#barbava

[hoescarer]

yall dont understand how important barbava is to me guyss GUYYSS. theyre like opposites but both equally fucked up in the sense that both of them hide behind these confident and assertive personalities and try to be perfect all the time guysyss :(. and and aand even though their beliefs clash alot they still try to help each other as much as they can and ad and :( guys :(

[murcielagatito]

my barbava heart is so full right now 🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺

[cdyssey]

for the short prompts thing, because you know I’m gonna take advantage of that 👀 Ava and Barbara either as a ship or a dynamic: “Irredeemable”

You know what, Michael—ISWJSJSNS, I told @jeritoodles I would write some Barbava sometime, so let’s do it. Let’s fucking GO.

CW: Infidelity; Suggestiveness; Religious Guilt

—

Ava is nearly asleep when Barbara’s rich voice rings through the darkness, low and utterly broken. They’re in Ava’s bedroom together, their limbs hopelessly entangled beneath the sheets, even though well before five in the morning, Barbara will extract herself from the beautiful puzzle of their bodies, quietly get dressed, and go home to Gerald before he gets back from his graveyard shift…

But for now, they’re inextricable from each other, and Ava likes the way that her chin comfortably fits against the crook of the older woman’s neck.

Thinks it’s cozy here.

Safe.

But this also means that she hears every syllable of what the kindergarten teacher has to say in the dead of night when she apparently thinks no one’s awake to listen.

“Lord, forgive me.”

It’s a very common prayer.

Simple, economical, but undoubtedly effective.

It’s excruciating to hear, though, when Ava knows exactly what she’s prayin’ for forgiveness about—for the way their mouths interlocked just an hour ago. 

And their hands.

Their legs.

And so many other body parts besides.

For the fact that she had to take off her ring to be a good partner to Ava.

And relatedly, for the acknowledgement that in doing so, she was simultaneously being a horrible wife.

It’s far more complicated than that, Ava knows. Ava is well-aware. And she has tried to convince Barbara as much, stubbornly arguing for their total complexities as human beings, for the years of repression they’ve both never fully recovered from, for the slow death of the Howard marriage that neither party will ever truly confront.

But the bottom line is that Barbara thinks that what they have between them—these ephemeral nights and their other stolen moments besides—are absolutely immoral.

Petty thefts.

Repeated indiscretions.

Crimes against God Almighty or somethin’ unspeakable like that.

She had once called them—and what they were doing—irredeemable, and Ava had firmly told her to never fucking say that again.

‘Cause she wasn’t going to have something that made them both feel so good be called dirty and wrong, worthy of damning their eternal souls.

Sure, she plays faster and looser with the rules of the Bible than Barbara Howard ever could, but even with her less-than-stellar grasp on theology, she knows that God’s grace has gotta be far more liberal than what humans so cruelly and arbitrarily categorize as sin.

“You always actin’ like He hasn’t already, Barb,” she murmurs sleepily. “God knows your heart. He knows that you love Him.”

“Ava!” Barbara inhales sharply, startling violently in bed, rocking the temple of their bodies. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart. I-I thought you were asleep.”

And Ava, eyes still half-closed, only reaches upwards through the blackness and cups her partner’s cheek, moving a stray curl behind her ear, her fingertips skimming that warm and smooth skin.

“You gotta stop persecuting yourself,” she continues. “Hatin’ yourself, goddangit, when you’re so loved, Barbara Howard.”

By her daughters.

By her students.

Even by that damn fool of a husband she has, who doesn’t know what he’s letting slip from his distant fingertips.

By Melissa.

By the three dorkateers.

By Ava.

Yes, Ava loves her—clearly, emphatically, irrefutably; and she’s almost vain enough to believe that she loves her better than them all; she just hasn’t figured out a way of saying it yet without sounding like she needs to hear it back. 

Of course, she does—absolutely, beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt. But it’s so hard for her to share that degree of vulnerability with another, especially when she’s terrified to ever let that someone go.

“It isn’t that simple,” Barbara rasps back, hoarse and disbelieving. She comes from a generation where any and everything good is only achieved through a goddamn struggle. Love is never easy. It is only pain. Earned through a constant martyrdom of self and dragging a cross up a godless hill.

Barbara Howard only thinks love is love when it hurts her.

When it devastates her precious soul.

“‘Cuz you won’t let it be anything else,” the principal snorts knowledgeably but not unkindly. “You think it’s your duty to suffer.”

Barbara doesn’t say anything to this, the silence thin as it stretches between them, and this is an answer in and of itself.

Barbara loathes herself.

Barbara has subscribed to the ass backwards belief in infinite suffering for the Lord.

Barbara believes that this—yes, this—is unconditional, Christian love.

Ava makes up her mind then, never one to keep it unresolved for very long. Still cradling Barbara’s face in the darkness, using this barest touch as her steadying anchor, she raises herself from the older woman’s warm embrace—

“Ava?” Barbara asks, confused and audibly afraid. It’s pitiful, a little pathetic. “What are you—“

—and she descends upon the other’s lips like a soft and holy rain.

“Ava,” she moans, breathless, still concerned. “Wait, you don’t have to—“

“Shut up, Barb,” she says, so gently, between kisses, between caresses, between generous and loving and utterly compassionate touches. “I’m showin’ you exactly what you deserve.”

[murcielagatito]

yknow whatd be the wildest curveball to happen in canon that would b so good -> if ava and barbara got their gay on

[murcielagatito]

PEAK BARBAVA CONTENT

[murcielagatito]

mrs howard, you are once again, that girl <3