#Filter words out you hate seeing its not that hard

[foxgirlmoth]

I made it look like my gf told someone to seethe and cope over slur discourse how's everypony else doing tonight

I guess I wrote most of my thoughts in the notes oops

[lightbulb-warning]

i used to freehand comics all the time as a child and since the part i liked was the drawing part i would just draw panel after panel because i didn't want to stop drawing to think about icky icky words, plus the story TOTALLY still made perfect sense! to me! and noone else, but 'whoooo caaaaares omgggg its not like comics and sequantial art are a communicative meeediummmm lmaoooooo'. i spent my entire childhood telling myself stuff like "oh pfft I know this story by heart- ill SIMPLY remember the dialogue and write it later" ...and. I can't help but admire baby maiora's (call that a minora ba tm tsk) fucking audacity? hubris? confident wrongness? kid couldn't even remember to finish the comics in the first place? INCREDIBLE levels of unearned self assurance, wish that were me, genuinely- what an icon!!! anyway i think i have forever cursed myself

[alltheirdamn]

Killing Me Softly | (Joel x teacher!f!reader)

Chap. 9 Act 1, Scene 1

Summary: Time passes, but the memories remain. Rating: 18+ Word Count: 6.7k Warnings: **THIS CONTAINS SERIES SPOILERS** angst, language, mentions of alcohol, brief mention of vomiting (tw for anyone with emetophobia), slight duel pov A/N: Well... the imposter syndrome has hit me HARD. I'm extremely discouraged by this chapter, but i hope its a decent enough follow-up to what y'all read last :/ bear with me, the last two chapters will MORE than make up for it. i promise.

Masterlist | Ko-fi

Time didn’t exist anymore. 

You woke up. You went to work. You came home.

Over and over, the cycle went, and the days passed with no significance. You didn’t eat much, your appetite dwindling just as much as your motivation. It started to show in the way your clothes hung on your body and how your face thinned out. If you cared, you would go to the store and actually buy food, but the possibility of running into Joel kept you away. 

Joel.

Two weeks had passed since parent-teacher conferences—two weeks since you had hidden the book far away. You considered re-writing your lesson plans for next year; you never wanted to teach Romeo and Juliet again. You weren’t strong enough to analyze a story you had shared so intimately with someone you now considered a stranger because that’s what Joel was now: a stranger. A stranger you could still pick out in a crowd of a million people, a stranger whose lips were still imprinted on your skin even after countless hours spent in the shower. 

He was a stranger, and you hated him.

You were perched on the couch with a glass of wine—as most nights went now—when your cell phone buzzed on the coffee table. You didn’t reach for it initially; it was most likely your mom. She had tried calling a handful of times since you had hung up on her weeks ago. You never once called back, but you listened to the voicemails when you were drunk enough. Your dad had been discharged last week and started physical therapy for his hip. Stella and her boyfriend were moving in together somewhere in downtown Boston. And Beth…your mom never once uttered her name. She knew better than to do that. 

But the continuous buzzing of your phone began to irritate you, and you reached for it with an exasperated sigh. An unknown number flashed on the screen, igniting a sudden burst of anxiety inside your chest. Setting your glass down, you inhaled and answered the phone.

“Hello?” You cautioned.

Your name filtered through the receiver, a voice you weren’t expecting to hear.

“Bennett?” 

“Yeah, it’s me,” he sighed. 

“I didn’t think you’d reach out,” you said. “I tried to see you in the hospital, but Natalie…” You let your voice drift off. 

“I know. She’s not big on the idea of talking to you at all.”

“I’m so sorry again, Bennett. Joel shouldn’t have done that. I really don’t understand why it got to that point. I—.”

“I deserved it,” he said, cutting you off mid-sentence. 

You shook your head, your fingers knotting through the tangles in your hair.

“No, Bennett. No, you didn’t. He could have killed you,” you argued.

“He’s a man of his word, I’ll give him that,” he laughed. 

It was odd to hear Bennett talk so casually about this as if Joel hadn’t pummeled him into the ground. He should be mad, so why wasn’t he?

“Should I be waiting for a call from your lawyer soon?” You asked wearily. 

“If I wanted to come after you or Joel legally, I would be the one to do it. But that’s not happening,” he sighed. “It's too messy of a situation, and I really don’t want to go through the hassle. Natalie says otherwise, but she doesn’t really understand the situation.”

“The situation,” you echoed. “Joel told me his side of things after they took you to the hospital.  I still don’t remember anything, Bennett. Even if I did, I wouldn’t have been able to reach you. You left. You disappeared completely and broke my heart.”

There was a beat of silence. You took the opportunity to down the last of your wine, the beginnings of a light buzz coursing through your veins. Don't get angry, you told yourself. You didn’t feel much of anything anymore, but anger was never too far out of reach. Sitting with that emotion and festering in it was easy if you let yourself. Bennett deserved your anger just as much as the rest of them, but you needed answers more than you needed to feel anything.

“There’s a lot to explain,” he finally said. “I’m not sure if you even want to see me again, but I can drive up to Austin this weekend and tell you everything. Or at least everything from my side.”

Seeing Bennett again would unfurl so many unchecked emotions: heartbreak, betrayal, grief. But it would be something you needed. Joel wasn’t the one you were with those two years following the accident; he wasn’t the one you had walked down the aisle expecting to see. Bennett had been with you through it all. You wanted to hear it from his mouth. You wanted an apology and an explanation.

“Okay,” you exhaled. “We can do that. Will Natalie have an issue with it?”

“Natalie won’t know.”

“You’re going to lie to your wife?” You laughed bitterly at his admission. He was still the same person through and through. 

“She’s fine,” he huffed through the phone. “She doesn’t understand any of this anyway.”

“Whatever you say, Bennett. We can meet at a coffee shop this weekend. Don’t abandon me again. I deserve an explanation.”

“I won’t.”

The guilt in his voice was thick, and you relished knowing he was suffering. Everyone, not just you, deserved to suffer for what they did. 

You quickly ended the call with Bennett and returned to the silence surrounding you. Knowing you’d see him in just a few days was unsettling and uncomfortable. The lingering grief he had left still hollowed out your heart. No amount of apologies would fill it, but it could sew up the remaining holes. 

What couldn’t be filled was the gaping hole Joel had left within your heart. Secrets wrapped in scar tissue and carnage that could never be fully healed, and it still infuriated you that your love for him still festered inside. It buried itself deep under the confines of your numbness, but sometimes, when you lay awake at night, you could still feel it. You ached for him in growing unbearable ways, but you had to continue with your life. 

You hadn't prepared yourself to see Bennett the first go around, and you had since thrown out the shirt still stained with his blood. Now, you were standing amid a pile of clothes strewn around your feet, your hair still wet and wrapped in a towel, and a face that screamed insomnia. You looked beyond amends.

After another hour of procrastination and a ticking timeline, you threw on the most basic T-shirt and jeans and left your hair a wet mess.

It was only Bennett.

It wasn’t serious.

Nothing was these days. 

You pulled into a spot in front of a cafe a little ways into town, your car sitting idle as you stared at the storefront. You could faintly make out Bennett’s silhouette sitting in the window, yet your body wouldn’t move. You were feet from all the answers, but the anxiety bubbling inside you made you immobile. Did you actually want this? Was it better to be blissfully unaware? 

Would the answers hurt you more than help you?

Before the constant questions led you to flee, you opened your door and decided to face the truth. Walking into the cafe, your eyes connected with Bennett, and your heart sank. Even from a distance, the scarring on his face was horrible: a thick, red, jagged line stretching down his temple and ending at his cheekbone. Another raised scar creased his left eyebrow, dragging down the arch over his eye. 

Joel did this. 

Inhaling, you met him at the table, sliding into the chair without a word. Bennett’s lips curled into a smug smile, one you still hated, and his eyes glazed over your body. 

“You look like shit,” he stated. 

“You’re one to talk,” you shot back, rolling your eyes. 

He shrugged, leaning back comfortably in his chair. Your eyes flicked down to the ring on his finger, the gold shimmering through the sunlight hitting the windows. 

“She really has no idea you’re here?” You questioned, nodding your head towards his hand. 

Bennett glanced down at his wedding band, his fingers twisting around the metal mindlessly. 

“No, she doesn’t. She thinks I’m out of town on business.”

“And where’s home for you now?” You asked. “I never really found out since you up and left without a trace.” You tried to swallow the bitterness coating over your words. 

“I live in Houston now. I found a firm seeking out a junior partner and settled down in the city,” he explained. “Trust me, I didn’t want to leave my life here, but it was the only option.”

You studied him momentarily, watching any signs in his body language that would frame him as a liar. But you found nothing to fault. 

“What do you mean it was the only option?”

Bennett leaned forward, intertwining his hands together.

“What exactly did Joel fill you in on?” Bennett asked, cocking an eyebrow.

You shifted in your seat. Bennett’s words hit a nerve inside you, one that was buried deep within the numbness and itching to revive itself on a spark of anger. Was there more Joel had kept from you? How much more heartbreak could you take before you completely withered away?

“He said you and I broke up after we moved to Austin,” you started. “That’s when I met him, and we started dating. I don’t know specifics or much more, but Joel said that when I woke up in the hospital, I asked for you, and that’s when my parents decided to reach out to you and cover up my memory.”

“He left out… a lot,” he emphasized.

“Oh.” 

“So, where do you want me to start then?” 

You chewed on your lip, glancing outside as the cars drove down the main road. If you had told yourself two years ago you’d be sitting in front of your ex-fiance learning about a life you never knew existed… you’d laugh. You’d laugh and tell yourself you’d gone crazy. 

“From the beginning,” you sighed. 

Bennett leaned back in his chair, stretching his arms behind his head. His eye twitched, the tight scar scrunching the skin around it. You averted your eyes, dropping your gaze to your hands as they fidgeted in your lap. 

“Obviously, you remember us moving to Austin,” he started. “It was probably a month or two after that when we started arguing a lot. You were always mad at me for working too much. You complained all the time that I wasn’t present or whatever.” You deadpanned him when he said those words; it was the same as the arguments you remembered during the engagement. Bennett shrugged off your glare and continued. “Anyway, you finally got fed up with everything and called it quits. You moved in with your teacher friend, whatever her name is… I don’t remember.”

“Maria,” you grumbled. “Her name is Maria.”

“Right, yeah.” Bennett quirked a grin as if he knew the buttons he was pushing. “So, you moved in with Maria and must’ve met Joel shortly after that. We didn’t keep in touch during those two years, but I missed you—a lot.”

Now, it was your turn to hit him with a rueful grin. He was so full of shit, just like you remembered. 

“I don’t believe that for a minute,” you scoffed. 

“Believe whatever you want, but I did miss you. Even with all our fights, I loved you,” he admitted. “I couldn’t stop thinking about you, so after a while, I decided to reach out. I asked if we could go to dinner and talk, you know, work things out. I didn’t expect you to agree to it, but you did. And you know what happened? You laughed. You laughed at everything I said. You told me you were finally happy and in love and that you’d never consider the chance of getting back together. You sure do know how to hurt a man's pride.”

“You probably deserved it,” you said, shrinking back into your chair. 

“Yeah, probably,” Bennett exhaled. “Doesn’t matter now, though. Anyway, after dinner, you left, and that’s when the accident happened. I had no idea until your parents called me to the hospital and explained it all to me. Looking back now, I can see how incredibly fucked up it all was, but I wanted a second chance. Joel wasn’t happy with the plan at all. As a matter of fact, he punched the shit out of me right when I walked into the room.”

“What?” You balked. 

Bennett laughed dismissively, running a hand over his jaw. You tracked his moments, imagining what Joel must have looked like when he saw Bennett that night. An unwelcomed pang of guilt swarmed inside your chest, not for Bennett, but for Joel. You still hated him, but you couldn’t image the pain he had felt knowing he was losing you. The guilt subsided as you reminded yourself he had a choice to step in, but he allowed it all to happen anyway. He was an accomplice to your parent’s plans. He didn’t fight for you, and that realization stung. 

“You alright?” he asked, tilting his head to study you. 

“Yeah, I’m fine,” you faltered. “Just—just keep going.”

“Okay,” he cautioned. “I agreed to go along with your parent's plan. I knew it was fucked up, and I knew it would bite everyone in the ass one day, but I did it because I loved you. I wanted a do-over with you, and it felt like the perfect opportunity.”

You nodded slowly, letting his words sink in. If this conversation had happened weeks ago, you would have reacted differently, but there was no anger left to exhaust. You couldn’t be angry at Bennett, at least not for this. You were still allowed to resent him for what he did during the engagement and for leaving you at the altar, but this? This wasn’t something he did; he went along with everything because he loved you…supposedly. That was still arguable. 

“So, you got your perfect opportunity and decided to fuck it up.” 

Bennett inhaled sharply, drawing his lips into a thin line. There he was, the asshole you remembered. He didn’t like when you called him on his shit, and that’s exactly what you were doing. 

“I tried to make it work,” he argued. “I mean, I tried the best I could. I didn’t want to lose you again. So, yeah, I might’ve tried to prevent the chances of you getting your memories back, but it was because I loved you. Then I just got sick of trying. I got sick of you always asking questions and me having to lie. It was exhausting. And then you started saying Joel’s name in your sleep, and I just—.”

“Wait,” you interjected, holding up your hand. “I—I said his name in my sleep?”

Bennett laughed, running a hand over his face. There was a shift in his demeanor, a mixture of anger and sadness. 

“Why do you think I slept on the couch most nights? I couldn’t fucking stand it,” he grumbled. 

“Bennett, I didn’t fucking know I was doing that!” You shouted. A few people turned their heads at the rise in your voice, but you didn’t care. The anger was awakening inside you again, pounding to get out of the cage you had locked it in. 

“Yeah, I know,” Bennett said, rolling his eyes. “I still hated it. I hated knowing that even when you slept, you still loved him. I was never going to be the person to make you happy.”

Tears stung your waterline, and you swiped them away before they could fall. 

“That’s why you left.” It wasn’t a question. It was a realization. 

“I called Joel the night before the wedding,” he confessed, cringing at the admission. “I told him how I felt, and he told me to leave. Well, he didn’t tell me… It was more like he threatened me. He told me that if I didn’t, he’d find me. We both agreed to stay out of your life, and I think you can piece together the rest.”

You sat before him, speechless. You knew it all along; you were the reason Bennett was unhappy. Instinctively, you always knew it. But hearing it aloud? That was a pain you weren’t ready for. Everything was your fault, from beginning to end. Bennett couldn’t love you, Joel couldn’t fight for you.

Why were you so unloveable? 

None of this was your fault, yet everything pointed directly back at you. 

You had nothing left to say to Bennett, so you shoved away from the table and fumbled for your purse. He said your name cautiously, grabbing your wrist before you could turn away. You tried to free yourself from his hold, but he squeezed tighter. 

“Stop!” You snapped. 

“I’m sorry, okay?” Bennett pleaded. “I really am, whether you believe it or not. I fucked up a lot, and I regret the way I left. It wasn’t fair to you.”

“This apology would have meant a lot more two years ago, Bennett,” you cried, still trying to free yourself. 

“I know it would have, but I’m doing it now. Alright? I’m sorry for everything I put you through, and I know none of this has been easy for you—.”

“You don’t know shit,” you seethed. 

You finally wrangled yourself out of his grip, rubbing your wrist to alleviate the pain from his touch. Bennett stared at you, agonized. You had walked in here hoping for an apology and got it. But it wasn’t enough. What was the point in all of this if nothing healed the pain inside you? 

You stumbled out of the cafe with blurry eyes, the cage bars inside you breaking piece by piece. It was only minutes before the anger fully consumed you, and you needed to leave before you let it wreak havoc on everything around you. You needed silence. You needed solitude. You needed a hole to crawl into. 

Before you could open your car door, Bennett called out your name and tore you away from the swirling thoughts inside your mind. You tried to ignore him, but he was relentless. Whipping around to face him, you came face first with his chest as he pulled you into an embrace. 

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, tightening his arms around your ridged body. “Hate me all you want, but don’t hate Joel. I can have my own grievances with him, but he loves you more than I ever could.”

You slumped into his chest, letting the anger overwhelm you to the point of complete defeat. Crying in Bennett’s arms was the last place you ever expected to be in, but here you were, sobbing into your ex-fiance’s chest. He held you through each wave of emotions, remaining solid and silent. 

“Hey,” Bennett whispered, pulling away. “Obviously, I don’t know shit about what’s going on with you, but it’s going to be okay. It’ll take time, but you’re going to be alright. I hope you get those memories back one day. I really do. You deserve to remember the things you lost, and I’m sorry for ever getting in the way of that.”

“Thank you,” you mumbled, wiping away the tears streaming down your face. 

Bennett gave you a soft smile and said his goodbyes. You watched him as he retreated to his car, waiting for him to drive away. As you turned toward your car again, you glanced up at the hardware store across the street, meeting the eyes of someone familiar. Someone you didn’t expect to see. 

Joel’s brother, Tommy. 

The resentful glare in his eye was deadly, and you couldn’t hide from it. He saw you with Bennett. He would tell Joel, even without knowing what had just transpired. For a brief moment, you wanted to rush over and explain everything to him, but you stopped yourself. It didn’t matter what he told Joel—at least, that’s what you told yourself. You could only shy away from Tommy’s scrutinizing stare and duck into your car. 

You had been gone too long from your numbness, and you missed it. It was time to bury yourself in your sadness once again and continue trying to unlove Joel Miller. 

**

Joel dumped his tools on the dining table with an exasperated sigh. He immediately reached for the fridge, grabbing a beer and popping it open in one fluid motion. As he leaned against the counter with the bottle at his lips, Joel heard the garage door slam shut. Peering around the corner, he tracked Tommy’s movements as he walked into the kitchen. 

“What crawled up your ass?” Joel grumbled. 

Tommy shrugged off his button-up and tossed it over a dining chair. He ran a hand through his greasy black curls before glancing at Joel. Joel shifted uncomfortably, trying to make sense of Tommy’s demeanor. 

“Seriously, Tommy,” Joel huffed. “Spit it the fuck out.”

“I saw her downtown,” Tommy finally said. “She was with that ex-fiance. The one you almost killed.”

Joel swore he felt his heart stop beating. Tommy must have seen wrong; it wasn’t you. It couldn’t have been you. You wouldn’t seek out Bennett, not after everything. You weren’t even seeking Joel out, even after two weeks of earth-shattering silence. 

“Are y’sure it was her?” Joel asked through clenched teeth. 

Tommy nodded, his eyes drawn to the floor. 

“Yeah, it was her. Not sure what was goin’ on between them, but I saw them huggin’ and all that outside of a lil’ cafe,” Tommy explained. 

“Probably doesn’t mean nothin’,” Joel shrugged, trying to let denial take over.

If he could deny it, then none of this was real. You weren’t with Bennett again—that wouldn’t happen. You wouldn’t do that. Bennett wouldn’t do that. Maybe Joel should have killed him. It would have torn you apart, but at least Joel could sleep at night knowing Bennett would never be in your life again. 

“Joel,” Tommy said, pulling him from his vengeful thoughts. 

“It doesn’t matter!” Joel yelled, slamming his beer bottle onto the counter.

The glass rattled between his fingers, and a slow trickle of liquid began seeping out of the crack he created. Joel glanced down at it, unbothered. 

“She’s not comin’ back, man,” Tommy sighed. “Y’gotta start movin’ on.”

“Go fuck yourself, Tommy,” Joel snapped.

He shoved off the counter and began to retreat down the hall, but not quick enough for Tommy. Tommy sidestepped in front of him, arms folded and a scowl twisting his lips. Joel knew Tommy hated everything about this situation, but he wasn’t the one experiencing the pain. He was just a bystander in all of this; he didn’t lay awake every night tossing over your words inside his head. 

I will never forgive you for this. 

Joel wasn’t losing you. He already lost you. 

“Listen, Joel. I know this is hard on you, but y’gotta face the truth. She’s gone, man. I know you tried your best to get her back, but it’s just not gonna happen. She deserves to make her own decisions for her life.”

“I know,” Joel sighed. “Doesn’t mean I don’t love her, still.”

Tommy’s brown eyes softened as he looked at Joel, his head dipping in agreement. 

“No one said y’had to stop lovin’ her,” Tommy offered. 

“I don’t think I ever will,” Joel said. 

Joel didn’t sleep much that night. Tossing between the sheets, Joel couldn’t steer away the thoughts of you in another man's arms—let alone Bennett’s. When Joel had seen you at parent-teacher conferences, he wanted to fall to his knees and beg for your forgiveness. He knew you had taken the news rough, but seeing you so physically distraught was another type of pain he hadn’t been prepared for. You were a hollow shell of the woman he loved; your voice held so much bitterness when you spoke to him. Your eyes didn’t look at him with love…it was his own personal Hell. Parting ways with you like that nearly killed him, but not knowing what was going on in your life killed him more. Joel had spent two years in limbo after your accident, always wondering what life would be like if he had you back. And then he had it. He had three beautiful months with you, albeit they were spent wearing rose-colored glasses, but he had you again. 

In the blink of an eye, in one messy series of events, he lost you.

He lost you, and he knew you’d never come back. 

**

~Six months later~

You thought time would heal the wounds left inside your chest, but you were wrong. Days turned into weeks, weeks turned into months, and nothing felt better. You stopped talking to your family altogether, and the phone calls stopped coming after some time. Beth never tried to reconcile with you, nor did you try to fight for answers. Having your heart broken by Joel and Bennett was one thing, but having it broken by your sister was a different kind of pain. It was visceral. It was a betrayal so brutal you still had yet to recover. Thinking of the things she had said to you in Boston only left you with debilitating headaches; her words festered deeper than anyone else’s. 

The truth is that you are a fucking idiot. And on top of that, you’re a coward.

You weren’t the coward; Beth was. She chose to hold onto those secrets for the last few years and weaponize them against you. You weren’t the idiot; you were the victim. You were the victim in all of this, yet everyone wanted to pin the aftermath on you. 

You were a mad woman, haunting an empty house with no one to confide in. You cut off all friendships with other teachers, especially Maria. You became a hands-off teacher, only going as far as in-class readings, quizzes, and occasional tests when necessary. The students adapted to the shift in your mood, and while you lived with the guilt of becoming that teacher, it was the only way you could survive the work days. The less effort you put into things, the less risk you had for disappointment or frustration. 

Sarah avoided you at all costs during class. She no longer participated in class discussions—which were far and few—but kept her head low and her grades satisfactory. Sometimes, you’d catch her watching you during class, her hazel eyes swimming with concern. You couldn’t stomach looking at her for more than a few seconds. You weren’t sure if she ever reported back to Joel about you, and honestly, you didn’t care. Well, maybe sometimes you did. It didn’t happen often, but there were fleeting moments of unwelcome flashbacks to your time with Joel months ago. Flashes of his hands on your body, his crooked smile, his deep voice. They wove through your mind at the worst moments, and everything hurt again. 

The school year had finally ended, and your days were filled with endless bouts of nothing. You exhausted everything: plucking weeds in your front yard, rearranging your kitchen cabinets (for the seventh time), building a new bookshelf…You found anything you could to keep yourself busy and the wandering thoughts at bay. 

The Texas heat was becoming unbearable, so you opted to spend the weekend indoors, siphoning through your closet. Heaps of clothes cluttered the ground around you as you tore apart each shelf, miscellaneous keepsakes piled in the corner. It wasn’t until you were elbow-deep in the crevices of your closet that you found the book. 

Romeo and Juliet.

The flimsy spine and dog-eared pages taunted you. You sat motionless with your hands hovering over the book, torn between flipping through the pages and setting it on fire. Minutes passed, though they felt like hours, and you remained paralyzed, stuck in limbo between the past and present. You’d tell yourself it was a moment of weakness, but you grabbed the book and let your hands move through the pages. 

“Under love’s heavy burden do I sink.

And, to sink in it, should you burden love;

Too great oppression for a tender thing.

Is love a tender thing? it is too rough,

Too rude, too boisterous, and it pricks like thorn.

If love be rough with you, be rough

with love;

Prick love for pricking, and you beat love down.”

The words hit you harder than you expect. Staring at the margins of the pages, scribbled with your words and thoughts, you blinked back tears. You thought you were strong enough for this. Tossing the book halfway across the bathroom, you succumbed to the tears that pooled in your eyes. Laying on the messy floor, you wrapped your arms around your shins and stared at the book as it taunted you from across the room. Your eyes caught onto something peeking out of the pages, and you slowly tilted your head. 

That wasn’t…

No. 

You couldn’t pull yourself to your feet, so you decided to crawl to where the book lay. As you got closer, you started to make out the grainy features of Joel plastered onto a Polaroid. With shaking fingers, you lifted it into the light, your eyes growing wide. Basked in the hue of sunset sat Joel, his broad torso dressed in a white shirt, with the biggest smile plastered on his face captured in a moment of laughter. Something sparked inside your chest as you stared at it longer, your eyes memorizing every softened feature of Joel’s face. He still had that patchy beard you were so familiar with, the sparse spots along his jaw no different than they were now. Creases around his closed eyes proved that his laughter in the photo had been genuine. 

You missed his smile. 

Shaking away those tender thoughts, you tried to pull yourself to your feet, only to have your ankle caught in a strap of a dress, sending you crashing to the floor. Your arms tried to brace for impact, but you didn’t catch yourself in time. Your body smacked against the corner of your shower door, your head taking most of the impact. 

And everything went dark. 

“Sarah, you’re a mess!” You laughed. 

Her curls were caked with mud, and half her clothes were soaked. You, Joel, and Sarah had decided to drive into the small town outside the campground for dinner, and of course, you got caught in the rain. As you all made a beeline for the diner, Sarah tripped into a huge puddle between cars, splattering rainwater and mud all over herself. Joel couldn’t contain his laughter, and neither could you. 

Joel took a seat on the beach outside the diner, trying to catch his breath from laughing, but every time he glanced up at Sarah’s messy face, he lost it all over again. You scrambled through your backpack to find your Polaroid camera, snapping a quick picture. 

“Hey!” Joel laughed, grabbing you by the waist and dragging you down to the bench. 

“What?” You asked innocently. “It was the perfect opportunity! Plus, you look extra handsome right now.”

“Handsome, huh?” He smirked, peeking you on the cheek. 

You shook the Polaroid as it developed, presenting him with the proof. He was handsome. So fucking handsome. Joel reached for the camera in your hands, turning it quickly on you. You stuck out your tongue, trying to hold back another fit of laughter. 

“Perfect,” he grinned before turning toward Sarah. 

“Alright, kiddo. Smile!”

“Dad, stop!” Sarah wined. 

But Joel was too fast, the camera shutter going off right in time to capture Sarah’s big pout. 

Each of you had a Polaroid now, picture proof of a happy family. 

Pinpricks of pain stabbed into each side of your head as you finally roused from your sleep. You squinted through the harsh light of the bathroom, letting your eyes readjust to your surroundings. Everything was foggy, but you remembered. 

Oh God, you remembered everything. 

The nausea was quick to hit you, and you scrambled to the toilet. You weren’t sure if the fall was to blame for the sudden disruption to your body or the memories slamming back into place, but you were helplessly stuck with your head over the toilet. Flash after flash, like the shutter of your camera, everything fell back into place. 

“Oof! I’m so sorry!” You said, rubbing your nose.

You had turned the corner too quickly and smashed right into the solid chest of a student’s father. 

“S’all my fault, miss.” 

The voice alone sent shivers up your spine, but they multiplied as you gazed up into a pair of deep brown eyes. You lost all the words in your vocabulary as you took in the sight of the most handsome man you’d ever seen. He was too rugged and masculine to call ‘cute’; handsome fit him so much better. With dark scruff covering his jaw and creases around his eyes, whoever this man was…he was stunning. You were captivated.

“I really should have looked before I turned the corner,” you rambled. 

“Don’t go apologizin’,” he said, offering you a kind smile. “I coulda got outta the way.”

“Do you make a habit of taking up an obscene amount of space?” You joked. 

“Depends on the hall,” he countered, extending his hand. “Joel Miller.”

You told him your name, then shook your head. 

“I should probably keep it professional. You can call me Miss Smith.”

“Nah, don’t need all the formalities here. Your name is just fine.”

“Is your daughter enrolled here?” You asked. It was hard to maintain the color creeping into your cheeks. 

“That she is,” he said proudly. “Goin’ into third grade this year. She’s a real good kid.”

“I bet she is. I’m only student teaching while I finish my Master’s program, but I’ll be taking on a position with middle school students next year. Maybe she’ll be my student one day.”

“I reckon she’d be pretty lucky,” he offered. 

“Yeah?” Now, you were definitely blushing. 

“Yeah,” Joel smiled. “Somethin’ ‘bout you makes me think you’ll be one of the best teachers in the school.”

“That’s a bold statement, given the fact you hardly just met me.”

“I wouldn’t hate it if I got to know you more.”

Your eyes shifted down the hallway, watching for any teachers that might be coming. You weren’t sure what the policy was for flirting with a student’s parent, but it was hard to stop when he was so enticing. 

“I don’t think I’d hate it, either.”

Another wave of nausea hit you, and you groaned. The room was spinning, your body ached from falling, and countless memories continued to pile up inside your mind. 

You were overwhelmed. 

Those two years of nothing became everything in the span of minutes. 

Dragon Tales was playing softly in the background as you curled your body around Joel’s. His hand was tracing circles around your shoulder as you both “watched” the TV. Something electric pulsed between your bodies, an unavoidable shift that had continued to unfurl over the last several months. You didn’t know how to verbalize your emotions—at least, not without knowing if he felt the same. 

“Joel,” you whispered.

His eyes were already on you when you finally glanced up. It was written all over his face. It was the proof you needed; he felt the same. 

“Yeah, baby?”

“I really like you,” you confessed. “Okay, well, maybe I really, really like you.”

“Maybe I really, really like you, too.”

You peeled yourself from his warm body, turning to face him completely. 

“I’m gonna say something,” you warned. “Please don’t freak out. It’s okay if you don't—.”

Joel’s lips were pressed against yours before you could finish the sentence. You melted into his touch, your hands coming up to tangle in the messy curls at the nape of his neck. He held you firm to his mouth, his tongue dragging over your bottom lip. 

“I love you, baby,” he mumbled. “So much.”

You reeled him in for another frenzied kiss, all your efforts to contain your smile going down the drain. Oh, God. He loved you. 

“I love you, Joel.”

You sagged onto the bathroom floor. The throbbing in your head was growing stronger and stronger with each memory. You wanted to tear your brain from your skull and flush it down the toilet, but that wouldn’t help anything. This was what you wanted, wasn’t it? All your memories were coming back, and yet, you desperately wished they would fade away again. 

You loved Joel. 

It was a fact you already knew, but remembering the exact moment you admitted…. You were going to be sick all over again. 

“Y’look so pretty in my t-shirt, baby,” Joel hummed.

He lay up against the headboard of the bed while you paced the room. You gripped the binding of your copy of Romeo and Juliet, your mind racing a thousand miles a minute. It was hard to focus when his bare chest was on display, the spattering of dark chest hair swirling down his torso and disappearing under the waistband of his boxers.

Focus. 

“Don’t distract me!” You pleaded. “Okay, you know how I was talking about how Romeo is just head over heels for Juliet? Get this: they kiss right away in the first act! He’s so bold with how he speaks to her, and then he just kisses her. And Juliet’s response is basically telling Romeo that all of his sin is on her lips now.”

“And what happens next, baby?” Joel asked, quirking a smile. 

“Romeo says, ‘Give me my sin again’, and then they kiss… again!” 

“Ain’t he just a romantic,” Joel chuckled. “Now, can y’get your sinful ass in bed?”

“What? This one?” You teased, flipping up the hem of his shirt. 

Joel’s eyes dropped to your backside as you exposed your naked body, and he nearly went flying across the foot of the bed to grab you. You shrieked with laughter as he tugged you onto the comforter, flipping you onto your back. 

“C’mere, baby,” he growled.

His lips trailed down your neck, sucking marks into the skin just below your collarbone. You let out a small whimper and helped guide the t-shirt off your body. Somewhere along the way, your book had dropped to the ground, but you didn’t care. You’d much rather give into the sin of Joel’s lips on your body. 

It felt like an eternity had passed when your stomach finally settled. You managed to drag yourself from the floor, staggering your way into the bedroom. The migraine behind your eyes had still yet to subside, so you threw yourself into bed and buried your body under the comforter and pillows. You had everything back—everything you wanted—but why wasn’t it enough? 

The images of Joel swam through the pressurized ache inside your mind; his smile refracted in the blinding light of a constant camera shutter. Snapshots of the past dissolved from the darkness, fragmented puzzle pieces slowly molding into place. 

Another flash, another memory. 

A frustrated scream erupted from your mouth, muffled into the pillows surrounding you. Every thought started and ended with Joel. Joel. Joel. Joel. Was this how it felt to go crazy? 

It was clear that sleep was evading you; it ran from the thought of Joel quicker than you could. Pulling yourself from the bed, you emerged into the bathroom once again and began rifling through the piles of clothes. 

What the hell were you supposed to wear to see someone who was no longer a stranger?

[elizaleclerc]

you’re good to me 🎨

lando norris x reader

summary: perfectionist painter!reader & poet lando enjoy a relaxing day in their apartment

song: wasteland, baby! by hozier

author’s note: lando reads a poem he wrote (part of the hozier song lol) and you paint something beautiful. neither of you can truly see the beauty of your own work.

word count: 1.4k

You sat in a comfortable cross-legged position on the carpet of your living room. Your back was slightly curved as you delicately maneuvered the bristles of your paintbrush across the canvas propped on the easel before you. With each stroke, you lost yourself in the colors and textures, creating a masterpiece with every dip into the paint. Lando lounged effortlessly on the couch nearby. His book of poetry lay open on his lap as he drifted between reading and writing his own verses, occasionally glancing over at your focused form with admiration.

As you meticulously adjusted the details of your painting, Lando watched you with rapt attention. His eyes traced every movement of your fingers as they delicately flicked and swirled, expertly mixing colors on the palette before you. A small smirk played at his lips, knowing how much you loathed having your hair fall in front of your face while you worked, but he couldn't help but find it endearing. Despite the messiness of your pulled back hair, you were a vision of determination and grace as you poured your soul onto the canvas before you. The room was filled with the subtle scent of paint, creating a serene atmosphere that enveloped both of you in its embrace.

You almost forgot Lando was in the room with how hard you were concentrating and how lost in your own work you got. Your mind had become an amalgamation of paint swirls and the fleeting visions you had for the finished product. You'd pause in your work, tilting your head to the side as if listening for a whisper from the canvas. Your eyes would narrow in concentration, searching for any missing touches that could bring the painting to life. Speckles of dried paint adorned your hands and lower arms, an accidental splattering of colors and textures from your passionate strokes. Some droplets even found their way onto your jeans.

After roughly three hours you emitted a sigh, “I hate it.” You proclaimed, dropping your brush in the water cup with frustration. 

“What?” Lando replied, his voice filled with disbelief as he shifted to get a better view of your work. It was a painting unlike anything he had ever seen before. The landscape seemed to stretch on for miles, depicting a fantastical realm that existed only in dreams. Cobblestone steps, now aged and overgrown with moss, wound their way up to towering trees with branches adorned in shades of blue and purple. A sense of magic emanated from the painting, transporting Lando to another world entirely. “Love, this is exquisite,” he breathed, unable to tear his gaze away from the mesmerizing scene before him.

You rolled your eyes in frustration, the words dripping with disappointment. "You always say that," you muttered under your breath. The painting before you felt off, no matter how much you added or changed. The colors, once vibrant and full of life, now seemed dull and lifeless. You let out a heavy sigh and pushed yourself up from the floor, walking over to the kitchen sink to wash off the paint from your hands. As the water splashed against your skin, you couldn't help but feel a sense of defeat. All that hard work, all those hours spent perfecting every brushstroke, and it still wasn't good enough. You considered tossing the painting altogether, feeling disheartened by its lack of beauty.

Lando couldn’t believe the words that came out of your mouth. “You must be joking.” He almost laughed, “I think you’d be the only person on the planet to hate this painting.”

You walked over to him lounging on the couch, his notebook resting on his broad chest. The warm glow of the sun filtered through the large windows, casting a golden halo around his head. His tousled brown curls lay playfully on his forehead, and his tanned skin was like honey. He motioned for you to join him on the couch, and without hesitation, your body molded to his as if they were made to fit together. Your chest pressed firmly against his side, and your arms naturally draped over his toned torso. From this close distance, you could admire every tiny detail of his face - the way his eyes crinkled when he smiled, the slight dimple in his cheek, and the gentle curve of his lips as he focused on his notebook. You couldn't help but feel a rush of love and admiration for this man who captivated you with just a mere glance.

Your body rose and fell in sync with his breath, a gentle rhythm that calmed your frustration over the failed canvas beside you. “May I share something with you?” He asked in a hushed tone, flipping through the pages of his worn notebook.

“Always, my love,” You grinned, anticipating the words he was about to share. Lando had a way of weaving you into each of his pieces, making every poem and story feel like a love letter written just for you. Over the years as partners, he had slowly but surely merged your essence into all of his work.

All the fear and the fire of the end of the world / Happens each time a boy falls in love with a girl / Happens great, happens sweet / Happily, I’m unfazed here too. / Wasteland, baby, I’m in love, I’m in love with you 

Your lips curled into a smile as you listened to his poetry, savoring each carefully crafted word that flowed effortlessly from his mind and onto the page. It was like a river of beauty and emotion, twisting and turning through your thoughts as you marveled at his ability to weave such intricate and poignant verses.

All the things yet to come are the things that have passed / Like the holding of hands, like the breaking of glass / Like the bonfire that burns / At all worth in the fight fell too / Wasteland, baby, I’m in love, I’m in love with you 

“That’s breathtaking Lando, truly.” You look into his gorgeous gaze as your hands rested on his chest.

"Do you really think so?” He questioned, his critical eye scanning over his own work. And in that moment, you realized just how much of perfectionists the two of you were. Never satisfied with your own creations, always searching for flaws and imperfections. But in each other's eyes, the flaws were transformed into a unique kind of beauty, every word and brush stroke telling a story of its own.

“I know so,” you whispered, leaning closer to him. As his lips met yours, a surge of electricity shot through your body, causing your heart to flutter and your stomach to do somersaults. In that moment, you were painfully aware of how deeply in love you were with him - with his mind, his touch, the way he loved you back with such fierce passion. A million stars seemed to explode around you as you lost yourself in his touch.

As you basked in the warmth of his embrace, his lips traced a path of delicate kisses along your neck and collarbone. His breath was sweet with the scent of vanilla and cinnamon, intoxicating your senses. Lost in the moment, you couldn't help but smile and revel in the feeling of complete contentment.

With a smirk on his face, he pulled back slightly to look into your eyes. "How did I get so lucky with you?" he asked, his words dripping with adoration.

You returned his gaze, feeling your heart swell with love for him. "Some may say it's fate," you replied softly. But as you melted under his touch and the sound of his voice, you knew that it was something much deeper than mere chance.

It was a force stronger than any other, binding the two of you together in an unbreakable bond.

[aris-ink]

Hi so I saw your post about request, well I was wondering if you could write about "somnophilia and pseudo incest," with jungkook or jimin. However, idk, if its okay if the oc/yn is a lowkey yandere too? 😅😅

jk because I already have a similar request for jimin 💖 also, yes

pairing: jungkook x reader

genre: forbidden romance, step!siblings au

warnings: this is nothing but sin, allusions to violence (not towards the reader), possessiveness, jealousy, pseudo incest, mentions of medication, con noncon, somnophilia, masturbation, creampie, some dirty talk, lowkey yandere reader

It wasn't unusual for your stepbrother to check up on you before bed. You've grown closer than you initially thought you would; it turned out that beneath the surface, you and Jungkook weren't that different, after all.

With a soft click, he turned off your nightlight, the mattress dipping under his weight as he settled beside you. Only the light of the moon filtered in through the curtains now, casting an ethereal glow on your face. Not for the first time, Jungkook's thoughts strayed far from the appropriate, familial path that they should have stayed on. He had always been rather closed off, but you managed to reach his heart and make a home in it so deep he couldn't stand to be apart from you.

Not for the first time, looking at you, Jungkook thought he understood the primal, ancient practices of making sacrifices to the gods. You were certainly a goddess to him, and he'd fall on his knees a thousand times over to pray at your altar; he'd slaughter and maim, to worship you and protect you. And he'd do so without batting an eyelid.

You wrapped an arm around his waist and snuggled into him, letting him pull you into his broad chest. You seemed to realize it was wrong to be this affectionate with him; he could see it in the way you jumped when your parents walked in as he'd hold you, pushing his hands away and avoiding his eyes. He could see it in the way you'd tense up when he'd come near you anytime your friends were around. But you never said anything; so he didn't, either.

He accepted that for a while, he could only be close to you in moments like this, concealed by the darkness behind closed doors. He stroked your cheek with the back of his hand, his rings cold against the heat of your skin.

"Sleepy?" He asked, amusement clear in his voice as he watched your eyes fall shut.

You hummed in response.

"I feel so much better on the new medication," you whispered. "I can't even remember when I fall asleep."

"That's good," Jungkook nodded. "I'm really glad."

It was true; Jungkook hated seeing you worn out, tormented by constant interruptions in your sleeping patterns. Seeing your eyes glow brighter and the bags under them disappear brought him a sense of relief he could never put into words.

There was one more reason, though. One more reason he had waited so patiently for you to get your new medication, settle into good sleeping habits and lower your guard. One more reason why he watched you so carefully as you swallowed your pills tonight. Jungkook was a good brother; but he was not a good man.

Carefully, he slipped his arm out from under you, ignoring the adorable groan of protest that tumbled out of your mouth. He pressed one knee into the mattress, right in between your thighs, resting his muscular arms on either side of your head. Your eyes fluttered as you felt his weight above you, your lids heavy with the weight of exhaustion, struggling to stay open.

"Jungkook?" You whispered.

The question lingering in the air felt so tangible he could practically taste it on his tongue. He could practically taste you as he leaned in, your breath mingling with his. This was a line he had never crossed before, and the fact that he was on the verge of doing so just as you were being pulled into the dark abyss of dreams was perplexing enough to make you reach out to touch him, see if he was real.

His arm felt hot and hard beneath your palm. He felt real enough. What was he doing, exactly? You weren't sure. Your head was beginning to feel fuzzy; but Jungkook had no intentions of letting you go to sleep scared or confused.

"Relax," he muttered. "This is what you wanted, isn't it, baby?"

It wasn't a term that he used with you often. You blinked up at him slowly, like you weren't quite catching on. Jungkook tapped the tip of his finger against your bottom lip, clicking his tongue.

"So this is how it's going to be, huh?" His voice turned into gravel, though it remained quiet all the same. "We're gonna pretend I don't notice how you push that little ass against me when we're in bed? Walking around the house with your tits on full display."

Seeing the embarassment that settled on your face made him grow harder in his briefs. It was all the confirmation he needed. He brushed his cheek against yours when his lips touched your ear.

"Should I also pretend I don't know about the mess you made behind my back?" He could feel you stiffen beneath him, your breath catching in your throat. "Scaring away all my girls. Possessive, aren't you?"

When he lifted his head again he couldn't hold back the arrogance that shone through his smile. The way you squeezed your hand into a fist with the little strength you had left, the way you pursed your lips, refusing to meet his eye. So cute.

He kissed your cheek tenderly, cooing at you.

"Don't be mad, baby. You're my only girl."

And then the way you looked up at him. It made his lungs constrict. He could have spent neons counting all the stars in your eyes.

"Then kiss me."

Whether it was your request, or the drugs taking over, your eyes fell shut again. Jungkook could swear his cock was starting to leak, his heart thudding loudly in his ears. The realization that he was finally going to have you, touch you and do whatever he wanted was beginning to settle in, setting his nerves on fire. Because you had no idea what you were in for.

"No," he gruffed. "You're a little minx. And you're going to get fucking punished for making me wait."

"Jungkook," his name came out as a weak, beautiful whine. "You were the one sleeping around."

Jungkook raised his eyebrows.

"Two can play at that game, baby. Don't be jealous."

His teasing tone was deceiving. He wanted you to be jealous. That was the whole point. And now that he reached his goal, it was his responsibility and utmost pleasure to take all of your concerns away.

"You're the only girl that matters," he promised sincerely, his thumb tracing over your cheekbone. "The only one that ever mattered."

The peaceful sigh that left you made excitement simmer in his stomach.

"And you're mine," he added in a murmur, "aren't you?"

You nodded in agreement.

"Then dream away, baby. I'm gonna leave you a gift," he pressed two of his fingers into your panty clad core, sliding them down to your entrance. "Right here."

You moaned into his ear. Jungkook's eyes almost rolled back, the dampness of your underwear sending him spiraling deeper into the most depraved parts of his mind.

"You'll be dripping with my cum," he dropped his voice down to a whisper. "Extra wet to touch yourself in the morning, yeah?"

You shuddered, attempting to wrap your arms around him, but they fell helplessly to your sides. "Please," you sighed, barely audible.

There was no way Jungkook could resist, not when you were begging for it, pliant and wet even as you succumbed to your medication and drifted off into a deep slumber. In fact, knowing that you were so eager for him despite being unconscious made his cock swell more, along with his heart.

"Sweet dreams."

He took in the steady rise and fall of your chest, how your head lolled to the side. He wanted you to be awake for your first time together; he wanted to capture your every moan and face expression, because Jungkook was greedy that way.

That didn't mean, however, that he couldn't keep his promise tonight.

He ran his tongue over his piercing as he lifted your shirt, pupils blown out, eyes stuck on the swell of your breasts. Tight, pretty nipples he couldn't wait to put his mouth on. He felt like a teenager again, watching porn for the first time; only this was real, you were real, so much better than any fantasy mankind could conjure up.

A deity from heavens above indeed.

He cupped your breast, the softness of it almost overwhelming. Leaning in to catch a hardened nipple in his mouth, he gave it an experimental suck. You were perfect. Groaning, he quickly switched to flicking his hot tongue against it. You tasted so sweet, he couldn't help looking for relief, shifting slightly in between your legs so he could grind his hard on against you.

It didn't help. The pleasure shot through him like a bolt of lightning. He was too excited; he knew he wasn't going to last long, but he didn't care. The sight of you lying there, helpless and waiting to be taken was enough to corrupt any man, that much he knew. Should he have felt some kind of guilt, a shadow of doubt, maybe? He didn't care about that either. Somehow the thought of how wrong this was made him leak more precum into his briefs. You belonged to him in all ways possible, and this was proof. You always have.

He inched away from your chest to pull your underwear aside, long, tattooed fingers grazing your wet folds. You were so warm, so mesmerizing; he couldn't take his eyes off of you, fumbling to take his needy, throbbing cock out with one hand.

The cool air that hit him was a small relief. He couldn't wait, no matter how much he wanted to savor the moment. He consoled himself with the thought that he'd have plenty of time to do it again. To feel you, to grope you, to choose where he wanted to come - because right now he still had a promise to keep.

Only a fraction of him was sober enough to remember how thin the walls were. He gritted his teeth as he rubbed his cock in between your folds, fighting to keep his breathing under control.

So wet. So still. He spread your lips, slipping the flushed tip inside the tightness of your cunt. His abdomen tensed up, a whimper trying to push its way out of his throat. This was the real test of his faith, the biggest temptation Jungkook had yet to face. It would have been so easy to just ram inside and fuck you.

But Jungkook was a good brother, and good brothers didn't go back on their word. Good brothers weren't selfish.

He wrapped a hand around his veiny shaft and pressed his lips into your neck, proceeding to stroke himself slowly. He grunted when he felt your walls sucking him in, like you were begging for the rest of his cock to ruin you. Instead his hand sped up, his hips beginning to rut forward.

"So tight, so tight," he gritted into your skin. "Mmph- fuck."

No response. Of course, how could there be one? He tightened his hand around your breast, squeezing desperately. He had dreamed of jerking himself off right into your willing, drenched pussy, and the fact that it was finally happening was too much for him to handle. He could feel his orgasm rushing at him like a freight train, and he made no attempt to move out of the way of its blinding lights.

His cock pulsed as sticky cum shot into your heat, a throaty moan muffled against your neck. He emptied himself inside you with his eyes shut tightly, letting the sensation consume him entirely until he was spent.

He limped against you before pulling his cock out of your filled cunt, attempting to catch his breath.

"Oh fuck..." he mumbled. "Oh fuck."

His body was humming with a pleasant rush, his stomach still jittery, the aftermath of a rollercoaster. He breathed you in, trying to ground himself in you.

Not wanting to crush you, however, he forced himself up and lied down beside you, a heavy sigh fleeing his chest. He fixed up your panties and pulled his own boxers back up, trying not to think about his cum resting inside you. If he focused on it too much, he knew he'd get hard again, and he didn't think he'd be able to restrain himself this time.

Wrapping an arm around you, he left appreciative kisses on your shoulder, an uncomfortable pang of sorrow stinging his chest when he realized he couldn't stay with you. Not as a boyfriend. Not as a lover. If your parents walked in and caught you, you'd both be immediately disowned. And while Jungkook didn't give a flying fuck, personally, he didn't want to see you hurt.

It looked like he'd have to take care of this problem on his own. Sooner rather than later.

He sighed again, pressing a final kiss into your lips. Soft, short and sweet, a silent goodnight, see you tomorrow, I love you.

He couldn't wait to say it out loud.

[torchstelechos]

just saw you saying you want to talk about The Characters (isat) what are some thoughts you got bip bap boppin around in the noggin about the Them

Ooooooooohhhh Anon,,,, Ooooooh, You have unlocked deep thoughts and long monologues.... have this piece of bullshit that I spat out in excitement

Isabeau: 

Ah yes, dear Isabeau, my most beloathed <3 (self recognition in other /derogatory). He’s one of the characters I’ve written the most meta for that's actually about his character in the game. I love him and hate him in equal measures but that's not what I want to talk about today! I want to discuss his morbid humor and fascination, I suppose. Also his rather interesting character type and how that's displayed in the game, specifically through his morbid thoughts and discussion choices. 

In the game we see plenty of times that Isabeau uses morbid word choices (killed them so that I could live friendquest quote) and brings up morbid discussion topics (what do we do if you die? What do we do if Bonnie dies?) that the others find disquieting. He also laughs at Siffrin’s time traveler joke, finds scary Siffrin attractive, and finds being paid attention too enough that they can harm you attractive. This brings me to my main point, which is that Isabeau is the cold scientist archetype character that tries to be the himbo fighter character. Of course we know that hes trying to hide himself behind the himbo character type, but the fact that he's analytic to a fault, morbid in almost every way, finds scary things attractive, and calls Changing killing his past self… this man is very much a scientist that was about to turn evil but decided friendship was the answer whose character was subverted into himbo fighter because those who are dumb are more liked than those who know things. It's interesting, and I think it’s one of the reasons I despise Isabeau POV fanfics. Most fanfics feel almost like his facade is him, and thats just not true and it bugs me so very much to read fanfics with his POV now. But! This isnt to say those fanfics aren’t well done! They are, I just find them lacking in canon Isabeau’s almost neutral analytical personality that was then filtered through therapy and self help books esque vibe. Fascinating character, hate him dearly for it though. 

Misc thoughts: 

I generally have a hard time nailing down everything I feel about him for a variety of reasons but I do want to say that I think he finds Siffrin’s big melt down appearance attractive after the whole thing blows over. I also think he doesn't have the best track record for what is okay to say or not? So he falls back on “I am dumb therefore I can say things that others find disturbing and frame it as something I just don't understand or misunderstood :)” which kind of backfires on him constantly because now no one really takes him seriously? I don’t know, I just find most smart characters have a hard time figuring out the social situation of certain things so they tend to either not care at all for tact or overthink everything and over compensate by not allowing themself to go for certain things. In this instance its him not being able to confess because he thinks he's bad for liking someone in a certain way and doesn't want to pressure them which backfires because he's otherwise a good communicator but failed hard with Siffrin. Speaking of, I don’t think hes ever gotten with anyone other than Siffrin. It took the world literally almost ending and a time looping induced trauma attack for him to confess he liked Siffrin, this man does NOT have game. So, lol, that kiss? Probably his first <3, RIP my man did not deserve that

Odile:

Strangely enough I don’t believe I have ever written a meta post for Odile? Or anything about her other than tags? So yeah, let's focus on her. She's a very honesty based character in a game literally about someone not being able to speak the truth, which is why I appreciate the sus route so much. She noticed something was wrong and went for it, leading her down rabbit holes best left untouched. Odile is a character that I truly think would have accidentally unleashed an eldritch horror on the quest if not for Isabeau stopping her. Mainly because she is smart but not academic smart, she's learned from her travels plenty of things that lend to real life experience but she's not much of an academic when it comes to how to get answers she wants (taking until the very last town to get a familytale while Siffrin took maybe three loops to do is. Certainly something!). Its fascinating, because if I were to actually describe her personality and how that lends to a character archetype I would say that she's a brawler character. Effectively, she and Isabeau are reflections of each other in a very specific way and I think about this often in her relation to the group. Its almost laughable how shes been put into this responsibility role of the group while Isabeau is off goofing around (and secretly plotting how to best respect his friends remains), shes not very good at knowing what is the best course of action and acts out in impulsive ways that harms others (Looking at you, hitting Trauma Big Siffrin moment) and that doesn’t… make her a good leader per say? I just find it funny, how others write her as someone who would go out of her way to research Siffrin’s home country and succeed when she barely succeeded in her own knowledge hunt. If anything, it would be Isabeau who would find the information and inform Odile rather than the other way round. I dunno, I just don’t think anyone is really considering the fact that she probably hasn’t set foot into a higher academic institution just based on her research skills. 

Misc thoughts: 

I’ve only seen one fanfic acknowledge the fact that Odile hit Siffrin? And did so in such a way that it hurt badly. I wouldn’t be surprised if it left a scar (which that little freak probably adores because he knows that it means he wont forget Odile ever again), alongside the others they gave themself. Speaking of said hurting, I don’t think it's really acknowledged how much Odile puts down Siffrin? Yes it's usually just a teasing moment here or there, but have yall thought of the fact that she compared Siffrin to an animal and has hit him? I think about this so much. I think about it when I'm trying to fall asleep sometimes. She did that to him, and he *remembers it,* he acknowledges it during act 5, he has that ingrained into his *soul.* I think people should write about it more, or at least acknowledge that Siffrin probably… doesn’t want to talk to Odile about feelings or be touched by her for a while? Honestly, if I was Siffrin’s position during the failed friendquest moments? I would have said worse. I would have done worse. Because can you imagine? Imagine with me, you just remembered that your country is gone, everyone you love either doesnt remember you or is dead, the only person who could possibly tell you anything is the man you must kill, and your family member is talking about how hard it is to be in the country her mother is from and not feel a connection to it. That you are both more than your heritage. I would start biting, kicking, fighting, hell I would probably find out what she looks like without her bun! I would be pissed. But yaknow, Siffrin is a nice fella and kind of only waited to go off the deep end when they were sure they wouldn’t be able to escape. Anyway, I think of Odile sometimes and get violently ill by the knowledge she no longer holds that would explain some of Siffrin’s reactions and word choices to her cause no matter what? She can’t take it back. She never even said it. It’s not even real anymore. God I love this game, it makes me feel sick.

Mirabelle: 

Big ol’ sigh, yeah the-bitter-ocean if your out there I think about your tags on my Mira post a lot. The fandom doesn’t really get her do they? Most of the time I see people write her off as not very understanding or oblivious to other people’s feelings, which fair for romance (she didnt notice the very glowing sign of what I believe to be a ginger blushing but yaknow I understand as aro) but shes very good at knowing when someone isn’t feeling well? She has several unique dialogue options after Siffrin gets up from the field after looping which Odile does not have (despite EVERYONE ACKNOWLEDGING THEY’RE NOT OKAY), and asks after their wellbeing despite being in a constant anxiety attack and morality stress issues induced panic attack in the house. The only real big character flaw is a very typical shonen main character flaw which is that she is too trusting to a degree that it let Siffrin get away with almost destroying the world, Bonnie dying, and the others stepping all over her own feelings (not that any of these are her fault, but she did contribute to the lack of communication which lead to the loops. I love her, I do, but EVERYONE had a hand in Siffrin getting stuck in the loops). Her trust is also what led to the big fallout and slap she gives Siffrin during act 5, she was already giving her heart to him and the others and was constantly checking in during the adventure to make sure everyone was happy and okay with what was happening so the sudden switch from her POV is a huge betrayal of her trust in them. This is basically someone you were already on edge about hating you suddenly deciding that yes, they do hate you and everything you stand for because *they know.* No matter what you think about the situation, Mirabelle’s trust (her biggest character flaw) was thrown back into her face after she thought they were okay with her (not even a few weeks ago they said that this was the happiest they have ever been and she *remembers this fully and utterly*) and broke her heart with all her insecurities. It’s a very hopeless situation when you don’t have context, which means I don’t really blame her for slapping Siffrin, I just wish that it didn’t happen because as a Player I know the full context. Betrayal of trust… its a funny thing in this game, because it wasn’t a betrayal specifically from one POV but from the other it was. Fascinating! I despise it, I love it, it makes me sick. 

Misc Thoughts: 

Oooooh Mira we are in it now, This endgame of yours has left you with insecurities and trauma you didn’t think possible. I love her, I do, which is why I also have a great idea for a fanfic that involves her getting some VERY bad coping mechanisms <3 teehee. Careful what you wish for darling! Things go bad if you don’t take care of what you love. Anyway, I don’t think it’s weird to have Mira in outfits that are contrasting too heavily from her personality in the game? I dont know how to say this, but I think it’s a tad strange that I’ve seen roleswap aus/personality swap aus where Mirabelle is different via aesthetic? Because thats her whole religion? Sure she doesnt want to change but I don’t think she minds much clothing or aesthetic wise? In fact i think she considers that the safest option? So I dunno, I think people should dress her in goth and emo outfits more. Also I do think its a tad silly people don’t focus too much on her journey trauma and rather focus on her romance trauma, yall know that was just a distraction and not her main issues, right? Like yall know this game isnt romance the simulator, right???? RIGHT???? God Mira, you would hate that the fandom boils you down to your AceAroness, I just fucking know it. 

Bonnie: 

Who let this sassy small child into this story???? God, dearest Bonnie, the literal best party member Imo. I love them dearly, they are one of the meanest fucking assholes in the game I adore them. Yall think about the longstanding issues Siffrin has with touch and reaching out and how the rotten adults route fucking annihilates them into smithereens lol. I think about the fact that Bonnie has harmed Siffrin soooo much in the loops, it leaves me breathless because this small child has killed Siffrin twice, slapped their hands away when they tried to help them (for the first time in Bonnies POV!! Thats huge!!), and yelled at them multiple times about how awful they are. I do wonder what would have happened if the rotten adults route continued without looping? Who would have spoken up and who would have had to realize that something is WRONG with Siffrin in that moment? Would Bonnie backpedal when they realize? What was Siffrin’s facial expression right then? What happened? I just. God. Fuck. No one talks about this AT ALL in the fandom and it drives me insane. Despite everything, despite what was erased, what was unmade, the effects stayed and will continue to harm Siffrin. Do yall think about the idea that Siffrin probably doesnt reach out until Bonnie does post loops? I think about this so much, Bonnie has harmed Siffrin so many times it would kill them if they ever found out, and I desperately need them to find out. I also kind of,, just assumed that Bonnie would be keeping a keen eye on Siffrin’s eating and remind them to eat and drink water (even if I dont think Siffrin needs that) after the loops because its an easy way to help and have some control over situations? I dunno, I think Bonnie is a very complicated kid who has harmed and been harmed and no one will ever know just how much has been done and undone. 

Misc Thoughts: 

I still think Bonnie should be able to make and throw bombs post bomb memory. I just NEED Bonnie to throw a molotov at the King, fuck, it would be so funny. Also as a side note, I do think growing up Bonnie has to deal with a lot of untreated Trauma and probably reacts very similar to Siffrin before someone comments on the fact that they are just like him and suddenly they start going to a therapist about it, I do not think they would take it as a compliment for even one instance. They would get sick so fast and go, me and them? Similar? No. I have to go to get a doctor. I cannot be a Frin Jr. the world could not handle it. And suddenly they have the second best mental health of the group (first goes to Isabeau because Isabeau was already in therapy before the game, I just fucking know it <3) which makes everyone fucking jealous as hell because seriously? The Kid??? Damnit. But yeah I do think the fastest way anyone could get Bonnie to accept help is to compare them to Siffrin because they do have a Recognition of Self in the Other (derogatory) thing going on with Siffrin in the game, which is probably worse by the fact that they grew up with him as a role model. Everyone that knows them is like, oh my change your so lucky! The saviors are your family that must be so cool <3, and Bonnie is like. They make me to go to bed on time and force me to eat veggies what the fuck are you saying. Anyway yeah I love Bonnie so much, the meanest fucking kid in the game <3. 

Siffrin: 

Aaauuuggghhhhh, the one everyone is waiting for, the Siff of the Frin. Love this fucking idiot, but yeah lets talk touch and how the family has hurt them over the loops <3. Okay so straight out the gate, Bad touch! Isabeau pushing them away after they kiss him, which is very understandable because yaknow Isabeau could tell that was a desperation kiss and is not okay for either of them but! Holy shit! Siffrin, my dear friend that was probably the worst thing you could have done, but yeah that did leave its marks deeply in them so I will mark that down as harmed. Then we get the bad friendquests, which yeah Isabeau hitting them with the “I thought you were also trying” hurts more than I can physically say, but we’ll mark that down as two. Then Odile hits them, grabs their collar, sus quest bullshit, and general disdain for Siffrin lying about the stars we’ll mark down as four more which leads to six. Mirabelle slapping Siffrin and letting him get away with lying about his health we’ll put at 8. Bonnie pushing him into a tear, pineapple, slapping hands away, and yelling at them multiple times we’ll put at 12. Then there's the “like taming a wild animal” teasing which Ill put at 13, all of which is just off the top of my brain and I know there's more moments that hurt Siffrin deeply. Yaknow, looking at this, typing this, it seems a tad silly but. How else could I describe the never ending pain at knowing that most of these wont be acknowledged as bad for Siffrin as it was bad for the others? I dunno, I think about Siffrin giving everything up for the party and no one knowing exactly what they did because how could they? It’s gone. It’s not real anymore, not until Siffrin says it. I just. I dont know where I’m going with this but Siffrin as a character hurts me deeply, and I think it’s because no matter what happens Siffrin refuses to acknowledge when the others hurt him back. Just. Keeping the cycle going because they dont know how to break it, and they never have until they break first. I just think of this a lot. Him being stuck, in circles over and over. 

Misc Thoughts: 

I wanna chew him up and spit him out like a dog toy. No further comments (see my blog for further comments). ((I need to see a Self inflicted Achromatic animatic, pls, fuck plsssss))

LOOP: 

Loop time!! Loop time! I am physically ill because of this beast. You all know that one fanart where it says “You Won!” and Loop is dry heaving? Thats me at literally any moment when I think about Loop. 

I am a little shy to admit though that I didn’t catch their facade at first, mainly because I’m not very good at catching things like that at first? If a person acts a certain way, thats how they act! So Yeah, ya boy was confused by two hats lol. But afterwards I did do a bit of thinking and as I mentioned in a previous post i do think Loop is pretending/acting like how they remembered Siffrin acted like before the loops. Mira mentions that Siffrin is mean in teasing, enough so that it might have hurt if she didnt know that it was friendly teasing. Isabeau has a great monologue about his feelings on Siffrin before the loops, and Siffrin themself acknowledges some of their less than savory traits before the loops during the loops as well. This is to say, Loop is a fucking prick that tries to be floating and teasing in their comments while hitting where it hurts in just the right way that they can pretend that they mean something else. I genuinely think thats how Loop remembers themself before they were Loop, even if they got some things VERY WRONG. Of course, by the time they realize this it’s too late and that’s their personality now, which is kind of fucked up when you realize how much of their personality is them acting out a half remembered person who died many many many loops ago. But alas, such is the way of Loop. 

Also if we think about Loop in comparison to Siffrin. Well. We get an interesting picture. But the thought makes me too ill to continue. But I will say loving someone so much you destroy yourself for them… I don't think anyone in the family would be happy about that really. Theres a difference between destroying yourself and destroying the world… I wonder why that is for them, what made the difference between self and the world. A fool, and the world. Hmm. Interesting. Anyway, Loop’s facade gets me everytime and I want to use them as a stuffed animal. 

Misc Thoughts: 

Yeah that STAR CAN NOT EAT OR DRINK, lol get rekted they cant even fucking get drunk. Now for some HCs, I do think that Loop would wear a promise ring, even if no one in this Vaugarde understands what that means. I just. Think that Loop wouldn’t be able to let go of Their Fighter. Hahaha! I don’t really wanna go further into detail about this rn but I AM THINKING… Loop is one of the saddest characters I have ever fucking had the audacity to love. No I will not take comments on this further lol. (Me loving Loop and Siffrin while disliking Isabeau? Call me an Isabeau Kinnie at the rate lol)

[pinkpigtailsprincess]

౨ৎ ⁺ . Manifesting Rant.ᐟ 🎀🧁

⊹ ⋆ﾟ꒰ఎ ♡ ໒꒱ ⋆ﾟ⊹ ; first i wanna say i am not targeting this towards one particular person & im not hating on a specific person or group!!

this is just things people in the manifesting community do that i find very weird (ie: loa,subliminals,shifting etc)

No.1 ꒱ 🎀 ! ; Sub-Makers and Toxic Affirmations

omg i while ago i seen the sub makers community post talking about hoe they’re gonna put affirmations in their beauty subliminal to the user make others jealous and hate themselves

uhm what the hell?? that’s honestly so weird and the fact that them and they’re subscribers are sitting laughing at the shit?? like that is honestly so weird and demented get help!

No.2 ꒱ 🧁 ! ; Ruining peoples lives through LOA

this is honestly so fucking weird of people too do especially like over a boy its so unnecessary and its not gonna get you any cool points either it’s weird & hateful and you need to get some help literally just create a new man you don’t have to go out of your way to harm someone

No.3 ꒱ 🐬 ! ; Self-Sabotage in Shifting

i honestly hate seeing people on shiftok say things like “shifting is hard” “only affirming once the going too sleep😝” that is honestly why your not shifting, shifting really isn’t that hard

set intention > method > affirm > persistence in affirming > SHIFTED!! 🌟

please stop setting your self up for failure!!!

No.4 ꒱ 👙 ! ; Sub-Makers and wanting too look European or east asian

i get so sad when i see poc sub users using subliminals to erase their ethnic features like anyone is allowed to live their life as they see fit but damn i really wish some if them would realize they don’t need pin straight hair,light skin,ski slope noses etc. too look beautiful (and it ties into texturism,colorism and its just a mess)

and now they’re certain sub makers that take these gorgeous female celebrities and put filters on them to make them “more beautiful” and they only just end up looking european like thats NOT jessica alba 💀

No.5 ꒱ 🍦 ! ; Sub-Makers and Getting T-worded

okay i feel for you getting ur account terminated but it gets too a point where you have to realize your the problem!

they purposely post stuff like h€ntai,soft p*rn,naked women,th1nsp0 and p@nt!es and they get terminated for it they make another acc and DO THE SAME THING and expect nothing to happen?? like youtube isn’t against sub-makers y’all are just not taking accountability like omg stop saying “snaketube” when you know the stuff your posting is against the guidelines ! REFLECT

[handwrittenhello]

"Dad?" Kira's voice filtered through the mindless haze of Edgin's cursing as he weeded the garden.

"Yeah, hon?" he replied distractedly. The mint was starting to take over, and while its leaves made a nice tea, there was only so much they could harvest at a time. He tried to calculate how much he could rip out without going overboard.

"I want to be a rogue."

Edgin's hands stilled on a clump of roots. He stared at the dirt underneath his fingernails. "Okay," he finally said, hearing himself from a distance.

"What?"

"Okay," he repeated. Thoughts surfaced one after another in his mind. He didn't put words to any of them. You're too young. We don't have to steal to get by anymore. I'm a horrible influence. Your mom would hate me.

"I thought..." She trailed off. "You're not mad?"

Edgin finally looked up. She stood just outside the garden, hovering behind the gate as if to keep a barrier between them. Her hands twisted in the fabric of her dress. It was getting short on her—she'd grown recently.

"Do you want me to be?" he asked mildly. "I don't know what you want me to say, honey." He couldn't say what he actually thought. He'd promised honesty, but...

"It's just... Uncle Forge..." Even now, she still called him that, and Edgin winced every time. A habit of two years was going to be hard to break.

Or, as his mind liked to remind him late at night when he should be sleeping, maybe she didn't want to break it. Maybe she wished he were her dad instead. What good was Edgin, failure of a man, compared to a life in Neverwinter Castle? A life she could never go back to, once he'd come along and stirred up a bunch of shit.

"What about him?" Edgin asked, turning back to the vegetables. As he pulled up carrots he imagined it was Forge's guts he was pulling out.

"I'm not doing it to be like him," she said in a rush. "I don't want to be like him."

Ha, Edgin thought savagely. Shaped in your image my ASS. "Well, good, because he's rotting in prison."

"That's not what I mean!" she said, but she was hiding a smile. "I just meant, I'm not following anyone. It's what I want to do."

"Well, you don't need my permission." As much as he hated it, he'd missed two years of her life; she was nearly grown, now. Another year or so and she'd be old enough to take on an apprenticeship, even though it seemed like yesterday he could fit her tiny swaddled body in the crook of one arm.

"You don't like it." She'd caught him out, and he froze.

Then he brushed the dirt from his hands and stood, his knees cracking loudly in protest. Gods, he was so old. To prove to himself he still could, he hopped over the fence to join her outside the garden.

"You're right, I don't like it. I don't like that you grew up while I wasn't there to see. I don't like that we never had the option of an honest living. I don't like that your mom would hate me for doing this to you." He reached out and pulled her into a hug. "But I like you, no matter what. If you think that becoming a rogue is what's right for you, then do it. Don't ever change yourself just because you think someone will love you better for it."

"That's so sappy," she said, but her face was buried in his shirt and he knew she was hiding tears.

"I'm a bard. It comes with the job description."

"Good thing I'm not becoming a bard then." He broke the hug and pushed her away in mock disgust as she laughed.

"I take it all back, you're a disgrace of a daughter. I'm sending you to bardic college until you learn some respect."

She laughed again, a beautiful sound. He vowed, not for the first time, to do everything in his power to make sure she never stopped.

[fuck-customers]

I really wish people would understand that I don't read minds.

Right before I went home yesterday, a family came in with a huge metal water bottle. Like, a full gallon/3 liters. We don't allow metal bottles because we've had them used as a bludgeoning weapon.

Me: "Unfortunately, you're not really supposed to bring in the metal bottle."

Customer: "No its fine, we've done it before." [Starts to walk past me towards my manager]

Me: "You can ask my manager if you want, and if she says you're good, then you're good. But I'm not allowed to okay it."

So he starts chewing out my manager about how I'm horrible and hate disabled people because his son needs the giant metal bottle for his medical condition. So the manager tells him he can bring the bottle in and then comes over to talk to me.

Manager: "Next time, when you tells you it's for his son's medical condition, just let him being it in"

Me: "Literally all he said to me was 'no its fine, we've done it before.' He said nothing about his son having a medical condition."

Manager: "Oh. Well, just for next time, let them bring it in"

But I see hundreds of customers a day and I'm bad with faces (autism) and have brain damage that affects my vision; I can't promise I'll recognize them next time, if he doesn't fucking say anything. And no, he doesn't need to tell me how son's full medical history and all that; I am multiply disabled, and I know how this shit works. I see it as no different than a service dog. If my friend walked in to a grocery store with her dog, who isn't wearing any sort of vest or any indication that it is actually a service dog and not just a pet, and then just said "no its fine, I've done it before" instead of being like "its my service dog", then of course the store is gonna tell her she can't bring her dog in.

They were already in their movie by the time I left, which was a little sad because part of me wanted to wave with my cane in hand (they don't let me use my cane while I'm working, which is a whole other story that I've talked about before on here) because other than my cane, I don't look visibly disabled, other than the fact that a lot of people interpret my Autism Vibes and Generally Dopey Face (I have a big head and tiny eyes, so I look a bit like that meme/filter people do where they shrink the face) as meaning I'm intellectually disabled, which I'm not (no shade on intellectually disabled people, y'all are great, it's just the wrong term in my case). I don't think the customer made that assumption though, given what he said. But if he did, he's even more of a dick. Just use your damn words. It's not that hard.

[viperwhispered]

So I was listening to "Being low as dirt taking what's important from me" by Tuyu and it got me thinking: we got enough angst between Jamil and Kalim, give me angst between Jamil and his parents.

We know that Jamil sincerely cares for his family since they're the reason he puts up with everything but I get the impression that he only has a real genuine relationship with Najma. I feel like his parents only have a very superficial of who their son it and that is some good angst just in itself.

So I kinda just wanna see Jamil snap at them. Think of this scenario: Jamil has an s/o back at NRC. They've kept quiet cause he doesn't want his parents harassing about "how could he be distracted when he should be serving Kalim". This is post-OB, meaning Kalim has come a long way in finding other coping mechanisms, actively working on being observant, and in being more independant. Anyway, Jamil heads home for vacation and io and behold his parents are trying to put him in an arranged marriage with a girl from another servant family.

Cue Jamil going quiet as they joyfully explain who he's gonna marry. Then he just fucking explodes.

Completely loses whatever's left of his filter as he rages on them about everything. His hatred for their situation, the servanthood, and his lack of freedom. He especially rubs in how they clearly care more about the Asims than their own children and how they're the reason he overblotted. He lets out that he already has a lover because "unlike you prostating pathetic worms I have a life outside of Kalim".

Mom/dad try to slap him to make him stop but he just grabs the hand and slaps them back HARD. Finally, he finishes off with "you digusting beings low as dirt, how dare you try to take whats important from me?!"

At this point his composure is gone. He is enraged, he is full on sobbing as he yells.

His parents? They have no possible response that could ever satisfy him. They can't even mutter some sort of comeback.

Najma? She was on her way to greet him when she overheard him lose it. She's shocked and hurt at hearing Jamil's words but not really surprised nor does she blame him.

Jamil? He just takes his bags and goes right back to NRC to spend the break with his s/o. He turns off his phone and refuses all forms of communication throughout the entire break. The only people he picks up for is Kalim and Najma after about two weeks.

Kalim? At this point, he is fully aware of how unfair Jamil's situation is and is pissed that the Vipers are trying to ruin Jamil's relationship after months of Kalim (trying) being the best wingman possible. He also scolds the Vipers cause "he's already giving away his future, how dare you ask for more?!" He angrily orders that Jamil is to be left alone and they'll talk after the break.

Bonus angst: the supposed fiance was the daughter of another major servant family who had been in love with Jamil since they were children. And by that I mean she loved his servant persona and has no idea how much of a hot smug asshole he is. She was waiting in the next room to surprise him after his parents explained the new arrangement. There she was smiles and giggles at marrying what she thinks is the man of her dreams before that dream is shattered when she hears Jamil's tirade. Her heart shatters into a million pieces as she learns that not only does he hate the future set for them but he also already has a beloved.

Yeah we get so little info about Jamil’s parents that it’s hard to tell just what they are like or how their relationship is with Jamil. I mean, for the Scalding Sands event, all the adults were pretty absent (perhaps conspicuously, perhaps they only decided to start adding in the parents in the following hometown events, who knows).

That absence of Jamil's parents in the story other than as authority figures may be telling on its own, but it’s not like some of the other students are super chatty about their families either. And Jamil’s private enough, anyway, considering he didn’t mention Najma, either. Since I do agree that he and Najma definitely do care about that each other, in that particular sibling way with its own hiccups.

I certainly would not be surprised (and may have said this somewhere) if Jamil’s parents are of the sort that they are doing what they think is good for their son / children, but they don’t actually stop and think about the child’s point of view or opinion. (This may also be because my husband had an upbringing like that so it sure resonates and checks out.)

Oof that sort of a confrontation with his parents, though. For some reason I do feel like Jamil would not generally seriously stand up to his parents - at least not until something like that, when the straw breaks the camel’s back (again). Though I could be just assuming here. Though he certainly has been going along enough (and also has been told to do so since very young) to keep to his position with Kalim.

Tho honestly, his parents definitely deserve some choice words for their choices. Maybe, from their point of view, they’re ensuring a materially comfortable and in some ways perhaps even influential future for their child. But they sure aren’t ensuring Jamil’s happiness or mental or emotional wellbeing.

Oh boy would that be a tumultuous situation, though. Like in some sense, I’d imagine it would be cathartic for Jamil, to let that all out.

Yet, it would also be so disappointing. Yet another crushed hope for his parents to do better, yet another sign of how they treat him. It would be rough, especially trying to reconcile his parents' actions with any affection that Jamil may think they still do feel for him (and that Jamil feels for them). Sure ain’t easy.

I do love Kalim being on Jamil’s side in this, though. I mean, I do think in general that is likely, no matter where we are in the timeline. But especially here, if Kalim can tell that Jamil’s genuinely upset, and Kalim has a better understanding of what’s going on and how things have been affecting Jamil.

Though Kalim is not much of the sort to lash out, imo. So instead of scolding the Vipers, I’d think it’d be more likely for him to focus on trying to cheer up Jamil, or to try to mend the rift. Like more carrot than stick, you know?

Whether Jamil would be in the headspace to appreciate that kind of approach is another thing altogether.

And oof to that bonus angst. Might be better for all parties involved, in the end, but certainly not a pleasant way to learn about it.

[daceydeath]

Cigarettes and Cliches (Part 1)

Pairing: Lee Felix x Reader Word Count: 4.3k Genre: college au, slow burn romance, Warnings: 🔞, 18+, minors DNI, swearing, alcohol use, sexual themes,

He was the most impractical guy for you to be interested in, the incredibly handsome cliché bad boy who collected girls like trophies. As hard as you wanted to hate him his persistence and hidden softer side just could be your undoing.

It had been a month since that stupid party where Seungmin had managed to get himself injured, albeit a minor injury, and you were still feeling a bit protective of him. He never told you what the fight was about aside that some guys were being a bunch of dicks about a girl he knew so he stepped in to get them to stop, you never asked any other questions because you could tell he didn't want to talk about it. He had stayed home with you over the weekends for the 3 weeks after that letting Jeongin go and have fun while you made the both of you dinner and either studied or watched a movie together. That changed however on the fourth week.

"Are you going with Jeongin? you asked from the kitchen as they played video games in the lounge, Friday evening had rolled around once again too fast for your liking but you had a shift tonight that you needed to get ready for so you snacked as you finished up a few things.

"Yeah, everyone will have forgotten by now" he grinned back toothily while keeping his eyes focused on his character.

"Boys" you chuckled going around the kitchen island to get to your room "you do remember I'm out tonight yeah?"

"Oooh have a hot date?" Jeongin squealed excitedly pausing the game to look at you hopefully.

"Yeah with a coffee machine you twat, it's Friday night I'm working" you laughed as you shut the door behind you to change, as you did you could here the game not restart like you assumed it would.

"She needs to get out, she needs to date" Jeongin whined softly "There is more to life than her just studying and working".

"I know but you know how hard her parents are on her she got yelled at for over an hour when she told them she moved in here, we can't tell her how to live" Seungmin hissed as you continued to listen at the door.

"I just want her happy, she deserves to be happy and accounting is not going to make her happy it is going to make her parents happy. She will graduate, get a job, sit at a desk and never have a chance at life again to keep people who just run her down all the time happy" Jeongin was arguing getting a little louder as he went.

"Keep it down fuck wit she will hear you" Seungmin scolded "I want her to be happy too but we can't tell her she's making a mistake it isn't our life its hers". After a moment or so more the game unpaused and you could hear the sound of the game filter through the closed door as you rushed to get dressed and go.

"I'll see you guys later" you called as you rushed to the front door and out into the hallway.

Work was busy as always Friday nights usually started quiet and ended up a bit chaotic as people came in for coffee to sober up again, you and a few of the girls called it the witching hour as a joke since pretty much anything could and would happen. Not that you cared Friday nights paid well and you were always happy to have a little extra to spare in the bank if you could manage it. During your break you made yourself an iced tea and sat at the far end of the counter so you were out of the customers way and played on your phone. You could feel eyes on you but you were determined to ignore it you were about to go back on and witching hour was almost beginning, clearing your things you walked back around the counter and put your apron back on pulling in place over your head you noticed him, that pretty Felix guy that helped Seung home that night. He was on the far side of the room watching you with a strange look on his face, the girl hanging off of him hadn't noticed that he wasn't paying any attention to her but his friends had. Taking a breath you got back behind the coffee machine and started on the orders occasionally flicking your eyes to him to see if he was still looking at you which he was every single time.

"Excuse me miss" a honey smooth voice murmured to you making you startle slightly as you turned to him, he was taller than Felix but equally as stunning to look at, like a sculpture come to life.

"Can I help you?" you smiled politely trying not to look dazed.

"I hope so" he almost purred looking you over "I'm Hyunjin" he introduced himself seamlessly.

"Pleasure Hyunjin, but you haven't told me how I can help" you replied tilting your head.

"I was wondering what time you are getting off tonight? I thought you might like to join us" His voice was almost hypnotizing and you were sure that with the combination of this and his looks he could speak to any woman in the cafe and get them to follow him home.

"Who is us?" you asked zeroing on his words not his voice making him chuckled softly.

"In truth it would be you, me and my friends Minho and Felix he gestured behind him where you looked to see Seung's friend glaring at Hyunjin and another handsome guy laughing at him while the girls hanging off of them looked pissed Hyunjin was speaking to you at all.

"I don't think some of your numerous girlfriends would be that happy about that" you smiled politely before turning back to your orders not noticing Hyunjin's slightly baffled expression or how hard Felix immediately started laughing.

Two and a half hours later you were finishing up and saying goodbye to your co-workers when you noticed that Hyunjin, Minho and their gaggle of fangirls were no longer sitting in the back corner of the room however, Felix was still sitting there looking at something on his phone. He hadn't noticed you staring but he seemed to be conflicted about something as he typed then waited then typed again. You knew you should leave it but he was sitting alone in an fairly empty coffee shop on a Friday night which considering his other options seemed odd to you.

"Can I get you anything" you asked casually standing in front of him making his eyes flick up at you prepared to roll his eyes but he stopped as soon as he realized it was you.

"Have you finished for the night?" He asked smiling faintly "you aren't in one of those stupid aprons anymore".

"Yeah I have, thank you for the uniform critique, but I can still get you something if you wanted me to" you smiled awkwardly pressing your lips together.

"I'm good thanks" he nodded as he phone seemed to continue to chime nonstop with notifications.

"Alright then sorry to bother you" you nodded adjusting your bag and starting to turn around.

"You haven't bothered me and it's Felix, I forgot to introduce myself that night at your place after we got Seungmin and Jeongin back" he blurted out seeming every bit as nervous as you which was impossible since he was infamously attractive and had made his way through more girls than you even knew.

"I thought you were hanging out with your friends, at least that's what um...your friend said" you felt your face heat up not being able to remember the name of the handsome guy from earlier.

"Hyunjin" he chuckled looking genuinely happy "Yeah they have gone to party Hyunjin was a little deflated after you shot him down"

"Shot him down?" You yelped your eyes widening at the implication.

"I'm just kidding they were only wanting to tease you anyway, word got around the Seung and Innie have been hiding a cute roommate so Hyunjin just wanted to make them squirm about which one was hooking up with you" he chuckled looking back to his phone to silence it.

"Right...well have a good night then Felix" you mumbled feeling stupid for thinking that they were actually being friendly or that Felix might have hung around for another reason since you had definitely heard him say you were cute that night before he left. You walked towards the door not hearing him call out to you until he grabbed your elbow a few feet outside the café making you jump your heart pounding in your chest.

"You aren't walking home alone are you?" he sighed "It's not safe for girls to walk home alone at night".

"I always walk home alone" you snapped annoyed that he had embarrassed you and now scared you.

"Let me walk you this time then" he replied sounding irritated.

"Why would you even bother, just to give me shit? No thanks I already know that's all I'm good for thanks" You ground out utterly pissed at how handsome he looked but how much of a dick he apparently was. "Besides you didn't care when I was getting chucked out into the night so you could get your dick sucked why start caring now?" You pulled your arm from his grasp and walked away as calmly as you could leaving him as far behind as you could.

When you got back to your apartment you found only Seungmin was home, well his shoes were home but he wasn't alone so you crept passed his door hoping to not disturb him as you made your way to the kitchen to grab some water and painkillers to dull the headache you now had. For a moment you thought Seungmin and Jeongin had been right maybe you did need to date but Felix and his friends showed you just how untrustworthy some guys could be so maybe it was better to just stick to what you knew. As you stood in the kitchen contemplating your non existent love life you heard very familiar voice in the hall, Seungmin was obviously finished entertaining his 'guest' and he was seeing her out with an excuse that the other roommates couldn't know she was there. Sighing you waited to see if Seungmin made his way into the kitchen or back into his room.

"When did you get back?" he asked as he rounded the corner seeing you standing there staring off into space.

"A few minutes ago, I didn't overhear if that's what you're worried about" you sighed not feeling like you could do the normal back and forth with him tonight.

"No, I was just wondering, are you alright?" he asked leaning his back against the counter so he could see your face.

"Long shift, annoying customers" you nodded trying to mask your annoyance.

"You seem sad that's all" he pressed a little making you more irritated.

"I'm fine Seung, I'm just tired" you smiled tightly "I'll see you in the morning" you left him standing there knowing he would ask more questions in the morning hopefully not in front of Jeongin.

Morning came and you had been correct more questions followed though annoyingly Seungmin seemed to have filled in, the not as hung over as you had hoped, Jeongin.

"Do you feel better this morning?" Jeongin welcomed you from the kitchen as you left your room.

"Yeah I do thanks. How was the party? you seem pretty chipper this morning" you smiled hoping you could just have Jeongin spill the tea for the next hour to keep your from having to explain anything.

"It was amazing, Hyunjin and Minho arrived late without Felix which is strange but apparently some girl turned Hyunjin down, like who turns down Hyunjin honestly, anyway that probably isn't true but who knows maybe it is and Minho was giving him shit about it since apparently Felix has a crush on her but that has to be shit Felix doesn't have crushes he fucks his way through campus" Jeongin began which instantly made you annoyed again why would he be so invested in the lives of fuck boys even if they are his friends "but that helped us all hook up though after they picked who they wanted the others just always gravitate towards us since we're their friends, Seung picked up some girl who was devastated that Felix wasn't there so good for him".Jeongin continued to babble and you tuned out continuing to nod like you cared until Seungmin interrupted.

"You have that look on your face again, the one from last night" he called you out easily.

"I'm fine I just had a weird conversation with some friends of yours and one was a jerk that's all" You sighed hoping you could play down everything.

"Which friends?" Seungmin asked seeming surprised.

"Not important Seung was back when I got in from work but you weren't Innie" you prodded "spill".

"Oh yeah so after Seungmin left with that chick Felix did show up and he was pissed, I don't know what happened before he got there, but Hyunjin and Minho were giving him shit then these other guys decided it would be fun to chime in and Felix lost it so he punched one of them and he and Minho ended up taking on like four guys, Felix will probably have a black eye but they are always in fights so it's not like that's never happened before" Jeongin continued loving that your were interested but again Seungmin interrupted.

"Which of our friends were rude to you?" he asked again with far more authority making you frown.

"Hyunjin and Felix, apparently I turned the mighty Hyunjin down even though he only wanted me to hang out with him to give you two shit about which one of you was fucking me and then Felix was a prick about it all, it was nothing really" you sighed.

"Hold on you're the one who turned down Hyunjin?" Jeongin's eyes widened in disbelief.

"I didn't turn him down he came over while I was working and introduced himself then he asked if I wanted to hang out with them after I finished work. I told him that the girls that were all over them didn't seem thrilled with that idea then went back to work" you explained, mainly to Jeongin who was looking like he was too shocked to speak.

"And Felix?" Seung asked softly looking like he knew more than you did which confused you.

"They left, Felix stayed when I finished I asked him if i could get him anything and he told me they only asked me to hang out to give you two shit and then scared the shit out of me on the street when he grabbed my arm, he offered to walk me home. I declined. End of my super exciting story" you tried not to sound fed up but honestly you were not only had they made you feel insignificant, Jeongin couldn't believe they would waste their time on you and Seungmin had slept with Nali, not that he knew that you knew.

"I'm sure he didn't mean to scare you but we have both told you not to walk home after your night shifts and get an cab instead" Seungmin chastised you slightly.

"Did Nali take a cab home after you fucked her then Seungmin?" you snapped looking his dead in the eyes making him flush pink his mouth falling open "Yeah that's what I thought, I think maybe the no dating and no men thing is something I'll stick to for now but thank you for both spending your time worrying that I'm wasting my life" you seethed as you turned walked back to your room to get ready to go out. You had no idea where you would go you just needed to be away from them, it was irrational for you to be angry with them it wasn't their fault that Felix had made you feel like a fool but the fact that they defended him over listening to what you had to say had pushed you too far.

When you reemerged from your room both of the guys looked guilty since they must have realized that they had been overheard their conversations about you at some point but you didn't speak you just scooped up your bag and walked out needing time to calm down before you spoke to them again and apologized for being short with them. Just wandering you found yourself in the public gardens beside the university, you hardly ever took time to wander between your classes, studying, working you didn't actually have time to do much else. The gardens were beautiful in the quiet of the morning, still a little too early for the party goers to have emerged, it was still and quiet which made you feel calmer. Slowly making your way around the pathways you came across no one so you decided to just sit and think. Seungmin and Jeongin were right in a sense, you did live your life to meet your parents expectations and you did do everything you could for them to be proud of you but you were missing out. Maybe you weren't missing much in the way of dating morons or one night stands, which weren't your thing, but just the mere fact you had never even taken the time to actually wander the gardens that were so close to where you spent so much time did prove that you were missing out on really living your life. Sighing you knew you were going to have to apologize to them but only if they were willing to not dismiss you so easily.

"I didn't think gardens were your thing? they don't have anything to do with studying" his deep voice drawled from somewhere to the right of you, shaking you from your thoughts.

"You don't actually know anything about me Felix" you frowned looking towards him to take in his appearance. He wasn't in his trademark leather jacket and black jeans, just blue jeans and a grey hoodie, looking suspiciously young and innocent with the exception of the purplish looking bruise blooming on his cheek.

"I know, but maybe I want to" he shrugged walking over to you and sitting at the opposite end of the bench from you.

"Why bother I'm not going to be another conquest for you so I doubt I'm very interesting to you" you sighed trying not to sound annoyed at him and failing since his face fell slightly.

"Do you think I can't have friends? I don't have sex with every girl I know" he smirked as you looked over his face finding yourself drawn to try to count the freckles on the bridge of his nose.

"From your body count I doubt that very much and that wasn't there when I last saw you" you gestured to his face.

"No I got this later" he murmured looking sad for a moment before schooling his face.

"Want to talk about it?" you offered softly not knowing why you would even ask him, he kept giving you mixed signals and you couldn't decipher them.

"It was just a fight nothing important?" he shrugged fiddling with the cuff of his hoodie a bit. "I'm sorry I scared you last night after you got off work, I called after you but you obviously didn't hear me, I shouldn't have just grabbed you" he smiled at you this time.

"No you shouldn't have, grabbing a woman in the street at night is a dick move, but thanks I guess" you relented.

"Seung said you're doing accounting, do you like it?" he continued still smiling.

"Not really but it's what I'm supposed to do" you admitted reluctantly "I was interested in other careers but accounting is more stable I guess" you explained "What department are you in?".

"Arts" he smiled examining you closely "I'm doing English Lit, is it your parents wanting you to do accounting?".

"Umm... yeah" you nodded slowly now watching him as closely as he was scrutinizing you.

"It's hard to make your parents proud" he breathed sadness flashing across his eyes.

"Yeah it's almost impossible" you agreed clearing your throat awkwardly "I have to head back Felix bye" you half smiled standing up quickly you didn't like how unbalanced he was making you feel.

"You too Choi" he smiled leaning further back on the bench and closing his eyes. Your eyes lingered on him for a few more seconds before you left feeling less annoyed in general but still frustrated by everything.

The walk back to your shared apartment felt longer than it had on the way out this morning which you figured was probably the difference between annoyance and guilt. You could hopefully smooth everything over with Seung and Innie, after all it wasn't their fault you hadn't really explained the situation or how you had felt, you had tried to minimize it which of course would leave to misunderstandings. Plus you liked the boys they were easy to live with so you hoped they wouldn't ask you to leave. Keying in your code you slipped off your shoes and padded towards the kitchen where you assumed they would be to be once again caught in a situation where you were snooping.

"Chan, we didn't mean to make her upset" you could hear a voice whine over the phone.

"Not the point Hyunjin, Seung and Innie have potentially lost a housemate because you guys thought she was an easy source of amusement" Chan groaned and you just stayed still thinking about how to fake that you weren't overhearing another private conversation.

"She seems real nice too" another voice that you didn't recognize said.

"She's better than nice" Seungmin replied dryly "She's kind, sweet and always helpful, not to mention easy on the eye which helps".

"She is cute, is that why you decided to play her? she's the only cute girl one of the three of you hasn't fucked?" Innie almost spat sounding more annoyed that you had heard him before.

"It's not like that" Hyunjin instantly answered "It wasn't about teasing her it was about pissing off you guys and Felix, you should have seen the way he was looking at her she has him whipped and she doesn't even know".

"I highly doubt that" Chan sighed skeptically "Felix doesn't want a girlfriend he wants to stick his dick in every girl he can".

"She's too good for him anyway" Seungmin grumbled "too smart and too steady for the guy who can't date someone for longer than a fortnight".

"Damn Seung savage" one said but you weren't sure who as you crept quietly back down the hallway hearing them laughing, jamming your feet roughly back into your shoes to make nothing suspicious you loudly open and shut the door taking your shoes off again.

"Seung? Innie? you home?" you called down the hall knocking on each of their doors as you passed them.

"In the lounge" Innie called as you made your way into the kitchen and opened the fridge to grab some water.

"Alright look I'm really...Hi" you pretended to be surprised that there were other people in the apartment.

"This is Han" Innie smiled at you like he was actually thrilled you were home "I can't remember if you have met before and of course you know the others".

"Hi all" you waved from where you were standing "Han and I have met, I think I have met all your friends but one now" you poked your tongue into your cheek.

"Who haven't you met?" Seung tilted his head looking at you.

"I think his name is Minho, he's apparently glued to your mates Hyunjin and Felix" you smiled "I mean he waved but you have never introduced me to him, although same could have been said for Hyunjin".

"Yeah we did try to keep you away from them" Innie admitted as you walked around the kitchen island to move closer to the group lounging around on the sofas.

"I noticed" you chuckled "It's fine Innie I get it".

"No it's not because we think you need to stay away from them it's just that we know they aren't your type of person so.." Innie tried to explain quickly.

"Innie, it's fine I don't need to know all your friends I'm not your mother" you laughed rolling your eyes at him before retreating to your room.

"She seems fine guys I don't get why you were so panicked" Changbin chuckled as you shut your door.

"I get Felix's interest now she is pretty cute" Han whisper shouted making you roll your eyes as you heard Seung and Innie protest loudly and they all began bickering.

"Look we both get that she's cute but back off she's like super innocent the last thing she needs is any of you fuckers messing her around" Seung whispered back.

"When you say innocent?" Changbin asked softly.

"She hasn't hooked up with a single guy since she started collage, I'm pretty sure she's a virgin" Innie blurted like he was spilling some kind of tea which made you put your face in your hands embarrassed that they were discussing your sex life.

"How would you even guess that kind of information Innie, bloody hell if she overheard you know she would be mortified" Chan scolded.

"Trust me she is" you yelled through the door hoping that it made them cringe at the whole idea because you were mortified that it had been so obvious to Jeongin that you had pretty much no experience in that department, outside of a few sloppy make out sessions and the moment you lost your virginity which you hadn't enjoyed so you had never bothered to go back for seconds.

"Her bedroom walls are thin" Changbin laughed awkwardly as you flopped down on your bed hoping to not have to face any of them ever again.

a/n: Thank your for reading my lovliest loves I hope you enjoyed it and please know that any likes, reblogs, comments and amazing tags are loved and enjoyed xx

Taglist (open): @christopher-bangnaldoskzz, @armystay89, @damnyouficc, @roamingpolar, @bakedlilgoonie, @shiy, @is2cb97, @beautifulixr, @skyhold-tara, @army-stay-noel,

[writergracethepanda]

🔥 choose violence ask game 🔥 Secret Shanghai Edition

the character everyone gets wrong

Marshall. He is canonically an excellent cook, s why are we convinced he'd set something on fire if left alone in the kitchen?

a compelling argument for why your fave would never top or bottom

no comment

screenshot or description of the worst take you've seen on tumblr

EVERY SINGLE DAMN TIME I have seen Alisa and Phoebe shipped (let aroace people live and bisexuals are still bisexual even in a seemingly hetero relationship) or those takes I've seen on TikTok of people shipping Rosalind and Benedikt and Celia and Marshall if I weren't on my computer I would put sooooo many barf emojis here

what was the last straw that made you finally block that annoying person?

luckily nothing yet I believe

worst discord server and why

mine with my friends its sooo annoying how we have incredibly amazing and intelligent and sometimes incoherent conversations like guys we're the worst (sarcasm)

which ship fans are the most annoying?

like I said, anyone who ships the above things needs to stay 10 feet away from me at all times and undergo intense media literacy training

what character did you begin to hate not because of canon but because how how the fandom acts about them?

I think everyone's answer for this is Oliver. I'm so sorry we (especially me tbh) did you so dirty pre fhh I promise we've learnt our lesson!

common fandom opinion that everyone is wrong about

Oliver loves cats. incorrect. Cats are his entire life. there is a difference, and we need to recognize it.

worst part of canon

roma and Alisa's dad just disappeared before I could beat him up

worst part of fanon

we're too funny my stomach literally hurts from laughing too hard sometimes. Seriously though, the above ship takes that make my blood boil, as well as some complaints about how a lot of us talk about how we think certain characters are neurodivergent/disabled. While I think some of those are actually considered canon, I don't understand why people are so made that we (a relatively neurospicy bunch) are identifying the parts of characters we relate to and labeling them. We're doing you no harm and not interfering with your ability to enjoy the characters. Shouldn't it be a good thing that we're able to identify with the characters? Just mind your business. (also anyone who erases Rosalind's and Alisa's aroaceness that is indeed canon and I hope both sides of your pillow are too warm)

number of fandom-related words you've filtered

I don't think any

the unpopular character that you actually like and why more people should like them

I don't think anyone hates these guys, but why don't we ever talk about the couple from LVC? They were so sweet, and I'm kind of sad we didn't get any mention of them in FHH.

worst blorboficiation

I feel like a bad Tumblr user, but I don't know what this means. is this like uwu-ification?

that one thing you see in fics all the time

@typingwithmyhandstied 's GENIUS

that one thing you see in fanart all the time

Juliette always has the appropriate amount of knives thank you very much for that guys :)

you can't understand why so many people like this thing (characterization, trope, headcanon, etc)

I personally don't get into the Rosalind is a vampire thing, but I'm cheering you guys on from afar (im just not into vampires lol)

there should be more of this type of fic/art

idk I should probably work on my university au

it's absolutely criminal that the fandom has been sleeping on...

the fact that not only did she feel comfortable falling asleep around Orion (see one of @no-1-rosalind-lang-apologist 's recent posts) but Rosalind was also muttering in French in that scene. Her dominant language. She was both out of it enough/comfortable enough with him that she dropped the I was raised in American fake accent and just started speaking normally in this essay I will- basically we need to talk more about the use of multilingualism in the ss books

you're mad/ashamed/horrified you actually kind of like...

past me would be horrified to know that I like Oliver now

part of canon you found tedious or boring

I think TVD can be a bit boring sometimes, but that makes sense, since it was Chloe's debut, and she's grown immensely since then

part of canon you think is overhyped

the seagreen trio is overrated (they are literally my favorite characters)

your favorite part of canon that everyone else ignores

THE MULTILIGUALISM

ship you've unwillingly come around to

Olivercelia. Like I said, I was his strongest hater pre fhh. Now I see what she clearly sees in him.

topic that brings up the most rancid discourse

discourse on ss Tumblr is mostly joking. my personal favorite is when @marsneedstherapy and I pretend to yell at each other in different languages

common fandom complaint that you're sick of hearing

"no one appreciates x enough" I do. I love them.

[piosplayhouse]

Horse Isle 3: The Yandere Sim of Horse Games

(or, an extended study in how to hate your own playerbase as much as humanly possible)

(or, or, tldr there's pretty much no updated information on just how ridiculously bad this game is so here's a writeup on how I got banned and all the subsequent information I found during my time playing for documentation's sake)

Part I. The Backstory

My beloved followers will know that a few months ago I began playing Horse Isle 3, a horse-raising MMO surprisingly released in the year of our horse 2019 despite its 1997-era website and Runescape-esque graphics. Some of my play through (mostly just horse pictures) is chronicled in my tag #homophobic scum horse chronicles ¹ if you want to see how drippy my horses were before they killed me.

Now, don't get me wrong. I have endless respect for small teams of game devs that manage to create insanely impressive products-- which HI3's elaborate real-genetics breeding system, its main draw, certainly is. Coding is hard, modeling is hard, moderation is hard. Tip a coin to your local small indie teams that work hard to make incredible art.

However, HI3 is far from an admirable success story about a small dev team that triumphed over its obstacles.

The game is known for a variety of things, chief among them being the staff's rampant homophobia (which has earned it the moniker "the homophobic horse game"), hilariously uncharismatic mods (to the point where one of the main moderators, Connie, is mentioned by NAME in the majority of poor reviews of the game), the dev team's unrepentant rejection of criticism, and racism with a side of downplaying war crimes.

(Screenshots taken from Sitejabber, here)

Now, it's marketed as a game for ages 8+, which, as I've briefly talked about before, is unfortunately a rarity in today's hostile internet climate. I grew up on a variety of typical child friendly MMOs like ye olde Pixie Hollow and PetPet Park, and truly lament that so many of these have been shut down over the years. As such, I have no issue with strict rules or word filters in games, with the caveat that they are effective and genuinely intended to keep people safe. Kids are naive, and can and will say things that they shouldn't (I, for example, got kicked from a Minecraft server when I was 8 because I posted in chat that my mom told me sex wasn't a bad word. things happen). Filters are a very appropriate tool to aid manual moderation of chat features, especially in an environment where mistakes will be made.

However, HI3's, as shown below (words that are forbidden from chat are marked in red), are... questionably selective.

(Screenshot taken by Alice Ruppert, from here)

This appears to be attributed to the fact that along with having horrible moderators, HI3 also seems to have a remarkably horrible developer backend, which is a trend that you'll see pop up quite a lot in this post. Taken straight from the horse's (haha) mouth, the lead developer is the only person who seems to be able or willing to add to the filter list, and for whatever reason only wants to block the "most common inappropriate words"- because saying transgender is more of an issue than nazi and gulag I guess.

(Screenshot taken from Top R.'s Sitejabber review, here)

¹ I'm not sure how far this will reach out of my audience, and since people have already assumed weird stuff about me I thought I should probably clarify-- I'm not calling the game "homophobic scum" ghghg, my play through was focused on making horse versions of characters from a novel called "scum villain", so I took the scum and added horse (I actually have another tag for a different horse breeding game called "scum horse chronicles" so I needed to distinguish them easily but am not very good at tagging). That's it.

Part II. The Game

The game itself is, putting it simply, a mess at best and openly hostile towards newcomers at worst. The game's UI is comparable to your average petsite with 20 thousand things to click on but if you tried to navigate that while also watching the Pilgrim's Progress movie by Scott Cawthorn on 90% of your screen. This is a very good overview of what your experience first logging in will be like, with the added caveat that talking in global chat costs in game currency and that the game doesn't tell you this at ALL until you try to type in chat, and that depending when you log on it's entirely possible that you'll spawn into a completely dead town miles away from anyone who can help you, wilderness survivor-style.

To make things more complicated, information about the game is split between the game itself and the laughably horrible website/forums. Spectacularly enough, the forums, which provide vital game information and rule elaborations, cannot be searched in any way (not via Google or any hard-baked search bar) and are regularly purged by admins to erase evidence of scandals and poor moderation complaints.

Now, something you will find to be generally people's biggest issue with HI3 is their strict no "date-speak" rule, which sounds ok on paper but is worded *just* vaguely enough to give the moderators full jurisdiction over whether or not they think you're breaking the rules. Selective moderation is a major theme in the HI3 chronicle, but it is perhaps most documented with regards to this rule, because what the hell does "boyfriend/girlfriend talk" even mean?? Outside of vagueness, this rule has also been scrutinized extensively by others due to the fact that a pair of previous moderators were openly married with the igns "FrogLips" and "MrsFrogLips". I don't personally think this is super condemning, since kids usually address adults by Mr/Ms etc whether or not they know they're in a relationship, but regardless it's clear that the complete lack of elaboration on what this rule means can be easily manipulated to lodge any number of complaints against people.

(Screenshot from the Horse Isle website rules page, here)

What I will say, however, is that this rule would probably hold more water if the game wasn't literally about breeding horses.

You can pimp out your horses, you can pay others to breed your mares, you can put any number of special (real life currency-bought) amulets on your horses to make them more fertile/have twins/give birth faster. I paid $1000 to castrate Jiang Cheng. The word "stud" (which btw, is another word for a black butch lesbian) is used constantly. Perhaps most shockingly, horse inbreeding is very common and accepted among the community, to the point that it is explicitly mentioned and EXPLAINED in the game guide; the only penalization for it is that your incest product foal will have a lower intelligence stat. Call me old-fashioned, but I feel as though implementing and acknowledging that horses can breed with their own relatives is hmm perhaps more harmful than another player saying the word gay, but what do I know.

(Screenshot from the Horse Isle website game guide page, here (only accessible with an account))

Well, you might ask, after you breed and sell a horse, is there any way to put a brand on it so you know it's from your ranch? That's where the "prefix" system comes in. Prefixes are bolded titles that appear in front of a horses name in lists and in the overworld, and are described in the official game guide as follows:

(Screenshot from the same Horse Isle website game guide page as linked previously)

I think you can toggle them off if you don't want to see them, though I could be wrong. They're basically just 1-5 letter titles you can put on your own horses (nobody else's, importantly). There's no way to search prefixes, and you won't see them in game unless either a horse with a prefix is listed in auctions or you actually encounter someone in-game and see their horse.

In fact, I would learn later that not even the moderators monitor the prefixes, and apparently have no way to mass-delete them. At all.

(Image taken from an anonymous friend)

Now, it's not unusual that a game as complicated as HI3 would inevitably have a pretty taxing server-side code. Millions of multifaceted assets and features is really nothing to scoff at. However, the notion that your lead developer has to perform a manual search in the game's code to delete the equivalent of a stamp from every instance individually is hilarious. I'm not going to pretend to be a game developer, but there HAS to be a better way of coding a feature that intakes user-generated content that should probably be monitored regularly than that, right? Or, at least, there should be a robust filter system that could prevent any issues from occurring before they would need to be fixed so tediously. You might think.

On December 29th, 2022, I discovered how to register a prefix. It's very common to headcanon the characters I was naming my horses after as transgender, and I thought it would be cute to attach "TRANS" to my horses as a nod to this. However, a filter blocked the word. I was disappointed, but not surprised², and then tried to think of another word that was under 5 letters. To my complete and gay surprise, "GAY" was not filtered out, and henceforth, this worked as my prefix.

As you can see on the popup here, there are scant guidelines for what the requirements for a prefix should be. And, in this moment of apparently utter foolishness, I was under the impression that since "GAY" was NOT filtered out despite there clearly being a filter on this function, it was ok to register. Possibly it's not filtered because it's a synonym for "happy", I thought, which is also cute because I do like when horses are happy. Perhaps the staff had learned from their past criticism and had loosened the restrictions slightly because they felt restructuring was appropriate now that gay marriage is legal in the US, I imagined.

(My original post)³

What I could not imagine, however, was that the only reason the word wasn't filtered out, despite being possibly the most common sexuality-related word, was just because the lead dev couldn't be assed to add it to the filter list. And that apparently I was supposed to know this because it would lead to a permanent ban on my second offense with no warning.

² Hence typing "eat shit lol". Admittedly childish of me, but I didn't put a lot of thought into the post because it was just part of a casual silly live blog I was doing to blow off steam. The "if I get banned" tag surprisingly was not referencing "GAY", as I genuinely thought I was in the clear for that for reasons stated above, but because I tried to register "TRANS" and then posted about it online. You don't have to believe me, but I feel the need to defend myself since some people have wildly extrapolated that my actions were malicious instead of just a split second decision I made because I was bored one morning.

³ Despite the pop-up box saying that prefixes cannot be removed, they actually can at any time, given only that the person that owns the prefix unregisters the horse from it. The unregistering mechanic is for whatever reason not told to the player upon registering the prefix, but is mentioned in the official game guide linked above.

Part III. The Ban, The Report

I will preface this section by saying that I played the game normally. I do like being outrageous sometimes for my followers' entertainment, but I really don't like dragging random people into my antics if they aren't interested. Because of this, I really didn't interact with other players unless we were mutuals on some other platform. I rarely used the chat feature except to participate in server-wide events that required team participation, and I typically just explored on my own for fun. In general I think I was a pretty ok player, objectively, which lines up with my user trust score.

You see, the way moderators of HI3 allegedly keep track of rule breaking is through a "user trust score" with points added if you use features in the game, help people, etc, and points deducted if you violate rules. Anecdotally I've heard that around the -10 total points mark is when moderators put you on a sort of list to be monitored for suspension or punishment, which is pretty reasonable.

By the time I was banned, I had a score of +31. The -10 offset was a part of this debacle. The only thing I had ever done in the game which warranted any kind of violation was, as you will soon see, literally just naming about 30 of my own horses "GAY", a sin egregious enough to apparently offset about 200 hours worth of playtime with no issues.

Because of this, I was a little bit confused on multiple levels. For one, I had never even seen a moderator in game, nor been informed of discipline at any time before. On top of that, their permanent ban notification is extremely strange and vague. The text pop up when you try to log in just reads "Account currently banned -1 minutes ().", which is probably just copied straight from the server-side code for things and just wasn't translated into user-side comprehensibility. You'll also notice there is a "()" section in the notification, which I would assume is where they put the reason for bans, except for the fact that mine was completely blank.

The website which allegedly would hold more info just repeated a near identical code: "BANNED! -1min. Reason:".

So, with nothing else to go off of, I messaged support on the jankiest help center submissions I've ever seen on a website with this:

"Insisting" and "total disregard" are very strong words to use for a situation in which I just typed a word into a textbox because the game let me, I'd think, which is why I tried to reason with her. The prefixes mentioned in my message are well-known amongst the userbase and are much older and wider-spread than mine, so I would think that there would be at least some sort of precedent for this. The "geldings and yearlings" reasoning was mostly a joke, but also intended to express that the nature of an acronym (as the majority of prefixes seemed to be) is that it can be interpreted in many ways. Intent was thrown around a lot when I was discussing the issues of prefixes with other users, and it seemed to have been used to excuse previous behavior in situations where mods liked the users in question better.

I also cannot emphasize enough how much they did not warn me about my prefix being removed. When I logged in and saw my horses' names did not include it, I was suspicious that the moderators removed it just because of the history of their behavior. However, I had no hard evidence because they did not inform me at ALL. Not through in-game mail systems, not through server messages, not through the website. Complete radio silence except for the addition of an unexplained "-10" to my user score. I did complain to some people that I thought it was removed, but a combination of things suggested that it wasn't a huge deal, so I mostly let it lie. For one, I had over 100 hours of playtime and was mildly worried that one of my chat messages had been flagged without my knowledge. For another, my profile text had also mysteriously disappeared, probably because of a glitch, so who knows what could happen in this game. Lastly, I went to the prefix registry again just to check and hilariously enough, they didn't actually block "GAY" from the database. Yeah, they apparently individually deleted it from all of my horses, but couldn't be assed to add such an "inappropriate" word to their filter system.

So I just registered it again and publicly told people that I would do it again if the mods didn't actually tell me to stop. I didn't really care about the prefix because to me, the feature was purely cosmetic. All I wanted was transparency from the staff.

Well, anyway, I assume Connie couldn't think of a comeback, so she just closed my report. I was annoyed because quite literally none of my questions were answered and she didn't even refer to anything in specifics. It would take less than 1 second to type the number of the rule I violated, but I guess that was too much work for her.

I tried to give them as many outs as possible to just apologize about poor communication, but they didn't even take the bare minimum. I would also like to mention that this support ticket process is the ONLY way to directly communicate with any staff. There's no ability to upload files or images on this system, and no email listed that you could contact. So essentially, there's no way to give actual evidence for anything you say even if you want to.

Kat, who is known as the slightly-more-reasonable-but-still-pretty-bad mod then picked up the case. Her response actually provided specific information, which made it leagues above Connie's, but still included some very strange elements for sure.

The notion that this game is intended for a worldwide audience is especially funny to me because you would really think if they cared about other countries they wouldn't violate their own rule one by using a slur for Europe's largest ethnic minority, but ok. It's a weird hill to die on considering how USA-dominated the staff's opinions towards rules are (Connie justifies the usage of a slur for Rromani people based off the opinion of a single roommate she had who reclaimed it, Joe defends a store in-game being called "The Gulag" because Americans don't think gulags are that bad (discussed and cited in the conclusions section)). But then again, picking and choosing what parts of other countries' customs you want to respect is very American, which is why I think they should add an extra star rating for its patrioticness on the website.

As I mentioned before, the prefixes I included in my response are definitely older and more commonly-used than mine, so I'm not sure how they wouldn't have seen them before. This comment also ties back to the suggestion that the moderators have very little control or insight over a distinct feature of their game, which is not a great thing to admit so casually.

Kat has a strange habit of immediately contradicting herself in the same paragraph, as can be seen here. "The glitches never happen and bugs were quickly fixed, but games still have bugs". "People that break the rules usually write in to ask what was wrong, but most people usually never ask". At this point I think we can confidently say that they don't even make an attempt to proofread any of their responses, to be honest.

Her 7th paragraph has one of my favorite lines in this exchange. "If we had to notify players every time we made moderator changes to their account we would spend 24 hours a day" is giving huge Yandere Dev "stop emailing me because I have to spend 24 hours a day reading all my emails instead of coding" energy. You really have to wonder why these people that seem to hate moderating so much are moderators.

You can tell by my response, but I do not like the use of "most" and "usually" in this at all. What's your standard isn't others' standards, and this is a topic which needs to be navigated gently, especially when kids are concerned. I never played the previous Horse Isles. I had no experience with the mod team, or with violations, or with anything because no one bothered to take five seconds to send me a message. No, I did not know that you would permaban me for typing a word that's in one of the most popular traditional Christmas songs in a place were only people who interacted with me would be able to see it. Most games would not do this. To take a lackadaisical approach to your literal job of community management because you want people to moderate themselves is contradictory to your claims of keeping children safe.

I will admit I was being a bit cheeky here as a subtle hint that perhaps they should take feedback, but I also would have taken a genuine response. I try my best to be as polite as possible to tech support staff because not everyone is! But they're people too and a simple thank you is worth a lot in customer service, even virtual. But Kat... you're not really giving me anything to work with here! If anyone reading this has feedback for how I could've rephrased things, feel free to comment them honestly. I actually ran drafts of these messages through a few people before sending them to make sure I was as concise and polite as possible, even if support clearly wasn't interested in reciprocating the effort ("following out rules using the the GAY to begin with"...?).

Part IV. The Backlash

I won't go too into depth in this section because it's more personal than documentarian, so feel free to skip to the next section if you want!

After this, the girlies were not happy with me. The one saving grace of HI3 that I've heard pop up over and over again is that the community is great. And a lot of users are! Don't think I'm disparaging people who play the game because I'm not-- it's a really fun experience with the right people. I was in a Discord server with a lot of people who were extremely helpful and kind.

However, within the community, there's also a pervasive culture of silence. According to Alice Ruppert of The Mane Quest, a lot of people will refuse to go public with their complaints about the staff due to fear of retribution, which I feel is unfortunate but understandable. There's a pressure to shut up and eat your food lest you be seen as someone causing controversy for the sake of it and ruining the sanctity of the game, which is an attitude explicitly encouraged by the staff (discussed more in the next section).

I liveblogged my entire correspondence with the support team to a group of other players for the 2 days I talked to them, and did have a lot of acceptance from people who appreciated someone speaking out. After the 2020 Mane Quest article, public information had sort of just gone dark as the community was pushed further into niche seclusion, despite things not improving at all. However, towards the end of my messaging, a group of people that I had never even spoken to or seen online before accused me of a variety of things ranging from "displaying my sexuality to children" (note: all I ever did was name my horses "GAY". I never once talked about my own sexuality in-game, nor did I say the word in chat ever) to "joining the server to cause drama" to "mocking the lgbt community by throwing around the word gay" (actually I'll attach a picture of this one even though I don't want to put people on blast in this section just because its so funny).

I think most of this can be attributed to the game having gained such a notoriety that longtime players, especially those with strong nostalgic feelings, have become completely desensitized to it. And this compounds with the fact that the game is so niche it doesn't yet have a good alternative to turn to to create a toxic cocktail where people tell themselves that they have to be loyal to the staff to play this one of a kind game-- and that anyone who doesn't follow them just doesn't understand. It's really sad, honestly.

Part V. Conclusions

I don't necessarily think the devs of HI3 are legitimately consciously homophobic-- unfortunately LGBT rights are still controversial amongst the largely southern and rural population of horse enthusiasts, and I could understand if they felt it necessary to skim the line towards conservatism to maintain a userbase. It's cowardly and dumb but it's not a sin to do what you have to do to survive in a capitalistic hellscape as cutthroat as the game industry.

However, what I do think the devs are is power-hungry and hypocritical. They have failed at every turn at community management because they're unwilling to admit they make mistakes, instead choosing to issue non-apologies like "[we] regret you guys got so upset and did not realize neither our true intentions nor motivations nor the whole situation [that we said it's ok that a player has a shop called The Gulag because it's 'not direct or violent']". To respond this way to a userbase filled allegedly with young children as a fully grown adult with a wife and kids is laughably out of touch. 'Sorry your fee-fees were hurt by our adult moderator responding to a serious complaint about inappropriate user-generated content with "lol", but actually you just misunderstood us and we're going to ban anyone who brings this up again' is the sort of response you'd see from the teenage mod team of an Undertale amino, not the supposedly responsible head dev of a 'rare oasis of kid friendly content'.

Telling an audience of impressionable kids that the fact that their feelings are hurt is their fault for not intuiting the intentions of 40+ year old adults is unbelievably toxic, and it's no wonder why people are so nostalgia-bound to feverishly shut down criticism about the games. They've been guilt-tripped into believing the mod team can do no wrong and any controversy, even if valid, that springs up is just extrapolated by people that haven't been laboriously groomed to know what the mod team wants to hear.

Countless times throughout my time researching and playing the game, the number one advice I've heard has always been "suck up to the mods or they won't do anything for you". It's crystal clear that the moderators care more about the joy they get from having power over some 200 users who will kiss their ass if they say a buzzword more than they care about you, your child, or the game itself.

It's essentially a model scam Kickstarter's wet dream, a game propelled to release and popularity by its singular defining feature and left to fester on the shelf as the only game in its niche market. Because of this, I believe there's truly no better way to describe HI3, with its messy backend, refusal to improve, narcissistic moderators, broken features, poor visuals, and inefficiency than as the Yandere Simulator of horse games.

[drabbles-mc]

Palliative Care

Horacio Carrillo & F!Reader

For @narcosfandomdiscord's Day of Horror: came back wrong

Warnings: 18+, major character death, angst, scars, blood, hospitals, all the sad angsty things idk

Word Count: 1.8k

A/N: Is this a day late? Yes. Is this one of the strangest, saddest fucked up little things I've ever written? Also yes. No clue where my brain went during this but here we are. I also think this might be my first ever fic with no dialogue. What a day!

Narcos Taglist: @ashlingnarcos @garbinge @hausofmamadas @cositapreciosa @narcolini @proceduralpassion @artemiseamoon @justreblogginfics (If you want to be added to any of my taglists, please let me know!)

palliative care (noun): treatment that reduces the pain without curing its cause

You had been one of the lucky ones. You knew it, too. With the minor exception of a few scars running up the side of your body, you came home fully intact. And compared to what you’d seen happen to so many others, a few ridges along your ribcage and thigh were hardly worth mentioning. You were grateful, in your mind at least, even if you didn’t always feel it all the way down into your bones.

The only thing that had gotten you through the atrocities that you’d seen, the losses that you’d suffered despite how hard you tried to prevent them, was the knowledge that one day you would be back home again. You weren’t going to live out your days wading through the carnage of war. And even though there was no guarantee of it, you were determined not to become and be buried as part of the mess yourself.

Unfortunately, no amount of determination and wishful thinking prepared you for what it was going to feel like being home again. All the days and nights you spent begging for some stability, some peace, maybe even a little bit of quiet, and once you got it you had no idea what to do with any of it. So many months in the midst of war and once you were relieved of that sense of urgency, your body just couldn’t accept it. There was no turning the dial down. The last thing you wanted was more chaos, but it felt like you were constantly filled with adrenaline, ready to handle crises that weren’t even there.

After months of struggling with guilt and the dreaded thought that you were somehow subconsciously ungrateful for the opportunity to be home and safe again, when you were asked whether or not you wanted another change of venue, it felt like the only answer was yes. It’d be different than last time, they assured you, but it wasn’t going to be some quiet hospital in the middle of a relatively safe city like where you’d been in the interim. Part of you knew that this was the last thing you probably needed, but if peace and quiet wasn’t fixing you, maybe getting thrown back into it would do the trick. So, off to Medellín you went.

It was different, just like they’d said. But in a lot of ways it was also the same. The apparent spontaneity felt familiar. There wasn’t always an obvious rhyme or reason to when the violence would crescendo, although you supposed that was the point.

The thing that felt the most familiar, though, was the underlying feeling of futility that you felt. More officers, more soldiers brought to you begging you to not let them die. You’d spent enough time doing triage on battlegrounds to know relatively quickly if you were going to have any control over the outcome. You hated how often you didn’t. But you knew better than to let them know that. Calm, collected, reassurance even if it was a lie was the best you could do for any of them regardless of whether or not you could help them.

You didn’t like the feelings that came rushing back, the familiarity of it all, but even though that was the case, it was the first time in a long time that you didn’t feel like you were out of place.

You grew to recognize the people that filtered in and out of the hospital on a regular basis. Sometimes they saw you frequently because they themselves were getting injured. As much as you hated seeing people getting hurt over and over again, at least return trips meant that they kept surviving.

The other people you saw frequently were the officers in charge. Sometimes they were getting patched up by you, but other times they were coming through to check on their men. All you could hope was that you had good news for them. The same way you could tell within moments of seeing someone getting brought in whether you’d be able to help them or not, officers soon learned to be able to tell whether or not you had good news for them. They never held it against you when you didn’t—the families were another story.

You didn’t know much of anything about Colonel Carrillo outside of the things you’d heard about him in passing. Your conversations with him were always short, always professional. He never seemed to show any emotion to you one way or another regardless of whether you were delivering good or bad news to him. His expression almost always stayed the same. Neutral, hardened. No matter what you said, he’d always conclude the conversation with a tight nod, and an even tighter “Thank you” before going off to wherever he was needed next. He never seemed to want to listen to your apologies, whatever condolences you used to try and offer him. You stopped giving them after awhile—he seemed almost relieved about it.

His absence wouldn’t have been something that crossed your mind at all if you hadn’t heard other nurses and doctors talking about it in passing. People stopped showing up all the time—you considered yourself lucky if you weren’t there to find out the reason why. If you hadn’t heard the murmurs, you never would have given it another thought. You would have just hoped the best for him, while in the back of your mind knowing it most likely wasn’t the case.

But then you heard them talking about how he’d gotten sent away. You watched the news enough to put it all together. Part of you felt relieved knowing that at least he was one person who wasn’t being sent away from the war in a pine box. Another part of you felt the tightness reappearing in your chest the more you thought about it. You knew what it was like to try and leave the fight. You’d done it of your own volition and you still couldn’t handle being away from the thick of it all. You could scarcely imagine what being pulled away before he was ready would do to someone who seemed to operate the way that Carrillo did.

He faded from your mind eventually, the way that most people tended to when you saw so many of them each day. You had much more present issues to think about. All of Colombia did. The surges of violence had you feeling like your hands would never be clean of blood no matter how hard you scrubbed them, no matter how scalding the water was. More officers than you could try to count or keep track of, dead before they got to you if not shortly after. There was no way to keep up with it. It was a feeling of drowning that you had felt before, one you never wanted to feel again. This time around, though, you at least knew how to tread water—exhausting but vital work.

The days had blurred together so completely that you lost track. You didn’t know how long Carrillo was gone for, but suddenly he was back again. He strode across the hospital floors like he hadn’t even been gone a day. You saw the difference in him, though. Soldiers all reached a point where they get pushed so far that they will either break, or they’ll evolve. You’ve seen the fallout of both those options and it was impossible to say that either one was preferable. But you could tell by the set of Carrillo’s jaw that he wasn’t broken. He was different, but not broken.

He spoke to you like no time at all had passed, so you returned the favor. Right back into old scripts, old routines. He had more jagged edges now where you just had more exhaustion. Maybe when all of this was said and done you’d simply be too tired to do anything but adjust to a quiet, normal life. More wishful thinking.

You felt like you had needed to claw your way out of your shift. The hours just kept slipping on by. Just when it seemed like there was no end in sight, you were told to go home. You didn’t need to be told twice, immediately taking off to get your things so you could grab what precious few hours of sleep that you could manage.

Your car keys were in your hand when you heard the sudden rush of yelling voices and running feet. It would’ve been so easy to pretend you’d missed it all, to slip out the back and cross the lot to your car. Avoiding it was infinitely easier than confronting it and throwing yourself into the middle of it. You knew that. Easier would’ve been such a nice change of pace. And yet you threw your keys back into your locker and headed back out towards the floor.

There was chaos and cussing and men groaning in pain. Immediately it became a game of Tetris trying to organize and find room for everyone, both patients and hospital staff alike. Only so many of you could populate a floor and still do your jobs without tripping over each other.

You were trying to figure out where the hell you were supposed to start when you felt someone’s hand reach out and grab yours. You returned the gesture on instinct, never one to deprive a desperate soldier of a last hint of comfort. However, when you looked down at the person who had grabbed your hand, you couldn’t hide the surprise on your face. You’d never seen the Colonel being anything other than cold and composed—never the one on this end of the equation. You’d definitely never seen him reaching out to anyone for comfort.

When you took in the state of him, you couldn’t help but to wonder if he was just looking to you to confirm what he already knew. No amount of tactical gear in the world would’ve saved him from whatever he’d gone through before he got brought to you. Despite all the blood and the pale look of his face, the grip he had on your hand was surprisingly strong.

All of your usual words got caught in the back of your throat, things you would typically say to provide comfort in moments like this. But it was Colonel Carrillo, a man who wanted nothing to do with being placated. It was better that way for both of you now because the lump at the back of your throat made it impossible for you to say anything at all, comforting or not.

The tighter he tried to hold onto your hand, the more you tried to match his grip. You brought your hand that he wasn’t holding to rest on his shoulder, fingers wrapping over the curve of it. You tried not to pay attention to the blood that seeped from his uniform into the pads of your fingertips. Even as the seconds ticked by, and his grip started to weaken, and tears began to cut the edges of your eyes and his, you didn’t apologize. He didn’t ask for one either. He didn’t ask for anything. He just held your hand until he couldn’t anymore.

[kexing]

Its so wild to see how openly and aggressively people hate forcebook and their work. Iknow bl opinions are so varied but other than the odd 'this is not for me' i never really come across hate for pairings on here (maybe its different on twitter idk) so its so insane that when it comes to fb people just stop being considerate to fans or even look to bother them actively. there are some actors who get rightly criticized for awful behaviour but with fb it just seems like its the one pairing that people are allowed to shit on and thats why they do it? bc what's the worst they've done? not act the way you would want them to or take part in a show you didn't like?? why would people then focus so much on them rather than focus on the stuff they do like? its so baffling i truly wonder if its just 'playground join in with the bully' behaviour. sorry thats been on my mind as someone who only filters into bl every now and then, its so strange.

hi there!

RIGHT????? before them, i had never seen hate for pairings on this level. i knew about some problematic actors and pairings that had broken up so most people had moved on but actual gratuitous hate??? was unknown to me.

i used to think we all minded our business with our faves and everyone lived in peace. at least it was like that here on tumblr for my first years of bl. i do think twitter is different and probably worse, but the way their behavior has been poisoning tumblr as well is concerning.

truly. i don’t KNOW what’s with forcebook that people seem to enjoy hating on them. they’ve been on the public eye for nearly two years now, they have zero rumors, zero scandals, zero accusations, work hard, just do their thing, openly support the lgbtq+ community, all their coworkers like them, for fanfest in japan geminifourth, joong and phuwin went to force’s room in the middle of the night to hang out because their adore spending time with him, their previous directors adore them, p’film considers forcebook his actual children and p’new opens his arms for book to bear hug him whenever he sees him.

hell, even their old classmates from school came forward to say they were really nice people back then. that force was popular because he was friends with everyone and book was quiet but sweet.

when there’s actual deeply problematic actors out there. people who get accused of unspeakable things EVERY SINGLE DAY. and fans still defend them and give them 937482848384 chances.

it just doesn’t make sense to me. WHY would you be so obsessed with someone you don’t like? focus on your faves instead of complaining about other people just doing their job!!!!!!!!!!

i do usually call it “hate train” because it seems like everybody’s hopping on it just because it’s going around a lot.

but STILL. i see some criticism that’s just baffling. the way people will take forcebook’s words out of context and attack them with it, invent shit saying they’re nepotism babies (they are not). some even use forcebook’s friendship against them which is????? surreal. jobless behavior. go find a hobby or something else to do???? WHAT ARE YOU GAINING FROM ALL THIS?????

force and book are very open about their friendship and how it’s not perfect because they like being honest with us instead of painting a false image of their relationship, it’s not for people to turn it into weapons!! the disrespect is just so infuriating!

i’m not asking for everyone to start loving forcebook, just RESPECT THEM. or even ignore them. but don’t ruin things for them 😭😭😭 and us fans who are just trying to support them.

it’s okay! i wonder about the same things every single day. and i sincerely don’t know if i’m just too biased or something but i have never understood the amount of hate and still don’t because i would never do this to anyone. i never expected things to become like this.

but oh well :/

[planetpiastri]

16 with bob pls

an anon after my own heart 🫶🏻 when i rbed that list i immediately thought of 16 w bob. hope this is up to snuff!!

16 - meeting in a cinema, both there with their friends, but sitting next to each other and accidently grabbing each other’s hand when something scary happens on screen

word count - 1.1k

You didn’t even want to go see this stupid movie. You’d wanted to go see that new Billy Eichner romcom, or that new movie with Julia Roberts and George Clooney. But as usual, your friends hadn’t listened, and now you were stuck in a crammed theater watching Georgina Campbell follow Bill Skarsgard into the very creepy and very gross underground tunnels of their Airbnb.

To your right sat your two best friends, giggling with excitement at each scare while you flinched and gasped, hating it. To your left was a group who had come in partway through the trailers, whispering and apologizing and squeezing into their seats. You were shoulder-to-shoulder with a guy who was sitting so still you worried he might have stopped breathing. That made you feel a little better.

On screen, Georgina Campbell screamed out for Bill Skarsgard again. You flinched, hissing under your breath, “Oooh, be quiet, be quiet, be quiet!” 

Your friends giggled excitedly, one of them grinning as they watched through their fingers.

When Bill Skarsgard finally reappeared, the whole theater gasped. You gripped the armrests of your seat so hard it hurt, squeezing your eyes shut. Next to you, the guy had put a hand over his heart, and in the dim light it almost looked like he was smiling—or was that a pained grimace?

“There’s something down here,” whispered Bill Skarsgard.

“No,” you groaned, scrunching down in your seat, your hands still clenching the armrests. 

The whole theater was quiet, waiting, holding its breath. One of your friends had their fingers pressed tightly to their lips, their eyes wide. Next to you, the guy reached up and pushed nervously at his glasses.

A creature came screaming out of the darkness with a loud musical sting, and the theater shrieked in alarm.

“Fuck!” yelped the guy next to you, jumping hard in his seat as you did the same, nearly folding in half. A hand closed over the one you had clenched around the armrest, squeezing tight, but then lifted as soon as it had happened.

“Sorry,” the guy whispered, glancing at you nervously.

“It’s okay,” you murmured back, drawing your knees up to your chest. “I’m scared, too.”

He exhaled a shaky laugh, attempting to smile at you.

The movie continued—apparently Justin Long is here, too?—but before long, the characters were back in those terrible tunnels and you had your legs up in the chair again. When there was another sharp musical sting, you sucked in a sharp breath and reached out, grabbing a fistful of the guy’s sleeve in alarm. You let go quickly, squeaking out a quiet, “Sorry,” of your own.

“You’re okay,” he whispered back, his eyes huge and fixated on the screen. He reached over and absently patted your hand, like he didn’t even notice he was doing it.

At that exact moment, Justin Long screamed and started running from whatever was chasing him, and you and the guy both flinched. His hand tightened on yours, and before he could pull away, you laced your fingers through his and held on tight, grateful for the grounding presence.

He turned in the dark, his eyes wide and surprised behind his glasses. The light from the screen filtered over his face, revealing the bluest eyes you’d ever seen, and you realized with an embarrassed jolt that he was really cute.

You whispered, “Is this okay?”

He nodded and half-smiled, turning back to the movie and shifting in his seat so that it was easier for you two to hold hands. A pleased flush of warmth spread across your cheeks as you did the same, leaning against the armrest between you and tucking your legs up in the chair.

By the time Justin Long and Georgina Campbell had started to desperately climb the water tower, you were as close to your seat neighbor as the movie theater chairs would allow. Your hands were still intertwined, and at some point when you’d buried your face in his shirt, his other hand had come around to rest on your leg, where it still remained.

The credits finally started to roll and the lights in the theater came up. You stretched out your legs, wincing at how tight your muscles were from all the clenching you’d been doing. You were the first to disentangle your fingers, and you immediately regretted it.

“Hi,” you laughed nervously, turning in your seat to look at him.

“Hi,” he said back, letting out a nervous little chuckle to match yours.

You held out your hand and introduced yourself. He laughed again before shaking your hand and saying, “I’m Bob.”

“Bob?” you said, fighting back a smile.

He nodded. “Just Bob.”

“Well,” you said, “it’s very nice to meet you, Bob.”

“Yeah. You too,” he added, smiling shyly. Behind him, his friends were starting to gather their things and stand up. He glanced over his shoulder quickly before saying, “Oh, uh, I guess we’re about to head out, but it was—you know—thanks for—”

You cut him off by turning to your friends, who were watching your interaction with matching knowing smiles, and asking, “Do either of you have a pen?”

They handed you one in record time and you turned back to Bob. “Give me your hand,” you instructed.

“Okay.” He pushed up his sleeve and proffered a bare expanse of forearm. You made sure to keep your thoughts strictly above board as you scribbled your phone number onto the inside of his wrist. Then you squeezed his hand warmly and leaned over, planting a kiss on his cheek. When you pulled away, he had a dumbfounded smile pulling at his mouth.

“If you want to go see another horror movie or anything, let me know,” you said, sounding a lot more confident than you felt. “Sitting with you made it tolerable.”

“Just horror?” he asked, still looking at the ink on his arm. “I was thinking maybe a rom-com next time.”

You were so busy watching the sweet, sheepish expression on his face that it took you a moment to realize you were grinning. You nodded. “A rom-com sounds nice. I’ll see you later, Bob.”

As you stood up and made your way out of the theater with your friends, you watched Bob go back to his own group, where they all enthusiastically pounded him on the shoulders while he blushed, tugging his sleeve carefully back down to hide your phone number. Your own cheeks were warm as you lowered your head and followed your friends back into the daylight, figuring that maybe that horror movie wasn’t so bad after all.