything back then), and he still did it better.
“Hey,” Rogan asks, “you wanna make a porny gifset together?”
“Hey, yeah!” He hated making gifsets the least. It was nice to focus completely on one specific thing, one detail, one movement. Besides, it gives Biff’s mind something to chew on besides itself.
Mori checks out, but he and Rogan nonverbally toss images and ideas back and forth, Rogan movement arcs and circles, Biff the horny shit. Something nasty, something Grok Spicy could never, something easy. It’s not enough, he’s still angry, but at least it’s a distraction.
They finish the run, loop back to the yard sale. (The friend has left.) There’s some fancy mechanical keyboard that Sneak declares “peak clackage,” which Biff could give a shit about, but the vessel’s shoulder has been struggling and he thinks the different shape will help. (He will later be proven right.) He’s willing to spend twenty bucks to find out, but they’ll have to go home to get their wallet, adding another eighty minutes to their outdoor time.
Mac comes up alongside. “Hey, B, you want to do those rounds with the bag?”
Biff thinks. “Nah, I wanna focus on that gifset thing. We do our usual workout later, ‘kay?”
“Sure.”
Biff, Mori, and Rogan head home, and on the way, they find a box of canned goods, marked FREE: beans, mostly, but some unsweetened applesauce too. Biff looks at the box, and he thinks, that’s no good; people won’t find it out here. But there’s a little free pantry out by the yard sale… and feeding people, that’s the most basic, decent thing a person can do for a body. Ain’t nothing good’ll happen without food. They need to go get their tote bag for garage sale stuff anyway…
So they hit the house, get their wallet and their bag. Biff shoves all the cans of food into the bag and lugs them to the yard sale, where he buys the “clacky” keyboard and the “boopy” mouse and also a hooded cloak thingy for Rawlin. They head on to unload the cans at the little free pantry, only to discover that someone’s shoved a million boxes of tampons in there.
That’s no good, Biff thinks; nobody will be looking for those there. Those should go in the personal care free box, way over by the grocery store…
So then they exchange the cans for tampons and lug those all the way down to the grocery store, except on the way they find a dumped box of magazines. Biff sighs; nobody’s going to be looking for those here either, but there’s a free book box on the way to the free personal items box… after the other LBers go through them all.
So Sneak plops on a curbed armchair (“FREE, CLEAN, NEWISH”) to go through the mags. The Mother Jones is about every bad thing happening, so fuck that, but there’s an issue of something called Yes! with a recipe for bone broth and photos of wheelchair dancing and Iñupiaq tattoos that seems cool. The rest of the stack goes into the book box further down the street, safe from the rain and easier to find, but that box also has some comics Sneak and Mori want, so they grab that. Their tote bag has never seen such traffic.
Finally, the tampons are in the right box, the canned goods are in the right box, the magazines are in the right box, everything’s where it’s supposed to be, and they all make it home. It’s 4:30 and they haven’t even had lunch yet; no wonder they’re starving!
Biff realizes, to his surprise, that he’s not angry anymore.
It’s such a crazy thing to experience that he has to poke it with a stick, trying to see if it’ll blaze up again. He’s always been angry. It’s never gone away, when he’s gotten mad like this. Some things would drown it out—drinking, sometimes—but no matter how many fights he picked, no matter how hard he worked out, the rage was always still there, just in partial remission. Nothing ever worked before.
He listens over the other LBers’ shoulders sometimes when they read; it’s way better than trying to do it himself. So he knows there’s a book they read, called Burnout, by two sisters named Nagoski, where they talk about dealing with the stress and dealing with the stressor: the thing that pisses you off, and the way your body reacts to it, two separate things. He realizes… maybe the reason the anger was always stuck was, the shit he was angry about was also the shit he never felt like there was anything to be done about. Pumping iron and busting heads maybe could purge the adrenaline, but it wasn’t doing anything about what he was pissed about in the first place. Running food and tampons and mags all over town, though… for some reason, that felt like not just doing something, but doing something about all the fucking bullshit in the world. He couldn’t kill a president, but he could get beans and tampons to people what needed them.
It also probably helps that he’s had a steady roof and breakfast, lunch, and dinners for the past ten years.
“Huh. Well, son of a bitch. Guess some of that shit really works,” he muses.
Then he goes to make lunch.
Series: LB autobio
Summary: Biff rages out over politics, beats the shit out of a headspace wall, and then goes on a fetch quest to blow off steam.
Word Count: 1800
Notes: Winner of the fan poll this month! If you want to support writing like this (and have your votes count double!), check out our LiberaPay or Patreon! The book referenced is Burnout: the Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, by Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski. Content warnings for consensual sex and the American political everything.
The moment Biff comes, his thoughtleak starts feeling off.
“I can keep going,” he insists. “I wanna keep going.”
Rogan and Mac exchange uneasy looks. “If you’re sure…”
“Yeah, I’m sure, c’mon.”
But it’s not working, something’s wrong, and when it becomes clear things won’t go the way Biff wants them to, that Rogan won’t be able to come again, Biff goes, “shit!” and stomps off, snatching his briefs from the floor.
“Angel…” Rogan reaches for him.
“Don’t fuckin’ touch me, man! Just don’t fucking touch me!” Without the sex to distract him, the rage is eating his guts, and if Rogan tries do that fucking shrink-talk bullshit and hug him…
“I’m gonna go get some orange juice and cookies,” Mac says, their go-to for endorphin drop. “You want a punching bag or something, B?”
Mac used to box. Him and Biff sometimes takes turns with the bag when one of them is mad, Mac’s even taught him a few things, so Biff keeps from biting his head off. “Yeah, gimme—gimme something solid,” something that pushes back, that doesn’t swing away, something that resists.
Rogan conjures up a padded wall roughly the size of a big bookcase, and Biff hurls himself against it, pounds on it, kicks it, until the first adrenaline rush is through.
“You good?” Mac asks, holding out the juice.
Biff shotguns it, resists the urge to hurl the glass at the wall to break it. He doesn’t trash rooms anymore; that’s his rule to himself, because then either he’ll have to clean up the mess himself, or way worse, Rogan will do it for him. That shit is what Biff’s old man used to do, and he isn’t like his old man.
Rogan, who to his credit sat very quietly while Biff pounded on the wall and didn’t try to fix it or make it about feelings, ventures, “You wanna talk about it?”
“I hate this fuckin’ president!” Biff shouts.
Mac and Rogan blink at him.
“Oh,” Rogan says with an air of sudden understanding, “it’s a present thing…” All his sex freak-outs are about past things.
Biff rants about politics for a bit, but it doesn’t help, he already knows it won’t help. Talking about shit has never once helped him when he’s like this, it just wastes air. What he needs is to do something, push back, fight back, and how does anybody fight something this big? (He doesn’t touch the cookies Mac offers. Fuck the cookies.) He’s so fucking pissed that these jack-offs are fucking with his sex life. They don’t think about him at all, in bed or out of it!
“Here,” Mac says. “How about we go running, then you and me, we can go a few rounds with the bag, get some of this energy out, huh?”
“Okay.” It won’t solve the problem, but he can’t go around biting heads off all day.
Mori bangs on the door. “Hey, you decent? Is this Rogan’s fault? Do I need to kill him?” She has a standing promise to murder whichever one of them is a dick to the other.
Biff rolls his eyes. “Yeah, I’m decent, come in.”
She gives him a hug and shoulder-punches, but he still simmers as they dress for the run and eat breakfast. The anger’s still in him, seething and coiling in his guts. He hates when he gets like this; nothing makes it go away. Running at least gives all that rage somewhere to go, channels it through the old familiar pounding of feet on pavement, breath in lungs, Mori and Rogan on either side of him. They lob thoughts back and forth, since he can’t keep the pace and talk at the same time.
“I need to do something about it,” he thought-snarls at them, “but the fuck do I do? Only shit I ever been good at is busting heads and sucking dick, and then we’d get arrested!” And even this pissed, Biff doesn’t want to get all of LB (or even just his own self) arrested.
“And to be fair,” Mori adds, “our noodle-armed body is probably way worse at ass-kicking than yours is.” Which is true.
“Also, you’re way better at more than that,” Rogan adds, because he can’t resist trying to shrink-talk his way through anything. “Cooking, cleaning, adulting…”
Biff rolls his eyes. Sure, real helpful, all that… he’ll mop the White House’s floor, that’ll teach ‘em…
They jog past a yellow elephant and a yard sale. A friend calls to them from a park bench; they wave but don’t stop. They’ll loop back after the run.
They continue lobbing thoughts back and forth. Biff could give a shit about billionaire computer nerds who have to pay people to play their own video games for them, but the Grok Spicy thing (a new fresh annoyance) chaps his ass. He used to shovel out that kinda McDonald's porn for a living, he hated it (he hated everything back then), and he still did it better.
“Hey,” Rogan asks, “you wanna make a porny gifset together?”
“Hey, yeah!” He hated making gifsets the least. It was nice to focus completely on one specific thing, one detail, one movement. Besides, it gives Biff’s mind something to chew on besides itself.
Mori checks out, but he and Rogan nonverbally toss images and ideas back and forth, Rogan movement arcs and circles, Biff the horny shit. Something nasty, something Grok Spicy could never, something easy. It’s not enough, he’s still angry, but at least it’s a distraction.
They finish the run, loop back to the yard sale. (The friend has left.) There’s some fancy mechanical keyboard that Sneak declares “peak clackage,” which Biff could give a shit about, but the vessel’s shoulder has been struggling and he thinks the different shape will help. (He will later be proven right.) He’s willing to spend twenty bucks to find out, but they’ll have to go home to get their wallet, adding another eighty minutes to their outdoor time.
Mac comes up alongside. “Hey, B, you want to do those rounds with the bag?”
Biff thinks. “Nah, I wanna focus on that gifset thing. We do our usual workout later, ‘kay?”
“Sure.”
Biff, Mori, and Rogan head home, and on the way, they find a box of canned goods, marked FREE: beans, mostly, but some unsweetened applesauce too. Biff looks at the box, and he thinks, that’s no good; people won’t find it out here. But there’s a little free pantry out by the yard sale… and feeding people, that’s the most basic, decent thing a person can do for a body. Ain’t nothing good’ll happen without food. They need to go get their tote bag for garage sale stuff anyway…
So they hit the house, get their wallet and their bag. Biff shoves all the cans of food into the bag and lugs them to the yard sale, where he buys the “clacky” keyboard and the “boopy” mouse and also a hooded cloak thingy for Rawlin. They head on to unload the cans at the little free pantry, only to discover that someone’s shoved a million boxes of tampons in there.
That’s no good, Biff thinks; nobody will be looking for those there. Those should go in the personal care free box, way over by the grocery store…
So then they exchange the cans for tampons and lug those all the way down to the grocery store, except on the way they find a dumped box of magazines. Biff sighs; nobody’s going to be looking for those here either, but there’s a free book box on the way to the free personal items box… after the other LBers go through them all.
So Sneak plops on a curbed armchair (“FREE, CLEAN, NEWISH”) to go through the mags. The Mother Jones is about every bad thing happening, so fuck that, but there’s an issue of something called Yes! with a recipe for bone broth and photos of wheelchair dancing and Iñupiaq tattoos that seems cool. The rest of the stack goes into the book box further down the street, safe from the rain and easier to find, but that box also has some comics Sneak and Mori want, so they grab that. Their tote bag has never seen such traffic.
Finally, the tampons are in the right box, the canned goods are in the right box, the magazines are in the right box, everything’s where it’s supposed to be, and they all make it home. It’s 4:30 and they haven’t even had lunch yet; no wonder they’re starving!
Biff realizes, to his surprise, that he’s not angry anymore.
It’s such a crazy thing to experience that he has to poke it with a stick, trying to see if it’ll blaze up again. He’s always been angry. It’s never gone away, when he’s gotten mad like this. Some things would drown it out—drinking, sometimes—but no matter how many fights he picked, no matter how hard he worked out, the rage was always still there, just in partial remission. Nothing ever worked before.
He listens over the other LBers’ shoulders sometimes when they read; it’s way better than trying to do it himself. So he knows there’s a book they read, called Burnout, by two sisters named Nagoski, where they talk about dealing with the stress and dealing with the stressor: the thing that pisses you off, and the way your body reacts to it, two separate things. He realizes… maybe the reason the anger was always stuck was, the shit he was angry about was also the shit he never felt like there was anything to be done about. Pumping iron and busting heads maybe could purge the adrenaline, but it wasn’t doing anything about what he was pissed about in the first place. Running food and tampons and mags all over town, though… for some reason, that felt like not just doing something, but doing something about all the fucking bullshit in the world. He couldn’t kill a president, but he could get beans and tampons to people what needed them.
It also probably helps that he’s had a steady roof and breakfast, lunch, and dinners for the past ten years.
“Huh. Well, son of a bitch. Guess some of that shit really works,” he muses.
Then he goes to make lunch.
no subject
Date: 2025-10-15 12:35 am (UTC)Dreamwidth doesn't have a "kudos" button so...
Date: 2025-10-15 12:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-15 02:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-15 07:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-15 12:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-20 03:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-16 04:11 pm (UTC)Reminds Arini, when Brick is feeling very trapped in his feelings, or Zahi is, they will find a way to hold space for someone else. And then they feel better.
“No one will find them here” coming up a few times stood out to Arini for some reason.
This especially salient. More people should know this. Arini should carry this with it.
no subject
Date: 2025-10-16 09:13 pm (UTC)When we have a shitty day, we often say to ourselves: everything sucks, so I should make something not suck. Sometimes that is creation, sometimes it is putting things in the right place or fixing or cleaning them. We don't control everything, but this little thing is going to Not Suck. This story was a good reminder.
no subject
Date: 2025-10-20 04:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-20 04:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-20 03:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-20 04:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-25 02:38 am (UTC)Also, yay for putting shit in boxes where folks’ll find it.