#(pretty sure those are synonymous but who cares)

[willbyersapologist]

good night to all of the little ppl on my phone and to my son Will Byers whom I love so deeply.

[anxious-lee]

The Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known || Hazbin Tickle Fic ||

A/N: this entire fic was inspired by that one scene where Al threatens Husk in ep 5. it broke my heart to see him so utterly petrified so I wrote this as a hurt/comfort for myself

Warnings: mentions of Alastor's control over Husk, slight NSFW language but it's not actually sexual I just didn't have any synonyms for what I meant lol

Word count: 2,466

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When you're an Overlord of Hell, you tend to get pretty comfortable with staying in control.

Because one wrong move can mean the end of the line.

Husk knew that better than most.

And even now, after all that power of his was lost, he still found himself more suited to calling the shots in whatever situation he found himself in. It was just easier that way. If he could remain on top of things, then nothing would go wrong. Mostly.

That feeling of security never lasted long, though, because sooner or later, he was reminded of the terrible choice he made long ago. That he gave away his autonomy to the most psychotic demon in hell.

The way he spoke to him. Like he was so small. And insignificant. Like he existed purely for the bastard's own amusement and nothing else. Any input given was condescended to, patronized, and dehumanized. It formed an ugly little pit in Husk's chest. How little control he had once Alastor stepped into the room. It scared him, in a way that so few things did.

At least he had someone else to talk to who knew how he felt.

Speaking of whom, Angel Dust strutted into the bedroom, sporting a fluffy silk robe.

"Hope I didn't make you wait too long~" he whined seductively.

"Not long at all," the other purred.

The two settled down together in bed, soaking in each other's embrace.

Tonight was all about them, huddled together in hell's moonlight.

Husk remained still as Angel shifted downward until his head fit under Husk's chin, knowing just where to go.

He loved to be pampered, that much was obvious.

It was peaceful for some time before Angel's eyes suddenly blinked open.

"Hey. How come you never want a turn at being the little spoon? I'm not unreasonable, I'm sure we could share," he said coyly.

Husk didn't quite know what to say to that. It wasn't something that needed to be spoken in words. Husk dominated, Angel submitted (in more ways than one). It seemed almost absurd to suggest that Husk would be the one being given affection.

"Nah, I'm good. You look pretty comfy down there, anyway."

Angel, however, wasn't satisfied with that answer. He pulled himself back to get a good look at the cat's face, cocking his own head curiously. Who wouldn't want to be on the receiving end? Even once? It couldn't be understated how warm and protected one could feel in the arms of another. And Husk didn't want that? Did he feel pressured to say that because he knew Angel liked to take that spot?

"Really? You THAT much of a top that you can't play second fiddle once?" said Angel.

"I'm just not a big... "softy-cuddles" kinda guy, as if you already couldn't tell," Husk admitted, gesturing to his overall gruff demeanor.

Angel studied his face.

"Not buying that for a second," he said, punctuating each word with a poke to the chest. "Come on, you're missing out!"

"That's sweet, babe, but I'm-"

"Just five minutes?" Angel pleaded, holding five fingers up in front of him, "Five minutes of me cuddling you for a change. If you decide you hate it, I won't bring it up again. I just... you're always taking care o' me. I want to give some of that back to you, ya'know? You deserve it."

Fuck.

How was he supposed to say no to those puppy eyes?

Besides, it couldn't hurt... right?

"Fine," Husk relented.

"Yay!" His boyfriend cheered.

They rearranged their positions; Husk now farther down the length of the bed and Angel wrapping all three pairs of arms around him like a furry burrito. His knees and head also tucked themselves inward to cradle the cat properly.

It still made Husk a little tense, letting someone handle him so willfully, but the touch was too nice to deny for very long. Thoughts of safety oozed into his brain as his body relaxed against the chest behind him.

"See? Now isn't this nice?" said Angel softly, barely above a whisper, "For a man who supposedly doesn't little-spoon, you've got the moves down pat."

"I'm not making any moves," Husk mumbled, smiling loudly in his voice.

"Well, you're relaxed, aren't ya?"

In a way.

Angel peered down at the bundle of fuzz, taking in how much shorter he was in comparison.

"Awww! I never noticed how cute you were from up here." His hand began petting the top of the kitty's head, smoothing down the hair.

And there was that feeling again. The one that couldn't let Husk enjoy a good thing while he had it. The fear of releasing control.

"I'm not a pet," he grumbled, having no control over the defensiveness in his voice.

Angel, ever oblivious, pressed on. "Oh, but you are to me~. My sweet little Husky~."

Finally, the camel's back broke under that straw.

"Just stop, okay?! I don't-" Husk took a much-needed breath, sitting up, "I know being treated like a toy is your thing, but it's not mine. I don't like being talked to like I'm a pet. Like all I am is your little dancing monkey." It dawned on him just how much of all that was directed at Alastor. The words sunk in like cement in a lake, and he turned his eyes away, unable to look at what he just ruined.

Angel blinked. All of sudden, the moment had soured, and he had no clue why. Was it something he said? Husk said he didn't want to be treated like a toy. Is that how he felt? Like he wasn't valued? That wasn't what he was trying to say at all! It was adoration! Not condescension.

"What...?" Angel breathed.

"Forget it. Just, I'm sorry-"

"No! No, don't apologize," Angel interrupted, choosing his next words carefully, "I'm sorry if I made you feel that way. It wasn't what I meant to say. I wasn't tryin' to say you were weak or small. I was... I was trying to tells you that I adore ya. You do so much for me and our friends. You look out for us, and protect us, and listen to our bullshit problems all the time.

"I think so highly of you, Husk. You don't take shit from no one, not even me. You're unafraid to speak your mind. You know how to keep your head when life gets messy. I got nothing but respect for you. That's why I wanted to do all this. That's why I want to pamper you with love and shit. Because you're always so strong, and I wanted to... I don't know... give you the space where you didn't have to be strong. Not with me."

A heavy silence fell over the room.

Husk couldn't find the words even if he tried. He had never heard such meaningful things spoken about him. Him, the grouchy barfly. How could he possibly come back from such a beautiful declaration? Especially now with how foolish he felt. It had never occurred to him that accepting affection was an act of good, and not an admission of weakness. That someone could be trusted to hold him in their hands and lift him up rather than drag him down.

Angel could never be Alastor. This was not a hostage situation.

This was a security.

One that he felt that he needed in this moment more than ever.

"Fuck... I'm sorry. I messed up everything and spoiled the mood. I'm still not very good at this whole intimacy stuff," Husk sighed.

"I know, and it's okay. I can teach you," Angel cupped his hand around Husk's cheek.

Husk leaned into the touch. "And uh... thanks. For what you said."

"I meant it."

What did Husk do on Earth to deserve such an Angel?

"Look, if uh. Ahem. If you still wanted to... to do what you were doing before... you know, I won't fight you," Husk stammered, falling quieter with each word.

If that's the only means of permission that Angel can get right now, then he'll take it. He gently eased Husk onto his back once more.

"Good. 'Cause I still have lots more love to give you, sweetcheeks." Angel's iconic smile returned.

Even though Husk basically just admitted he wanted Angel to keep going, his praises were beginning to fluster him. The corners of his lips started to rise, and the only defense he had against them was to turn his face away from the man in front of him.

"You like it when I talk to you like that, huh, baby? Do you hear in my voice how much I'm crazy about you? How I'd do anything for ya? Cause I would~. There's nothing that you don't deserve," Angel said, scratching oh so lightly beneath Husk's chin.

Husk squeezed his eyes shut as he surrendered to his smile and tried to crush Angel's hand with his neck.

"It's true~. Because you're just the cutest little thing alive! Er, unalive, so to speak," the spider said, feeling encouraged by this reaction, and bringing another hand to scritch in the middle of his side.

Before he could stop it, a giggle escaped from Husk's mouth. Mortified, he then clamped his jaw shut, holding any more upcoming laughs in.

"You don't have to pretend for me, baby. It's just us here," said Angel, now bringing all three sets of arms into the mix. One pair was tracing his sides, another scritching either sides of his neck, and the last drumming their fingers torturously over his belly.

The giggles rose back up again, and this time shutting his mouth wasn't keeping them at bay. If he weren't so stubborn, he might've given in by now. But it was just too embarrassing.

Husk clapped his paws over his mouth, and while it did (partially) succeed in quieting his laughter, it didn't do anything to remedy the tickly sensations now all over his torso. He twitched and quivered under the touch, but with Angel hovering over him, it didn't leave much room for reprieve.

"This looks like it really tickles. I'm sure you'd feel better if you let all those laugh out!" Angel encouraged, "Pleeeeeease? For me? For yourself?"

Still, he didn't budge.

"Okay. I didn't wanna have to do this, but you've left me with no otha' options." Angel took one hand that was scratching his chin and took both of Husk's paws in it, holding them above the cat's head.

The effect was gradual.

At first, you couldn't hear a peep. Then, over a matter of seconds, Husk's giggles began to bubble up once more, fighting their way to the surface, and tickling him from the inside out.

It was over. Before long, there was nothing between the loving attacker and the melodic sound he adored so much. It started out deeper and huskier, much like his normal speaking voice, but with each passing moment, it grew higher in pitch; the kind of laugh he reserved only for his softer moments with Angel.

The spider took this as a sign to continue and deepened the pressure of all of his appendages, digging into the jittery muscles.

Husk couldn't even recognize himself anymore. He sounded nothing like the bitter old drunk he normally was. In its place, was a goofy little lovesick fool who laughed like no one in the world could hear him. He guffawed and chortled and cackled with reckless abandon.

"There it itihis! There's that gorgeous laughter!" Said Angel. "For a moment there, I thought you was bout to explode!"

The compliment somehow made everything worse. The helplessness of the situation was still there, the feeling of being small, but it was... different. Like he was small enough to be held in someone's palm and protected from all harm. It felt safe.

Husk's cheeks began to burn red.

Hopefully, Angel would be too distracted to notice.

"Aw baaabe! Are you blushin'?!"

Fuck.

As if on cue, his cheeks burned brighter.

"Am I making you feel flustered~? Does it make it tickle more?"

"WOHOHOULD YOU SHUHUT UHUHUP?!"

"So it does. Hmm," Angel hummed as he started moving his hands faster and faster up and down his body. Up his sides, then down his sides, up his tummy, then down his tummy.

It was maddening.

It was tortuous.

It was wonderful.

If Heaven didn't feel like this, he didn't want it. If salvation didn't give him the same amount of relief and safety and joy that playing with his lover gave, then it wasn't worth it. He'd stay in this inferno of hell forever if it meant he could stay with Angel. Stay in this moment.

The demon in question kept on with his teases.

"Who's the cutest little thing~?" Angel cooed as he noticed Husk jump when he touched the lowest portion of his belly, "Ohoho, looks like someone's ticklish! Coochie coochie coooo~!"

Just when Husk thought he couldn't laugh any harder, he did.

"HAHAHAHAHAHA YOU FUHUHUCKING PRIHIHICK HAHAHA!" Husk snorted.

"Oho my gosh! You sound just like Fat Nuggets!" Angel chortled.

Husk's laughter was beginning to go silent, and started getting wheezier. This, Angel knew, meant it was time to stop.

"Alright, doll, I think you've had enough," Angel said as he released his prisoner.

As the spider removed his hands from his body, Husk started panting and giggling hysterically, still feeling the phantom sensations on his skin.

"Need some help there?" Angel offered, moving his hands back towards the other's belly.

Husk curled away from his hands, "Dohohon't!"

"I'm not gonna tickle ya, I swear! I'm just gonna get the leftover tickles to go away. Okay?"

Husk nodded hesitantly and revealed his stomach to him.

Angel's hands met his fur, and although it did jump at first, the firm pressure and massaging motions rubbed away the remaining tickles, just like he said it would.

"Dahamn. That really works." Husk breathed.

"Right? Now do you feel better?"

"Yeah," Husk sat up as Angel gave him room, "You know, for such a compliant gentleman, you sure do know how to take charge."

Angel swiveled to Husk with his mouth agape. "I can be a boss when I wanna be!"

"Heh. Sure, power bottom."

Angel reached for Husk's right foot (or paw) and skittered one set of fingers over it.

"NonononONONOHOHO! I'M SORRY, I TAKE IT BACK! I tahahake it bahahack! Hehehehe!"

"Uh huh. That's what I thought," Angel stopped and huffed with a wink, nothing but kind love behind his eyes, "So. You ready for bed?"

"After all that laughing? Hell yes I am. I might even sleep through tomorrow." Husk said tiredly.

Angel chuckled, sidling up behind Husk and gently cacooning his arms around him again.

"This okay?"

Husk sighed.

"It's perfect."

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Wooh! That was a rollercoaster! 😅 Hope the people that wanted lee!husk enjoyed this fic 🫶

[polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup]

hii 📓

Okay so the thing is that I wanted a “the Zenin raised Megumi instead of Gojo” fic but the thing is that I’m absolutely convinced that if the Zenin were the ones that took Megumi they wouldn’t actually take tsumiki too. The fandom consensus I’ve personally seen has been that she would have been taken and mistreated by zenin for being a female non sorcerer but I personally think they would have just straight up left her behind.

They only bought Megumi. They keep non sorcerers and women as servants in their compound but all of them are Zenin themselves. Tsumiki isn’t related and I couldn’t really see any reason why they’d want her. Which turned this into a fic where Tsumiki loses her brother, but she’s trying to find him again, she swears. I think of it as my “siblings doomed by the narrative desperately try to write a new one where they can be together” fic.

The thing is that Tsumikis mom was one of those people who thought love and consumption were synonymous. She had a habit of getting caught up with assholes and just… having both of them chew on each other for a while until it turns into this horrible fucking bloodbath.

Tojis just another loser her mom got caught up in, but he’s Tsumiki’s favorite out of all the losers, because he gave her her brother. Her mom marries this random guy she barley knows and Tsumikis pretty sure she does it so they can both ditch their kids twice as much, secure in the knowledge that there’s supposedly another person checking in. It works out great for them, because they both stop coming entirely. It’s fine, because Tsumiki has Megumi and Megumi has Tsumiki and they don’t need anything else.

It’s one of those things where they were in really unhealthy circumstances and it made their relationship a little bit unhealthy but not necessarily bad. They both had to grow up way too fast and deal with way too much too soon and become codependent on each other because they are, in the most literal way possible, dependent on one another. Neither of them know how to love in a way that doesn’t involve sacrificing themselves for their sibling, mostly because they don’t have a way that doesn’t involve that.

They’re in a sinking ship and tsumiki knows it. Their parents aren’t coming back. The money is going to run out sooner or later. Their problems are stacking up.

Megumi has confessed to her that he sees things that no one else does. When she asks him how he knows no one else sees them, he explains that they’d say something if they did and won’t say anything else. And she doesn’t know what to believe but she refuses to call him crazy. He tells her that monsters cling to her back and he fights them off for her. She patches up his bruises and cuts and tells him he’s brave and tries to figure out if she’s just imagining that her back feels lighter after. He tells her that there are dogs that only he can see that have started following him around, and she tells him she believes him and can never remember, later, if she meant it or was just saying it.

The last time Toji came by, he left them more money than tsumikis ever seen in her life, took them to ice cream, told them that he was sorry he was so shit at this and that the money was Megumi’s share in a payment. It was for something he was going to help daddy with later. Tsumiki and him were to use it to take care of themselves and be healthy, because Megumi couldn’t help him later if he wasn’t. And tsumiki was always afraid of what he meant by that, but in the end, she let it slip her mind. After all, Toji hadn’t been by in ages. He probably wouldn’t come by at all.

And he didn’t. But others did. Two men she’s never met before are waiting outside their building one day, and when they see Megumi, they laugh. But the thing that Tsumiki can never get out of her mind later is that she swears they weren’t looking at Megumi directly. They were looking at his dogs.

Tsumiki basically tries to get Megumi and powerwalk past them, but they’re a lot bigger and a lot stronger and there’s nothing she can do, really. They have a brief conversation about whether they should take her too, before one decides that Toji only sold him his kid and to leave the other behind. This makes both of them try to run, but there’s nothing either of them can do to overpower the men, and the men say that “Naobito would go ballistic if they left the ten shadows behind” so they take Megumi and leave her.

They put Megumi in a car and shove Tsumiki to the curb outside of it, and she tried to hold onto his hand, she swears. She grabbed at the car door even when the car started moving, and she banged on the windows, and she watched as Megumi kicked and punched and screamed inside, until one of them hit him and he went still. She ends up falling and hitting her head when the car picks up speed, and when she wakes up again, the cars gone and she has no idea where it went.

And it becomes a foundational moment for who she is. I think she was just intensely lonely before Megumi and poured a lot of herself into this idea of a family together. Tsumikis never able to shake the moment of her being outside the car and Megumi being on the inside, and not being able to get into him. She can never again get what she felt in that moment out of her head.

She goes to the police and tells them that it’s her little brother, his dad sold him but she wants him back, and they’re like “…”. The issue is that apparently her mom can pick up the damn phone if the police call and she shows up, spins some lie about how her and the stepdad split up and he took the kid with him, they never adopted each others kids so it was within his rights, Tsumiki was taking the separation hard and acting out. She lies, basically, because toji hadn’t kept up his end of the deal and dropped in to check in (neither had she) and his kid wasn’t her responsibility, he could do what he wanted with him. She doesn’t want the police poking around the way she lives. Just let the kid go because he’s probably dead and not her real brother anyway.

Tsumiki refuses to give up on him. They were both kids who no one cared about but they cared about each other and that had to be enough. But she’s seven with no support and zero idea on how to find him. She starts skipping school to look for him in random streets, puts up flyers, can’t go outside without looking for him. She gets held back a year in school because of how much she skips and she can’t bring herself to care. She buys him gifts on every birthday and writes him letters she can’t post because she’s going to find her brother and she’s going to prove to him that she never once stopped looking for him. She just. She needs him to know that she never stopped looking for him. She needs to find him and be able to honestly tell him she never stopped trying.

One day her mom comes back in clothes she can’t afford and comes with movers they shouldn’t be able to afford and announces a move they definitely can’t afford. Tsumikis absolutely opposed to going because if her brother comes to look for her, she needs to be in their old apartment so he can find her. She doesn’t have much of a choice in the matter. They have mysterious new benefactors who are setting up a trust to take care of tsumiki with a very generous stipend for her mom but they have to move to Sendai as a stipulation of getting the money.

It’s not until the attorney who’s managing her trust hands her a set of glittery blue butterfly hairpins that tsumiki realizes her mom sold her brother a second time.

The thing is that tsumiki had this one cheap set of butterfly hairpins she’d always stopped to look at in the store when she took Megumi to go grocery shopping. Shed never buy them, because they couldn’t afford it, but it was the thing she wanted most openly in front of him. She was always secretly really insecure about her hair, because they were the kind of poor where bar soap was a luxury they could only sometimes afford and kids at school made fun of how her hair was dirty and frayed. Megumi was the only one who ever saw how badly she wanted those stupid hair clips. If they had to give her a set of butterfly hair clips, it’s because he demanded that they did.

It’s basically implied that the Zenin are the ones paying for her care and upkeep due to an unspecified deal they cut with Megumi, but when they approached her mom with it, they added the caveat that Tsumiki had to be moved to a new city entirely and there could be no forwarding address left anywhere.

The zenins stance on tsumiki is, effectively, that she’s a weakness Megumi needs to be weaned off of. They honestly assumed he’d just like, forget she ever existed and he. Did not do that. He actually pitched a total bitch fit. Tried to scale the compound walls. Bit multiple people including the clan leader. But he’s got the ten shadows, he’s heir to the clan, and he can’t be caught up on some random non sorcerer who isn’t even a Zenin. They end up agreeing to pay for her to live very comfortably if he starts cooperating more but they want to make sure that he can’t ever find her again if he does ever succeed in running away.

Tsumiki is at once full of hope and hopeless, because on one hand, the butterfly clips prove that Megumi still loves her and remembers her, at least in her mind. But at the same time, she’s being moved to Sendai and doesn’t know how they’ll ever find each other again. She doesn’t honestly know if they’d recognize each other if they saw each other again. She wears the butterfly clips every day, even when she gets too old for the style, because she’s more confident about her brother recognizing them than her.

The thing about tsumiki is that she doesn’t understand hate. She just doesn’t. Her mom and toji always got caught up in these perceived slights and revenge and never once let go of the past. They’d destroy themselves if it meant taking down the people they hated with them. She never wanted that. She wanted to live with the people she loved and she’d happily turn around and forget everything, all the pain, all the searching, if it just meant she could go back to being megumis sister.

This isn’t about hate. This is about that moment outside the car, where her brother was inside and she couldn’t get in to him. This is about how helpless and small she felt when they shoved her to the curb and ripped megumis hand out of hers. She needs to make sure that when she finds Megumi, she can take him home again. So she decides she needs to learn how to fight.

Itadori Yuuji has the constitution of an ox and the strength to match it, and he is known for getting in fights with bullies and trouncing them so thoroughly that it’s never a question of who wins when the fight starts. He’s insanely physically capable and can hold his own in a fight with ease. He’s also nice and kind and Tsumiki’s comfortable enough asking him to teach her how to throw a punch or two.

She is bad at it.

So fucking bad at it.

But she never gives up, and Itadori is nice enough to keep teaching her despite how embarrassingly horrible she is at it all. He always asks her why she wants to learn so bad, she doesn’t seem to like it all, and she never answers his question honestly.

In their last year of middle school, their class has a trip to Kyoto. She, Itadori, and the rest of their group walk into some random restaurant in the city and have barely sat down when someone comes inside, starts searching every booth in the restaurant while shouting Tsumikis name.

And oh. They could recognize each other after all.

She looked for Megumi in every crowd she was ever in, but she didn’t consider that he was doing the same. Or that he would see her first.

Her brother grew up without her seeing it. Hes older, dressed in strange, expensive clothes, has a slightly bruised up face and split lip, but his eyes are the same, and he looks like the brother she remembered.

But a lot more nervous than Megumi ever was. He was a tiny, stoic child who didn’t take any shit and never showed fear, even when there were monsters that only he could see. But he’s nervous when he tells her that she probably doesn’t recognize him or remember him, but when she was a lot younger, he—

Megumi. He’s her little brother. Of course she remembers him. She’s been looking for him everywhere.

Megumi didn’t smile much as a child, but he smiles at her then. He tells her he doesn’t have a lot of time and she tells him that they can leave out the back, and he never let her hold his hand as a child but he takes her hand so easily in that second. And just for a second, she’s his sister again, and it’s everything she wanted.

They never make it out the back.

Two men come in. Megumi calls one of them uncle, and he goes stiff and flat the second he sees him. His uncle apologizes for his nephew, tells everyone that he always makes scenes when they’re out in public, tells him to apologize to the nice people and leave. Megumi was mistaken.

Tsumiki tríes to keep ahold of his hand. Really, she does. She tries to tell people to call the police. But megumis “uncle” steps towards her and Megumi slams him into a table, and then suddenly Megumi’s the one insisting that they leave immediately. They can go. It’s fine. They’re leaving. She loses ahold of his hand.

She tries to follow, but the other man restrains her. She learns that she’s better at slamming plates into peoples heads than she is at punching, and at this point itadoris Friend In Danger Override has been triggered and he fucking tackles the dude, which gives tsumiki the clearing that she needs to chase outside after her brother. She gets out just in time to see him be pushed into a car, and she’s had years to think about the last time this happened and figure out what to do differently. She throws herself in front of the car and refuses to move.

See her entire stance is that she’ll sooner get run over and killed in the street than let them do this a second time, but she also can see Megumi trying to fucking punch the drivers head in from behind because he’s about to hit his sister. His uncles trying to restrain him, and just for a second, she sees his hands make the shape of the shadow puppets he used to show her as children. Something invisible slams her out of the way just as his uncle knocks him out.

She picks up a rock and tries to smash in the fucking window with it, and itadori has to pull her out of the way to keep her from getting her feet run over when the car finally tears out of the parking lot. She goes ballistic on him for stopping her because her brother was right there and she lost him again and she didn’t even get the license plate. He was right there.

The police basically do jack all again. There’s no license plate, no names they can follow up on, and they’re still half convinced this is a settled custody issue even though tsumiki insists her brother was sold by his dad and is very plainly getting hurt wherever he is. Itadori is now a devoted advocate of finding tsumikis brother and reuniting them, and both basically kind of end up becoming really close to the other? He’s taking care of himself and his grandpa alone, she’s alone while her moms awol again, and they both become the others support system.

At one point, there’s this random girl and boy who doesn’t speak who shows up to their school for indeterminate reasons. The girl is bored and twirling her glasses in one hand while the person in a suit that they’re with asks the principal questions, and when tsumikis eyes catch at the right angle, she sees an invisible monster clinging to a classmates back through them. She realizes it’s exactly what Megumi always talked about and still remembers that the people who took him could see his dogs. She corners the two others in a room and tries to demand information about the invisible monsters or see if they know her brother or the people who took him, and immediately gets blown off. The fight escalates until the girl tells him that actually, yeah. She knows tsumikis brother. He is a very special person to some very powerful people, and the only way she can ever help him is to tell him that she’s let go of him and that he needs to do the same to her. That’s the only message that the people who have him would ever let get through, and his life would get a lot better as soon as he got it.

The people who have him would give him anything in the world, except for her. He could be a lot happier and healthier than he is right now if he just agreed to stop trying to find tsumiki. If she really wants to help her brother, then she needs to let him go.

Tsumiki nails her in the back of the head with a milk carton when she tries to walk away. It sloshes out on her. Tsumiki did not intend this. She cannot admit that fact. There are some actions you just have to own when you do them. She tells the girl that he’s her brother and she’s never letting go of him. She’s going to find him. They can’t keep him from her forever. She doesn’t care how long it takes her.

For a second, tsumiki really thinks this girl is going to kick her ass, but she doesn’t. She wishes her luck and tells her she’ll need it, and it’s only later that tsumiki realizes she slipped the eyeglasses into her pocket.

And as it turns out, her brothers monsters were real all along.

There was a knife that toji left in the frame of his bed. Tsumiki confiscated it from Megumi as soon as he found it, and it was odd and strange and gave her bad feelings when she held it, and it can kill the things that gather on her back. When she follows Itadori to their local high school and joins the occult club in an attempt to find more people involved in this world of invisible monsters, she wears the eyeglasses and keeps the knife hidden in her bag.

It comes in handy when her senpais are trying to open this thing and suddenly there’s like a fucking portal opening and Actually Let’s Not Oh Too Late Let’s Run Let’s Fucking Run.

They run.

Meanwhile at the hospital Megumi found out in very quick succession that his sister has fucking sukunas finger and also that there’s a very over enthusiastic himbo who is the self appointed vice president of the Find Fushiguro Megumi And Bring Him Home Club who absolutely fucking refuses to leave his side. Sorry who are you. Why are you so enthusiastic about finding him. Megumi sort of was the one doing the finding there was a whole tracking situation and him waiting dramatically in the shadows like they just did it.

Anyway they run very very quickly to tsumikis school where she is dodging she is serpentining this is a fuckton of monsters oh holy fuck is that her brother?

The fight goes bad.

Tsumiki manages to follow itadori and her brother out at a much slower pace because she’s not a freak of nature like itadori and shows up just in time to see her brother shouting at itadori to not eat the fucking finger while itadori is absolutely trying to eat the fucking finger.

She chucks her shoe at him. The finger goes flying.

Then the monster eats it instead.

Tsumiki: :o

Yuuji: :o

Megumi: fuck

Now there’s a bigger monster and the fight goes even worse. There’s a lot of shouting. Itadori ends up with her knife. Then he ends up getting eaten and they’re down both a knife and itadori, who’s probably fucking dead. Then megumis insisting she run and she’s insisting he shut the fuck up because it’s sort of taken a decade to get this close to him again and she’s not fumbling the bag now because of a monster on the rampage. Have a sense of fucking priorities here.

Then itadori bursts out of the monsters stomach with the knife like the fucking Kool Aid Man and the fight is suddenly very over. Good job, team.

Gojo rolls up to his most stoic and eternally pissed off student having a dramatic and emotional reunion with his sister.

Yuuji, in a very bad whisper: no no so like she’s been looking for him for years but he saw her in the restaurant

Gojo: :o go on

Yuuji: and then he got caught by like, I don’t know, he said he was his uncle or something but the dude acted so weird and creepy and they put him in a car and Tsumiki tried to stop the car but they got away

Gojo: *gasp* what no

Yuuji: I know! Anyway then I start helping her look for him but we can’t find him anywhere until I’m at the hospital and he just walks up to me right?? And I’m like “dude I have been looking everywhere for you” and he’s like “I have no idea who you are, I’m here about that fucked up demon finger” and I’m like—

Megumi, really trying to have a moment here: we can both hear you

And megumis like “this is uh. My new teacher. I guess. I am his only student. And he is uh. Enthusiastic. Do not linger in conversation with him.”

Tsumiki is lingering. She needs fucking intel so he can’t disappear again. Where does he go to school and can she transfer there. It’s fucking wizard school? Will they take her even though she’s not a wizard? She cannot emphasize enough that she will study any fucking subject they want so that way she can be close with her brother again she does not care if it’s applicable to her education or life. She can throw things at people itadori tell the man tell him how enthusiastically she will throw things at monsters for their weird fucking wizard school.

Itadori: she hit me in the face with her shoe like five minutes ago

Tsumiki: see???

Megumi keeps trying to forbid her from wizard school but she’s technically the older sister so she has override rights. She will go to wizard school. How does she get wizard school to accept her.

And Gojos just really weird and off and keeps looking at Megumi and saying that he “didn’t know he had a sister.”

He really didn’t know that Megumi had a sister he wanted to stay with.

And then suddenly it’s like a switch is flipped and he’s back to his normal self telling them to leave everything to him, because he’ll make sure tsumiki can come back with them. And uh? Itadori? Weirdly physically capable kid who will apparently eat anything? Is he going to be good getting home after all this?

Itadori: actually if it’s not too much trouble can I go to wizard school too my grandpa sort of died half an hour ago and I don’t have plans for the rest of my life. Tsumikis kind of my best friend and I’d like to make sure she’s all good at wizard school. I’m a really good fighter and I stabbed the last monster so like can I come too because you know. Dead grandpa. No family or future to speak of. Haha.

Gojo:

Megumi:

Tsumiki, softly: dude

There’s more after they make it to jujutsu high but this is already really long so we leave it here

[garoumylove]

Man, Garou's idea of what a monster is so ...strange?

Pretty sure I've talked about this before in one of my rare 'meta' posts but I still can't get over how left-field it is?

Usually, when we use the word monster, it has connotations of danger, destruction, lethality. When we call someone a 'monster' it is never in a complimentary sense (not talking about pet names or anything like that here).

Monsters are creatures that kill and destroy.

Now, yes, the media is awash in stories where a 'monster' turns out to be harmless. And this is the point...the monster turns out to be not a monster at all. Just someone who doesn't fit in with society and we go, 'Hey! They're not the monster...humans were the real monster all along *sad face emoji*'

This is exactly what happens in Justice Man. When Garou speaks to Tacchan (little shit) he explains that the crab monster only wanted to protect the ocean and Justice Man and his little cronies came and destroyed his treasured possessions and kicked his ass.

Garou is, on some level, aware that the crab demon is not a real monster but someone who is just misunderstood and is on the edges of the society of the world of Justice Man.

And I think that's a huge issue. The fact that to Garou 'monster' and 'loner/outsider' become synonymous.

Again, a monster is a dangerous creature. Once they show that they are not a threat to others, they cease to be known as a monster, whatever their appearance may be.

But Garou keeps calling these sorts of outsiders and loners that he identifies with as monsters and I think this is the fault of shows like Justice Man, which also equate being different/lonesome/strange with being a monster. In which case, Justice Man and his group are the real monsters for treating those who are simply different in such a cruel way.

I can understand this mix up when Garou is a kid, but it makes me wonder, why does he not change his views when he's older? Why doesn't he say to himself, 'Wait a minute? Those weren't monsters. Just creatures that didn't fit the norm.'

He clearly hates actual monsters and thinks they're disgusting and has no problem killing them.

Why Garou? You clearly care not for monsters, but for underdogs which Justice Man mislabeled as monsters.

Garou sees himself as a hated underdog (but calls that a monster!) who is going to rise up and become powerful to protect all the underdogs everywhere. Underdogs like Tareo. He actually has no interest in protecting or standing up for actual, real monsters.

At the end of the day, I think that's what he actually hates. That innocent loser kids like he was get mislabeled as 'monsters' and so he begins to wear that label with pride, despite not actually being a monster but rather just a lovely, hurting, lonely young man who sees all the pain of all the other loser kids and decides to do something about it.

You are a complicated man Garou...complicated man.

[axeylotl]

thinking abt Jack and Roger's similarities. the ones I can think of are pretty superficial but I also think they're really compelling. for what, idk. not 100% sure they were intentional even. but

orange

black "eye" with white, rectangular "pupil"

(like, seriously. if you wanted to translate Jack into a phonehead you couldn't pick a better one than Roger's)

history of alcohol issues

springlocked by a bear suit, specifically

connections to dogs (Roger having had a dog isn't particularly special by DSaF standards, but it could say something that it was notable enough to be brought up.)

again, idk what its supposed to mean, if it was even intended in the first place. I just think about it a lot. blehhh

lotta wild speculation under cut

Maybe Roger's story was meant to peek into what Jack's could have been, had he not accepted or been offered fredbear's deal. Becoming a phone, alone and forgotten. Leaving behind little family, and the family that does remain never caring that he's gone. Burying himself in Freddy's to escape all his old mistakes (which, of course, is something Jack already does do throughout the series, DSaF 3 in particular)

the personalities are obviously very different, but the circumstances were so similar

(this next bit is flimsier, and I don't 100% believe it myself. maybe 30%-70%, depending on my mood)

then of course there's Jake, to complete the orange/purple dichotomy. If you want to go down the color symbolism route, you could make an argument that Jake's story is somehow an alternative angle/route to Dave's

though, tbh, I'm not nearly confident enough in my understanding of Jake or Dave's characters to draw any conclusions there atm, if there are any to be found. there might be something to say about Jake being the only phone we meet to have a child/connection to fatherhood as a concept

In this interpretation, Roger's nervous people-pleasing and Jake's abrasiveness would likely have been meant to do the same to Dave's dog-like loyalty and Jack's... all of it.

what I mean by "alternative angle" is that it's a distortion, almost. You take some of the same key reference points (being rude and standoffish / constantly putting other people before oneself) and put it in a different form (festered aggression taken out on anyone, cynical bitterness for those who cause & prolong your pain / being desperately & proactively devoted for fear of abandonment, being a quiet & malleable doormat for fear of punishment)

uh. dunno where Harry would fit into this take. if you're gonna draw parallels between Harry and any other character, it would be Dave, imo. 100%

again, I really don't think about Jack and Dave very much, so if any of this reading is fucky/stupid/other synonym for "this should've stayed in drafts" that's my bad. I'm lazy

[butch-reidentified]

if someone is on death row, they deserve whatever method is used to kill them. some prisoner is traumatized? i'm sure the family and friends of whoever he killed or raped are far more traumatized. stop giving sympathy to these losers.

ok fascist 🤷 let the state do whatever they want, there's a brilliant idea

my post you're butthurt about - which you clearly didn't actually read before sending this lmfao - actually included multiple quotes from the victim's family (who's also the perpetrator's family since the prisoner was paid by the dad to kill the mom), so you're real stupid for this in context. especially since the son said he found witnessing the execution traumatic. if you care so much about the victim's family being traumatized, that should concern you.

you're also real stupid for tryna come at me with this point as a survivor of multiple violent crimes, including some where people I personally knew were murdered. maybe I have a better grasp on this than you 🤷

the perpetrator of the most violent crime I survived (Pulse Nightclub mass shooting in 2016) died at Pulse. His death did not prevent me or anyone else from suffering the consequences of the trauma. I am connected with mass violence survivors all over North America. we have an annual gathering, during which we always end up discussing trauma healing and justice, and one thing we talk about both at in-person events and in the online group is the difference between the perpetrator being killed at the scene, being executed after the fact, or still being alive. while there are many nuanced issues with all of these scenarios, those of us whose perpetrators died on the scene feel a distinct lack of closure/justice. the only survivors I know who have issue with their perpetrator's imprisonment are the Thurston survivors, whose shooter, sentenced to 111 years w/ no possibility of parole, is constantly filing new appeals which obviously causes a lot of stress and anxiety for them.

But it's important to note the ocean of difference between a mass shooter and an impoverished man who accepted money to kill someone and regretted it forever, despite being forgiven by the victim's family. Plus, someone remorseful isn't constantly trying to evade any justice whatsoever.

you pro-state-managed-retaliatory-murder fascists love to act like anyone who objects is somehow anti-victim, but if you ever once listened to actual victims and victims' family/friends, they almost always despise ppl like you.

trusting the state to determine who should be violently murdered is literally a core tenet of fascism. every fascist government in history relied on state-managed executions to obtain and stay in power.

the USA "justice system" (what a joke) insists that it's about REHABILITATION, justice, keeping people safe. Which one of those was achieved with this execution? Let's take an honest look:

Rehabilitation had clearly been achieved beforehand, but executing a rehabilitated person and never letting them interact with society makes rehabilitation pretty meaningless.

Keeping people safe has a strong relationship with #1, rehabilitation. There are 2 ways to keep people safe from an individual: rehabilitate the individual (which, again, this person was) or remove them from society permanently. The 2nd is achieved with locking them up for life. Where is the necessity for execution? Especially in a situation where the person being executed never came up with the idea to kill or had any desire/urge to kill - it was only ever about money for him. This is still obviously inexcusable, but it's hard to see how he's as dangerous or twisted as someone who WANTS to kill or thinks of killing as a solution to a problem.

Justice is a synonym for "fairness," both of which are inherently subjective. When we talk about "justice" for victims/their loved ones, we often mean "revenge," but this is very rarely what those left behind want - and it's pure assumption to assume the victim would want this either. In a typical homicide case, this is assumed to mean the killer getting life in prison or put to death; kill-for-hire is and should be less black & white, and cases like this one where the hired party was not a "career assassin," but was convinced to commit an atrocity by someone else only to instantly regret it for the rest of their life, we must take a variety of factors into account. How have we as a society and our government failed someone so spectacularly that they've ended up so desperate to earn some money that they accept an offer to kill for it? Is someone in that position an inherently bad person? How much responsibility should the government take for allowing its people to live in extreme poverty? How much responsibility does the hired killer bear vs how much responsibility should be placed on the hirer who made the original decision to facilitate ending someone's life? What do the surviving loved ones think justice looks like? Do we even ask them before sentencing someone? Who gets to decide when justice has been served? Does achieving justice help the living people who have been affected by the crime in any measurable way?

EDIT: btw rape isn't a capital crime like p much anywhere. maybe nowhere, I'm not sure but I've never heard of a rapist being executed for it, only women who kill their rapists

[raayllum]

The latest rayllum anon really got me pretty upset tbh. Like if the creators didn't "give a damn" about them they wouldn't be written like that… Rayllum has become one of the major plot points of the series and they are basically the center of each other's developments being the main characters. They are the couple with the most screentime, they got the most development of all of them, the first arc ends with the epic salvation, the first comic of the series is around them, etc etc… it's just that they are written diferently because each couple got it's thing. With Janaya and Ruthari originally being the main ones, I highly doubt it. Ruthari doesn't have a lot of screentime and I think Janaya was born after Rayllum. They have said in some interviews that they "don't write" romance and are guided by the character's feelings (I can't find them right now but I read a couple when they mentionthat, with rayllum in one of them) so I doubt that Janaya was suposed to be a main couple in the first place as no one was suposed to be a couple at all. That aside, I love how politely you respond to everyone! It's great. I just wanted to add something. If everything, the biggest fans of rayllum are the writers themselves, If they didn't care they wouldn't have made Rayla and Callum so down bad for each other, s5 is full of them for example. I think people tend to miss the fact they that are best friends who happen to be in love. Anyways have a nice day!

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, even if I definitely agree - while Rayllum's development or meshing as a ship may not work for everyone, how much focus their dynamic gets shows that it is one of the major cornerstones of the entire show. We once again got a season where they spent zero episodes seriously apart, while literally every other pair dynamic has been separated for much much longer and/or receives less focus.

In terms of 'planned,' what I meant by Janaya and Ruthari likely being from the show's conception is 1) the Sunfire elves have clearly always had a big role to play and Amaya's plot line has been synonymous with Janai's since 2x01 and 2) Runaan's home life (and Rayla's subsequent upbringing) were likely realized very early on, particularly as it plays into the series slow burn of the coin plot line. The show has also been very clear that a broad variety of Queer rep was important to them, so I'm sure Janaya was in the cards very early. I think the latest ship to be created for the show was likely Terry and Claudia (in that sense anyway)

Like... everyone following me presumably likes and/or ships Rayllum pretty damn hard, but I don't think anyone ships Rayllum harder than the TDP crew / writers. They're insane. I love it. And I do think like - even with shows or movies or whatever that have disappointed me, it's never, I think, that the creators behind them don't "give a damn". To me, it's usually that they just cared about other things/characters to the detriment of other things/characters, and/or didn't think about the implications of those choices. But like - creators almost always care, hence why they create, and I think that's important to honour too

[pen-observing]

to make sure.

synopsis: you’ve seen him around a few times and every single one of those meetings has just added to your interest in him; and perhaps a few tales of how you managed to act foolish. but, you keep meeting and some things just have to be answered.

( aka. the one in which you order the Captain of the Fatui and somehow get away with it despite all the embarrassment.)

pairing: capitano x gn! reader. warnings: fluff, the reader is whimsical not dumb, written after 3.1 so before we know him truly. word count: 2k

You have been thinking for a while and you are pretty sure that your automatic thoughts get lost along the way. One is enough to create a mountain of others; your brain, body and soul stack them all up like papers until they grow so big your hands are flying out clinging to whatever can be taken hold of.  

They get buried in the buzzing so they are hard to identify on their own. And it seems like it has always been that way. One step in your childhood meant just something small to get to a grander destination. The blades of grass were just something to pass so that you could get to the tree and attempt to climb it. The grass, even when earthly brown with just a speck of green mixed in was frozen; but your rush was active in getting what you’ve desired. Always.   Because back then; those mountains of thoughts were synonymous with what you wanted down under. In adolescence, you were able to force them to blend together. But now, once out of that time period – you’ve become confused after burying it all down for so long. Once they blended, they grew together and there was no way to force them apart to get to the real truth or question that bothered you.  

And, now all that you are able to do is stand in front of a frozen lake, staring at your face while recognising you are trying to grasp an answer to a question: Just what is it about Capitano that makes you ask so many questions?  

And maybe that is the problem. You keep adding new questions to distract from the main mission. Adding new ones does not mean rationalising the situation; especially for a curious mind as your own. Instead of adding more – perhaps you should go back to the most basic ones of them all?  

Where did you first meet him?  

That question makes you fall back into the snow, almost like a child who refuses to go inside the house once the streetlights turn on. You decide to sit there, staring at the frozen lake; choosing not to confront that mirror right now.  

But just the fact that you are here and refusing to move must mean something, right? This is the place where you met him. And by good grace was it embarrassing.  

There is nothing wrong with deciding to help out and take care of a few children who were left homeless in the harshness of your homeland. It is a noble act, one that rewards. What was wrong of you, however, is the fact that you got too carried away by playing catch with them and ended up deciding to throw yourself to the best of your abilities to save the ball.

Just thinking of it again makes you hit the sand with your feet and groan into your hands.  

You met Capitano by catching the ball, toppling over because of your bravery to challenge gravity like that, and rolling over twice in the snow until your back ended up against something firm. At first, you imagined it to be a tree; perhaps because you were used to such circumstances from childhood. So, you yelled out ‘Sorry Mister Tree!’ and turned around only to come face to face with a masked man.

Maybe that is why you thought about him so much? He reminded you of your lowest moment, of your mistakes and pure embarrassment for acting so childish. That’s normal, right?  

And there you go again. Just asking more and more questions. You would roll in the snow again just to forget that memory if you could. He helped you, of course. He introduced himself and asked for your name. And even if he had laughed, you never saw it because of his helmet. And if you had only ever spoken to him that one time; it would have been easy to forget. But, you kept seeing him around.  

Maybe you should think of a few more scenes with him to balance out the complete embarrassment of the memory?

The next time you saw him was when he was out buying fruits. It was funny to see how every shop seller somehow straightened up as they handed him oranges; how stiff they were when giving him discounts which he always refused. You even saw him throw in some extra money before he departed.  

You..were not scared of him precisely. You were scared that he would remember your embarrassing display and end up laughing in your face. When he passed by, you pulled up the restaurant menu so close to your face the words became ink spatters without shape. You remember holding it up for at least a minute and a half before you put it down to look through the shop window again.   But, he was there.   He did not laugh, he simply raised up his hand as a greeting before walking away. Another embarrassment. The irrational part of your brain ended up thinking that perhaps he believed you were almost illiterate.  

It wasn’t until the next meeting that it got cleared up.  

Your next meeting was, funnily enough, another one when you volunteered to help the kids. This time, you were in the library event and reading fairy tales to the kids when he walked by with a few other men who seemed far too serious. Yet again, Capitano never let down his own guard. But he seemed awfully lonely to you.  

Capitano was always around such people. The bag of his fruits was always on the smaller side. Did he have anyone to share them with? The image of him peeling his fruit alone, having no one to offer it to and eating it alone under candlelight made you feel sorry for him.  

And yes, you knew who he was. A Harbinger Lord. You knew why the sellers were so scared of him but... your nature would not give you rest, so, you approached him after you saw him walk out alone and sit at one of the library tables. He came just in time to hear the end of the book your chose. After the kids were done thanking you and asking questions, you approached his table.  

Remembering the... ‘menu incident’ the first words out of your mouth sounded silly.

“See! I can actually read. I am not illiterate.”  

He simply looked up at you, but from the way the tension of his shoulders relaxed – you thought that he was smiling.  

“I never implied that you were unable to read. Why did you come to think that?”  

Maybe the reason you couldn’t stop thinking about him was that you were always putting yourself in such situations that ended up as embarrassing.

“Well, I thought that you thought I had a hard time reading when I was in that restaurant with the menu.”

“Ah, that. The reason I stopped was because you seemed like a threat. Usually spies get brave and when they think they were spotted – they try to look more innocent. So, I stood there until I recognised it was in fact you.”

Being told you seemed like a threat from a Harbinger Lord definitely made you shocked. But Capitano did not wait for your reply because he was already walking away.

“It was a charming story. Your voice was well-fitting for it, as well.”  

And then, the two of you kept meeting. In markets, on the street, even in a few restaurants. Your conversations were always brief; to be honest, they were just simple greetings. It is a bit hard making conversation at the market stall where everyone stands so stiff you feel bad for them. Not to mention how most of the kids told you that the man was scary.  

But even with such fleeting moments; your thoughts had already shaped up a mountain out of a few interactions. And so, you swore that you would invite him somehow and somewhere the next time that you saw him.  

You’ve embarrassed yourself enough in front of him already for that to create an obstacle in your plans.  

When you wondered what the top of the tree looked like as a child, you tried to climb it. And now, when you were wondering about Capitano, you would try to find out again.  

And luckily, your chance presented itself relatively soon. It seemed a bit sad to stay sitting in your apartment when the full moon was so beautiful and the snow glittered in an idyllic way.   You decided that a walk would be nice, grabbed your coat, and stepped outside only to spot Capitano. There was no other way, so you immediately invited him to join your walk.

“Are you sure you should be out at this hour? We both know how cold evenings grow even into colder nights.”  

You turned your head towards him, grinned and kept making footprints in the snow. Capitano decided to walk on the cleared path while you wanted to leave your mark in the fresh batch of snow, pretending like they would be visible tomorrow.  

“It’s fine, I quite like it. And we both know our coats are designed especially for weather like this!”  

You wonder if you would be this free to talk to him if you were not an ordinary civilian. Maybe your status should have made you even more careful? And while that was a logical thing to consider – you did not feel fear.  

“You do know your coat is the reason you are so easy to spot when you try to hide behind the banana stall to avoid saying hello to me. It is a shame I won’t have to bring mine to Natlan.”

“W-Wait that was only one time! And besides, people would then offer me discounts too and I can’t give them extra money like you can when I refuse and then – did you say, Natlan?”  

“Yes, my next mission is there.”  

Your feet halted in making footprints. Capitano walked two steps ahead of you before he realised your boots were no longer leaving sounds.  

“Is something the matter?”  

You clenched your fists. Your eyes became focused.  

“Capitano. Stand completely still and no matter what you do – do not move.”  

He was experienced enough to realize there was no actual threat or danger around you. His body felt none. This trail wasn’t a popular one either – it was only the two of you and lines of trees. Yet, you were completely serious.  

He turned around completely to face you and stood still; broad shoulders and a perfect posture as always.

“I need to make sure. Forgive me.”  

You’ve had enough of creating hypothetical mountains. Of burying the main automatic feeling with heaps and bounds of rational and irrational thoughts and questions that would be picked apart and picked into.  

So, in that moment, you leaped towards your goal. And yes, it was only a leap of two steps but it meant everything once your hands wrapped around Capitano and your face rested against him.  

Yes, like this you would make sure.   Like this you would establish and catch the main automatic thought that came.  

He never said that he would do it, but he stood completely still for a minute and a half. Just like he did in front of that restaurant window months ago.  

You were not moving away. But he never promised you that he wouldn’t speak.  

“You give me too much credit, I am but a simple man, you know. I have to say, this behaviour is pretty odd from someone that hides in the market place from me.”  

No answer.  

“Allow me to embrace you back?”   “Not yet!”  

He grunts as you say that and move away. But your hands are back on his body, holding his shoulders. Your eyes are not leaving his.  

“Capitano, I think I like you! That is my automatic thought.”

And this time – he actually laughs. But you don’t think he is laughing at you because his hands find your waist and he brings you closer in an instant.

“You know, if you had let me embrace you earlier, there would be no need to shout such a proclamation in this part of the woods.”  

Earlier. Yes. Perhaps if from the first few meetings you had been able to dig up your true intentions and emotions; it would have been easier. But, even like this, it seems perfect to you.

a/n: i have realised capitano is my blorbo that i write fluff for when i am sad and want to cope. and this wasn’t what i was expecting and idk how long that will last but,,,,I HAVE HAD THIS IDEA SINCE LIKE JULY.

[astraltrickster]

Making this its own post actually - I can't help but notice that some people, despite picking up on support needs language over functioning language...still can't get past the high-functioning/low-functioning dichotomy and judge it in others based solely on outward signs and just use "support needs" language as a synonym for the same flawed concept.

Like, compare two autistic people; many people will look at someone whose internet posts use choppy, "awkward" grammar and go "ah, high support needs!"...even if it turns out that a little bit of patience with communication difficulty is damned near the ONLY support need they have. Conversely, I'm "well-spoken" and don't have many strong, hard-to-avoid sensory aversions, the only real "typical" one I have is fluorescent lights and I'm pretty okay at masking that one most of the time; in fact I'm more inclined to seek stimulation than to avoid it, so...you hear I'm autistic, and, ah, low support needs, I only need to Buy Product (fidget toys, weighted blankets, chew jewelry, MAYBE earplugs for when euphoric overstimulation stops being euphoric) and I'm basically 100% abled! Right?

Nope! My interroception is basically nonexistent until a bodily need becomes immediately urgent and physically painful. I have almost every physical comorbidity in the book; generalized chronic pain, stomach issues, hypermobility, the works - and when my dyspraxia combines with my hypermobility, the result is me being so injury-prone that it's not even misleading to say I've been an on-and-off mobility aid user for nearly as long as I've been walking. Combine that with my lack of interroception making it hard for me to judge when I'm fatigued, and it's even worse. Sure, I have lots of highly-valued skills, both physical and intellectual; I'm an engineer, I fucking love designing and building things and do it on a personal and occasionally freelance basis, I get in the ZONE - but I can't get a steady long-term job with those skills because I'm very limited in how long I can do it for both mental and physical reasons, and no one around me wants to hire an engineer or welder or machinist or forklift operator or anything like that for a 16-hour max week, and many of the seemingly very few intense sensory aversions I do have are found in those environments (e.g., working with metals often means exposure to fire brick my beloathed) and way harder to deal with in a professional environment than on my own terms, and did I mention being ridiculously injury-prone? There are aspects of personal care I struggle with, and "cosmetic" procedures that would probably dramatically improve my life, for sensory reasons. My face-to-face social skills are...garbage, despite me having a strong interest in communication as a compensation Thing; I can fake my way through a conversation but I'm usually screaming on the inside, overthinking everything, for absolute terror that I'm getting a bad grade at human interaction, which REALLY sucks because I'm actually more extroverted than introverted, I want to spend time with people, I want to socialize more...but my brain is just out to kneecap me all the time. This isn't even getting into the ADHD side of things or other physical issues. In short, I outwardly seem...pretty "normal" even when only masking one (1) item, but in my private life...I hate to admit it sometimes because it makes people dismiss everything else I have to say, but I don't really function well. I'm lucky to have understanding people in my life, because the likely alternative for me would be, at best, moving back in with my parents for the rest of their lives, and at worst (or probably after that), an institution.

...really didn't think this was how my life would go, but the fact that no one expects someone with my strengths to have my needs, not even me until just a few years ago, well, that's part of WHY it is what it is.

Like. People like me, or indeed that fairly common other theoretical guy who prominently struggles with communication but not much else, are WHY we jettisoned high-functioning/low-functioning labels in favor of discussing support needs. "Low support/high support" wasn't supposed to be just a less clinical synonym for the exact same externally judged concept of how well someone can pass for abled and/or perform a function valued under capitalism.

Tl;dr: yes you've stopped using "functioning" LANGUAGE, but have you stopped THINKING of support needs in "high-function/low-function" terms?

[duhragonball]

Were you aware of/do you have an opinion on the Dragonball theme park that is starting construction soon? On the one hand it seems like that Harry Potter theme park (which was a dumb idea, nobody serious cares about HP anymore), but Dragonball also isn't shitty, and Akria Toriyama didn't spend the last years of his life making sure everyone knew he was a transphobe (which J.K. Rowling is doing her best to do). Do you have a take?

I was not aware of any of this, so I don't think I have much to contribute to the conversation.

The article I just found was published only a few hours ago, so I guess this is a HOTTT scoop? Also, it looks like the thing is being built in Saudi Arabia, so I guess that's why this got announced in the middle of the night where I live. It's 3am here and I'm up early because I went to bed at 7pm and woke up around 1am.

Okay, so the Saudi connection is something I can talk about, because this sounds a lot like the same agenda that led to the WWE's infamous deal with Saudi Arabia. For those of you who aren't into pro wrestling, in 2018 WWE started putting on events in Jeddah and Riyadh. This has been controversial for several reasons, but the main sticking point is that the Saudi assassination of dissident journalist James Khashoggi took place in October 2018, a few weeks before WWE's second-ever Saudi show, Crown Jewel. The U.S. condemned the assassination, and politicians pressured WWE to call off the show, but the Kingdom paid a lot of money for the deal, and Vince McMahon only cares about himself, so they just went ahead and did the show anyway. There's other issues, but that one especially stuck in my craw, and it's why I canceled my WWE Network subscription and haven't watched their product ever since.

Basically, the Saudi government has been trying to revamp their economy to reduce dependence on the petroleum industry. The WWE deal is part of the "Saudi Vision 2030" project, which aims to increase the economic, social, and cultural diversification of the country by the end of this decade. Tourism is a big part of that plan, which is why they're paying big money for sporting events, live shows, and so on. Their plans also include a lot of political and social reforms, but this feels like an afterthought, especially to a lot of critics. For example, they announced a "Red Sea Film Festival" in 2019, but in order to put on such an event, they first had to lift a 35-year moratorium on building new movie theaters. They started allowing women to enter the King Fahd International Stadium for the first time, but that's probably just because they really wanted a packed house for these shows and concerts they're putting on.

The whole thing smacks of propaganda designed to distract the public from KSA's lousy record on human rights. When WWE was promoting their first Jeddah show, they ran a lot of video packages about Saudi Vision 2030 and talked up how cool it was that the country was seeking to modernize. Meanwhile, a lot of their roster couldn't even go to these shows for various reasons. Sami Zayn's a Syrian by descent, Noam Dar is an Israeli, and Montel Vontavious Porter is a former Muslim, so he might get executed for apostasy if he entered the country. The women's roster was a whole other thing. I think they were just left at home for the first couple of shows, and then they gradually started allowing more women to participate. And all those slick Saudi Vision video packages looked pretty hollow when James Khashoggi got murdered.

My take has been that KSA is just throwing money at their problems and trying to distract their critics. Saudi Arabia is practically synonymous with oil, and that's what made the country rich. I watched a video on this a while back, and if I remember right, they discovered oil in the 1930s and wanted to avoid getting exploited by the British and French, so they partnered with the United States. That prosperous relationship allowed Saudi Arabia to become a regional power and basically have things their way. The human rights problems were allowed to persist because they knew the U.S. would always back them up to protect their oil interests.

But over the last fifty years or so, U.S. dependence on Saudi oil has declined. See, it's not that Saudi Arabia has more crude oil than other countries. What made it so important in the petroleum industry is that Saudi crude is much easier to refine than other sources. So Saudi refineries can produce more fuel in a short span of time, which gave them a lot of leverage in that sector. But there's been a big push in the U.S. to seek out and refine more crude oil domestically, and that's cut into Saudi Arabia's prestige. Now, when rival powers like Iran start bothering Saudi Arabia, the U.S. isn't as quick to offer support, and that's why KSA is trying to figure out how to adapt to the changing times.

To be blunt, I don't know how the hell a Dragon Ball theme park helps solve any of this. If the oil revenue is on the decline, then it makes sense for a country to invest in other industries while the coffers are fuil, but now Saudi Arabia has to backtrack a lot of their draconian laws and authoritative policies to improve their public image. And they need to do it quickly, but not so quickly as to upset the conservative elements in the country.

Like, all right, let's say they open this park, and they really want people to fly in from all over the world. I know a lot of women in the Dragon Ball fandom. What kind of restrictions would they have to deal with in the park? Is there a stringent dress code? They made a big deal out of the historic first-ever women's match at one of those Crown Jewel shows, but the wrestlers had to wear black unitards under their usual ring gear. So they eased up on some rules, but you watch the show and you can tell there's still some rules in place.

I've met a lot of LBGTQ+ people in this fandom. Can they go to the Saudi Dragon Ball theme park? Can a same-sex couple hold hands as they wait in line to ride the Ginyu Force Log Flume? And I'm sure there's a guy at the General Entertainment Authority office who would assure me that it's all good, nothing to worry about, everyone is welcome, please come to the theme park and spend lots of money. But once you get there? Remember, James Khashoggi was a citizen of Saudi Arabia, and he walked into that consulate assured that everything would be cool, and then it wasn't.

You mentioned the Harry Potter theme park, and yeah, that whole franchise is a PR hot mess, but at least I don't have to ask these kinds of questions about who can go to the park without getting detained. That's the public relations mess Saudi Arabia has to clean up. At least with Harry Potter, they just have to distract people from one hateful, cranky billionaire. For most casual fans, "J.K. Rowling" is a name they barely notice in the credits. But Saudi Arabia's issues are baked into the government, laws, and history of the whole country. Reform is possible, but it isn't as simple as the propaganda makes it sound. There's a lot of damage that needs to be repaired.

I'm sorry, I kind of turned this into a rambling essay about Saudi Arabia's pivot to tourism, but for me that's the main issue here. The park might get completed and it may even do big business, but I don't think there's a lot of transparency with these projects. From what I've heard, the WWE shows in Jeddah and Riyadh don't actually make a lot of money. Much of the live crowd attends for free just to make the shows look more popular than they are, and WWE only plays along because they're getting paid handsomely for the effort. It just comes across like the country is spending lots of money to imitate a tourist destination without actually becoming one. So the Dragon Ball park looks like it's also going to be a means to an end. Someone in charge liked the idea enough to push it through, but that doesn't translate into success.

Oh, wait, I just realized: What if the park opens, then fails, and it gets abandoned? I really don't have any interest in theme parks, but abandoned theme parks kick ass. Imagine Dogpatch U.S.A, except it's Dragon Ball themed. That would be amazing. I hope I live long enough to see photos of it when it gets all old and decrepit.

[scorchedhearth]

Day. 31 A LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL

Comfort | Bedside Vigil | “You can rest now.”

im in a jaykyle mood so enjoy this one :]

Kyle wakes up slowly, dragged inches by inches towards consciousness, a process he knows and is used to, something he wouldn’t take notice of if it weren’t for the spikes of pain he vaguely registers throughout his body, in his limbs, wrist, chest. He’s been in this position enough time to know what it means, and it’s not something he’s looking forward to.

He cracks an eye open, looks at the room he’s in. A bedroom, stripped to the bare minimum, impersonal but clean. A familiar sight. He’s on the bed, over the covers with a light blanket over his legs, head resting on a pillow and a noise coming from his right. He jerks, shifts his head subtly to find who’s sitting next to him.

“My place,” a voice he knows well speaks in the quiet of the room. “Found you on the sidewalk, this isn’t the worse you’ve looked but I’ve definitely seen better.” Jason continues speaking as his fingers fly over his phone’s screen, typing faster than Kyle can follow

“Hey,” Kyle rasps out as an answer and takes a moment to look at him, his hair longer than he remembers, the jeans and shirt he’s wearing, the false air of casualty Jason carries with him wherever he goes. “How long?”

“About an hour since I picked you up.” Jason deftly pockets the phone and lays his gaze on Kyle, looking him up and down methodically. “Anything hurting?”

“Everything,” he sighs dramatically, because Jason means safety, and he’s not sure when those two ever became synonyms for him.

“Got roughed up good, yeah,” Jason smirks as he says those words. “Crash landed in Gotham, right in my turf. Nobody got hurt,” he answers before Kyle can even ask. “Unlike you. But you’ll live, nothing too serious. A couple broken bones, minor cuts and bruises, your ring is pretty nifty when it comes to protection shield, you know that?”

“I can patch myself up.” He protests weakly, even to his own ears, when Jason details the injuries. He tries to sit up but even the idea of loving his arms or torso seems like torture. He settles for shifting his head to look at Jason.

“No, you can't,” he answers bluntly. “Not in your state. You are exhausted so you won't be able to focus to use the ring, and-” he cuts when he sees Kyle is about to speak. "I pumped you with enough painkillers to take out a horse. You cannot patch yourself up."

Kyle focuses on his ring, on green, on will, the one that comes most easily and yeah, even using all the focus at his disposal he can't get a single construct out, must less a clear idea of what he’d want to make. It feels like his mind is being pulled in a dozen directions at once.

“Yeah, ok.” He sighs and lets his head roll on the pillow, looking at the ceiling. But there is one thing, though. “Why’d d’you pick me up?” Kyle asks him, turning towards him once again.

“The White Lantern laying unconscious in the narrows ain’t a good idea, you know. Had to fish you out the street did.” Jason keeps his voice casual, but there’s something on his face, the way he’s still sitting on a mismatched armchair near him.

“You’ve been sitting with me the whole time?” He rasps out, and watches, delighted, as Jason clams down and shuts off his face. Kyle beams, knowing he just hit the target right on. “Aw, you do care about me, Jason!” And that makes him laugh, unfortunately, because his entire left side is eaten by a pain burning like fire, something that makes him cough out pained grunts instead of laughter.

“Cracked ribs.” The smug expression slides easily on his face, although it is subdued. “Just making sure you were breathing right.”

“Right,” Kyle drawls and slowly lifts a hand up, the one with the ring. “I do yield the power of Love, you know.” When Jason doesn’t speak, he does it for him. “I know you’ll never say it, but I know.” The hand flops back on the covers and he closes his eyes. He knows he should say something more, could taunt and mock but he’s tired, and in that weird feeling where he knows things hurt but they don’t really, they just feel numb and that in return make him feel fuzzy. So he doesn’t say anything, letting the silence drags on as Jason stands up, walks around the room.

The foot taping he was hearing since he woke up is gone, as are the tense shoulders and Kyle knows that, even if he refuses to admit it, he’s sitting in this room just as much for himself as he is for Kyle’s sake. It’s heady, this holds they have on each other, one that crept up on them without him noticing.

"Hey, wanna cuddle?” He blurts out when Jason steps closer, grins at the falter in his footsteps.

"Don't push it, Rayner,” he grunts, and that makes him open his eyes, if only to watch the twists of his lips and the angry frown of his eyebrow.

"Come on, you know you want it too. Hugging is supposed to release good hormones for healing, right?"

“Cuddle this," is all he gets for an answer, along with a pillow thrown in his face. Ouch.

“Asshole,” Kyle mumbles even as he grips the pillow in his arms and releases some of the tension that built in his chest. “As soon as the drugs wear off, I’ll deal with that.” He promises and Jason hums. “Show you how it’s done.”

“Sure.” He says as if he were entertaining the ideas of a child, not the promise of witnessing great powers in action. “I’ll be right there when you wake up to see that.”

“Good,” Kyle nods once and his eyes slip close again, the sense of safety and familiarity of having Jason by his side enough to pull him back into unconsciousness, a well-known feeling by now.

[decepti-thots]

Mesothulas/Tarantulas and 8?

8 - Describe the place where they sleep. (ie what does their safe space look like. How much (or how little) care / decoration / personal touch goes into it.)

I think he probably sleeps where he works if he has the choice, and if he doesn't then he accordingly doesn't pay much attention to anything except the practicalities. Sleep is a regrettable necessity he's never quite managed to engineer his way out of. There's no separation of 'work' and 'living space' for him, those may as well be synonyms.

Still, that seems like kind of a cop out answer. It really just offloads the question here of 'what does their safe space look like'. His 'safe space' is just therefore where he feels comfortable working and occasionally passing out. I think he's probably very, hm, territorial? He would put a lot of work into ensuring that space is his, and not likely to be infringed upon. Anyone trying to break in will regret it. I especially assume that pre-canon he was pretty much running solo, and that whatever little nest he set up for himself was somewhere he put a lot of time and effort into isolating so that nobody would ever disturb him.

Which makes his canon living situation during his and Prowl's collaboration very interesting- because it's one where Prowl is coming and going whenever he likes, without so much as a prior warning before showing up. That seems like the sort of thing Mesothulas would see as a very obvious gesture on his part and which Prowl would not notice at all as significant in the same way. He lets you just walk in, my guy! He programmed all his security to ignore you! (Prowl, who implicitly sees both the lab itself and Mesothulas within it as his assets to treat as he pleases, does not perceive this at all. He'd be unnerved if he knew.)

As to the place itself: well organized but full of a million things because he always has another project to start, lacking stereotypical personal touches less out of deliberate cultivation and more because Mesothulas cares about different things, showcasing a sense of drama aesthetically that doesn't take any effort on his part and is mostly unconscious. He doesn't have to WORK to make it look like a b-movie set, it just comes naturally to him. The sense of drama is innate. (He has a THRONE in his WEIRD MIND CONTROL ROOM as Tarantulas. A throne. I mean.) I think as Tarantulas, the fact he made his home in the noisemaze is very telling. Both in that it seems a very deliberate move to turn the place he was basically horrifically tortured into a home he has control over, and also in that it's the ultimate expression of 'make sure noone can intrude on my work which is also my sense of self'.

Also: I think he made room for Prowl without asking. There's two berths down there and Prowl never asked why, that sort of thing. Maybe he assumed it was for Ostaros. Maybe he just didn't notice. Mesothulas really thought that Prowl would be happier down there with him than vice versa, but he wasn't the sort of person who knew how to ask about it.

[autumn-rain-co]

A funny thing happened in a system discord which is syscourse adjacent... And I'm gonna yap about it!

I have a little link in my bio, which has an about me, interests, and dni/byi section. That dni/byi section explicitly states "dni if you believe in non-trauma did / demedicalize cdds" and also "byi former avid syscourse (+ 3 links to my opinions)".

So, I join anti endo system discords, and if they ask what my opinion on endos are, I used to give a pretty elaborate answer but apparently some servers hate that so I cut it down to "I don't believe in non-traumagenic / endogenic OSDDID". Heavy emphasis om the OSDDID part so it doesn't feel like I'm lying to them, because I'm not lying.

And I quickly realised these people don't... Look at the link I have in my bio. I used to think they would and it would give me a lot of anxiety. I eventually calmed down but I knew that one day, someone will look at the opinions I linked in my dni/byi, and report me to one of the servers I'm in.

And then that day came! I was trial staffing in a server until I suddenly got pulled into a ticket. The head staff wanted to ask me about "something in my link" and proceeded to ask me if I "still believed endos are real/valid".

I think they only read that part of my dni/byi and not the part where I explicitly put "dni you believe in non-trauma did / demedicalize cdds"...

My anxiety drastically shot up and my hands were literally shaking since I really liked the server and loved talking about system stuff and other interests I had with other people who were around my age. I didn't wanna get banned!! Getting kicked out of the staff team was fine but y'know.

I typed back that I made it very clear I don't believe in non-traumagenic / endogenic / endogenous / insert synonym OSDDID. And to make it a bit extra I had to add that I don't support the actions that endos* have done.

*endos as in non-trauma osddid believers and as in endos who have done really shitty things

And then... I was in the clear. Woo!! I was saved!!

Then some of the other trial staff got promoted while I was the only trial staff left LOL

I'm not sure what to take from this other than I should probably be more careful with what I put in my bio. But I guess I don't really... Need to hide it? I dunno, just something about if people could just read those links of opinions I agree with carefully, they'd be able to change their mind on some beliefs. But whatever, if it manages to convince someone, awesome! If not, I guess I'll have to cope.

[ceescedasticity]

On stealing from Dark Lords:

I'm not sure you can, actually. It's not stealing.

That's facetious and oversimplifying, and any discussion of theft/property in Middle-earth (or any fantasy world) runs into the issue that both property and theft are at least in part social constructs dependent on culture. Also I'm not a lawyer and 95% of my law-related information comes from Wikipedia, but since the laws wouldn't precisely apply anyway who cares.

But: In my opinion, there are several arguments based on plausibly inferred laws that could be used by any Elf, Man, Dwarf, Hobbit, Ent, etc. to assert that taking something from Melkor or Sauron is not legally wrong — or morally, if you're in a culture which assigns moral value to running off with other people's stuff.

Argument 1: Laws restricting the taking of spoils of war are all pretty recent. I'm not sure any pre-modern culture would have considered taking stuff from your enemy to be theft.

(Even now prohibitions are focused on private and personal property, plus articles relating to religion, charity, education, and arts/sciences. I think you could make a pretty solid argument that none of those actually exist in Mordor or Melkor's realm. [Among humans under Sauron's control is probably a different question — modern law wouldn't allow sacking Umbar, I'm pretty sure — but we aren't talking about that.] Everything in their direct power is their property, and they are synonymous with the state — insofar as there is a state — so… that's not really private, is it?)

And the constant existence of a state of war between the Dark Lord and everyone else is pretty clear, so… basically anything could be a spoil of war.

The other two arguments are based on laws which do not apply now; one is canon and the other featured in medieval English common law and so is pretty plausible for Middle-earth.

Argument 2: Weregild. I believe Isildur out-and-out cites this as a justification for taking the Ring. I'm not sure there's anyone in Middle-earth who wouldn't have a solid claim on weregild from Melkor or Sauron.

Argument 3: The original legal concept of outlawry in English common law meant declaring someone outside the protection of the law: It is not illegal for anyone to persecute or kill them. The Wikipedia article doesn't say anything about seizing things from them, but I feel like if you can kill them that's probably implied? One of the early English terms for this was caput gerat lupinum, to 'bear a wolf's head' — they're equated with a wolf. Sauron seems to have signed up for that part himself.

This doesn't precisely apply, as I don't think Melkor or Sauron ever were subjects of any mortal law in any way — but there's no reason to think they should be within the protection of any mortal law, and they seem to have removed themselves from the jurisdiction of the Valar, so…

[imaginedreamwrite]

I need more alpha!silver-fox!Steve!! Pretty please write more!!

I chose alpha!silverfox!Steve from the barista/artist pairing (hope it was what you wanted)

“Coniglietta,” his voice seemed to be continuously husky for the sake of either seducing you, or offering some primordial comfort that stole your breath.

Even in the early hours of the morning when you were sweating bullets down the back of your neck and from your brow. Even when you felt your legs quaking from the irrevocable start of heat that was coming rapidly, his voice was husky and he was calm.

He was always calm, even when he was angered he seemed calm. Perhaps that was even more frightening than Steve reacting in anger.

The calm way that he seemed to speak to the aggressors in a way that made them feel simultaneously soothed and terrified of what he would or could do. Steve was massive, he was an alpha who was broader and taller, stronger even, than most he had come across. Even as he had silvered and greyed, he was terrifying to most alphas.

Yet he was it hung but devoted and attentive, protective to a fault, over you. Even while considering that you’ve only spoken a handful of conversations, and had sex once since you’d met…

Steve was treating you like you were already his.

“Sorry,” you muttered an apology as the bed dipped and his striking eyes settled on you.

“What are you apologizing for?” He asked, the corner his lips twitching as a smile built. “You didn’t do anything wrong, and I wasn’t going to leave you alone while you’re in a pre-heat.”

“You could’ve taken me home.” You argued his point, albeit weakly.

“Sweetie, you live in a big complex. If I would’ve taken you home, you could’ve been hurt. I had to bring you here, and you can stay here as long as you want.” His voice was soft and tender, a synonymous match to his eyes and the gaze that centred upon you.

“I hope you don’t mind…” Steve had recoiled only for a moment to turn and open a drawer on the side table. “I got you something.”

“You got me something?” You questioned sleepily, angling your head to get a better look at him.

“It’s a aromatic locket that releases small doses of scents to calm an omega.” Steve had grasped hold of the box with the necklace and held it out for you.

The locket was stunning yet simple, an engraved flower set in the top corner of the oval was reminiscent of your birth month with the centre of the flower being your birthstone. The scent slowly emanating from the locket was a perfect pair between your scent and Steve’s, calming and comforting you like he had promised.

“I can’t take that, Steve. That’s…” you exhaled slowly, unable to think straight. “That looks like it cost a lot of money and-“

“Consider it a courting gift.” He hadn’t pushed it into your hand, he hadn’t forced you to take it. He was offering it to you.

“A courting gift…?” Your voice hitched in your throat, bewildered and surprised.

“If you would let me court you, sweetie…” again, he had wait for you to answer. He was willing to wait for as long as you needed.

“I…” you hummed under your breath, your heart racing and your hindbrain screaming at you to say yes.

You wanted to say yes, you wanted to accept.

“I won’t hurt you, darling.” Steve spoke as if he could read your mind. “I would never hurt you. I want to protect you, take care of you. I want to make sure you’re safe and happy.”

“A courting gift.” You grasped the box and pulled it toward your chest, studying the gift and the box it came in. “Am I dreaming? I feel like I’m dreaming.”

“Coniglietta,” Steve crooned softly and slipped his hand under the blanket, fingertips brushing against your side, “good morning, little omega.”

Steve leaned in, the feel of his lips against yours was another shot of energy to wake you up even further. His lips against yours was as delightful and invigorating as you remembered from the first round you’d had with him.

“Hungry, coniglietta?” He hummed against your lips, stroking your waist tenderly. “I made you breakfast, those Belgian waffles you liked.”

“Starved,” your stomach grumbling followed your speech and Steve laughed softly into your lips, kissing you again.

“Come downstairs, sweetheart. They’re ready for you.”

[morgana-ren]

Ooh, building on your comment about subtle manipulation... We know Astarion probably subconsciously wants to be what Cazador represents in his mind: utterly powerful, which means in control, which means safe from anyone else's predation because he's the predator.

A thought: a smart Tav would pick that up pretty easily. A wise Tav would know that such a path would lead to the inevitable destruction of this man they care for deeply- they're going to destroy Cazador for him, after all, they love Astarion and want to keep him from hounding their friend-or-something-more, but if Astarion becomes like Cazador... Someone will come to kill Astarion to protect their loved ones from him. Someone already has- poor Gandrel. A monster you love is still a monster.

A clever Tav would ask him... "Do you want to become Cazador? Do you want to chain yourself to him forever? Or do you want to stay my Astarion, and be free of him when he's finally gone?"

After all... Tav warns him that though they're helping him without expectation of any reward or even 'good' behavior, they will not let him become their own Cazador; just because they will not force him to conform to their way of living, they also will not let him make them worse... And all the while presenting it in a way that doesn't make him think he's doing it out of pity or guilt.

... Can you tell I love the delicate balancing act between a paragon and a walking corruption arc, where goodness and innocence is not synonymous with foolishness or guilelessness lol

That's what I utterly adore about Astarion's story. I think he's quite literally right on the precipice of it. He's still getting his bearings here, dipping his toes into the freedom he's dreamt about for so long. The vengeance is still ripe within him, and it very much guides his decisions.

I think it's highly possible that it could go either way, because whether he likes it or not, he is influenced equally by the actions of those close to him as he is his own thoughts.

A rotten Tav? Now that could push him over the edge easily. Encourage him to indulge in his wretched instincts, his more base, awful desires, all of it. Help him claim that power he thinks he needs so damned desperately and abuse it to the fullest extent.

However, I think that his growth was somewhat stunted during his time with Cazador. We don't know much at all about who he was before he was the Astarion we know and love, but I get the feeling that while he wasn't a good person necessarily, he wasn't rotten to the core either. Probably just a bit selfish and self serving. So technically, it's also possible that he could become better.

It's all still fresh. He's still bitter as hell. He thinks he wants these things, but does he truly?

It's entire possible that he could become a better person... or at least one not hellbent on abusing everyone around them. A delicate touch and a tad bit of manipulation and it's possible he could come to see things in a new and different way.

In a strange way, he seems a wee bit confused. He really thinks he wants power, but I think what he actually wants it to protect himself and keep from ever being put in a position of such vulnerability for the rest of his very long life. He wants to make good and goddamn sure that no one can ever do anything like that to him ever again. But power breeds corruption, and he openly admits he's susceptible to it.

How Tav interacts with him and their own personal morals and alignment will probably have a decent impact on how he proceeds.