Not the Alternative! Anything but that!
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Listing Series
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Better Than The Alternative by 420_im_lonely
Fandoms: Hermitcraft SMP, Life Series | 3rd Life SMP Series
21 Jul 2026
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Summary
Etho has tried four therapists, six medications, and every coping strategy anyone has ever handed him. He is, by clinical definition, stabilized. He also can't sleep through the night, can't stop cataloging his own behavior for signs he's becoming his father, and can't figure out why scrambled eggs make him want to cry.
Cleo holds the family together. Beef holds Etho together. And Gem — quiet, careful, six-year-old Gem — holds his hand under the table and says you can't mess it up. I won't let you.Series
- Part 1 of Not the Alternative! Anything but that!
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Sequel to Better than the Alternative
Six months after the bathroom floor, Etho has a fairy wand in his back pocket and star-shaped cookies in the oven and a medication that's doing something, which is more than the last two managed. He's showing up. For Bdubs at the principal's office. For date night in the navy dress. For tea parties and road trips and the slow, unglamorous work of becoming a person instead of a diagnosis.
Series
- Part 2 of Not the Alternative! Anything but that!
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Two years out from the worst of it, Etho is the one making breakfast. He's the one checking homework and signing permission slips and carrying Cleo to bed when the project eats her alive. He's the stable one. He's holding it up.
Scar is seventeen and closing doors. Gem is twelve and everywhere. Bdubs is fifteen and cycling between close and gone in a pattern that means something nobody talks about at dinner. And Beef brought his boyfriend to Saturday breakfast and everyone has noticed something except Etho.
Series
- Part 3 of Not the Alternative! Anything but that!
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Etho's father dies on a Thursday. The body is just catching up.
There's a house to clear out — the house on County Road 6, with the cracks in the drywall and the knife marks in the counter and the floor where everything happened.Series
- Part 4 of Not the Alternative! Anything but that!
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Bdubs comes downstairs in sweatpants on a school morning and says "I'm not going today." Etho hears what Cleo doesn't — not yet. Not independence. Something else.
Series
- Part 5 of Not the Alternative! Anything but that!
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The couch is moved, Scar has opinions. He doesn’t check in on Bdubs, but he has opinions about the couch.
Series
- Part 6 of Not the Alternative! Anything but that!
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Bdubs, the ultimate hand biter as a kid, now quiet and restrained. But he still has teeth, he still bites, and he can take a chunk out if he needs. And he does. Good for him.
Series
- Part 7 of Not the Alternative! Anything but that!
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Summary
The season after the worst of it. Not a single story — a collection of days.
No end in sight for this one. A prolonged and slightly planned out diary of sorts. Plot points here will be referenced in other works.
Series
- Part 8 of Not the Alternative! Anything but that!
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Summary
Before the floors and the trees and the shoe rack — before any of it — there was a woman who sang in a kitchen, and a boy named Doc who held his baby brother for the first time, and a house that was, for two years, just a house.
This is the before. The good years and the silence after.Series
- Part 9 of Not the Alternative! Anything but that!
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Summary
Bdubs is five, and he is not getting better, and Etho has been sitting in a hospital chair for nine days.
Not because it helps. Not because the doctors asked him to. Because when Etho was fourteen and in a room that looked exactly like this one, his father dropped him off at the emergency entrance and drove away, and the chair was empty for three days except for one afternoon when a boy named Beef sat in it and held his hand and said I'm here.
Etho doesn't know if sitting in the chair is love. He doesn't know if it's enough. He knows it's the only thing he has that his own father didn't give him, and he's going to give it whether or not it matters, whether or not Bdubs ever remembers, whether or not the monitors keep saying what the monitors are saying.
Series
- Part 10 of Not the Alternative! Anything but that!