#because they were both dealt such shitty hands and they're just not used to love like that. unconditional and limitless

[megatraven]

fake fic title: “(you’re) too sweet for me” for sydrian

yessssssssss >:3c

Sydrian - Sydney loves him, somehow. Adrian doesn't quite understand it, beyond the fact that he loves her, too, and they understand one another more than anyone else ever could. Despite this, sometimes he doubts that he's deserving of her and her love. The pills help with his mood, but there's often part of him that wonders what he ever did to deserve her kindness, that now-frequent smile, her softened gaze. He tries to push those thoughts down; he doesn't doubt her, after all, and he never wants her to think she does.

But like clockwork, Sydney figures him out, and pokes at his denial of any problem until he comes clean. Together they can do anything- he's been convinced of that since day one- and this is no different. That's what Sydney tells him, before launching into what must be some kind of a plan with a terribly high number of steps, that all involve showing him just how much he means to her.

From a timeline of photos, to a replica of Hopper he'd made for them both, to the AYE shirt she still keeps tucked safely in her drawer, and to the Pies N Stuff mug that she takes her coffee in every morning. Sifting through one piece of their life at a time, she convinces him that he's done as much for her as she's done for him. That he deserves every bit of love and sweetness she can muster.

[sky-fire-forever]

Responding to your line that you put in the water for izzyxreader asks —

Maybe reader is super tough all the time, and so they and Izzy bond over repressing feelings and everything, and then Izzy goes through his transformation and healing era and the reader feels abandoned because everyone on this crew is touchy-feely and now they’re all alone in putting mind over emotion

But then they find out some really bad news (maybe they lost a loved one or something) and fall apart at the seams, and Izzy is there to pick up the pieces

Idk

[AN: I try to leave it vague as to what the bad news actually is, so I'll leave it to your imagination! This is my first time writing X Reader fic, so I hope it's any good! Also, I am posting this on mobile, so I apologize for any formatting errors]

FALLING APART [IZZY HANDS X GENDER NEUTRAL READER]

Izzy Hands is the only one on the ship who understands you. Or so you thought.

These days, it doesn't seem like anyone understands you at all. Izzy included.

It used to be you and Izzy against the world. The two of you understood what it means to be pirates: It means bottling up the fear and the sadness and the… all of it. It means facing the world with a brave face despite how you might feel inside.

You both understood that. Once.

Izzy seems to have forgotten. He wears his emotions on his face now. He talks about them. He wears the title of Unicorn with pride. Things that Izzy wouldn't have been caught dead doing once upon a time.

It seems so easy for him now. He sits with the crew, smiles with them, congratulates them on a job well done. He belongs with them.

And all you can do is watch.

You're almost envious of his ability to change, to grow. It was less lonely being an outsider when Izzy was on the outside with you. Now, you just have to look in and watch as he builds this fantasy family. You wonder how much it will hurt him when it comes tumbling down.

"You could join us, you know," Izzy tells you one night as the crew huddles together by the light and you stand on your own. "No point in you drinking all alone."

You scoff and wave him off. "I don't do well with people." It's an old excuse, one you've used for years.

Just as he always has, Izzy sees through it. "You don't need to push them away. They're... not what we thought they were."

You narrow your eyes at him. "Just because you've gone soft doesn't mean we all will."

Izzy looks at you with something like sadness in his eyes. "The invitation's open."

But it wasn't an invitation you could accept.

Not until later, when a letter comes for you.

As you read it, your hands begin to shake. Your vision gets blurry as your eyes fill with tears. Before you know it, your entire body is trembling.

"Fuck," you whisper. "Fuck!" You shout it at the sea, crumpling the letter in your fist and hurling it at the ocean.

You can never catch a break, can you? The world loves punishing you no matter what you do. People like you don't get a happy ending.

That's something you've always known. You're a pirate and pirates' lives are full of bloodshed and misery and death. A happy ending has never been in the cards for you. Hell, you never even expected a happy middle.

You've never seen the point in crying over the shitty hand you've been dealt. Expressing emotions changes nothing, fixes nothing. So what's the point?

But in this moment, you can't hold it all in. You fall to your knees as tears hit your cheeks. You sob so hard you can hardly breathe. The world around you becomes a blur as you begin to cry.

Strong hands come to wrap around you. Your first instinct is to fight, to shove away whoever is offering you comfort. But you're just too tired and weak to bother.

"I've got ya. I've got you, love." Izzy's soothing voice washes over you as he pulls you into his lap. "I'm here."

Not long ago, the idea of Izzy Hands gently holding you as you fall apart would have been laughable. But here you sit, curled up against his chest as he rubs circles into your back.

You hiccup, trying desperately to regain some control over your breathing. "H-Hurts," you whimper through the tears. "Fuck, it hurts."

"I know," Izzy says softly. "I know, love. I know it hurts. Just let it all out, yeah?"

He presses a kiss to your temple and you squeeze your eyes shut. Sob after sob wrecks through you and you're powerless to stop it.

There's a reason you keep your emotions to yourself. Crying is painful and it's weakness and it fucking sucks. Why would you choose it if you could lock it all away instead?

But somehow crying in Izzy's arms doesn't feel quite as bad as you feared. It still fucking hurts, but he holds you through it, whispering gentle assurances all the while.

And when you've finally cried yourself out, a part of you feels… lighter. Like a great burden has been lifted from your shoulders and all it took was falling apart.

"Shit. I'm sorry," you mutter as you wipe your eyes on the back of your sleeve.

"Nothing to apologize for," Izzy says. "How are you feelin'?"

You hesitate before answering. "Better," you admit somewhat grumpily.

He smiles like he knows how much it pains you to admit that crying helped. "It's easier to fall apart when someone will help pick up the pieces." He reaches up to cup your cheek, brushing away a few stray tears with his thumb.

You swallow and if you had any tears left to shed, you're certain you'd start crying all over again.

Instead, you just wrap your arms around Izzy and hold him close, burying your face in his neck.

"Thank you," you whisper.

He holds you close like it's easy to do it. Like being there for you isn't the burden you know it must be. "Always, love."

And you believe him.

[yuriswitch]

there's this one thing that's been bothering us particularly badly as of late, and it's this recent surge in "normal people" going out of their way to mark all evildoers as "abnormal". It's far from the first time we encountered that kind of behavior, and we more or less get why so many people say things like "he's not a real christian" or "she's not a real mother" or "how sick do you have to be to do something like that" or "you have to be abnormal" and so on and so forth, especially when put in front of a shocking news of a particularly gruesome murder or something equally drastic.

It's uncomfortable, and hard to imagine yourself doing that, but you still see a person looking like any other, with all the outward features of a human just like you. I'm not really surprised, that when faced with someone that looks similar enough to them to count as a human, most people immediately separate themselves out by making up some sort of a "difference" major enough for them to be able to re-categorize this uncomfortably human-looking person as an inhumane monster. Completely outside of the realm of "normal people".

The problem is, that what that essentially does is create this assumption that harm is some sort of a symptom of "not being me enough syndrome" that ought to be treated in some way, or at least dealt with by means of isolation. This often involves throwing insults, accusations or otherwise asserting that the perpetrator must be mentally ill, or disabled, or an Arab or whatever is considered too far away from "normal"

On one hand, this is just another way normal people balance out the desire to be the only thing X in existence (something that we might as well call the "oneness perversion") with the need to recognize and react to any signs of something or someone unusual. Everyone is supposedly the same person, but depending on the degree of "deviation", weirdos like us either have a "sickness" that they believe they can "heal" (thus eliminating that pesky differentness) or don't even count as a human at all.

At the same time, doing this reassures the normals, that they will never have to assume responsibility for anything serious, because they're not "off enough" to do anything other than a minor, forgettable offense. And the way this interacts with both big events like the rise of fascism, with millions of people asserting that the fascists were all abnormal mental monsters from hell, and smaller more personal moments like "mommy loves you so she'd never do something like that" in response to us trying to tell her to stop doing something like that, is a major issue that could potentially result in yet another tragedy.

Unfortunately, the normals would have to acknowledge their capability to commit any harm imaginable and unimaginable, but most of them still seem to prefer comfort at our cost than any conscious effort to change and be a better person. And there's something really shitty about so many people immediately diagnosing all sorts of people from J.K.Rowling all the way to Adolf Hitler (admittedly it's not a particularly long way, but still) with all sorts of mental illnesses - schizophrenia, bpd, psychopathy, narcissism, even low libido and high libido for some reason.

This is really frustrating, because it's the everyday Joes of 20th century Germany that did the Holocaust. It's the standard view havers that radicalized so far right, that tried to do colonialism in Europe, and that were already okay with the concept enough to consider applying it to the "Wild East" as they called Eastern Europe in direct reference to the so called "Wild West" in America.

The serial killers and psychopaths and all the black characters that normals whiten themselves with were busy mentally breaking the fuck down from another day of burning the corpses of all the "abnormals" the nazis were exterminating on a mass scale. It's all wife-loving, dog-having, typical, everyday people that committed all of these atrocities, and we, the undesirables, were their primary targets of removal and eventually extermination. And it's high time the general public admits that and recognizes their own ability to do all evil, including the most disturbing and extreme of acts. If they can't do that, then we will all be doomed one day. Mind my words.

/Yui

[goron-king-darunia]

Annon-Guy: Finale - 1. Why was Richter surprised that Marta said "Courage is the magic that turns dreams into reality"? I know Richter learned it from Aster and taught Emil it, but still. 2. How come Marta and the others still care and look out for Ratatosk despite killing Aster? Marta still loves him because he's a part of Emil as they're the same person.

1. I figure Richter was surprised because he hadn’t expected the phrase to catch on or mean anything to Marta. For Richter, that was always something between him and Aster, and he only taught it to Emil because he thought it was something Emil needed to hear. I guess he didn’t expect it to be something meaningful to anyone except people like him, like Aster, like Emil.  2. I’m sure a lot of why everyone sticks with Emil is 1) The side of Ratatosk that IS Emil clearly feels bad about what he did to Aster and WANTS to be good, and Ratatosk, while he’s reluctant to outright say it because he’s a dope that doesn’t talk about feelings, also seems to feel bad even though he felt justified in attacking Aster at the time. 2) Emil and Ratatosk are a summon spirit, an entity necessary to the balance of the world, the closest tangible thing the world has to gods. There are people of many different religions who worship gods that did some pretty terrible things. So I’m sure part of it is some sort of “Emil/Ratatosk did something bad, but he’s necessary for the world to be healthy so we can’t blame him too much since we really need his help. But I’m sure the part the game wants us to focus on is that, on top of changing and wanting to be better and make amends for killing Aster, something he obviously regrets, the party, especially Marta, understands that part of the reason Ratatosk lashed out at all was because of what happened to his tree.  So it’s some combination of those factors. Kind of like I might forgive Richter for trying to stab Marta. From Richter’s perspective, he’s avenging Aster and preventing a minor deity from committing a genocide he is perfectly capable of enacting. Like, I want to punch Richter because “Dude this is not how you deal with trauma and if you have genuine concerns you should ASK FOR HELP and not try to do it on your own and/or manipulate people!” But I understand why he did what he did and I think if he worked hard afterward to make up for what he did, I could forgive his actions in the game. Similarly, if we understand Ratatosk’s perspective, how he's lashing out because he’s afraid, upset, in pain, and just wanted to be alone to grieve after he just woke up and some uppity mortals show up, don’t treat him with any respect, make demands, and then get in his face about how “actually, the creatures that killed your tree are very important” it gets easier to forgive the unforgivable. Killing Aster, also, was only one action. A crime of passion. What Richter did was a series of mistakes. He dug himself a hole and instead of asking for help he just kept fucking digging whereas Ratatosk, apart from being just a little too trigger happy and having a temper, really only did the one bad thing. Like, honestly, this entire game is a massive case of “people who were hurt tend to hurt other people.” Like, both of these boys need therapy and a hug but also some spanking because like... they clearly don’t know how to process trauma. So like, on the one hand, yes, both these boys deserve forgiveness and happiness and Emil unconditionally supporting Richter is definitely something Richter needs even if he doesn’t “deserve” it for everything he did in the Vanguard. Similarly, Marta’s unconditional support of Emil and Ratatosk is definitely something they both need even if Ratatosk might not deserve it for squishing Aster like a bug to make a point. On the other hand, both these boys have serious issues and as much as I like to “solve” Richter’s trauma by shipping him with Emil, Richter and Emil should, ideally, have some sort of therapy and prison sentence because like... they’re directly or indirectly responsible for people losing their lives and that not having a consequence, as much as I don’t WANT it to have consequences, is kind of shitty for the families people that died. If Brute and Marta are going to take responsibility, Richter and Emil/Ratatosk should too. Unless they all get freedom in which case unrealistic but it’s better than Brute doing jail time, Marta getting community service, Richter being stuck in the Ginnungagap for 1000 years/his whole life depending on how Ratatosk deals with Richter aging, and Emil doing whatever he ends up doing with Marta. Like, IDK, I feel like they all deserve happiness, despite what they did, but, like. That’s not how the justice system works so... IDK, the game does a REALLY good job of making EVERYONE the victim, and you just can’t help but woobify them because the circumstances they had life deal to them are just terrible and they didn’t deserve anything that happened to them. Ratatosk didn’t deserve to lose his tree, Richter didn’t deserve to lose Aster, Aster didn’t deserve to die while trying to help the world, Emil didn’t deserve to come into being to pay for Ratatosk’s mistakes, Marta didn’t deserve to be part of the Vanguard and watch her dad slowly go insane after she just lost her mom, Brute didn’t deserve to be manipulated into a militant organization’s leader. Everyone in the game got dealt a shitty hand in life and they all suffered because of it and because they suffered, they inevitably caused harm to others. IDK, if there are real gods in the Symphonia universe, not just the Spirits and not just “Martel” but, like, actual gods that influence the events on Aselia? They need to be slapped. “What if we just give these guys unresolved trauma on purpose?” is, like, great from a narrative’s perspective but it’s so fucking cruel and I’m still mad at the writers for hurting my boy Richter like they did and then continuing to hurt him in Rays. But I have to admit, I probably wouldn’t like Richter as much if he wasn’t damaged.