#IM CRYING BTW. I FUCKING HATE MYSELF WHY DID I REWATCH THIS SHOW

[virmillion]

ragt rambling :/

so this is. DEFINITELY. because i just watched the good place s3e6 again and it ALWAYS gets me because of who i am and where i'm at as a person but. i really think i might up and die if you gave rough a sibling. i think sister, because that's easier (and statistically you should probably have at least one cis character that's not a parent). i also think it should be a younger sister. i think rough's parents loved him, but they were bad at it. they were bad at being parents, and they were inexperienced, because being a parent is hard, and even though they had good intentions, it still sucked. it sucked for rough, and no matter how much they wanted to do good, that doesn't fix how much they fucked him up.

but then they had a second kid. a girl, a beautiful baby girl, planned and wanted and perfect. where rough was an accident, something to be worked around as they tried to learn how to be parents before they were truly adults, this girl was planned. im calling her emily for now, exclusively because unsaid emily always makes me cry, but also a little bit bc of the kid in the drew gooden video about the christmas mail movie, which i can recite from memory.

so along comes emily, and she's perfect and amazing and everything rough wasn't and isn't. their parents dote on her, because they learned from their mistakes. they lavish her with attention and gifts and driving to the after-school clubs - she's in all the sports, all the extracurriculars, they buy her all the pieces to all the hobbies she picks up every other week. rough is in the photography club. sometimes he gets some spare cash, which he socks away to eventually buy a better camera than the one that comes in his phone.

and he loves her, he really does. it's impossible not to, she's so nice and genuine and sincere in everything she does, she couldn't tell a lie if she wanted to. she doesn't get the perfect grades, but she works hard for B's and gets praised for an honest effort from every teacher. rough wishes he could hate her, and he wishes he could hate his parents for doing this to him, but it's no one's fault. it's not even his own fault, so there's no fair way for him to be mad at anyone, this is just how things are, and what can he even do about it! he's here, and he's a little fucked up, and emily's here, too, and she's with him, and she doesn't care that he's a little fucked up, because she loves him anwyay!! they don't get each other, rough wouldn't know the first thing about getting her, because her world is so alien from his own, despite the two being parallel

and then rough dies, and emily is alone. and really, what difference has there been before now, in her being an only child who happened to have a roommate? things are hard at first, and she misses her brother, and everyone is so understanding, but no one lashes out at her, or gets mad at her for doing the same. everyone understands that she's confused about her feelings, and that's worse, because what does she do with that? what do either of them do with that?

and she doesn't even know that rough is still there. rough is always there, because it's never been fair that he was loved, and that wasn't enough. it wasn't, and now it never will be, because there's nowhere for his parents to put that love but straight back into emily. and although emily doesn't know it, when she goes to the store and she buys the polaroid camera rough coveted and she takes pictures of everything, as if that might bring him back, rough is in all those pictures. he interrupts the dust motes spiraling through the light from the window, he nudges his littlest pet shop figures to be unaligned, and when emily finally turns the camera on herself, he's there, too, forcing a grin from over her shoulder and wishing she knew. she doesn't, of course. the newest picture prints, and she's a little bit out of focus, the camera instead choosing to zero in on the space behind her. she folds this picture up and keeps it in her pocket and sleeps in rough's bed that night, and he sits against the side and sorts all the pictures she took, spreads them out for her to see when she wakes up, because that's all he can do for either of them.

he doesn't know how to miss his parents, and he's not sure they do, either. he knows how to miss his sister, though, because he's been doing it all his life. he puts his swimming goggles around the camera when he leaves