#SURE FEELS LIKE IT

[companionjones]

Sure Feels Like It

Pairing: Billy Butcher x Fem!Reader

Fandom: The Boys (Amazon Video)

Summary: You get hurt. Billy wasn't there.

Warnings: Cursing, a badly written cockney accent

*******

"Where is she?"

MM and Frenchie got to Butcher before he could see you.

The taller man stopped Butcher. "Black Noir surprised us. She took the brunt of it, but we were able to get her out of there."

Frenchie explained, "It looks worse than it is."

"I don' care how bad it fuckin' 'looks'. You tell me straigh' away when something like this 'appens. No excep--" Billy paused for a moment upon seeing you. "Fuck," was all he could say.

You heard the cockney man swear once he entered the room. You opened your eyes to see Billy staring worriedly at you. "Hey, Butch."

Usually, Billy cringed at your annoying shortening of his name. This time, however, you saw no reaction to it. Billy took your steps necessary to get to you.

Hughie and Kimiko, who had been surrounding you, backed off upon Billy's approach. He knelt at your side. With one look from him, the room cleared for you two.

Billy took over from Hughie, who had been dabbing a wet cloth on the road rash on your forehead. "The one time I leave you alone..."

"I was not alone, and you know it," you pushed.

Butcher pushed back. "Well, I wasn' there, and look what 'appened to ya."

His worried words caused you to go silent for a moment. But not for long. "This wasn't your fault."

Billy was still trying his best to patch up your wounds. "Sure as fuck feels like it."

*******

Author's Note: Thank you for reading! Fill up that heart and reblog if you liked it. I would also really appreciate a comment, if you have the time. If you would like to read more, check out my masterlists. Have a nice day, night, or whatever time it is for you! <3 <3 <3

[itscrazylate]

taking a homestuck quiz with people who’ve read (??) homestuck had the same energy as reading your zodiac chart to astrology ppl.

Am I getting insulted when they said ‘that makes SO much sense’ a bunch? Idk dude.

[sanguine-tenshi]

Having watched s4 finally.

Eddie really puts into perspective how much other characters shit on Steve when he had his big development all the way back in s1.

[unknownarmageddon]

On today’s episode of Armageddon takes fucking forever to write anything substantial

[not-the-organ]

he got really fucking drunk

Great…

[shithowdy]

i thought my laptop was on its last leg because it was running at six billion degrees and using 100% disk space* at all times and then i turned off shadows and some other windows effects and it was immediately cured. i just did the same to my roommate's computer and its performance issues were also immediately cured. okay. i guess.

so i guess if you have creaky freezy windows 10/11 try searching "advanced system settings", go to performance settings, and uncheck "show shadows under windows" and anything else you don't want. hope that helps someone else.

*yes sorry i mean usage i posted this before bed :( i do not mean the hard drive is full aaaaghhhh

[unsung-idiot]

don't show him modern technology; it won't end well

bonus under the cut:

[skrunksthatwunk]

see 0 note flop posts aren't that bad when they're personal but 0 note fandom posts feel literally so bad. like if you don't wanna play toys with me anymore just say that. i'll pack up my super cool awesome things and go and i'll sit on the other side of the playground by myself and i won't even look at you. fuck

[celeste-tyrrell]

is it really true that the average person's pain level is a 0?

[hinamie]

mentor

[cotehardie]

yearning so hard I could burn a hole through my heart

[mm974]

Starting to work in an office and realising a 9-5 in which you get an hour lunch break, flexible working hours and WFH options and great coworkers you go out for pints with after work is actually a dream come true

[bacchuschucklefuck]

typical tavern scene

[sui-imi]

Funeral, right

---

been seeing some discussion about canon/fanon sans re: papyrus' death, and then i thought, unrelatedly, "hey i wonder what he did with the dust"

[shadowtraveled]

"mithrun is the only real monsterfucker in dungeon meshi" is objectively the funniest bit you can get out of his everything, but in all seriousness i think his attraction to his love interest is deliberately overstated—and that makes sense, because romantic jealousy is a classic and digestible motive, which is explicitly what kabru was aiming for in condensing mithrun's backstory, and also because until chapter 94, mithrun wasn't willing to admit to the true nature of his desires.

but because romantic envy is both classic and digestible, it probably isn’t a unique enough or complicated enough desire to tempt a demon’s appetite. mithrun’s wish, as far as we can figure from kabru’s reduced retelling, was to have a life in which he had never become one of the canaries, and that carries like 3857 implications and desires within it. that’s delicious. his love interest acts as sort of a red herring to his motivation for making it, though. (side note: i'm saying "love interest" here because, keeping in mind that i barely speak japanese on a good day anymore, "想い人" is something i'd usually take as just kind of an old-fashioned and romantic way to refer to a lover, but in context i wonder if both the connotation of yearning and the vagueness are intentional, and i think this phrasing gets those aspects of it more effectively. anyway.)

mithrun considered his love interest to be untrustworthy. there was a minute where i thought that comment might be about a similar-looking elf (yugin, one of his squad members), but comparing the two…

the "sketchy" arrow is definitely referring to the elf we know as his love interest—the bangs go toward her right, she only has the one forehead ornament, and, most notably, her ears aren't notched.

every time she’s given a full-body depiction in his dungeon, she’s drawn as a chimera, with the body of a snake from the waist down. (side note: the “what if a dungeon has chimeras before reaching level 4?”/“then the dungeon lord is unstable” exchange just being mithrun grilling his past self alive is so funny. he’s so. but anyway) there are a couple things about this.

first, the snake part of the chimera appears to be modeled after some species of coral snake mimic

which, in the biology-for-fun manga, i… doubt is a coincidence, especially with the added context of the “untrustworthy” comment. the dungeon’s conjured illusion of mithrun’s love interest was a harmless copycat of a venomous original. for whatever reason, he felt this person was a threat and made up a "safe" version of her to be in a relationship with, and while it’s definitely possible to be attracted to or even love someone you find to be toxic and/or intimidating, when you take that into consideration alongside the configuration of her body, you get some interesting implications.

which brings us to our second point: if we assume that mithrun was not in fact fucking a snake, then sexual attraction, at least, was so far removed from his idea of a relationship with this person that he did not even bother to keep her dungeon copy human enough to maintain the illusion of the option of a sexual relationship. this is somewhat echoed in the depictions of their interactions, which also imply a frankly unexpected romantic distance. she kisses his cheek and he doesn't seem to react; she's at the edge of a narrow bed with only one set of pillows, on top of his blankets while he's underneath them.

the kiss is particularly interesting because it seems to contrast the text. kabru's narration tells us this was everything mithrun could have asked for, but mithrun is there looking unreadable to pensive, likely because this is right before the panel that makes it clear things in the dungeon are beginning to go wrong.

walking through this backwards for a minute, we have the physical barrier of his bedding and the spatial separation inherent in a bed made for one person, the emotional barrier of his mounting anxiety getting in the way of his ability to enjoy the affection he sought, and... the snake, which historically carries the connotation of temptation, yes, but also mistrust, barring physical intimacy. okay. ok. if a dungeon reflects the mentality of its lord, all of this might suggest that mithrun was not able to have any real desire for a relationship with this person. his unwillingness to be vulnerable or let another person in was insurmountable. but in that case, why was she such a focal point that she remained to the end, after his dungeon had stopped creating iterations of his friends to come and visit him? why would he get so upset over her meeting with his brother that he became lord of a dungeon about it?

well. mithrun's brother was also interested in her, probably genuinely. and mithrun had to win.

you have an older brother who your parents completely ignore, probably in part because he is chronically ill/disabled and almost definitely in part because he received a ton of recessive traits that resulted in rumors that he was an illegitimate child. you are aware, most likely because those same parents fucking told you, that you actually are an illegitimate child. but they keep you around because you had the good fortune of looking just like your mother. what can that possibly teach you but that you, like your brother, are disposable?

it's utterly unsurprising that mithrun, under these circumstances, developed a pathological need to be better than everyone around him. people don't keep you otherwise. i'd argue this is also why he says he looked down on everyone he knew while milsiril claims his dungeon reeked of feelings of inferiority—he sought out people's worst traits and prioritized them in his mind to protect his already extremely fragile sense of self-worth, and all the while he tried to be as likable and high-performing as he possibly could be. his parents disposed of him anyway, but even then he tried to keep up the performance. he was kind to everyone. he never once lost to a dungeon.

when he saw his "love interest" meeting up with his brother, what he saw was himself being replaced by a person his parents had always treated as worthless, and if that was what they thought of the child they'd kept, what value could anyone possibly see in the bastard they'd given away to die? mithrun and kabru tell the story like he wanted to win this unnamed elf's heart, but it was never about being with her. it was about cementing his worth, proving that he didn't deserve to be thrown away.

and so it's particularly cruel that his demon discarded him, too. but maybe it's also particularly gentle that, in the end, there was someone who refused to even consider giving up on him.

kui laid it out in three panels better than i could hope to.

yeah. it's love. you wanted to be loved, even when the only way you were able to understand it was through the desire to be wanted, and you wanted that so badly that the idea of being consumed felt like the promise of finally mattering to someone.

[flamboyantposting]

Is this anything