#bc i empathize

[therandomfandomme]

you know what, i feel for USAmericans, I do, and I'm devastated abt what this will mean and what impact this will have both for y'all and globally, however, kinda sick of everyone being in a state of mourning, as if elections like this haven't been happening everywhere and bigger tragedies aren't occuring, like it's not opression olympics or anything, but god, the world truly must stand still whenever something happens in the USA and it's annoying and exhausting sometimes

[inkskinned]

i'm still trying to piece together the truth of it. when you left, you said: feel free to spin this narrative however you want. i have no idea if you were being cruel or if you just genuinely don't remember what you've done to me.

it's hard because i'd done so much of the work for you. i had seen the parts that flaked off, the rust underneath. i started separating you into two people - the one i loved, and the one who hurt me. i had this fantasy version of you - my partner - and then i had this stranger, a third person who would show up randomly to shatter me. i am deliriously glad i'm no longer with "the stranger". i miss the gentle (unreal?) "other" you terribly.

at first, i was so strict about my boundaries. i remember telling you to get the fuck out of my house if you were going to talk to me like that. by the end: i would justify your behavior for you, accepting even your mistreatment as "my fault" in the grand scheme. i look back on the person i was before you - smart, independent, confident - and i feel a strange sense of detachment. i don't even recognize me.

even in one of our last conversations, you said: if you want a partner that always talks warmly to you, find someone else. there was a time that a comment like that would have made me leave. and instead, somehow, i just placidly accepted that kind of thing. you were literally telling me that i wasn't allowed to have a reaction to your cruelty - and i just took it, because you'd so fully turned things around on me.

when people are faced with irrationality, a rational brain tries to make sense of it. this is the trap. they're lovely in the morning, gentle and blue-eyed and sweet. like nothing even happened, they breeze around the house and kiss you on the mouth. but at night; who is that? they snap almost randomly; flying into an impotent rage about just-about-anything. it just doesn't make sense. so the problem must be me, and my brain, and how i think.

the traumatized brain just wants peace. so maybe i'm misremembering. maybe you were just having a bad day. maybe it's actually me.

you eventually would fully turn on me and start implying that i am the bad actor in our relationship. that's what happens, right? that's literally in the playbook. you went to therapy for all of a month, told her a half-truth, co-opted therapyspeak. you figured out how to reframe your actions as "seeking peace." any time i stood my ground, i was "gaslighting." when i asked you to be more gentle, you said i was "tone policing." you said, randomly, i had emotionally manipulated you - i still have no idea what that's even specifically referring to. maybe my consistent requests for calmness and empathy?

and while i literally know better, and i'm sitting here, trained by you, thinking: wait, fuck. was i actually the person you made me out to be?

and the thing that scares me is that i literally do not know if you ever actually saw what you were doing to me. when you'd tell me how you remember arguments, you'd always summarize them in a way where you come off as gentle and easy: "i was trying to set an important boundary." what had actually happened was 15 minutes of you shouting at me i know you did something shady, just admit it already. eventually you'd say my reaction to your shouting (when i finally reacted, which usually happened around hour three) was inevitably "disappointing" and "another way i'm silencing your feelings."

how many times did i ask you - beg you - to just take accountability? looking back, i don't think i ever heard you say: you're right. the way i talked to you was wrong of me.

i am trying to tie together the two people into a full version of you in my head. yes, you made my coffee and made me laugh and spent hours on the phone with me. and yes - you would scream at me until i had to run away and hide behind something.

i wish i did have a narrative i could pull out and shape to my whim. i wish i did have some semblance of reality. instead i just stand here, strange and vibrating, wondering: what the fuck just happened?

[anghraine]

It's silly, but one of my favorite Kirk/Spock things is that they are clearly very much more on each other's wavelength intellectually than most others are, but—

There are so many scenes in which everyone else is baffled or missing something important that Spock or Kirk see in the other's behavior. Probably the peak moment for this is Spock, and Spock alone, realizing in "Arena" that Kirk has the raw materials to make gunpowder just as Kirk himself realizes it. So you get Spock murmuring "good, good...yes...yes..." right there on the bridge as his beloved starts reinventing the bazooka (pretty sure this counts as sex for him), but McCoy and the bridge crew are completely confused about what they're seeing. And there are plenty of moments of this kind of half-unspoken mutual brilliance while their co-workers wish they'd just use their words.

However. The important counterpoint to this is that Kirk and Spock each possess the special ability to instantly incinerate entire neuron paths in each other's brains and become 10x stupider around each other, also. Spock barges into Kirk's quarters in "The Enemy Within" without explanation, sees his naked chest, and his higher functions crumble into ash on the spot; when he regains the power of speech, he asks the baffled Kirk what he can do for him as if this somehow explains what he's doing there, and Kirk is just confused but pleased, and smiles enough that Spock's gay awakening visibly burns through even more neural circuits until he runs away.

And Kirk himself doesn't need to see skin to completely lose track of what he was even talking about because Spock did a thing. For instance, the scene when Kirk looks at Spock with flirty adoration at the end of "A Taste of Armageddon" and bats his eyelashes and says, "Why, Mr. Spock, you almost make me believe in miracles"—yes, it's extremely gay, but I feel it's important to understand the immediate context is a general conversation on the bridge about the horrors of war. But then Spock raised his brows and ambiguously complimented him, so Kirk's entire cognitive process melted into Spock Spock Spock Spock. In S3, Spock sits down beside Kirk to tenderly watch him sleep, without appearing to consider that anyone (like say the empath standing right by them) would notice, and then poorly fakes looking at tricorder readings when said empath picks on his emotions. Surely that will fool her psychic powers! (It doesn't.) Kirk, often a master of performance and theatricality, has to be physically held back from trying to singlehandedly maul a Klingon while in disguise and surrounded by an occupying Klingon force because one guy slightly shoved Spock.

They're a brilliant and wildly successful command team together and they are also so incredibly stupid about each other, it's beautiful

[sleepyvib-es]

Jason who everyone believed would be great and Percy who knew that everyone except his mom believed he wouldn't amount to anything unless he proved himself. Percy who chose to make the Great Prophecy be about him so Nico wouldn't have to carry that burden after losing his sister. Jason who chose to confront Caligula alone so Piper would live after the oracle told him he or Piper would die.

Percy who believed he would die at 16. Jason actually dying at 16.

Imagine if Percy and Jason actually had the chance to have a genuine conversation about how being sons of The Big 3 hurt them in different but similar ways bc of what was expected of them and bc of how they were treated by people. Percy and Jason knowing that they can't really show weakness or insecurity or ever say that they were scared bc everyone at their respective camps were counting on their leadership.

Percy and Jason who had their own distinct journeys to be the heroes they became and both journeys were valid and important but did Jason and Percy ever believe for a second that they were important not for their parentage and achievements but because of who they are and actively chose to be

[revasserium]

had me at hello

todoroki shouto; 4,082 words; fluff, tiny sprinkle of angst, no "y/n", summer camp, canon-divergent, domestic fluff, teeth-rotting fluff, summer-time romance, self-indulgent as all living fuck

summary: nothing lasts forever, not even goodbye. or, in which todoroki shouto discovers that summer flings really aren't his thing

a/n: chat we are SO back. back on this todoroki brain rot GRIND!!! and as opposed to posting at the last possible second for @pixelcafe-network's challenge friday like i did last time, i'm posting mine first this time to make up for it! the theme was "saying goodbye to a summer love" ♡⸜(˶˃ ᵕ ˂˶)⸝♡

It was to be a whirlwind summer, one that’s different from every one that came before it. Todoroki had thought, naively, that summer training camp would end up being just that — just another summer thing.

And he’d never been fond of the heat.

But you — you’d swept in like the rain, all bluster and brilliant, summer-thunder laughter. You struck across his storm-ridden skies like a spark of lightning, setting all his forests ablaze.

At first, he didn’t think much of it. Didn’t think much of the volunteers that the Pussycats had brought along to help around camp. Groupies, he’d dismissed, and thought of it no more. But the first night everyone came back, exhausted and sore and sweating in places they’d never thought could produce sweat, you’d been there along with the others (he doesn’t remember their names now, but he remembers yours), passing around cold water and setting up the food for dinner.

“Here,” you hand him a water bottle; he dips his head, his chest still heaving from exertion. He twists off the cap and gulps down half the bottle, feeling a cool trickle escape the corner of his mouth to run down his chin. He wipes at it with the back of his hand just as you cast him a grin before turning around to hand another water bottle to Kirishima.

Todoroki swallows, his palms warm, watching as you laugh at something someone says. He lingers on the gloss in your hair and the ease of your smile. He wonders what kind of quirk you might have; he catches himself wondering, and then proceeds to wonder why he’s wondering at all.

He thinks it’s the heat — fanning himself, he looks away — glancing up at the smoldering sky before sighing and capping his water bottle.

“They must love you at school, huh?” you ask, your voice jolting him out of one reverie and into another. Dinner’s almost done, and he’d wandered toward the edge of the wood for a moment of quiet, of peace or sanctity. He hadn’t noticed you following him, and that in and of itself should have set his senses on high. But, the air is tepid and the humidity heavy, and Todoroki only has time to cock a single eyebrow before you smile and continue —

“Your quirk — keeps you cool in the summer, and warm in the winter. Useful, no?”

He watches you watching him, your eyes huge and full of the dancing flames. He looks back towards the rest of his classmates, all chatting and laughing, grouped loosely with one another, Ashido flitting from one group to the other like the social butterfly she is.

“It’s alright,” Todoroki answers, surprising even himself. He drops his eyes, fixing his gaze on a point just above his own feet before you laugh, the sound drawing his attention back towards you.

“You’re not a very good liar, but that’s okay. It’s not a bad thing.”

You shoot him another grin.

“Your quirk,” he says, clearing his throat slightly as he feels a distinct heat prickling up the sides of his neck, “can I ask what it is?”

You list your head to one side, your expression curiously blank. Before you shoot him a smile that can only be called devious.

You nudge him with an arm before dancing away, but that momentary contact is all you’d needed. Todoroki feels his whole body relax, feels some of the tension drop from his shoulders, the strange nervousness that had been coiling in his stomach unclench.

“Guess!”

Someone calls your name from over your shoulder.

“Coming!”

You give him one final wink before dashing off, leaving him dazed, head reverberating as if someone had rung him through like a bell on a Sunday morning.

The weeks had passed in a strange blur after that, as if some vengeful giant had gone stomping through his memories, dragging a large hand across the vivid scenes, smearing the colors and scrambling the timelines. He remembers the ever-present ache in his muscles, the eternal shortness of breath that had accompanied the first few weeks, but he also remembers your presence in the evenings — always in the evenings, the shadow of you flickering around each and every one of his classmates, mostly asking about their days, but sometimes placing a comforting hand here or there.

He remembers your touch well, the gentle anchor of it, the immediate relief.

“Your quirk… it has something to do with feelings, doesn’t it?” he asks one night, a towel draped around his shoulders from a recent shower, his hair still damp in the early evening dark.

You flash him an enigmatic smile, swinging your feet as you turn your head back towards the liquid moonlight casting pale shadows along the edges of the summer-still leaves.

“What makes you say that?”

“Just…” Todoroki joins you, letting his arm brush along yours, his eyes following your gaze as he too sweeps the now empty campgrounds, the remnants of the barbeque fires still smoldering in their pits, the smoke twisting towards the cloudless sky like so many misty-tendrilled streams.

“Had a feeling.”

“A feeling, huh?” you echo, laughing softly, looking back down.

Todoroki doesn’t push you, but you don’t deny it either.

“You’re not wrong,” you say, after a brief moment of silence, “my quirk — it’s not offensive, or even defensive but… if I’m touching someone, I can… siphon their feelings into me,” and as if to demonstrate, you gently press your leg to his, and Todoroki feels the tired wariness drain from him, the feeling of ease trickling through him like hot water cascading down his skin.

He stifles a soft groan, feeling a blush press up against his cheeks.

You move your leg away, leaning back till your head is resting against the back of the park bench, poised at the edge of the large encampment.

“But that’s…” Todoroki searches for the right word — somehow ‘useful’ doesn’t seem quite right.

“No, you’re right,” you say, giggling even as you save him the necessity of finishing his sentence, “it’s a good quirk to have. It’s… necessary.”

But the way you say that word sounds a little too much like heartbreak for Todoroki to ignore.

“You said siphon…” he says, after a brief stretch of quiet, and he tastes the word on his tongue as if saying it for the first time.

“Yeah, that’s right,” you say, and longing is too close a friend of his for him not to notice it threaded through your voice like a secret.

“Which means… whatever you take from the person you’re touching… you have to feel it too, right?”

You lick your lips, your eyes flickering down to your hands, palms open.

“Yes.”

It’s a simple answer, but one that lands with a gut-punch of implication. Todoroki swallows, shifting ever so slightly to let his knee rest against yours. He tries his hardest to focus on calmness, to project relief. You turn to flash him a smile.

“You’re sweet,” and he hadn’t meant to blush, hadn’t meant for his heart to kick up like a drumbeat, but does. And he knows, instinctively, that you’d felt it too — passing through from his skin to yours by some strange glitch of nature.

He makes to pull away, but you reach out to rest a hand on his arm.

And almost instantly, he feels his heartbeat calm, feels the heat receding. But it isn’t like before — it isn’t the feeling of having something leave his body, but rather having something pressed in. Like a warm blanket settling over his shoulders, or a cold hand to ward off unwanted heat. Your calm seeps into him like summer rain, cooling his mind until he’s breathing steady.

He blinks down at you, startled.

“It goes both ways,” you say, and he can see the twin glow of warmth high in your cheeks. He spares a moment wondering if that blush had once belonged to him, if you were just holding onto it for a bit longer before letting it go. You move your hand away and he has to fight down the urge to pull it back.

“Oh,” is the only thing he can think of to say.

You are everywhere after that — perhaps not in the physical sense, but Todoroki seems to have lost the ability to not notice you. Or maybe he’s just gained the ability to — to what? Develop a crush? Is that even what this is? He doesn’t know — he’s never had one before to compare it to.

But he can’t help now how instantly his attention snags on the sound of your voice, like a stray thread on a mesh-wire fence, or how an unshakable shiver traces down his spine whenever you’re near. He feels childish, like he did when he was too little to control his quirk. But he’d learned since then, hadn’t he?

Hadn’t he?

“It’s all just hormones!” he overhears Ashido say to Uraraka one night, the girls all clustered together on a single long sofa, limbs against limbs, cheeks pillowed on shoulders, a careless sort of closeness threading them all together. Todoroki’s never thought himself a jealous person, but watching them now, he wonders what it might be like to be able to touch a person with little to no thought at all, for it all to be second nature.

Uraraka blushes something furious, crinkling her nose.

“I — I don’t know…”

“I’m pretty sure whatever Mineta-chan is feeling can’t just be explained by hormones,” Asui says, her eyes huge and dark even as Ashido rolls her eyes.

“Maybe not just hormones, but that’s a large part of it!” Ashido insists.

Dangling on the side of the sofa, one foot tapping to music only she can hear, Jiro glances over and shrugs.

“Boys are weird.”

The girls all make varying sounds of agreement, and Todoroki forces his feet to move, thankful for the thick slab of shadow that had kept him from view of the general common area. He stares ahead as he walks down the long length of hallway, wondering if hormones really are the culprit behind whatever the hell this is.

The grueling days bleed into sweat-slick weeks, and somehow, he finds himself seeking you out more and more often. Sometimes after a particularly hard training session, under the guise of needing some “help” recovering (it had come out that Recovery Girl couldn’t make it so the Pussycats had volunteered you as the next best thing), sometimes without any reason at all, other than the simple want of your company.

He finds himself laughing, finds himself reaching for you — and he blames it on the weather, blames it on the tiredness now eternally sunk into his muscles, the soreness that won’t ever quite go away. He tells himself that it’s just a summer thing, to feel so hot that he gets lightheaded, to laugh until his stomach hurts, to feel the inexplicable itch to graze your hand with his when you’re sitting too close and not nearly close enough.

Thinking back, he’d known it would never last. You’d told him early on that you don’t live in the city. But that it’s not too far, if ever he wanted to visit.

“Camp’ll be over in a few weeks,” you say, lying back on a patch of sun-dried grass, beneath a swirling canopy of stars, Todoroki sitting beside you, his arms propping up his torso as he stares up at the sky alongside you.

“Yeah. I’m surprised it’s been so peaceful,” he says.

You laugh, shooting him a curious look.

“Used to getting in trouble?”

“There… seem to be a few of my classmates that attract trouble. Of all kinds.”

“I don’t mind a bit of trouble.”

“Don’t you?”

You grin up at him as he glances down at you.

“Not one bit.”

You feel him shifting as he lies down next to you, your elbows brushing in the grass. He feels a jolt of electricity snake up his arm, coiling in the base of his belly. For a second, he wonders if its a him-feeling, or a you-feeling. And then, he realizes that it doesn’t really matter — and before he knows it, he’s twisting to his side, leaning over just far enough to press his lips to yours.

In the grand scheme of kisses, Todoroki thinks that it might not have been the most well-positioned kiss, or the most well thought-out. And for all everyone calls him genius, this is one thing he’s never really had the chance to practice. Still, by the time he realizes that he’s kissing you, he barely has the chance to reconcile with the fact that you’re kissing him too. You, pressing up against him and pulling him down all at once.

His lips on yours, and yours on his — an endless echo of this kiss, and this kiss, and just this kiss. He feels his heartbeat like a reverberation, because he thinks he can feel yours too. He loses feeling in all his limbs, and wonders briefly if this is what free-falling might be like — to feel weightless, to be lifted outside of yourself.

You reach up to press a hand to his cheek, and he feels himself being shunted back into his body. He feels each of his limbs like discovering them for the very first time — his fingers tangled in your hair, his other arm wrapped tightly around your waist, pulling you in, holding you close. He does not remember pulling away. But he must have, because he remembers gasping for a breath he’s long since lost to the heave of your lungs.

He feels fire, and ice, and the spinning song of a million overhead stars.

“Is this — are you —” he struggles for words but you just smile.

“I don’t know — sometimes when I’m too —” you swallow, a bit breathless yourself, the head-thrumming heat of it all passing between the pair of you like a whisper, or a secret, “when I’m too excited I — I’ll accidentally make someone else feel it too but —”

You look back up to catch his eyes, and he finds himself smiling.

“It’s not just you,” he says, quiet and sure. Because this, whatever this is, is more than just a quirk — more than just the accidental bleeding of feelings from one body to another. More than simple empathy — it’s entropy.

A chaos of feelings.

Because he’d felt it bubbling inside him, alone at night, staring up at the moon-slatted ceiling. Wondering what it might be like to hold your hand.

And maybe this is what Ashido had been talking about — with hormones and urges and all the woes that come with being a teenage boy. But he doesn’t care; there’s time to worry about that later. For now, he thinks he’d just like to kiss you again.

And so, he does.

Time passes by strangely after that — and though neither of you had intended on it, the budding relationship between the pair of you had become a known secret. No one had ever called it out by name, but no one questions Todoroki either when he wanders off after dinner. No one blinks twice when you press a hand to the back of his neck after morning drills, smiling when he lets out a soft, pleased sigh.

Even years later, Todoroki can’t quite piece together the exact timeline of things. He remembers the late nights, staying up just to talk to you, wandering through the woods, you jumping at a rabbit or a squirrel, and him slipping his hand through yours with a silent reassurance. He remembers telling you about himself — even though he doesn’t remember you asking. About his father, his mother, his siblings, his scar.

He remembers how you’d reached out and held his anger and sorrow and resentment in your upturned palms, how you cradled them like bruised fruit, with delicate fingers and a smile that looked not one bit like pity. How you did not run.

He remembers you telling him about your childhood too, of your quirk being used and abused by careless adults and ruthless children alike. Of how your parents had used you as one might use a bad therapist, like a dumping ground for unwanted emotions. Of how you learnt to deal with the unbearable weight of all those feelings — things that a little girl should never have to learn how to deal with on her own.

He remembers how you held him and he held you, and how you both had allowed yourselves to hold and be held by each other.

But what he remembers most is the ending — the last night of camp, when he knew he’d be leaving the next morning. All the bags are packed, and they’d all come out stronger. It had been an uneventful, tiring sort of camp, where nothing happened except daily training, but for a class full of teens with super-human powers and the uncanny ability to attract life-threatening situations, it could be called a resounding success.

“Excited to be going back to school?” you ask.

He watches you drag a pale pink nail polish over your fingers, one by one, blowing on each finger as you smooth out the color with steady swipes.

“I guess so. We have provisional license exams coming up, so I doubt we’ll get much rest after this.”

“Aww… but I guess no one ever said becoming a hero was an easy thing, right?” you laugh, tossing him a good-natured wink.

He sighs, leaning back against the wall of your camp room.

“Nothing worth having is ever easy.”

“Hm…” you hum, finishing off your manicure and carefully screwing the brush back into the nail polish bottle.

Todoroki turns to find you frowning slightly at your nails.

“What’s wrong?”

“Just…” you press your hands carefully into your lap, “it got me thinking — this was… easy, wasn’t it?”

And he doesn’t have to ask what you’d meant by this. Because he knows. And with a jolt, he realizes that yes. This was easy. It was so easy, being with you, in this secluded place. So easy to laugh without worrying about the outside world, to forget, if only for a while.

Easy to kiss you, to hold you, to push away the thoughts of tomorrows and endings until — well.

“Yeah…” Todoroki breathes, “I guess… I guess it was.”

Silence blooms between you like a plume of smoke.

“But… I mean,” you say, waving your hands through the air to help your nails along, before slumping back into your pillows, “it was never going to be forever, right?”

And this time, Todoroki can’t quite tell if you’re talking about this or perhaps — he can’t help the tiny bead of hope coalescing in his chest — a future where your goodbye is the thing that doesn’t last forever.

“No,” he answers, allowing himself a small smile as he looks down at his own hands, “nothing really ever is.”

You giggle, rolling over to peer at him from your stomach, “You’re so serious.”

But by the time he lifts his head, you’d already crawled over to press your lips to his. It’s a sweet kiss, a simple kiss, and Todoroki feels his chest seize inside him, his arms going heavy with a liquid weight. When you pull away, he notices your eyes are fractured with tears. You wipe them away with a laugh.

“Look at me — I’m so silly.”

Todoroki shakes his head, reaching out to cup your cheeks gently between his hands, the way you’d taught him to with his own jagged emotions. And he feels it then, your sadness, your uncertainty, the stomach-twisting knowledge of endings.

“The beginning might’ve been easy but… this isn’t.”

You hiccup, going still as he holds you.

“So… I guess we were worth it after all, huh,” you say, looking down at the space between you.

Todoroki nods, leaning forward just enough to press his forehead to yours, nudging your nose with his for a second before bringing you in for yet another kiss. He pulls away and tastes salt on his lips.

“That’s how we know — because the ending is hard. That’s how we know it was worth it.”

When the next morning comes, you don’t cry when you wave them all off, though many of the girls are. You catch his gaze and hold it for just a second longer than you’d done with anyone else. Beside him on the bus, Aoyama makes a soft, knowing kind of noise.

“Ah… first love is always such sweet despair,” he says, twinkling in his usual way.

Todoroki clears his throat, leaning back in his seat, a strange stillness settling over him as he thinks about the days ahead.

“Yeah, I suppose it is,” Todoroki says, to Aoyama’s dramatic surprise. But he recovers quickly and begins a soliloquy about something or other that carries them all the way back into the city, and to their assigned dorms.

He never forgets you, though there are moments when he’d wonder if that summer had really happened. Years later, when the memories have all gone watercolor-pale, and the edges blurred with time, he’ll still find himself reaching into the part of his mind that feels like the soft, steady weight of your hand on the back of his neck to calm him down, the smooth of your skin as you’d pressed against him and held him close.

And then, the year that he turns 24, it happens — he’d been called out into a small town just outside Shizuoka, for some kind of event that Fuyumi swears would be good for his publicity (as if he needed any more). Even after all these years, it still unsettles him to travel alone to these places, and he subconsciously reaches for the feeling of your palm pressing to his skin.

“Shouto?”

He turns at the sound of his name, and though a part of him assumes it’s yet another adoring fan, the deepest, most honest part of him whispers that it isn’t — that he knows this voice.

“Oh… its you,” the words slip from him like pebbles into a thawing stream.

And there you are, standing feet from him, your arms full of groceries, a red and white muffler strung around your shoulders, looking every bit as brilliant as the you from his memories.

The smile that splits your face is beautiful as heartbreak.

“Well, someone very wise once did tell me that nothing lasts forever… not even goodbyes.”

Todoroki takes half a step closer to you, a smile spreading across his own lips as he reaches out to help you with your groceries, taking the bags into his arms. The movement as natural as coming home.

“Yes but… I was thinking about it the other day and —”

“Oh? Just the other day?” you tease, bumping him slightly with your elbow was you set off down the half-empty street. It’s almost sundown, and the days are getting shorter again. Your breath fogs up the air before you and Todoroki suddenly thinks that winter looks good on you.

Even better than summer had.

“Yeah, but I realized…” he says, casting his eyes up at the cloud-strewn sky, the colors fading fast, the thick velvet of night inching up across the world like a curtain being drawn.

He turns his eyes back towards you, only to find you watching him with an indulgent smile on your face.

Todoroki blushes, feeling suddenly bashful, like the teenage boy he was when you two first met.

“I realized,” he says again, determined to finish his thought this time, “that when we first met… we never really said hello.”

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[fairiesandcocaine]

it's funny seeing all of robby's residents being repressed motherfuckers, because he himself is one, and all his advice seem to gravitate towards repressing, so much so that one of them ended being a drug addict. apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

[allsoundwavesarebeautiful]

i saw someone basically say that Nightshade is better nonbinary rep than Shredhead and i get their point and it's fine to feel that way but i do want to slightly caution against saying things like this. different kinds of rep appeal to different kinds of people.

i personally prefer the Shredhead kind of rep where they don't have a Big Explanatory Scene, but because i was in the Undertale fandom for a while i know you have to basically punch cis people in the face with trans and nonbinary rep for them to get it, so as a tactic i prefer Nightshade. (also, Earthspark is a kid's cartoon and Skybound is made for...older teens? Carly is at least 16 to be driving alone in the US so. you don't have to be as didactic with teen readers)

it is not a bad thing to have queer and trans characters that are more lowkey and i think trying to position one as being better than the other (as in, having a didactic scene explaining the concept of being nonbinary vs just referring to a character as they/them and leaving it at that) isn't great? the bad thing is when cis fans think Frisk and Chara using they/them means they "get to decide Frisk and Chara's pronouns," and that has a lot more to do with societal exorsexism than it does with the text itself.

[fuumiku]

Harpy mickrin AU yay! Sorta loosely set in Aatom87's harpy & zookeeper AU- Rin is a sooty owl and Mickbell is a cockatiel. You know how parrots are...

The zoo keeps them in the same enclosure out of lack of funds to try and fix behavioral issues. Rin was being too self-isolating and Mickbell was starting shit with other harpies and bonded with zookeeper Kuro instead, which is unhealthy, so they put them in a side enclosure to bond together and assigned Kabru to it instead. Thus they are forced to have enrichment together.

Kabru has it tough since they both act like they hate him, except one is only a tsundere act lol. Mickbell like "huh?? You stealing my cagemate punk?? Wanna fight??" and he's not even wrong lol. Tiny bird very angry very aggressive, cue Kabru getting scratched every day... Kabru leaving their enclosure after a whole showdown of cockatiel Mick screaming scratching biting inflicting him little wounds and then Mick goes right back to "I'm just a little guy"ing @ Rin. Keep going buddy i'm sure... one day...... you'll win her over and make her laugh. Or something.

Although hmmm Kabru hating monsters would mean he wouldn't work there in the first place. Maybe.... He's there undercover to investigate the zoos for corruption or animal-monster abuse or smth... And the injured Mithrun harpy is evidence that he has to take under his wing ba dum tss <- this is how my AUs get out of control

I love Mickbell's stiff paintbrush of a ponytail so much

[bruciemilf]

Hey, about the hate you got on that JL post; I've been noticing a trend lately where non-Batfam DC fans are getting really hostile toward Batfam fans up to and including hating any ship between a Batfam member and a non-Batfam character just on principle, almost like it's just out of spite. Have you noticed that too and why do youthink that is?

I wouldn't call it hate, necessarily!! More like counterproductive fact-checking.

I wasn't aware Hal’s father was dead in canon when I made that post, not only because I’m mostly familiar with Hal on surface level media (Justice League Unlimited and maybe Young Justice, but just barely) so yeah— didn't know, now I do.

I like Hal. He’s great. Got that out of the way.

I do believe that DC fans, — particularly comic-focused ones— need to keep in mind fandom isn't private property. They're sharing a space with people who won't pick their preferred method of resources, and they have to make peace with that.

There's some DC fans who’ll never read comics because they like movies, or comic book fans who’ll never touch a DC tv show, because it’s just not their thing. They're still allowed in that space, because its communal.

You’ll also have people who enjoy your media casually, so of course they're not gonna know the same information YOU do. You're allowed to be annoyed by them, but you can be annoyed and civil.

For example, I see Bruce/Batfam takes that I don't agree with, that, in an objective and analytic way aren't factual, but I don't DO anything about it, because? They don't? Belong to me???

I'm not saying you can't make posts about being annoyed or disheartened when your favorite character gets mischaracterized. God knows me and 80% of the batfam fandom do it all the time.

But like?? Getting into actual arguments with another blog IS rude to me. I try not to do it and I really discourage others from doing it. You’re responsible for your online journey as well as your experience.

That being said, I just wanna make it clear, I don't mind being corrected! It’s the way it was said.

[adam-scott]

i don't necessarily want kids but i've read some people been leggit weirdos about the gemma episode like "i couldn't relate to her or feel sympathy for her bc i don't want kids"

y'all need to learn to not be cruel ??????

[darthkote]

One thing about me is I'm always going to empathize with the villain. You may be big and bad, and no one likes you, but.. could I interest you in a hug and many sleepless nights thinking about how *maybe* you just needed help regulating your emotions?

I love you, bad guys, foes, and ne'er-do-wells; I see your pain, your struggle, your attachments, and your rage, and I respond with love.

[soundleer]

got a lot of time to love hyee :33

[reddamselette]

valgrace except jason is an international superstar and prodigy in football and leo is known worldwide for his podcast who brings special guests on his shows like piper mclean who’s made a name for herself in historical dramas always in the lead of a warrior, architect annabeth chase who’s been granted the honor of rebuilding the temples and ruins in greece and rome with her olympic swimmer boyfriend percy jackson.

and by popular demand, the public requested jason grace to be on hephaestus’ forge. leo, always the good host, obliges and reaches out to jason.

what the audience doesn’t know is that leo and jason have known eachother for years, running in the same crowd during middle school and high school despite being interested in different things. like all close best friends, they parted ways due to university and internships across the country. but they parted with a kiss goodbye, a promise to one another that held up since they were young.

so when jason finally arrives onto the scene, leo feels everything rush back and now that the season is over, jason plans to stay in new york.

[orderofthe-pyramids]

Can empaths shut the fuck up

[nemesis-is-my-middle-name]

has anyone else thought abt alia and yorick interactions... alia and yorick parallels... two sides of a broken ardor/vanguard connection, having been made into Something Else against their will... both expected to serve some other master and trying to define themselves and choose their purpose in the wake of that... burdened with knowledge of the bloody end of their journey that they can't share with the others... has anyone thought about Them...

[what-is-it-to-be-pk-esque]

sigh. my partner is playing bg3 and is visiting moonrise for the first time without it being the final battle and I just watched them make Astarion bite araj. 😑 as if it was not that bad to get a potion